How a 27-Year-Old Codebreaker Busted the Myth of Bitcoin’s Anonymity - WIRED (Full Access)   

That 180-degree flip in the world's understanding of cryptocurrency's privacy properties, and the epic game of cat-and-mouse that followed, is the larger saga that unfolds in the book Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency, out this week in paperback.

In early 2013, the shelves of a windowless storage room in a building of the University of California, San Diego, began to fill up with strange, seemingly random objects. A Casio calculator. A pair of alpaca wool socks. A small stack of Magic: The Gathering cards. A Super Mario Bros. 3 cartridge for the original Nintendo. A plastic Guy Fawkes mask of the kind popularized by the hacker group Anonymous. An album by the classic rock band Boston on CD.

Meiklejohn had personally purchased every one of the dozens of items in the bizarre, growing collection in the UCSD closet using bitcoin, buying each one almost at random from a different vendor who accepted the cryptocurrency. And between those ecommerce orders and trips to the storage room, she was performing practically every other task that a person could carry out with bitcoin, all at once, like a kind of cryptocurrency fanatic having a manic episode.

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Regulators Are Finally Catching Up With Big Tech - WIRED (Full Access)   

In 2024, we will see courts and regulators around the world demonstrate that tech exceptionalism, when it comes to the applicability of legal rules, is magical thinking. The tide has already started to turn on the assumption that law and regulation cannot keep up with technological innovation. But, in 2024, the sea change will come: not through new rules, but by old rules being applied aggressively to new problems.

In the United States, in the absence of federal privacy legislation, regulators have already started to repurpose laws and rules they do have at their disposal to address some of the most egregious examples of Big Tech playing fast and loose with our rights and personal data. In 2023, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) continued to expand the regulatory heft of consumer protection regulations.

It took on the problem of dark patterns—deceptive design used by apps and websites to trick users into doing something that they didn’t intend to, like buying or subscribing to something—with a half-billion-dollar fine against Fortnite maker Epic Games. The FTC also issued massive fines to Amazon for significant breaches of privacy through Alexa and Ring doorbell devices. There are no signs that, in 2024, the FTC will slow down, with rules in the pipeline to govern commercial surveillance and digital security. In 2024, we’ll see regulators in other fields and other parts of the world follow suit, bolstered by the FTC’s successes.

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You Know It’s a Placebo. So Why Does It Still Work? - WIRED (Full Access)   

You booked this doctor's appointment weeks in advance. You took off work, endured the trip here, filled out paperwork while a cooking show blared from a TV on the wall, and now you're finally in the inner sanctum, awkwardly perched on an exam table and staring at a jar of tongue depressors. Your doctor comes in, listens as you describe what's been bothering you. She nods, a wrinkle of concern crossing her forehead. She asks a few follow-up questions. Then she says, "I'm going to prescribe you something that isn't designed to treat these symptoms but may help you feel better. It's a placebo."

No doubt you're confused. Placebos famously rely on deception: You, the patient, receive an inert substance that you believe to be active and are fooled into feeling better. The word placebo comes from the Latin placere, "to please" (as in "more to please than benefit the patient," according to one 19th-century medical dictionary). How does your doctor expect you to be pleased, much less relieved of your symptoms, by a prescription for sugar pills? Is she a quack?

Fortunately, the answer is probably not. Many doctors—perhaps as many as 97 percent, according to a 2018 survey—prescribe placebos at some point in their careers. The American Medical Association green-lights placebo use as long as the patient is informed and consents; they need not be aware of when they're getting a placebo, only that it may be among the treatments. (The Hippocratic oath says, "Do no harm" not "Tell the whole truth.") A typical doctor might prescribe antibiotics even though the patient has a viral infection, or vitamin supplements even though there's no deficiency. What's different about your doctor is that she's letting you in on the secret. She's prescribing a so-called open-label placebo.

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An AI Executive Turns AI Crusader to Stand Up for Artists - WIRED (Full Access)   

Ed Newton-Rex says generative AI has an ethics problem. He ought to know, because he used to be part of the fast-growing industry. Newton-Rex was TikTok’s head AI designer and then an executive at Stability AI until he quit in disgust in November over the company’s stance on collecting training data.

After his high-profile departure, Newton-Rex threw himself into conversation after conversation about what building AI ethically would look like in practice. “It struck me that there are a lot of people who want to use generative AI models that treat creators fairly,” he says. “If you can give them better decisionmaking tools, that’s helpful.”

Ed Newton-Rex's nonprofit is trying to encourage companies to be more thoughtful about sourcing training data for AI projects.

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