YouTubers are using AI to bring history to life. But historians argue the process is nonsense. From a report: The first time you see Denis Shiryaev's videos, they feel pretty miraculous. You can walk through New York as it was in 1911, or ride on Wuppertal's flying train at the turn of the 20th century, or witness the birth of the moving image in a Leeds garden in 1888. Shiryaev's YouTube channel is a showcase for his company Neural Love, based in Gdansk, Poland, which uses a combination of neural networks and algorithms to overhaul historic images. Some of the very earliest surviving film has been cleaned, unscuffed, repaired, colourised, stabilised, corrected to 60 frames per second and upscaled to vivid 4K resolution. For viewers, it almost feels like time travel. "That is something that our clients and even the commenters on YouTube have pointed out consistently," says Elizabeth Peck, one of Shiryaev's colleagues at Neural Love. "It brings you more into that real-life feeling of, 'I'm here watching someone do this', whereas before you're looking more at something more artistic or cinematic." But these vivid videos and images haven't wowed everyone. Digital upscalers and the millions who've watched their work on YouTube say they're making the past relatable for viewers in 2020, but for some historians of art and image-making, modernising century-old archives brings a host of problems. Even adding colour to black and white photographs is hotly contested. "The problem with colourisation is it leads people to just think about photographs as a kind of uncomplicated window onto the past, and that's not what photographs are," says Emily Mark-FitzGerald, Associate Professor at University College Dublin's School of Art History and Cultural Policy. Peck says Neural Love makes clear to clients the huge difference the company sees between "the restoration aspect and the enhancement aspect." They see the removal of scratches, noise, dust or other imperfections picked up during processing as a less ethically fraught process to upscaling and colourising. "You're really returning the film to its original state," she says. That's not a view many academics hold, however. Luke McKernan, lead curator of news and moving images at the British Library, was particularly scathing about Peter Jackson's 2018 World War One documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, which upscaled and colourised footage from the Western Front. Making the footage look more modern, he argued, undermined it. "It is a nonsense," he wrote. "Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference."

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European Union leaders need to tackle urgently disinformation on 5G technology, which is central to the bloc's economic recovery from COVID-19 and its plans to catch up with the United States and China, a study by telecoms lobby group ETNO showed. From a report: Conspiracy theories that tie the wireless technology to the spread of the novel coronavirus have seen mobile phone masts torched in 10 European countries and assaults on scores of maintenance workers in recent months. For the 27-country EU, however, 5G which promises to enable everything from self-driving cars to remote surgery and more automated manufacturing is seen as the linchpin of its economic recovery and technology autonomy. A study by consultant IPSOS, commissioned by telecoms lobbying groups ETNO and seen by Reuters, underlines the battle ahead for EU governments. "While the majority of Europeans is positive towards 5G, 10% of those interviewed hold a negative view on this technology. IPSOS also tested some 5G myths and found that while a small minority believes in them, a substantial amount of Europeans isn't sure that they are false either," ETNO said.

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Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook abuse their power as gatekeepers of the internet, said the head of a House antitrust panel who's poised to propose legislative changes to rein in the technology giants. From a report: "Each platform uses their gatekeeper position to protect their own power," said Representative David Cicilline, who chairs a House antitrust panel that's spent more than a year probing the dominance of the internet platforms. "By controlling the infrastructure of the digital age, they have surveilled other businesses to identify potential rivals -- and ultimately bought out, copied, or cut off their competitive threats." Cicilline, who spoke Thursday during a hearing with experts on competition law, is preparing a final report recommending changes to the legislative and regulatory framework. That report is expected to be released as early as next week, according to people familiar with the matter. Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg testified voluntarily in July before the subcommittee. Cicilline criticized their testimony as being evasive and non-responsive and said "they raised new questions about whether they believe their companies are beyond oversight."

