FAA Warns of Aviation Safety Risks Without US Mandate On 5G Limits

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) wants the U.S. telecommunications regulatory agency to ensure a delay in some 5G C-Band transmissions from smaller operators. Reuters reports: Acting FAA Administrator Billy Nolen said the agency wants the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to mandate voluntary mitigations that AT&T and Verizon agreed to earlier this year mandated for 19 smaller telecoms and other spectrum holders. In a previously unreported letter dated Friday, Nolen cited industry data established “aviation safety would be compromised if the U.S. government does not codify certain additional operating limits in the 5G C-Band environment.”

Concerns that the 5G service could interfere with airplane altimeters, which give data on a plane’s height above the ground and are crucial for bad-weather landing, led to disruptions at some U.S. airports earlier this year. Nolen’s letter warns that without the FCC mandating the mitigations “the FAA would be forced to take immediate steps to ensure the safety of the traveling public, raising the likelihood of flight disruptions across the United States.”

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Rishi Sunak Is the First Crypto Enthusiast To Serve In UK’s Top Office

Gizmodo points out that the United Kingdom’s next prime minister, Rishi Sunak, “is a certified Crypto Bro who once requested that the Royal Mint issue an NFT.” From the report: During his tenure as finance minister under former PM Boris Johnson, Sunak was in charge of advancing a number of crypto-related initiatives that sought to normalize digital currencies and integrate them into the British economy. By all accounts, he is the first crypto enthusiast to serve in the UK’s top office. He’s also the first person of color and the youngest PM — 42 years old — that Britain’s had in 200 years. To be fair, Sunak’s efforts at crypto promotion have at least trended towards regulation and taxation as opposed to total laissez faire deregulated madness — though those efforts could, ultimately, simply normalize a phenomenon that critics say is redundant at best and a privacy hazard at worst. In April, Sunak announced a series of programs to turn the UK into what he called a “global cryptoasset technology hub.” Among the initiatives announced at the time was a plan to integrate stablecoins into the national payment system, thus “paving their way for use in the UK as a recognized form of payment.” Considered to be the least volatile form of cryptocurrency, stablecoins have seen more interest by governments than other forms of crypto — though projects like Terra and Tether have shown the potential danger in putting too much faith in the assets’ stability.

Sunak’s plans also suggested creating additional regulations that would’ve helped further incorporate crypto into the UK’s economic and legal framework, thus spurring greater investment in the space. “The measures we’ve outlined today will help to ensure firms can invest, innovate and scale up in this country,” Sunak wrote in a press release published at the time. Another ambitious initiative pushed by Sunak was the Financial Services and Markets Bill, a piece of legislation that would give local governments in Britain broad discretion to regulate cryptocurrencies, thus further assimilating them into the nation’s economy. The bill, which has not yet passed, is currently being looked at by Parliament.

At the same time, Sunak also recently backed a study to look at the potential benefits of creating a central bank digital currency (CBDC), or “Britcoin” as he dubbed it. Proponents of CBDCs argue that they could have benefits for spenders, making payments “faster, cheaper, and more secure,” as one op-ed puts it. However, critics argue that they are unnecessary and could ultimately spell huge privacy troubles, given the trackable nature of crypto and digital currencies. Despite his crypto track record, analysts have suggested that is is unlikely Sunak will have time to focus much on any web3-related initiatives in the near term. Given Britain’s current economic dumpster fire, any work on “Britcoin” might have to take a backseat.

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Comcast’s New Higher Upload Speeds Require $25-Per-Month xFi Complete Add-On

The availability of Comcast’s promised internet speed boosts has a catch: users need to purchase a $25-per-month xFi Complete add-on. Ars Technica reports: “As markets launch, Xfinity Internet customers who subscribe to xFi Complete will have their upload speeds increased between 5 and 10 times faster,” an announcement last week said. “xFi Complete includes an xFi gateway, advanced cybersecurity protection at home and on the go, tech auto-upgrades for a new gateway after three years, and wall-to-wall Wi-Fi coverage with an xFi Pod [Wi-Fi extender] included if recommended. Now, another benefit of xFi Complete is faster upload speeds.”

Comcast is deploying the speed upgrade in the Northeast US over the next couple of months. Plans with 10Mbps upload speeds will get up to 100Mbps upload speeds once the new tiers roll out in your region — if you pay for xFi Complete. Comcast told Ars that faster upload speeds will come to customer-owned modems “later next year” but did not provide a more specific timeline. There is a cheaper way to get the same xFi Gateway with Wi-Fi 6E, as Comcast offers the option to rent that piece of hardware for $14 a month. But Comcast is only making the upload boost available to those who subscribe to the pricier xFi Complete service. While the standard monthly rate for xFi Complete is $25, new customers who sign up by December 31 can get it for $20 monthly during the first year of service.

