CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M; PHILANTHROPY

Fixer tells of meeting with Prince Charles’s aide to discuss Saudi honour


Prince’s Foundation middleman says in 2014 he attended talk about award for billionaire donor

Clarence House has said Prince Charles had no knowledge of allegations of offers of honours.

 Photograph: Kirsty O’Connor/AFP/Getty Images

Jon Ungoed-Thomas
Sun 20 Feb 2022

A businessman involved in arranging donations for Prince Charles’s charitable ventures has confirmed how a 30-minute meeting at Clarence House helped secure an honorary CBE for a Saudi billionaire, which is now at the centre of a police investigation.

Michael Wynne-Parker, who acted as a middleman for donations for the Prince’s Foundation, attended a meeting in September 2014 with Royal aide Michael Fawcett. A key topic of the meeting was the ambition of securing an honour for the Saudi billionaire and charity donor Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz.

Wynne-Parker, 76, said he entered Clarence House, the official residence of Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall, by a rear entrance and was ushered into a small office for a meeting attended by Fawcett, then chief executive of the Prince’s Foundation.

William Bortrick, a society fixer who was helping Mahfouz, and an official at Dumfries House, a historic country house in Scotland which is one of Prince Charles’s key projects, were also at the meeting.

The agenda was forging the links between Mahfouz and Dumfries House, part of the Prince’s Foundation, according to notes of the meeting revealed last year by the Sunday Times. It was also a logistics meeting on how best to secure an honour for Mahfouz, who was a major donor for Dumfries House.

Within six months, a nomination was submitted to the Foreign Office for the honorary award for a foreign national. In November 2016, Mahfouz was given the honour in a private investiture at Buckingham Palace.

“It was amazing,” said Wynne-Parker. “I was shocked when I suddenly saw the reality later. They acted very quickly, as always is usual with Fawcett. I wasn’t surprised in one sense because of what seemed like Fawcett’s magical powers.”

Clarence House has said Charles had no knowledge of allegations of offers of honours on the condition or basis that donations were made to his charitable projects.

Dumfries House in East Ayrshire, part of the Prince’s Foundation. 

Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA

In August 2017, Fawcett wrote to an aide of Mahfouz offering to try to help him secure a knighthood and British citizenship, in addition to the award he had already received. The letter said the assistance was being offered “in light of the ongoing and most recent generosity of His Excellency”.

The meeting at Clarence House, the subsequent arrangements around the awarding of the CBE and the offer to try to secure a knighthood are likely to form key parts of the investigation announced by the Metropolitan Police last week into alleged offences under the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925.

Wynne-Parker said there was a long tradition of charitable donors receiving honours. He said he was not aware and had no knowledge of Mahfouz being offered an honour on the condition of giving donations.

He said: “There was nothing inherently wrong with what happened. If people have got spare cash and they want to give it to a charity and they get a gong, there’s nothing wrong with it.”

Christopher Sallon QC, a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers, said an offence would be committed under the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925 where there was a formal agreement or an understanding between the parties that an honour would be provided in exchange for a donation. The maximum sentence under the act is two years’ imprisonment and/or a £500 fine.

He said there was a high evidential bar for a successful prosecution. He said: “There must be an agreement or understanding between the parties or at least an attempt by one party to obtain a reward in exchange for an honour or an offer by another part to give such an award.”

Norman Baker, the former Liberal Democrat MP, whose complaint in September last year triggered the police inquiry, said he considered there was a prima facie case to be investigated based on the August 2017 letter which was first revealed by the Mail on Sunday. He said: “The whole honours system now needs to be tightened up.”

Fawcett resigned last year as chief executive of the Prince’s Foundation. An independent investigation commissioned by the charity found evidence that co-ordination took place between Fawcett and others regarding honours nominations. It said there was no evidence trustees were aware of these communications.

The Prince’s Foundation said last week it was inappropriate to comment on an ongoing investigation, but it was reported that a source close to Prince Charles said he would be happy to help with the police investigation if asked.

Meta must act quickly against risks of metaverse harassment

Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of a harmonious online community faces a test

 Updated: 22 Feb 2022

Parmy Olson


Virtual worlds must assure everyone safety at their very inception


When Mark Zuckerberg described the metaverse last year, he conjured an image of harmonious social connections in an immersive virtual world. But his company’s first iterations of the space have not been very harmonious. Several women have reported incidents of harassment, including a beta tester who was virtually groped by a stranger and another who was virtually gang-raped within 60 seconds of entering Facebook’s Horizon Venues platform, as alleged. I had several uncomfortable moments with male strangers on social apps run by both Meta and Microsoft in December.

