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Software developer at a big library, cyclist, photographer, hiker, reader. Email: chris@improbable.org
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Sticks and Stones - by Michele Banks - Artologica
Friday April 19th, 2024 at 2:32 PM

Artologica
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Next month I will be showing my work at Artomatic, an enormous, non-juried art event held in an empty office building in downtown Washington, DC. Artomatic has been held in and around DC eleven times since its founding in 1999 in an old laundromat, which inspired its name. I showed at six of the previous Artomatics and was deeply involved as a volunteer organizer for many years, until I decided that I was doing too much unpaid work.

Over the years, I have tried to become more strategic about my art career, rather than just grabbing opportunities as they come along. So when the announcement came out that Artomatic was back for the first time since 2017, I hesitated. Would I get sucked into the volunteer vortex again? Did it make sense to participate in a non-juried show, which would never be considered prestigious? (Like colleges, art shows are ranked according to how many applicants they exclude, and Artomatic is open to all comers)

I talked myself alternately into and out of it. Gradually, as more and more of my local artist friends signed up, I warmed to the idea. Vowing that I would keep firm boundaries on my time, I registered, although I still felt conflicted.

Then something happened.

After deciding to write this letter, I remembered that The Washington Post’s art critic had once written a scathing review about an Artomatic where I had shown my work. I thought I would go back and look at it for laughs. Well, I found it, but I didn’t laugh.

I’m going to share a few excerpts here, from “Artomatic 2004: Hanging Is Too Good for It” by Blake Gopnik, in the Washington Post, November 11, 2004.

Here's a fine idea. Let's find an abandoned school and then invite local dentists to ply their trade, free of charge, in its crumbling classrooms, peeling corridors and dripping toilets. Okay, so maybe we won't get practicing dentists to come, but we might get some dental students, hygienists and retirees to join in our Happy Tooth festival. What the heck, let's not be elitists here: Why don't we just invite anyone with a yen for tooth work or some skill with drills to give it a go. Then we can all line up, open wide and see what happens.

I'll be at the front of the line.

After all, it could hardly be more excruciating than this year's Artomatic, the fourth edition of the District's creative free-for-all, which opens tomorrow. Organizers have gotten about 600 local "artists" -- anyone who could ante up the $60 fee and 15 hours of his or her time, in fact -- to display their creations. …

The result is the second-worst display of art I've ever seen. The only one to beat it out, by the thinnest of split hairs, was the 2002 Artomatic, which was worse only by virtue of being even bigger and in an even more atrocious space, down by the waterfront in a vacant modern office building.

I won't dwell on the art. And I certainly won't name names. No one needs to know who made the wallfuls of amateur watercolors, yards of incompetent oil paintings, acres of trite street photography and square miles of naive installation art that will be polluting this innocent old building for the next three weeks. There's something for everyone to hate. The rest are works only a mother could love. …

A show like Artomatic, in theory organized and stocked by lovers and supporters of fine art, is actively insulting to all the genuinely talented artists who have managed the long slog to a professional career.

Actively insulting. Never mind that Artomatic 2004 featured artists whose works are now in museums. This type of ugly snobbery and outright cruelty is an absolute gut-punch to artists everywhere. It’s the kind of thing that crawls into your brain and makes you want to quit. And yet. The mean-spiritedness of this review is so extravagant that, in the ten minutes it took me to reread it, I once again became a passionate advocate for Artomatic and other shows like it, events that provide rare opportunities for self-taught artists like me. Filled with the fire that only a completely unfair appraisal can ignite, I am proud to be showing my work at Artomatic 2024.

So congrats, I guess, Blake Gopnik. Twenty years after you took a blowtorch to our efforts, many of us are still here, still making art, still feeling a little bit bad about what you said, and still using your nasty words as powerful fuel. You’ve achieved the same kind of immortality as the tiny, prehistoric creatures in my gas tank.

You can find my work in space 5108C at Artomatic, from March 8 through April 28 at 2100 M Street NW in DC. Please consult the website for opening times and more information. If you can’t make it to DC, you can always shop online

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Amazon ebooks: Are the Mikkelsen twins running a scam? Here’s our investigation - Vox
Friday April 19th, 2024 at 2:30 PM

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If you’re a millennial, you may remember that specific moment in time around the late 2000s when streaming video technology had just gotten good but there weren’t that many legitimate streaming platforms available yet. So if you were a student without a TV and you wanted to watch a show, you would go to a website that aggregated lists of illegal streams.

