August 24, 2022 | ± 4 minutes
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The hidden casualty from the war in Ukraine
If you’ve been with us for awhile, you may remember I drove to the Ukraine border in March to pick up a family of refugees and bring them back to Spain.
Starting tomorrow at 4:30am, I’ll be driving to the Ukrainian border to deliver medical supplies then return with refugees.
— Wyatt Cavalier (@itiswyatt) March 24, 2022
I’ll post updates here periodically to (hopefully) raise some awareness of the humanitarian situation on the ground.
Follow along if you’d like.
👇 pic.twitter.com/j4uQFRJUv0
We then hosted another family of Ukrainians in our guest house for three months. A granny, her daughter Anna, and Anna’s eight-year-old girl.
Tragically, Anna had a sudden and massive heart attack in June, which left her little girl and the granny without any support or income. So now they’re stuck in a foreign country trying to get to another foreign country to avoid a war that their country didn’t start.
If you’re so inclined and have a moment to spare, we’d be grateful for any donations you can make to the JustGiving page.
Cross that stream when we get to it
For the first time ever, Americans watched more TV and films via streaming services than cable or broadband (but not both combined).
Streaming viewership is up around 23% since last year, capturing a 6.5% bigger share of the overall pie. Both broadcast and cable lost ground in proportionate measures, more or less.
What were Americans watching? According to Nielsen:
Netflix gained 8% share, boosted by the nearly 18 billion minutes of Stranger Things that viewers watched, complemented by the nearly 11 billion minutes of combined viewing of Virgin River and The Umbrella Academy. Movies The Gray Man and The Sea Beast contributed over 5 billion minutes. Hulu’s record share was helped by the new season of Only Murders in the Building and The Bear, which combined for 3 billion minutes viewed. Amazon’s Prime Video’s 3.0 share was driven by the new series The Terminal List and new episodes of The Boys, which netted over 8 billion viewing minutes.
It’s worth noting there’s some seasonality to these figures. Cable and broadcast figures are likely to bump back up in the autumn when the NFL and NBA come back.
Meta gets a bit too cozy with OnlyFans
Have you heard of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism? I hadn’t before today.
The GIFCT was formed by Meta, Microsoft, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube in 2017 in a joint effort to stop the spread of mass shooting videos and other terrorist material online. When a member of the group flags a photo, video or post as terrorist-related, a digital fingerprint called a “hash” is shared across all its members.
So, if a terrorist posts a beheading on Facebook, the video is tagged there and immediately marked on YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram.
Sounds pretty ok in a boring regulatory sort of way.
But what happens if someone — a rival, an ex, a former employer — persuades an employee at Facebook to mark one of your photos as terror-related? And what happens if your livelihood relies on your photos, media, and videos? If you’re a film producer, for example. Or a porn star.
That’s what allegedly happened to thousands of adult entertainers, according to a number of lawsuits:
OnlyFans squashed competitors in the online porn industry with the help of a bizarre scheme that bribed Meta employees to throw thousands of porn stars onto a terrorist watchlist, according to a group of explosive lawsuits.Adult performers who sold X-rated photos and videos on rival sites saw their Instagram accounts falsely tagged as containing terrorist content — crippling their ability to promote their business and devastating their incomes, according to the suits.
Whether this happened or not will come out in the courts, but the fact that it’s possible is scary.
Crypto scams are way down in 2022
The total crypto scam revenue for 2022 is sitting at $1.6b through July, which is the lowest it’s been since (at least) 2019.
While $1.6b is still a lot, that’s 65% lower than it was in 2021.
That’s great, obviously, and it leads to all sorts of conclusions like security is getting better, people are getting smarter about their Bitcoins, and so on.
But really, it’s just a function of lower crypto prices – scammers are less motivated when the pie is smaller, and marks are more cautious when everything isn’t going up and to the right.
Some crypto crime is on the up this year, though. At $1.9b in July, hacks are up 58% since 2021.
Climate change is powering the fight against climate change
As sea temperatures rise, the coastline around Greenland is becoming more accessible to mining operations. It’s easier to get heavy equipment in & minerals out when it’s not ice-locked 400 days a year.
Taking advantage of the newly accessible island, a bunch of billionaires (including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Michael Bloomberg) will be going on a treasure hunt in search of rare earth minerals like cobalt and nickel. That’s the stuff required for electric vehicles and batteries.
While nickel is pretty common, cobalt is not. At the moment, some 70% of the rare earth metal comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and much of that is mined by children in awful conditions.
They’ve all backed the startup KoBold Metals, which has sent a team of 30 people to Greenland to look for the minerals. While any noises the company makes about altruistic aims are probably hogwash, it would be a lovely irony if rising sea temperatures helped fight climate change.