These are early days for the metaverse, but that’s the problem. If safety isn’t baked early on into its design, it’ll be much harder to secure down the line. Gaming firms like Riot Games, for instance, have faced an uphill battle trying to rescue a virtual community from toxic behaviour. Facebook also knows this problem well: It struggled to put the proverbial toothpaste back in the tube with covid vaccine misinformation, as highlighted by a whistleblower last year.

Mark Zuckerberg’s control of Facebook is unlikely to reduce

Nick Clegg appointed president of global affairs at Meta

It turns out Facebook has grappled internally with building safety features into its new metaverse services. In 2016, it released Oculus Rooms, an app where anyone with its headset could hang out in a virtual apartment with friends and family. In 2017, it built Oculus Venues (now Horizon Venues), a virtual space where it would show films or sports games in the hope that visitors would mingle and make connections. It was a big shift, but also open to new risks.

The firm began holding meetings to discuss how they might design safety features into Venues, recalls Jim Purbrick, a former engineering manager at Facebook involved with its VR efforts, which they hadn’t done when designing Rooms. Managers did pay attention to safety, he tells me. For instance, people had to watch a safety video before entering Venues. He says he warned engineers early on that VR avatars should fade out and disappear if they got too close to another user. They liked the idea, he says, but it was never implemented. A spokeswoman for Facebook didn’t say why the firm had not implemented a fade-to-vanish feature, and instead highlighted its new ‘personal boundary’ tool, which prevents certain avatars from coming within a radius of two virtual feet of your own.

The boundary tool can backfire, Purbrick says, pointing to how similar features have been misused in gaming. “You can end up with gangs of people creating rings around others, making it difficult for them to move out," he says. “If there’s a big crowd and you have a bunch of personal boundaries, it makes navigation harder." Meta said avatars would still be able to move forward with the boundary tool.“Oculus definitely cared about people having good experiences in VR and understood that a bad first experience could put people off VR forever, but I think they underestimated the size of the problem," Purbrick adds.

He believes Meta should make safety features easier to find, like a fire extinguisher, and get volunteers to monitor behaviour. The gaming industry has some templates for this sort of governance. Until now, Meta has centralized the task of moderating content on Facebook, but it will struggle with such an approach in a new virtual world.

The company has “the most centralized decision-making structure" ever for a large company, according to one early backer, a description underscored by Zuckerberg’s control of 57% of the company’s voting shares. But virtual worlds are human communities at their core, which means people will want more of a say in how they are run. Relinquishing some of that central control could help Meta mitigate harassment.

Educating visitors about what constitutes potentially criminal behaviour would, too. Holly Powell Jones, a criminologist, has found that an alarming number of children and teenagers shrug off harassment or the sharing of indecent images because they have no idea that they are criminal offences. People have “almost certainly" been harassed at a criminal level in virtual reality already, she says. “Harassment in digital spaces is nothing new, and it’s something we and others in the industry have been working to address for years," Meta’s spokeswoman said.

With the police already stretched from social-media cases and the offline world, tech firms should try more radical solutions to address harassment in the metaverse before it’s too late. The dearth of women in the development process for virtual reality certainly isn’t helping and could be fixed.

Microsoft last week announced a more drastic move to combat harassment: It was shutting down several of its social platforms, including Campfire, muting all attendees when they joined an event and activating ‘safety bubbles’ as a default. Meta should take a cue from that. Else, its metaverse dream may fade away.

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology.

Meta is down $500 billion since changing its name from Facebook

No longer a top ten company

By Rob Thubron


In context: Mark Zuckerberg has really gone all-in on the metaverse. So convinced is the CEO that virtual, shared worlds are the future of tech, he changed Facebook’s corporate name to Meta last year. But what has happened since that rebranding? The company has seen $500 billion wiped off its market value.

New York Mag reports that Meta’s half-a-trillion-dollar decline since the rebranding has resulted in a drop from its lofty position as the sixth-largest company in the world by market capitalization to 11th position, replaced by the likes of Nvidia and Tencent.

A lot of Meta’s problems don’t stem from the new name but are a result of Apple’s privacy changes introduced in iOS 14 that allow users to opt out of targeted ads and prevent apps from tracking cross-app behavior. Meta said the change would put a $10 billion dent in its ad revenue this year—an announcement that wiped $232 billion off its market cap in a single day.