We asked Comcast today if there’s any technical reason it can’t deliver the higher upload speeds on customer-owned equipment. A company spokesperson responded that Comcast is working on bringing faster uploads to non-Comcast modems. “We intend to extend the experience to customer-owned modems later next year and are working through the technical requirements as we learn,” Comcast said. “We started offering it with our own equipment first and now are working through how to extend to customer-owned equipment.” Comcast also said that giving the upload boost to xFi Complete customers first follows its “typical validate, test, and certification process for a new network innovation.” But if the reasons for limiting the upload boost to Comcast hardware initially are purely technical instead of revenue-based, it’s not clear why people who rent the gateway for $14 a month shouldn’t get the same benefit.

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Math Scores Fell In Nearly Every State, Reading Dipped On National Exam

U.S. students in most states and across almost all demographic groups have experienced troubling setbacks in both math and reading, according to an authoritative national exam released on Monday, offering the most definitive indictment yet of the pandemic’s impact on millions of schoolchildren. The New York Times reports: In math, the results were especially devastating, representing the steepest declines ever recorded on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card, which tests a broad sampling of fourth and eighth graders and dates to the early 1990s. In the test’s first results since the pandemic began, math scores for eighth graders fell in nearly every state. A meager 26 percent of eighth graders were proficient, down from 34 percent in 2019. Fourth graders fared only slightly better, with declines in 41 states. Just 36 percent of fourth graders were proficient in math, down from 41 percent.

Reading scores also declined in more than half the states, continuing a downward trend that had begun even before the pandemic. No state showed sizable improvement in reading. And only about one in three students met proficiency standards, a designation that means students have demonstrated competency and are on track for future success. And for the country’s most vulnerable students, the pandemic has left them even further behind. The drops in their test scores were often more pronounced, and their climbs to proficiency are now that much more daunting.

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Stockholm Thinks It Can Have an Electric Bikeshare Program So Cheap It’s Practically Free

Aaron Gordon writes via Motherboard: This past June, Stockholm introduced a new shared bicycle service to replace Stockholm City Bikes, which operated from 2006 until 2018. Since that service shut down, the city was one of many around the world swamped by shared e-scooters that littered sidewalks and streets. As a result, the city wanted to reboot a bikeshare program with a more modern approach without succumbing to the trappings of the dockless scooter and bike craze. The new service, Stockholm eBikes, started relatively small, with just over a thousand bikes this past summer, but will grow to more than 5,000 for this coming summer. However, this is not just another bikeshare program. First, all of the bikes are electric. And second, it is ridiculously, ludicrously, almost impossibly cheap to use.

The first time I stumbled on the Stockholm eBikes website and did a currency conversion, I figured there must be some mistake. The website says a 24-hour plan “just to unlock a bike and enjoy Stockholm eBikes for 24 hours” costs 11 Krona, or 98 cents at current conversion rates. A 7-day plan is 26 Krona ($2.32). A 30-day plan is 35 Krona ($3.12). And a whole year of unlimited 90-minute e-bike rides costs a measly 157 Krona, or just about $14. If you want to ride more than 90 minutes in one trip, you will be charged an extra 11 Krona (about $1) per extra hour. This is not simply cheap by e-bike rental standards. It is several orders of magnitude cheaper. And it is a story with global implications for the bikeshare industry and urban transportation in general. Because bikeshare systems have entered a paradox. The invention and proliferation of e-bikes have the potential to make bikeshare systems even more useful thanks to the effortless pedaling including on hills and higher speeds. But virtually every system has surcharges to ride an e-bike, making it expensive to use over time. “It’s a truly unique system,” [said Daniel Mohlin, Nordics Regional Manager for Inurba Mobility, the company that won the seven-year contract for the new bikeshare program]. “Both in terms of the technology and the setup and the pricing in combination with it.” So I asked Mohlin the obvious question: How can Stockholm offer essentially the same product and service for so much less than basically every other city? The obvious assumption would be that, unlike most every bikeshare system in the world which is expected to break even without public subsidies in contrast to traditional public transportation like buses and subways, the government is helping to foot the bill of Stockholm eBikes. […] But Mohlin said that isn’t the case in Stockholm. The city isn’t giving Inurba any money.