It would be covered in banner ads and autoplaying video ads decorated with little play button arrows, and in order to watch your show, you would have to solve the puzzle of figuring out which play button to click that would actually get you to your show instead of spiriting you away to a website that sold upsetting porn or amateurish video games. It could be done, but you had to be paying attention, and you had to have the barest modicum of web savvy to do it right.

Right now, navigating the ebook and audiobook marketplaces is like being back on those sites. There are a thousand banner ads larded with keywords, and they’re all trying to get your clicks.

Take, for example, when tech journalist Kara Swisher’s Burn Book came out this February. A host of other books hit the Kindle store along with it. They all had bizarre, SEO-streamlined titles, like those new businesses that are named Plumbing Near Me to game the Google algorithm.

“I found ‘Kara Swisher: Silicon Valley’s Bulldog,’ and ‘Kara Swisher Book: How She Became Silicon Valley’s Most Influential Journalist,’ and ‘Kara Swisher Biography: Unraveling the Life and Legacy,’ by a ‘guy’ who ‘wrote’ four biographies this month,” said Ben Smith when he interviewed Swisher for Semaforum.

Swisher was less than flattered by the biographies. “I wrote [Amazon CEO] Andy Jassy and I said, ‘You’re stealing my IP! What is going on?’” she told Smith. (Disclosure: Swisher works for Vox Media.)

Here is almost certainly what was going on: “Kara Swisher book” started trending on the Kindle storefront as buzz built up for Swisher’s book. Keyword scrapers that exist for the sole purpose of finding such search terms delivered the phrase “Kara Swisher book” to the so-called biographer, who used a combination of AI and crimes-against-humanity-level cheap ghostwriters to generate a series of books they could plausibly title and sell using her name.

The biographer in question was just one in a vast, hidden ecosystem centered on the production and distribution of very cheap, low-quality ebooks about increasingly esoteric subjects. Many of them gleefully share misinformation or repackage basic facts from WikiHow behind a title that’s been search-engine-optimized to hell and back again. Some of them even steal the names of well-established existing authors and masquerade as new releases from those writers. According to the Authors Guild, it would be impossible for anyone but Amazon to quantify these books — and that’s not information Amazon is sharing.

All of this means that to buy the book you want — to buy Kara Swisher’s Burn Book instead of Kara Swisher Book: How She Became Silicon Valley’s Most Influential Journalist — you have to know what you’re looking for and pay a modicum of attention to your purchase.

Who wants to do that? Especially in a marketplace like Amazon, where we are trained to buy quickly and thoughtlessly with a single click and where writers have been trained to send their wares without even thinking about it because where else are you going to sell an ebook.

It’s so difficult for most authors to make a living from their writing that we sometimes lose track of how much money there is to be made from books, if only we could save costs on the laborious, time-consuming process of writing them.

The internet, though, has always been a safe harbor for those with plans to innovate that pesky writing part out of the actual book publishing. On the internet, it’s possible to copy text from one platform and paste it into another seamlessly, to share text files, to build vast databases of stolen books. If you wanted to design a place specifically to pirate and sleazily monetize books, it would be hard to do better than the internet as it has long existed.

Now, generative AI has made it possible to create cover images, outlines, and even text at the click of a button.

If, as they used to say, everyone has a book in them, AI has created a world where tech utopianists dream openly about excising the human part of writing a book — any amount of artistry or craft or even just sheer effort — and replacing it with machine-generated streams of text; as though putting in the labor of writing is a sucker’s game; as though caring whether or not what you’re reading is nonsense is only for elitists. The future is now, and it is filled with trash books that no one bothered to really write and that certainly no one wants to read.

The saddest part about it, though, is that the garbage books don’t actually make that much money either. It’s even possible to lose money generating your low-quality ebook to sell on Kindle for $0.99. The way people make money these days is by teaching students the process of making a garbage ebook. It’s grift and garbage all the way down — and the people who ultimately lose out are the readers and writers who love books.

None of this is happening through any willful malice, per se, on the part of the platforms that now run publishing and book-selling. It’s happening more because the platforms are set up to incentivize everything to cost as little as possible, even if it’s garbage.

In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Ashley Vanicek said, “We aim to provide the best possible shopping, reading, and publishing experience, and we are constantly evaluating developments that impact that experience, which includes the rapid evolution and expansion of generative AI tools.”

Yet the garbage books predate the problem of AI. Here’s how they get made in the first place.

The scammy underbelly of online self-publishing

These days, the trash ebook publishing landscape is fully saturated with grifters. There are blogs that talk about the industry, but they tend to be clickbait sites riddled with SEO keywords and affiliate links back and forth between each other. Virtually every single part of the self-publishing grift world that can be automated or monetized has been automated and monetized.