Google is introducing similar privacy measures with its Privacy Sandbox for Android, though its implementation isn’t as extreme as Apple’s, and it won’t arrive for at least two years.

Then there’s Facebook. The social media platform had an unwelcome sight in its most recent earnings report: the fourth quarter saw its daily user numbers decline for the first time, plunging its share price 20%. Moreover, the AR and VR division (Reality Labs), an important part of its metaverse plans, made a $10.2 billion loss in 2021.


Another problem for Meta is that while many companies are looking to jump onto the metaverse idea, most consumers are apathetic towards what some consider a VR version of Second Life. The metaverse, Web 3.0, and NFTs might excite firms looking to capitalize on them, but the buzzwords leave many people apathetic at best, hostile at worst—a patent hinting at metaverse eye-tracking ad tech certainly hasn’t helped.

Meta still has a market cap of $561 billion. It made $33.76 billion in revenue during Q4, up 20% year-on-year, and the overall number of daily active users across all its apps grew slightly, so it certainly isn’t in trouble. But maybe the metaverse, at least Meta’s interpretation of it, isn’t going to be as revolutionary as Zuckerberg thinks.


Related Reads

Facebook takes the 'news' out of News Feed, figuratively speaking

Meta says it is not threatening to pull Facebook and Instagram from Europe

AUSTRALIA

Anti-vaxxers and Facebook have found a way to co-exist

This week: the stalemate between anti-vaxxers and Facebook, shark attack videos, and pictures of Scott Morrison's feet.


CAM WILSON
FEB 22, 2022

ANTI-VAXXERS AND OTHER PROTESTERS MARCHING ON CANBERRA, AND IMAGES OF SCOTT MORRISON ON HIS WIKIFEET PROFILE (IMAGES: SUPPLIED, WIKIFEET)

Trending

The anti-vaccine, anti-government “Convoy” protests in Australia and Canada were mostly organised on Telegram and Facebook, two very different tech platforms. The former is a company with 30 employees, founded in Russia, that largely doesn’t do any content moderation despite having more than 500 million users.

The latter? Well, the US-based, highly profitable company’s problems with misinformation are well documented. Incredibly, it was only in 2019 — when Facebook earned US$70 billion from their 2.5 billion users after 15 years of operation — that the company said it would stop recommending anti-vaccine pages and groups, and taking money to promote anti-vaccine content through ads. Since then, the company, now rebranded as Meta, has tightened the rules a few times further after facing increasingly intense scrutiny. Throughout this period, it’s felt a lot like whack-a-mole: major Facebook pages and groups were often banned. Sometimes they’d spring back up, but sometimes they’d go elsewhere.

Recently I’ve noticed a lot of the major anti-vaccine groups and creators have all found ways to evade bans and continue to exist on the platform. In October last year I wrote about how Craig Kelly, Pete Evans and Australia’s biggest anti-vaxxer groups were able to avoid Facebook bans. Many of the major groups and figures promoting this week’s protests are all on Facebook. Four of the top five pieces of content about the protests, as measured by Facebook engagements, are pro-Convoy to Canberra, and are largely being shared by anti-vaccine groups.

THE TOP FIVE PIECES OF WEB CONTENT ABOUT THE CONVOY TO CANBERRA BASED ON SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENTS (IMAGE: BUZZSUMO)

How are they doing it? Perhaps the biggest change I’ve seen recently is the way that anti-vaccine actors have learned to weave their messages through platforms and mediums in a way that evades Facebook’s ban. They’ll post YouTube videos (around three-quarters of the Convoy to Canberra content was hosted on YouTube) featuring claims that would get them banned on Facebook. They link people to their Telegram channel where they can say whatever they want without repercussions. Or they’ll host livestreams of rallies and interviews that seem largely unmoderated too.

And there’s also just an increased wiliness: everything from avoiding the word “vaccine” to calling anti-vaccine groups “dinner parties”.

Whatever the reason, it feels as though we’ve gotten to an impasse. Facebook has set rules to stop medical misinformation (even though it’s still all over the platform). Anti-vaxxers are able, with a few limitations, to use the world’s most popular social media platform to spread their misinformation further.