Mohlin says they plan to run a profitable bikeshare system by doing one thing most other systems do and another thing he says is too often missing. The first thing, the one that everyone does, is advertising. Inurba will be selling advertisements on the bikes and on 350 advertising locations near where the bikes are parked. But the brand will remain Stockholm eBikes. […] Advertising will only get them so far. The entire bikeshare system, Mohlin said, has been designed to be as efficient and cost-effective as possible. And this, he says, is the biggest difference between Stockholm’s system and the ones other cities offer. […] Inurba adopted a hybrid solution that some e-scooter companies have piloted in a few cities. Instead of traditional docks, there are virtual stations, painted lines on the ground with a sign post. Users lock and unlock the bikes via an app. Locking the bikes requires being within one of the station’s geofenced zones. These virtual stations not only save Inurba lots of money not having to outfit and maintain physical docks, but it also provides operational flexibility. Because there is some wiggle room in the geofence by nature of GPS’s imprecision, the stations can “swallow a lot more bikes” than traditional docks, as Mohlin put it. This helps avoid the always-empty-or-always-full phenomenon many docked bikeshare systems struggle with.

Mohlin also talked up Inurba’s IT infrastructure that helps them learn which stations tend to get full at what time of day and which tend to get empty. He says this enables them to be more efficient with bike-balancing efforts, that it’s “basically, do the right task in the right order at the right time.” Another smaller money-saver is the company uses cargo e-bikes to go around swapping out batteries, which has to happen about once every three days per bike on average. This means battery swappers aren’t stuck in traffic driving a van and can swap out more batteries per worker. So far, the model appears to be working. “55,000 active users took almost 450,000 trips, averaging six per day per bike, which is generally considered high for a bikeshare system,” writes Gordon. “Plus, the average trip was almost 40 minutes, much higher than most bikeshare schemes with mechanical bikes, including Helsinki where Inurba also operates the bikeshare system where the average trip is between 12 and 16 minutes.”

“We’re really looking forward for next year when we can get the full system in operation,” Mohlin said. “But I’m confident this is a really unique system that is going to have an impact.”

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Gartner Predicts ‘Digital Immune Systems’ and Virtual Metaverse Workspaces

Gartner, the prestigious tech research and consulting firm, has released its annual predictions for “strategic tech trends” in the coming year.

Forbes offers a summary. Some highlights:

Digital Immune Systems. [A]ntiquated development and testing approaches are no longer sufficient for delivering robust and resilient business-critical solutions that also provide a superior user experience. A Digital Immune System combines several software engineering strategies such as observability, automation, and extreme testing to enhance the customer experience by protecting against operational and security risks. By 2025, Gartner predicts that organizations that invest in building digital immunity will increase end-user satisfaction through applications that achieve greater uptime and deliver a stronger user experience.

Applied Observability. The path to data-driven decision making includes a shift from monitoring and reacting to data to proactively applying that data in an orchestrated and integrated way across the enterprise. Doing so can shorten the time it takes to reach critical decisions while also facilitating faster, more accurate planning. Gartner notes observable data as an organization’s “most precious monetizable asset” and encourages leaders to seek use cases and business capabilities in which this data can deliver competitive advantage.

“By 2025, Gartner predicts that 50% of CIOs will have performance metrics tied to the sustainability of the IT organization,” Forbes writes. But they also note that Gartner is predicting platform engineering — “a curated set of reusable self-service tools, capabilities, and processes” to speed up and optimize development. “Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams.”

They’re also predicting “adaptive” AI that can change after being deployed. But Forbes summarizes Gartner’s related prediction, that AI leaders “increasingly must bake governance, trustworthiness, fairness, reliability, efficacy and privacy into AI operations” to improve adoption and user acceptance. This will include tools that “make AI models easier to interpret and explain while improving overall privacy and security.”

PC Magazine offers this summary of a related prediction from Gartner: “By 2025, without sustainable AI practices, AI will consume more energy than the average European country, offsetting any environmental gains that AI creates by 25%.”

Gartner also predicts a phasing out of marketing that uses social media sites’ data about individuals — and that fully virtual workspaces “will account for 30% of the investment growth in metaverse technologies and will ‘reimagine’ the office experience through 2027,” writes PC Magazine:

[Gartner Fellow Daryl Plummer] said people need to reimagine how work will be done. He said that few people want to go back to the office full-time, but that virtual participants in calls often feel like second-class citizens. A fully immersive world is an answer to this, he said, with the interactive experience more important than information exchange. He believes metaverse experiences will be where people collaborate in ways they couldn’t do in the office, blurring the line between home and work.