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Krebs on Security: Companies victimized by ransomware and firms that facilitate negotiations with ransomware extortionists could face steep fines from the U.S. federal government if the crooks who profit from the attack are already under economic sanctions, the Treasury Department warned today. In its advisory, the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) said "companies that facilitate ransomware payments to cyber actors on behalf of victims, including financial institutions, cyber insurance firms, and companies involved in digital forensics and incident response, not only encourage future ransomware payment demands but also may risk violating OFAC regulations." As financial losses from cybercrime activity and ransomware attacks in particular have skyrocketed in recent years, the Treasury Department has imposed economic sanctions on several cybercriminals and cybercrime groups, effectively freezing all property and interests of these persons (subject to U.S. jurisdiction) and making it a crime to transact with them. A number of those sanctioned have been closely tied with ransomware and malware attacks, including the North Korean Lazarus Group; two Iranians thought to be tied to the SamSam ransomware attacks; Evgeniy Bogachev, the developer of Cryptolocker; and Evil Corp, a Russian cybercriminal syndicate that has used malware to extract more than $100 million from victim businesses.

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Michele Solis, writing for Scientific American: In a perfect world, we would learn from success and failure alike. Both hold instructive lessons and provide needed reality checks that may safeguard our decisions from bad information or biased advice. But, alas, our brain doesn't work this way. Unlike an impartial outcome-weighing machine an engineer might design, it learns more from some experiences than others. A few of these biases may already sound familiar: A positivity bias causes us to weigh rewards more heavily than punishments. And a confirmation bias makes us take to heart outcomes that confirm what we thought was true to begin with but discount those that show we were wrong. A new study, however, peels away these biases to find a role for choice at their core. A bias related to the choices we make explains all the others, says Stefano Palminteri of the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM), who conducted a study published in Nature Human Behaviour in August that examines this tendency. "In a sense we have been perfecting our understanding of this bias," he says.

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Sonos has filed another patent lawsuit against Google, alleging that the search giant is infringing five wireless audio patents across the entire line of Nest and Chromecast products. From a report: Sonos filed its first patent lawsuits against Google in January in California federal court and with the International Trade Commission; the federal case has been put on hold while the ITC reaches a decision on whether to block Google's allegedly infringing products from market. The new case is filed only in the federal court for the Western District of Texas -- an emerging patent lawsuit hotspot -- and represents a more aggressive approach from Sonos. "We think it's important to show the depth and breadth of Google's copying," says Eddie Lazarus, Sonos' chief legal officer. "We showed them claim charts on 100 patents that we claimed they were infringing, all to no avail." Google, of course, says it will fight back; it has countersued Sonos in the initial case. "Sonos has made misleading statements about our history of working together," says Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda. "Our technology and devices were designed independently. We deny their claims vigorously, and will be defending against them."

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I've been using the Podcasts app on my iPhone, it's using a whopping 20GB for old shows I'm never going to listen to again (or maybe never listened to at all). I assumed it garbage collected, but it doesn't. Podcasts should age-out, user configurable.

Kara Swisher's new podcast interview with Colonel Vindman. He's tells a good story. Honorable person in a corrupt administration. Very worthwhile. He answers the questions. I saw John Bolton on MSNBC last night, and he evades them. Vindman worked for Bolton.

I installed Covid Alert NY on my Pixel 4a. It uses Bluetooth to collect IDs of phones I spend ten minutes within six feed of and remembers them for some period of time. If one of them reports positive with Covid, I get notified. It's contact tracing with phones that we've talked about for a while. Does it work? I guess I hope not to ever find out. Yes I know it probably is a huge drain on the battery and privacy.