In fairness to Meta, it’s not like it invented anti-vaxxers. The pandemic has made it a salient issue that was played up by even mainstream political actors. Plus anti-vaccine content is all over other platforms too, particularly YouTube, Instagram (owned by Meta), TikTok, Twi- well, I guess most of them. Meta certainly seems to do more than YouTube or TikTok.

But it all boils down to this: Meta is a private enterprise. It makes an insane amount of money. It decides who’s allowed on its platform. And at the moment it’s allowed a situation where anti-vaxxers are still able to make Facebook their home.

Fake, international Facebook accounts behind the Convoy to Canberra protests

I spotted some unusual accounts behind some of the groups being used to promote and organise the Convoy to Canberra protests. Why were these international accounts doing this? Not sure! But there’s a few reasons people might want to. (Crikey)

Leaked data from Canadian convoy protest fundraiser reveals hundreds of Australian donors

Aaaand here’s why some people want to give money to these protests. (ABC)

Former SAS officer Riccardo Bosi leading dangerous anti-vax revolution across Australia

A deep dive into one of the leading online conspiracy figures in Australia who has in the past called for politicians and media to be hanged. Worth noting, this piece was posted without a byline. (The West)

Sick, paranoid, poorer and disorganised: the aftermath of the Convoy to Canberra protests An estimated 10,000 protesters, with a grab-bag of grievances, made up the Convoy to Canberra. It didn't take long, however, for the movement to fall apart.

Content Corner

There is a popular website that most journalists dare not speak about, fearing repercussions from the shadowy cabal of elites who pull the strings from behind the veil. But I am not most journalists. Without further ado, presenting: WikiFeet.

Called the encyclopedia for foot fetishists, WikiFeet has run for 14 years entirely off the back of volunteers who upload, curate and rate feet of notable people. It’s played a role in politics before. In 2019, the website was crucial in debunking a fake nude image of Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

With a federal election looming, I wondered what the feet of our political elites would tell us. My first search was of course for our dear leader, Scott Morrison.

THE ENTRY FOR SCOTT MORRISON ON WIKIFEET, AN ONLINE ENCYCLOPEDIA FOR THE FEET OF FAMOUS PEOPLE (IMAGE: WIKIFEET)

What I found was that, much like the polls, our prime minister had middling support at best — a measly 2.57 out of five rating from 19 images. Interestingly, his votes were almost entirely either five stars or one star, suggesting strong feelings either way. The website’s algorithm told me that people who liked Morrison’s feet also liked Pierce Brosnan’s, Tom Selleck’s and Kevin Spacey’s. No comment.

When I looked up Anthony Albanese? No images have yet been uploaded. Same with Adam Bandt and Clive Palmer. The only other Australian politician I could find who had a profile was Pauline Hanson (three stars, “ok feet”).

What does this tell us about the upcoming election? Not much, if I’m being honest. Do the polarised scores of Morrison’s feet reveal anything about the intensity of his supporters? Need more data to make such a conclusion. Is the absence of Albanese’s page indicative of his lack of public profile? I don’t know that you can draw that connection.

But if you have a spare moment, I know a website that’s looking for volunteers and has a big hole in its #auspol section.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cam Wilson is Crikey's associate editor. He previously worked as a reporter at the ABC, BuzzFeed, Business Insider and Gizmodo. He primarily covers internet culture and tech in Australia.

What Happened to Netscape Navigator?

Ericsson admits it may have paid off ISIS terrorists

Share price down after word of 'unusual expense claims' emerges

Jude Karabus

Wed 16 Feb 2022 

"Unusual expense claims in Iraq, dating back to 2018" triggered a review that led Ericsson to suspect it paid the self-styled terrorist group Islamic State while doing business in the country, the Swedish giant said last night.

Ericsson's statement comes a day after CEO Börje Ekholm gave an interview to Swedish newspaper Dagens Industri revealing the existence of a "previously completely unknown internal investigation [where] Ericsson identified such serious shortcomings in Iraq that they suspect [intermediaries] of having paid IS terrorists to get through transports" (translated from the Swedish).

In other words, Ericsson may have indirectly paid off ISIS to get equipment shipped through the terrorists' roadblocks in Iraq.

According to Ericsson, it "uncovered compliance concerns," and "investigations of these concerns led to a subsequent and detailed internal investigation that was undertaken by Ericsson in 2019, supported by external legal counsel." The company's share price dropped 12 per cent on NASDAQ after the admission.

The investigation probed Ericsson employees, vendors, and suppliers in Iraq covering a period stretching from 2011 to 2019, and "identified evidence of corruption-related misconduct."