If you look a few years back, however, you find a very different landscape. In the internet of the early 2010s, lots of people were excited about making money with trash ebooks and trash audiobooks, but they weren’t yet all trying to scam one another on top of their eventual readers. They wrote real blogs about the process of the grift with their real human voices. They distinguished between schemes that were “white hat” (following the rules) and “black hat” (violating some terms of service). They compared strategies and teachers of strategies.

According to the blogs of the era, one of the most infamous teachers was a man who went by Luca de Stefani, or Big Luca. Legend had it he held the world record for making the most money using Kindle Publishing in a single day. What set Big Luca’s Self Publishing Revolution course apart from the rest — Big Luca’s “black hat breadwinner video lesson,” per one review — was that he gave his students access to a secret Facebook group where self-publishers organized review swaps and buys.

For the self-publishing grift, good reviews are crucial. The more five-star reviews a book has, the more likely Amazon’s algorithm is to push it toward readers. If you’re mostly publishing trash books, you’re not going to get tons of five-star reviews organically. Big Luca’s Facebook group gave grifters a place to offer to swap five-star reviews or sell five-star reviews for $0.99 a pop. As far as Amazon’s algorithm was concerned, there was no difference between that kind of review and the one a real reader might leave. The results were extremely lucrative.

Luca didn’t invent this formula. He learned it from the OG self-publishing grift course K Money Mastery, now apparently defunct, where he excelled.

Eventually, Big Luca had wrung all the money he could from the self-publishing hustle. He climbed up to the next level of the pyramid and became a teacher, and in 2016, the lore goes, a man named Christian Mikkelsen enrolled in Big Luca’s Self Publishing Revolution.

The Mikkelsen twins are named Christian and Rasmus, and they are 28 years old. They have dark blond hair and blue eyes and meticulously groomed facial hair, and they always seem to be posting to Instagram from luxurious private pools that are also somehow exotic beaches. They have managed, in what must be fairly acknowledged as a feat of branding wizardry, to hold on to the domain <a href="http://Publishing.com" rel="nofollow">Publishing.com</a>, and there they peddle their wares: a course they say can help students make a lifetime of easy cash off the revenue from books they don’t even have to bother to write themselves. If they happen to land a student who wants to write a book in good faith and just doesn’t understand how to sell their book on their own, well, they’re happy to take money from that student, too.

According to a profile in Inc., Christian found his way into the self-publishing world by googling “how to make money online.” His first book was a brief ebook titled How to Be a 4.0 Student in College, Like Me. Big Luca’s method apparently served him well enough that he thought it would be worthwhile to bring his twin Rasmus into the fold.

Together, the Mikkelsens published trash book after trash book, guides to keto and sex and crystals. Then they started running their manuscripts through Google Translate to start selling foreign language editions, an innovation on the old grift that bumped their income into six figures and, after a few months, got Amazon to block their publishing account. The time had come, as Inc. would put it, to “do what entrepreneurs do”: pivot. They started a YouTube channel so they could teach the business of self-publishing to anyone else who wanted to learn. Six months and 1,000 subscribers later, they launched their first paywalled online course.

First it was called Audiobook Impact Academy. Then it was Publishing Life. Now, with AI an ever-more-fashionable buzzword, it’s AI Publishing Academy. It’s always more or less the same method, with a few new tweaks in every new iteration. But the method doesn’t change as much as you might think.

How the garbage books get made: A case study

If you want to take the Mikkelsen course, the first thing you do is sit through their sales pitch. It runs for two hours, and it’s just a video of Christian sitting in a dark room, drinking thirstily from a water bottle as he shows you screencaps of his students’ royalty checks and repeats that he is already rich; he doesn’t have to show you how to make this kind of money. He’s doing it for fun.

Christian’s offer is, he says, unbeatable. He will show you how to produce a book without having to write it. “What used to be the hardest part in the process — which was creating that book that you upload onto Amazon — is now the easiest part, and the most fun,” Christian explains. “Because AI can help do that for you.”

Specifically, AI will write your outline for you. The twins feel that the quality isn’t there on purely AI-generated books yet; they demand better for their readers than AI prose. Still, they say using AI to outline saves their students weeks of researching their own manuscripts.

That AI is part of but not central to the process is a helpful talking point for the Mikkelsens as Amazon strengthens its regulations against purely AI-generated text for sale.