The Trump administration is pressuring Senate Republicans to ratchet up scrutiny of social media companies it sees as biased against conservatives in the run-up to the November election, Politico reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the conversations say. And the effort appears to be paying off. From the report: In recent weeks, the White House has pressed Senate Republican leaders on key committees to hold public hearings on the law that protects Facebook, Twitter and other internet companies from lawsuits over how they treat user posts, three Senate staffers told POLITICO. They requested anonymity to discuss private communications. And action is following. Senate Commerce Chair Roger Wicker held a vote in his committee Thursday to issue subpoenas to the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter and Google to testify about how they police content on their platforms. That's after Democrats initially prevented the Mississippi Republican from pushing through subpoenas that could have compelled the CEOs to testify with only a few days' notice. Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), meanwhile, last week introduced new legislation to address alleged bias on social media and the same day scheduled a markup of the bill for Thursday -- a move that would have made it the fastest any bill on tech's liability protections has moved from introduction to a markup on Capitol Hill in recent memory. Graham announced Thursday that consideration of the measure had been tabled. Both committees are targeting liability protections that have been credited with fueling Silicon Valley's success. The provision -- enshrined in a 1996 law known as Section 230 -- has allowed online businesses to grow without fear of lawsuits over user posts or their decisions to remove or otherwise moderate users' content.

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Michael Arrington, who founded TechCrunch and is now a VC, shares an interesting story: A friend of a friend at Google interviewed at Facebook right as the virus hit. Accepted new job in March. Didn't quit old job. Apparently does both jobs at home in 55 hours/week. Neither company knows yet. Might have reversed the co's, not sure. I have so many thoughts on this. Interesting discussion (Twitter thread).

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According to the Subway Ireland website, the chain's six-inch and footlong subs are available on six different kinds of bread, including nine-grain multi-seed, Italian white bread, Italian herbs and cheese, nine-grain wheat, hearty Italian, and honey oat. And, according to the country's Supreme Court, all six varieties are too sugary to legally be called "bread" at all. From a report: The court case itself is a slightly confusing one unless you're well versed in Irish tax policies, but it started when a Subway franchise owner challenged the tax authorities' decision not to issue a refund for value-added tax (VAT) on some takeout foods. Galway-based Bookfinders LTD said that it shouldn't have to pay VAT on hot coffee and tea, or on the hot sandwiches that weren't eaten inside the restaurant. Its argument was that since the sandwiches contain bread, they should be considered a "staple food" and shouldn't be taxed. But the five Supreme Court judges countered by suggesting that those sandwiches aren't served on "bread" at all, at least not under the "statutory definition of bread." According to the Irish Independent, the judges ruled that Subway's bread is not a staple food because its sugar content is 10 percent of the weight of the flour in the dough; the Value-Added Tax Act 1972 stipulates that sugar, fat, and "bread improver" cannot add up to more than 2 percent of the weight of the flour. (Those limits are in place to prevent things like pastries and other sweet baked goods from being labeled as "staple foods" and exempt from being taxed.)

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I made the change that I wrote up yesterday. Now when you go to an instantoutliner.com address, example, it will redirect to LO2, and it will open the outline, read-only, and updates will be live.

Leading scientists call for realism about what a vaccine against Covid can achieve next year.

Huawei has failed to adequately tackle security flaws in equipment used in the UK's telecoms networks despite previous complaints, an official report says. From a report: It also flagged that a vulnerability "of national significance" had occurred in 2019 but been fixed before it could be exploited. The assessment was given by an oversight board, chaired by a member of the cyber-spy agency GCHQ. It could influence other nations weighing up use of Huawei's kit. The report said that GCHQ's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) had seen no evidence that Huawei had made a significant shift in its approach to the matter. And it added that while some improvements had been made, it had no confidence they were sustainable. As a result, it concluded, the board could only provide "limited assurance that all risks to UK national security" could be mitigated in the long-term. In July, the government announced that due to US sanctions Huawei would eventually be excluded from the new 5G telecoms network by 2027, but the Chinese company can continue to play a role in older mobile phone networks and fixed broadband. The US has argued that using Huawei's equipment creates a risk of the Chinese state carrying out espionage or sabotage, something the company has always denied. Despite the criticisms, British security officials say they can manage the current risks posed by using Huawei's existing kit, and they do not believe the defects they have found are a result of Chinese state interference. Huawei has responded saying the report highlights its commitment to openness and transparency.

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