As listed by the vendor itself, this included: making a monetary donation without a clear beneficiary; paying a supplier for work without a defined scope and documentation; using suppliers to make cash payments; funding inappropriate travel and expenses; improper use of sales agents and consultants; violations of Ericsson’s internal financial controls; conflicts of interest; non-compliance with tax laws; and obstruction of the investigation.

Crucially, investigators also identified payments to intermediaries and the use of alternate transport routes in connection with circumventing Iraqi customs, during a period when various terrorist organisations – among them Islamic State aka Da'esh – "controlled some transport routes."

Ekholm told the paper the firm's investigators "could not determine the ultimate recipients of these payments."

The firm stressed that the probe had not identified any Ericsson employee as being "directly involved" in financing terrorist organizations, adding that as a result of the investigation, "several employees were exited from the company and multiple other disciplinary and other remedial actions were taken."
The cost of doing business

Ericsson is the second-biggest network gear maker in the world due to its dominance in 5G telecoms contracts. The Nordic biz said it planned to continue the Iraq country business, albeit with "enhanced training and awareness activities, policies and procedures, and third-party management processes."

It's not great timing for Ericsson, which has been undergoing a restructure, but beat fourth-quarter earnings expectations when it reported yearly revenues several weeks ago. According to industry research firm Dell'Oro, Huawei is the top global radio access network vendor by revenue year-to-date, followed by Ericsson, which is gaining ground outside of China, along with the third of the Big Three full-stack networking solutions sellers: Nokia.

This has been helped along by US sanctions restricting Huawei's access to chip supplies but probably more so by the rip and replace mandates for Huawei radios in national rollouts of 5G networks in the US (whose FCC has designated it a national security threat and excluded it from carrier rollouts) and allied countries.

Huawei has always denied any claims its kit is insecure or that it is beholden to the Chinese state.

Sweden was the second country in Europe (after the UK) to issue a ban and a rip-and-replace order on Huawei kit. The Chinese tech behemoth initiated arbitration proceedings against Sweden after it instituted a ban on Huawei hardware in its national 5G rollout in October 2020. At the time, a backlash in China saw Ericsson's revenues plunge 74 per cent in the Middle Kingdom.

Nonetheless, the firm reported networks sales grew organically by 3 per cent for its in Q4 ended 31 December 2021, "despite considerably lower volumes in Mainland China." It reported sales of 71.3 billion SEK ($7.69bn) for the quarter and net income of 10.1bn SEK ($1.09bn) up from 7.2bn SEK ($780m) in Q4 2020.

The Swedish firm talked up its November purchase of cloud firm Vonage for $6.2bn in its full-year results for 2021. Vonage will be run as a separate segment reporting directly to the CEO, and the Ericsson boss said at the time it would gain "1 million developers" by swallowing the cloud platform. ®

European carriers push for more OpenRAN support... but it might not end in a win

Japanese telco Optage signs up to HPE 5G Core Stack to provide private networks

If you're not sold on the benefits of 5G, Ericsson suggests you keep an eye on gaming, home broadband

Don't blame rural carriers for buying Huawei, says FCC Commissioner. They couldn't afford the top-shelf stuff

Tax inspectors raid Huawei offices

Financial allegations could make nice change from accusations of being Beijing's eavesdropping machine

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor

Fri 18 Feb 2022

The Indian Government's Income Tax Department has raided the local offices of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei as part of an investigation into whether or not the controversial company has met its local taxation obligations.

Huawei's Indian outpost has acknowledged the visit from tax authorities and verified Indian media reports that stated several local staff were interviewed. It also asserted that it does its very best to comply with Indian laws.

In India, Huawei sells consumer electronics and Wi-Fi routers, and tries to sell telecoms gear – but was last year excluded from 5G rollouts.

In response to the raid, China's Ministry of Commerce on Thursday expressed its displeasure at what it described as "suppression" of Chinese companies in India. Ministerial spokesperson Gao Feng said China has "serious concerns" about India's actions, and said foreign investment is already suffering as a result.

Perhaps Gao didn't read The Register's February 14th story about Foxconn sinking at least $100 million into a new chipmaking plant in India, or our coverage of Chinese company Wistron investing in India to take advantage of server manufacturing subsidies – a scheme that also lured Dell, Singapore's Flextronics, and Foxconn.

