James' World 2

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(Image credit: Ben Fergusson)

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After a long weekend away, today let’s talk about the largely positive reception that Elon Musk’s radical remaking of Twitter is getting from tech CEOs — and whether those views are likely to change if the fight that Musk is picking with Apple erodes even more value from his $44 billion purchase.

The CEO’s revenge

Last week, Musk publicly mocked Twitter’s somewhat notorious “Stay Woke” T-shirts. The shirts, which the company produced in 2016 in response to the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, were considered suspect even at the time. In those days, it was the left rolling its eyes — particularly after then-CEO Jack Dorsey wore the shirt during a Code Conference interview, giving the impression that a phrase that had originated within the Black community in response to systematic oppression had been co-opted by white corporate marketers.

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Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

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And in Uganda, there are 47 psychiatrists serving a country of 48 million — less than one single psychiatrist for every million people.

These are staggering ratios. To get your head around them, take the US as a comparison. There are around 45,000 psychiatrists for all 333 million Americans, which translates to about 135 psychiatrists for every million people. That’s still not enough — experts are actually warning of an escalating shortage — and yet it’s a whopping 135 times more coverage than exists in Uganda.

These numbers have very real, and sometimes very brutal, implications for people’s lives. When psychiatry and other forms of professional mental health care are not accessible, people suffer in silence or turn to whatever options they can find. In Ghana, for instance, thousands of desperate families bring their ailing loved ones to “prayer camps” in hopes of healing, only to find that the self-styled prophets there chain their loved ones to trees. Instead of receiving medical treatment for, say, schizophrenia, the patients receive prayers.

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Violeta Encarnacion for Vox

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Happy Holidays Everyone Be Blessed

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Joy to All

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On Wednesday, OpenAI announced ChatGPT, a dialogue-based AI chat interface for its GPT-3 family of large language models. It’s currently free to use with an OpenAI account during a testing phase. Unlike the GPT-3 model found in OpenAI’s Playground and API, ChatGPT provides a user-friendly conversational interface and is designed to strongly limit potentially harmful output.”

The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests,” writes OpenAI on its announcement blog page.

So far, people have been putting ChatGPT through its paces, finding a wide variety of potential uses while also exploring its vulnerabilities. It can write poetry, correct coding mistakes with detailed examples, generate AI art prompts, write new code, expound on the philosophical classification of a hot dog as a sandwich, and explain the worst-case time complexity of the bubble sort algorithm… in the style of a “fast-talkin’ wise guy from a 1940’s gangster movie.”

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An AI-generated image of a chatbot exploding forth from squiggly radial lines, as was foretold by the prompt.

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If cold and flu season seems to be hitting your household harder this year, you’re not alone. This is the year when common viruses that took a backseat to Covid-19 finally return. Positive tests for the flu in the United States stood at 25 percent in late November, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, compared to 8 percent at the same time of year in 2019. Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) has pushed some children’s hospitals to capacity. And Covid hospitalizations are rising again. It’s the tripledemic that epidemiologists feared—those viruses, with the help of a few other seasonal recurring ones, are working together to fuel weeks of coughing, runny noses, and fevers. So if your kids, your coworkers, and everyone you know has been feeling sick, that’s why.

“This season is truly unprecedented,” says Katelyn Jetelina, who writes Your Local Epidemiologist, a newsletter about infectious disease spread. The high rates of flu-like illness could be an early peak or an early warning of a monumentally bad season. “How high it will go, and how severe it will be, is, unfortunately, something we have to wait and see,” she says. “We’re at the mercy of time.”

The problem goes beyond making everyone feel sluggish and icky. CDC director Rochelle Walensky has confirmed that the flu, RSV, and Covid are putting stress on US hospital systems. It’s the unintended consequence of measures that sought to save lives—social distancing and mask-wearing curbed the spread of flu and RSV in 2020 and 2021. (Although there was a warning sign in 2021 when RSV cases in the US had an out-of-season uptick over the summer, an indicator that things were shifting in the wake of Covid.) Now, these viruses are roaring back and hitting a burned-out healthcare system that’s spent three years treating Covid infections. 

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While Google develops its open-source Android mobile operating system, the “original equipment manufacturers” who make Android smartphones, like Samsung, play a large role in tailoring and securing the OS for their devices. But a new finding that Google made public on Thursday​ reveals that a number of digital certificates used by vendors to validate vital system applications were recently compromised and have already been abused to put a stamp of approval on malicious Android apps.As with almost any computer operating system, Google’s Android is designed with a “privilege” model, so different software running on your Android phone, from third-party apps to the operating system itself, are restricted as much as possible and only allowed system access based on their needs. This keeps the latest game you’re playing from quietly collecting all your passwords while allowing your photo editing app to access your camera roll, and the whole structure is enforced by digital certificates signed with cryptographic keys. If the keys are compromised, attackers can grant their own software permissions it shouldn’t have. 

Google said in a statement on Thursday that Android device manufacturers had rolled out mitigations, rotating keys, and pushing out the fixes to users’ phones automatically. And the company has added scanner detections for any malware attempting to abuse the compromised certificates. Google said it has not found evidence that the malware snuck into the Google Play Store, meaning that it was making the rounds via third-party distribution. Disclosure and coordination to address the threat happened through a consortium known as the Android Partner Vulnerability Initiative.

“While this attack is quite bad, we got lucky this time, as OEMs can quickly rotate the affected keys by shipping over-the-air device updates,” says Zack Newman, a researcher at the software supply-chain security firm Chainguard, which did some analysis of the incident. 

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Photograph: Thiago Prudencio/Getty Images

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