By 2025, “labor volatility” will cause 40% of organizations to report a material business loss, forcing a shift in talent strategy from acquisition to resilience. Plummer talked about revamping the way talent is valued. He said people don’t want to do just one thing, but want to be “versatilists,” which makes them more valuable to the company and less likely to leave.

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Behind TikTok’s Boom: A Legion of Traumatized, $10-A-Day Content Moderators

Time magazine teamed up with a London based non-profit newsroom called the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in an investigation that reveals that “horrific” videos “are part and parcel of everyday work for TikTok moderators in Colombia.”

They told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism about widespread occupational trauma and inadequate psychological support, demanding or impossible performance targets, punitive salary deductions and extensive surveillance. Their attempts to unionize to secure better conditions have been opposed repeatedly. TikTok’s rapid growth in Latin America — it has an estimated 100 million users in the region — has led to the hiring of hundreds of moderators in Colombia to fight a never-ending battle against disturbing content. They work six days a week on day and night shifts, with some paid as little as 1.2 million pesos ($254) a month, compared to around $2,900 for content moderators based in the U.S….

The nine moderators could only speak anonymously for fear they might lose their jobs, or undermine their future employment prospects…. The TikTok moderation system described by these moderators is built on exacting performance targets. If workers do not get through a huge number of videos, or return late from a break, they can lose out on a monthly bonus worth up to a quarter of their salary. It is easy to lose out on the much-needed extra cash. Ãlvaro, a current TikTok moderator, has a target of 900 videos per day, with about 15 seconds to view each video. He works from 6am to 3pm, with two hours of break time, and his base salary is 1.2m pesos ($254) a month, only slightly higher than Colombia’s minimum salary…. He once received a disciplinary notice known internally as an “action form” for only managing to watch 700 videos in a shift, which was considered “work avoidance”. Once a worker has an action form, he says, they cannot receive a bonus that month….

Outsourcing moderation to countries in the global south like Colombia works for businesses because it is cheap, and workers are poorly protected…. For now… TikTok’s low-paid moderators will keep working to their grueling targets, sifting through some of the internet’s most nightmarish content.
The moderators interviewed all had “contractor” status with Paris-based Teleperformance, which last year reported €557 million ($620m) in profit on €7.1 billion ($8.1 billion) in revenue. In fact, Teleperformance has more than 7,000 content moderators globally, according to stats from Market Research Future, and the moderators interviewed said that besides TikTok, Teleperformance also provided content moderators to Meta, Discord, and Microsoft.

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Facebook Warns It Could Block News in Canada Over Proposed Legislation

The Verge says Facebook “might ban news sharing in Canada if the country passes legislation forcing the company to pay news outlets for their content.” They cite a post Friday from Facebook’s parent company Meta, and a recent report in the Wall Street Journal.

If this type of law sounds familiar, it’s because Australia introduced a similar one last year, called the News Media Bargaining Code, which also requires Facebook and Google to pay for news included on the platforms. Although Australia eventually passed the law, it wasn’t without significant pushback from Facebook and Google. Facebook switched off news sharing in the country in response, and Google threatened to pull its search engine from the country.

While Google later walked back on its plans after striking deals with media organizations, Facebook reversed its news ban only after Australia amended its legislation. Facebook’s temporary ban not only affected news outlets but also ripped down posts from government agencies, like local fire and health departments. Earlier this year, a group of Facebook whistleblowers claimed the move was a negotiation tactic, alleging Facebook used an overly broad definition of what’s considered a news publisher to cause chaos in the country. The company maintains the disorder was “inadvertent.”

Now Facebook’s prepared to put a block on news in Canada if the country doesn’t change its legislation….
“If this draft legislation becomes law, creating globally unprecedented forms of financial liability for news links or content, we may be forced to consider whether we continue to allow the sharing of news content on Facebook in Canada as defined under the Online News Act,” Meta states.

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How GitHub Copilot Could Steer Microsoft Into a Copyright Storm

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Register: GitHub Copilot — a programming auto-suggestion tool trained from public source code on the internet — has been caught generating what appears to be copyrighted code, prompting an attorney to look into a possible copyright infringement claim. On Monday, Matthew Butterick, a lawyer, designer, and developer, announced he is working with Joseph Saveri Law Firm to investigate the possibility of filing a copyright claim against GitHub. There are two potential lines of attack here: is GitHub improperly training Copilot on open source code, and is the tool improperly emitting other people’s copyrighted work — pulled from the training data — to suggest code snippets to users?