News of the Huawei raid came as India this week banned another 54 made-in-China apps from distribution in local app stores, again on grounds that the apps endanger users' privacy. That brings the total of banned apps to over 300. India has also explicitly set out its stall as an alternative destination for global manufacturers who have found reliance on China worrying. The two nations' militaries have also skirmished along mountainous and ill-defined borders in the Himalayas.

China's Gao said the Ministry he represents hopes India will improve its business environment and treat all foreign investors – including Chinese companies – in a fair, open, and non-discriminatory manner.

Western nations hope China does the same, noting that the Middle Kingdom requires joint ventures with local firms and limits foreign entities' investments in Chinese companies. ®

US prosecutors: Chinese walkie-talkie-maker Hytera stole Motorola secrets

India bans drone imports to help local manufacturers take off

US carriers want to junk three times more Chinese comms kit than planned

Alarm raised after Microsoft wins data-encoding patent

This is why we can't have nice things, potentially

Thomas Claburn in San Francisco

Thu 17 Feb 2022 


Microsoft last month received a US patent covering modifications to a data-encoding technique called rANS, one of several variants in the Asymmetric Numeral System (ANS) family that support data compression schemes used by leading technology companies and open source projects.

The creator of ANS, Jarosław Duda, assistant professor at Institute of Computer Science at Jagiellonian University in Poland, has been trying for years to keep ANS patent-free and available for public use. Back in 2018, Duda's lobbying helped convince Google to abandon its ANS-related patent claim in the US and Europe. And he raised the alarm last year when he learned Microsoft had applied for an rANS (range asymmetric number system) patent.

Now that Microsoft's patent application has been granted, he fears the utility of ANS will be diminished, as software developers try to steer clear of a potential infringement claim.

"I don't know what to do with it – [Microsoft's patent] looks like just the description of the standard algorithm," he told The Register in an email. The algorithm is used in JPEG XL and CRAM, as well as open source projects run by Facebook (Meta), Nvidia, and others.

The Register asked Microsoft whether it intends to seek royalties for its patent but the company has not responded.

"This rANS variant is [for example] used in JPEG XL, which is practically finished (frozen bitstream) and [is] gaining support," Duda told The Register last year. "It provides ~3x better compression than JPEG at similar computational cost, compatibility with JPEG, progressive decoding, missing features like HDR, alpha, lossless, animations.

"There is a large team, mostly from Google, behind it. After nearly 30 years, it should finally replace the 1992 JPEG for photos and images, starting with Chrome, Android."

But now, he said, Microsoft's patent could make JPEG XL adoption more difficult.
The tangled web of patents

Others don't consider the situation to be that dire. Jon Sneyers, senior image researcher at Cloudinary and editor of the JPEG XL spec, told The Register in an email message, "As far as I know, this patent doesn't affect JPEG XL. At least Microsoft has not declared to ISO that it does, even though they have had plenty of time to do so if they thought it did, and Microsoft is participating in JPEG so they are aware of the technology used in JPEG XL. But of course I am not a lawyer."

In a phone interview, Timothy Lee, a reporter for Full Stack Economics who covered Google's attempt to secure an ANS-based patent three years ago, said that the proliferation of patent applications related to ANS illustrates the problem with the way software patents work.

"Companies try to make minor improvements on technologies and then patent those," he explained. "Then you end up with a patent thicket where there are only so many to implement, and if all of those ways are patented, it becomes difficult to figure out a way around it."

Another problem, he said, is that there's no standard terminology for software patents. Unlike drug patents, where chemical formulas can be specified, software patents may describe the same thing in different ways.

"It becomes quite a minefield when you are an open source developer who doesn't have the time or resources to hire a patent lawyer," he said.

Bradley Kuhn, policy fellow at Software Freedom Conservancy, told The Register in an email that the SFC opposes the patenting of software algorithms completely.

"We think it's risible that any company, and in particular Microsoft, can claim on one hand to support Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and on the other hand continue to build their giant patent portfolios that will ultimately have chilling effects on FOSS innovation," said Kuhn.

"Microsoft has a long history of patent aggression against FOSS; it was not too long ago that they were shaking down Linux users and Android distributors over patents, and we would expect more shakedowns to come on this and other patents."

Kuhn said attempts to extract patent rent tend to happen behind closed doors, to pressure smaller companies into an "acqui-hire" deal or secure huge licensing payments. The SFC, he said, would gladly work with any company to develop a clear, permanently binding FOSS-friendly patent license.