“Last year we began requiring all publishers using our Kindle Direct Publishing service to provide information about whether their content is AI-generated and further reduced the total number of titles that can be published in a day,” said Amazon spokesperson Vanicek. Vanicek added that they have “a robust set of methods” to detect content that violates their guidelines, and they regularly remove those books and sometimes suspend the publishing accounts of repeat offenders.

“The thought of human creativity being overshadowed by robots isn’t exactly the prettiest picture,” Christian wrote in a (suspiciously ChatGPT-sounding) blog post in March. “But we’re here to set the record straight. There are two camps of AI use out there: AI-generated and AI-assisted. They are completely different.”

In April, however, the Mikkelsens announced that they were preparing to launch a new proprietary AI program, Publishing.ai, that they promise will write a manuscript for you, “Soooo much faster than a ghostwriter!”

Under the Mikkelsen model, you also don’t have to pick your own topic. They give you access to keyword scrapers that have pulled trending topics off Kindle and Audible. And once AI is finished with your outline, you can send it over to a ghostwriter to turn into a book for a mere $500. For a 30,000-word book, that works out to a fee of $0.016667 per word. (The Mikkelsens work with a ghostwriting company developed by two former students. There, ghostwriters get hired on a freelance basis and are kept anonymous.)

Once you have your manuscript, Christian promises, the twins will show you how to hire audiobook narrators for a flat $20 fee by haggling their prices down. They’ll introduce you to a network of people who are generous with their five-star ratings and will push your book up the algorithmic Amazon rankings for you. All you have to do is sit back and collect your royalty checks as you rake in month after month of passive income.

As Christian talks, he seems to cast a kind of hypnotic spell. You start to wonder: “Am I stupid for not having invested in ebook publishing before now?” You see five-figure check after five-figure check. A ticking clock turns on. Christian wants to give you a special rate for the course. The course is worth $15,500. The regular price is $6,000. But he’s willing to give it to you for just $1,995 as long as you’re one of the first people to sign up after the webinar ends!

None of what the Mikkelsens are describing here is illegal, but if you know the norms of publishing, you know it’s unethical. As documentarian Dan Olson lays out in a lengthy 2022 deep dive into the Mikkelsens, their method of publishing means developing a book you’re probably not qualified to write. It used to mean paying a ghostwriter starvation-level wages to churn out a manuscript; now it means creating a book likely riddled with misinformation and minimal means of correcting it. It means deceiving readers with fake reviews. (That one can get you kicked off Amazon if you get caught.)

If you aren’t versed in publishing’s industry standards, however, the Mikkelsen model can seem incredibly attractive.

“I was like, ‘Yup, this would be great.’ I was totally vibing with it,” recalls Jennifer (whose name has been changed to protect her privacy), a 37-year-old in Virginia, who signed up for the twins’ course in September. She had recently written and self-published her own book on Amazon, but she wasn’t sure what to do to start promoting it.

The twins’ sales pitch struck her as the perfect solution: She could provide her ideas, people who were good with words could rewrite her draft and polish the whole thing up into a sales-ready package, and everyone would get paid. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’m ready to invest and make this a better thing.”

“It was a very efficient, friendly, interactive webinar,” recalls Cecilia (also not her real name), a Seattle-based 50-year-old who works in the health space. She signed up for the twins’ seminar in September, and she remembers being pleasantly won over by that two-hour sales pitch. It seemed to be so transparent. “It promoted trustworthiness,” she says.

Once Jennifer and Cecilia had turned over their money for the course, both of them changed their minds fast.

“I started listening to the modules,” Jennifer says. “And I don’t know how else to describe them” — there is a long, expressive pause — “but as a jet stream of bullshit.”

“All it does is tell you to buy different products,” Jennifer recalls of the Mikkelsen course. “It’s like there’s nothing that they actually provide themselves, other than ‘Go buy other people’s products’ — and I’m sure they own those too, right?” (We can’t confirm that the Mikkelsens do own the products they recommend, but the ghostwriting company they work with is run by former Mikkelsen students.)

The course cost $2,000, but that wasn’t enough. To get a Mikkelsen-approved topic for your book, you had to pay for access to the software that analyzed Amazon keywords to tell you what was trending. To create the perfect outline, you had to pay for access to the AI that outlined and drafted your book for you. You had to pay for the cover design and for the reviewers. The $2,000 fee was supposed to guarantee you frequent one-on-one calls with a publishing coach, but the coaching calls were mostly about upselling to the premium $7,800 course, Jennifer says.