Butterick has been critical of Copilot since its launch. In June he published a blog post arguing that “any code generated by Copilot may contain lurking license or IP violations,” and thus should be avoided. That same month, Denver Gingerich and Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) said their organization would stop using GitHub, largely as a result of Microsoft and GitHub releasing Copilot without addressing concerns about how the machine-learning model dealt with different open source licensing requirements.

Copilot’s capacity to copy code verbatim, or nearly so, surfaced last week when Tim Davis, a professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M University, found that Copilot, when prompted, would reproduce his copyrighted sparse matrix transposition code. Asked to comment, Davis said he would prefer to wait until he has heard back from GitHub and its parent Microsoft about his concerns. In an email to The Register, Butterick indicated there’s been a strong response to news of his investigation. “Clearly, many developers have been worried about what Copilot means for open source,” he wrote. “We’re hearing lots of stories. Our experience with Copilot has been similar to what others have found — that it’s not difficult to induce Copilot to emit verbatim code from identifiable open source repositories. As we expand our investigation, we expect to see more examples. “But keep in mind that verbatim copying is just one of many issues presented by Copilot. For instance, a software author’s copyright in their code can be violated without verbatim copying. Also, most open-source code is covered by a license, which imposes additional legal requirements. Has Copilot met these requirements? We’re looking at all these issues.” GitHub’s documentation for Copilot warns that the output may contain “undesirable patterns” and puts the onus of intellectual property infringement on the user of Copilot, notes the report.

Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy is less willing to set aside how Copilot deals with software licenses. “What Microsoft’s GitHub has done in this process is absolutely unconscionable,” he said. “Without discussion, consent, or engagement with the FOSS community, they have declared that they know better than the courts and our laws about what is or is not permissible under a FOSS license. They have completely ignored the attribution clauses of all FOSS licenses, and, more importantly, the more freedom-protecting requirements of copyleft licenses.”

Brett Becker, assistant professor at University College Dublin in Ireland, told The Register in an email, “AI-assisted programming tools are not going to go away and will continue to evolve. Where these tools fit into the current landscape of programming practices, law, and community norms is only just beginning to be explored and will also continue to evolve.” He added: “An interesting question is: what will emerge as the main drivers of this evolution? Will these tools fundamentally alter future practices, law, and community norms — or will our practices, law and community norms prove resilient and drive the evolution of these tools?”

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JavaScript Still Tops Python and Java in RedMonk’s Latest Rankings, While Go and TypeScript Rise

RedMonk has released its latest quarterly rankings of popular programming languages, arguing that “The idea is not to offer a statistically valid representation of current usage, but rather to correlate language discussion and usage in an effort to extract insights into potential future adoption trends.”

Their methodology? “We extract language rankings from GitHub and Stack Overflow, and combine them for a ranking that attempts to reflect both code (GitHub) and discussion (Stack Overflow) traction.” Below are this quarter’s results:

1. JavaScript
2. Python
3. Java
4. PHP
5. C#
6. CSS
7. C++
7. TypeScript
9. Ruby
10. C
11. Swift
12. R
12. Objective-C
14. Shell
15. Scala
15. Go
17. PowerShell
17. Kotlin
19. Rust
19. Dart

Their analysis of the latest rankings note “movement is increasingly rare…. the top 20 has been stable for multiple runs. As has been speculated about in this space previously, it seems increasingly clear that the hypothesis of a temporary equilibrium of programming language usage is supported by the evidence…. [W]e may have hit a point of relative — if temporary — contentment with the wide variety of languages available for developers’ usage.”

And yet this quarter TypeScript has risen from #8 to #7, now tied with C++, benefiting from attributes like its interoperability with an existing popular language with an increased availability of security-related features. “There is little suggestion at present that the language is headed anywhere but up. The only real question is on what timeframe.”

Unlike TypeScript, Go’s trajectory has been anything but clear. While it grew steadily and reasonably swiftly as languages go, it has appeared to be stalled, never placing higher than 14th and having dropped into 16 for the last three runs. This quarter, however, Go rose one spot in the rankings back up to 15. In and of itself, this is a move of limited significance, as the further one goes down the rankings the less significant the differences between them are, ranking-wise. But it has been over a year since we’ve seen movement from Go, which raises the question of whether there is any room for further upward ascent or whether it will remain hovering in the slot one would expect from a technically well regarded but not particularly versatile (from a use case standpoint) language.

Like Go, Kotlin had spent the last three runs in the same position. It and Rust had been moving in lockstep in recent quarters, but while Rust enters its fourth consecutive run in 19th place, Kotlin managed to achieve some separation this quarter jumping one spot up from 18 to 17.

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