"What we have regarding software patents is a patchwork of inadequate 'patent promises' and other incomplete solutions," said Kuhn. "For example, despite Microsoft being a member and licensee in the Open Invention Network (OIN, a for-profit industry-controlled consortium), our initial analysis shows that OIN protection will not meaningfully extend to FOSS uses that could infringe this patent.

"Similarly, standards bodies have a very poor track record in protecting FOSS from patent problems. These situations show the real downsides of allowing Big Tech to police themselves on their bad patent policies." ®

Third time's a harm? Microsoft tries to get twice-rejected compression patent past skeptical examiners

Apple, Broadcom allowed to press Ctrl-Z on billion-dollar Wi-Fi patent payout to Caltech

Nvidia CEO Huang jointly files patent for software tech in the metaverse

Google: We disagree with Sonos patent ruling so much, we've changed our code to avoid infringement

WeChat, AliExpress added to US Notorious Markets list

Trade watchdog admits China is #1 ... at cranking out counterfeit products, sometimes with forced labor

Laura Dobberstein

Fri 18 Feb 2022 

An updated US Trade Representative's Office register of online and physical markets that reportedly sell or facilitate fake goods has added AliExpress and WeChat to its already China-heavy list.

Released on Thursday, the 2021 Notorious Markets List names 42 online markets and 35 physical facilities accused of copyright infringement or facilitating substantial trademark counterfeiting. Of the markets included, around 20 per cent are based in China. Of the counterfeit kit seized by US authorities in 2020, 79 per cent of it came from China, and that haul accounted for 83 per cent of counterfeit goods by value.

Counterfeiting is not just about cheap knockoffs of designer handbags: fake routers are easy to find and The Register has often read about fake external hard disks that sometimes pack a low-capacity thumb drive and weights to give the device appropriate heft.

"China continues to be the number one source of counterfeit products in the world," according to the document [PDF] detailing the list.

For the first time since the yearly report began in 2011, the list names Alibaba's AliExpress and the Tencent-owned WeChat e-commerce platform.

Alibaba has experience of the list as its e-commerce platform Taobao has made it for the fifth year in succession. Other Chinese entities tied to the nation's big tech platforms include Baidu's cloud storage service Baidu Wangpan, B2B cross-border e-commerce platform DHGate, and social commerce app Pinduoduo.

Complaints from rights holders about the sites typically founder as responses to copyright claims are seldom swift and it is hard to have counterfeit products removed from sale. Many platforms are also accused of of not conducting due diligence to keep bad actors hawking fake goods off thier sites in the first place.

In addition to the six online platforms, nine brick-and-mortar Chinese markets were listed.

The Office reported that foot traffic had declined at many physical counterfeit Chinese markets due to growth in online sales. To avoid confiscation of goods in raids, sellers maintain less physical inventory and offer a larger range online. The physical shops then serve as points of contact for buyers and online sales fulfilment.

The Trade Rep was careful to note that the list is not exhaustive, nor does it reflect legal violations, government analysis of intellectual property, or enforcement-related matters.

However, it did note that enforcement has been somewhat ineffective – as shown by the number of repeat offenders appearing on the list.

In a canned statement, US Traade Representative Ambassador Katherine Tai said the sale of counterfeit goods contributes to "exploitative labour practices" and "undermines critical US innovation."

The reminder feels necessary, as the document often reads like a tour guide book – with such nuggets as this one about a Shanghai market:

Described by online tourist directories as "an underground maze" connected to a metro station near Shanghai's popular sights, this market hosts numerous stalls openly offering counterfeit apparel and fashion accessories.

Rights holders report that authorities have not conducted any recent raids on the market and that the majority of the goods are counterfeit.

Beyond the counterfeit merchandise openly on display, some sellers of counterfeit merchandise allegedly also offer "high end" counterfeits on demand via delivery.

Those finding themselves tempted should know the 2021 Review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy referred to China as "the country with the greatest number of products made with forced labour, including state-sponsored forced labour."

China has credibly and repeatedly been accused of operating forced labour camps – particularly in Xinjiang, a region whose inhabitants are mostly members of the Muslim Uyghur minority.®

Google's Chrome OS Flex could revive old PCs, Macs

India's Reserve Bank deputy governor calls for crypto ban

We get the privacy we deserve from our behavior

Construction starts on another Asia-Europe undersea cable

Redundancy may not be a bad idea after damage to sister links

Laura Dobberstein

Mon 21 Feb 2022 

Construction has begun on a 19,200km submarine cable running from Singapore to France, Singaporean telco Singtel said on Monday.

The company claimed the new optical-fibre cable system, called the South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 6 (SEA-ME-WE 6), would offer one of the lowest latencies between these regions at a transfer rate of 100 terabytes – or 40,000 high-def videos – per second.

Its exact route goes from Singapore to Malaysia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives, India, Pakistan, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.


Click to enlarge

Singtel exec and cable consortium chairperson Yue Meng Fai said in a canned statement that the cable has been in the works for over two years as rising demand for connectivity amid global digitalization was predicted.

Turns out that prediction was not wrong, as broadband needs have increased even more significantly thanks to pandemic consumption habits.

The cable won't be ready until around Q1 2025.

As the name suggests, there are a few iterations of the SEA-ME-WE cables. The SEA-ME-WE 3, 4, and 5 all connect Europe to Asia, with some extending beyond.

In 2013, three scuba divers were arrested trying to sever SEA-ME-WE 4. That same cable, along with SEA-ME-WE 3, was damaged in 2008 by a ship's anchor. The incident took out 75 per cent of Egypt's internet access and had a ripple effect in other regions.

Given both its history and that digitalization is not expected to slow down any time soon, redundancy doesn't seem like a bad idea here. ®

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AI-created faces now look so real, humans can't spot the difference

The uncanny valley has become shallow and short

Laura Dobberstein

Mon 21 Feb 2022 

Humans can no longer reliably tell the difference between a real human face and an image of a face generated by artificial intelligence, according to a pair of researchers.

Two boffins – Sophie Nightingale from the Department of Psychology at the UK's Lancaster University and Hany Farid from Berkley's Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department in California – studied human evaluations of both real photographs and AI-synthesized images, leading them to conclude nobody can reliably tell the difference anymore.

In one part of the study – published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA – humans identified fake images on just 48.2 per cent of occasions.

In another part of the study, participants were given some training and feedback to help them spot the fakes. While that cohort did spot real humans 59 per cent of the time, their results plateaued at that point.


Faces used in the study. Click to enlarge

The third part of the study saw participants rate the faces as "trustworthy" on a scale of one to seven. Fake faces were rated as more trustworthy than the real ones.

"A smiling face is more likely to be rated as trustworthy, but 65.5 per cent of our real faces and 58.8 per cent of synthetic faces are smiling, so facial expression alone cannot explain why synthetic faces are rated as more trustworthy," wrote the researchers.

The fake images were formed using generative adversarial networks (GANs), a class of machine learning frameworks where two neural networks play a type of contest with one another until the network trains itself to create better content.

The technique starts with a random array of pixels and iteratively learns to create a face. A discriminator, meanwhile, learns to detect the synthesized face after each iteration. If it succeeds, it penalizes the generator. Eventually, the discriminator can't tell the difference between real and syenethesised faces and – voila! – apparently neither can a human.

The final images used in the study included a diverse set of 400 real and 400 synthesized faces representing Black, South Asian, East Asian and White faces. Male and female faces were included – unlike previous studies that primarily used White male faces.

White faces were the least accurately classified, and male White faces were even less accurately classified than female White ones.

"We hypothesize that White faces are more difficult to classify because they are overrepresented in the StyleGAN2 training dataset and are therefore more realistic," explained the researchers.

The scientists said that while creating realistic faces is a success, it also creates potential problems such as nonconsensual intimate imagery (often misnamed as "revenge porn"), fraud, and disinformation campaigns as nefarious use cases of fake images. Such activities, they wrote, have "serious implications for individuals, societies, and democracies."

The authors suggested those developing such technologies should consider whether the benefits outweigh the risks – and if they don't, just don't create the tech. Perhaps after recognizing that tech with big downsides is irresistible to some, they then recommended parallel development of safeguards – including established guidelines that mitigate potential harm caused by synthetic media technologies.

There are currently ongoing efforts to improve detection of deepfakes and similar media, such as building prototype software capable of detecting images made with neural networks. A Michigan State University (MSU) and Facebook AI Research (FAIR) collaboration last year even suggested the architecture of the neural network used to create the images.

But The Register recommends against taking any of Meta's deepfake debunking effort at … erm … face value. After all, its founder has been known to put out images himself that will never ever ever ever leave the uncanny valley, thereby proving that, as narrow as that valley has become as a result of this study, it's here to stay. ®