After a few weeks of phone calls, Cecilia decided she had had enough of the program and asked for her money back. She didn’t expect it would be a problem, since the course was advertised as fully refundable. Customer service reps then told her that, to qualify for a refund, she had to prove she’d sat through the whole course, published a book, and failed to make her money back. She says she had to threaten to call the attorney general before they sent her money back without such proof.

Jennifer wrote off her $2,000 as the cost of learning a bad lesson, but she wanted to warn other people against making the same mistake. She posted a negative review of <a href="http://Publishing.com" rel="nofollow">Publishing.com</a> on the user review site TrustPilot, where it has a 4.7 rating. So did Cecilia. Both of them found their reviews queried by TrustPilot, which required them to submit proof of going through the course in order to keep their reviews up. Most of the course’s five-star reviews, however, remain unverified. I reached out to some of the five-star TrustPilot reviewers to get their take on the Mikkelsens’ course, but I never heard back from any of them.

After the Mikkelsens’ course got big, the rumors on Reddit say Big Luca was furious that they’d ripped off his business model. He used to brag that he was going to drag them into court. Instead, he got out of the self-publishing game.

Now he runs a program called Big Luca International or, more informally, School for the Rich, self-described as “the world’s leading company in online marketing training.” It’s supposed to teach you how to monetize any online business — the self-publishing black hat breadwinning tricks, extrapolated out to all the other industries of the internet. With the advent of AI, it’s easier than ever to flood the whole digital ecosystem with trash in pursuit of passive income.

The neverending grift

“It sucks that I did this,” Jennifer says of her experience at AI Publishing Academy. “But I mean, it’s put some fire under my butt to do it [marketing] myself for my own books.”

Jennifer didn’t set out to make a quick buck with a garbage ebook. She did the work of writing a book because she believed in it. The Mikkelsens got her because she couldn’t figure out how to sell her book on her own, and part of the reason she couldn’t sell it is because the marketplace is already so flooded with books. Many of which are garbage books.

The Mikkelsens are not the chief villains of this story. They are small-time operators working one level of a very big grift industry. The grift is that technology and retail platforms have incentivized a race to the bottom when it comes to selling books. Together, without ever caring enough about the issue to deliberately try to do so, they have built a landscape in which it’s hard to trust what you read and hard to sell what you write.

The incentives of the modern book-selling economy for writers are to keep your costs low, low, low and your volume high, high, high, and definitely put your book on Amazon because where else are you going to sell an ebook? The incentive of the modern book-buying economy for readers is to go onto Amazon and lazily click around with a few search terms, and then buy the first book that looks right with the click of a single button. The incentives are, in other words, driving us all straight into a flood of garbage.

That’s what the grift does. It finds every spot in the process of making and selling a book that is inconvenient or laborious, and it exploits those spots. It exploits our cultural belief that books are meaningful, that writing a book is a valuable act, that reading a book will enrich your life. When it’s finished, you’re left with something that’s not a real book but a book-shaped digital file filled with nothing of any use to anyone at all.

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Password crackdown leads to more income for Netflix | Ars Technica
Friday April 19th, 2024 at 12:28 PM

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Russia ups weapons production, using mass quantity to outgun Ukraine - The Washington Post
Friday April 19th, 2024 at 9:53 AM

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Russia has ramped up military production by replenishing stocks of standard weapons and ammunition and probably can sustain its onslaught in Ukraine for at least the next two years, analysts say — a sobering assessment for Kyiv, which is short on weapons and soldiers and losing ground on the battlefield.

While the Kremlin is struggling to expand capacity and to develop modern arms that could improve its army’s battlefield performance, it has capitalized on its overwhelming advantage in numbers of soldiers, its ability to arm them with old but reliable weaponry and a willingness to endure heavy casualties.

By recalibrating its economy on a war footing, forcing existing facilities to work in overdrive to produce or refurbish older equipment, and buying parts from Iran, China and North Korea, Russia has made a surprising recovery from its early losses in Ukraine.

“Russia is not producing more of its modern fighting equipment,” said Nikolai Kulbaka, a Russian economist. “But it has been making a lot more of simpler working equipment, rifles, shells, mass weapons for mass soldiers.”

As Western military aid for Kyiv has slowed in recent months, including in the United States, Russian forces have retaken the initiative in Ukraine, where they can now fire artillery and deploy drones at a far higher rate than the Ukrainians.

Russia has rearmed its forces by refurbishing existing gear — much of it dating to the Soviet era. Replacement parts from China, North Korea and Iran are of inconsistent quality, experts said, but procuring them has demonstrated Moscow’s ability to circumvent sanctions.

The Soviet-era equipment, including missiles and guided aerial bombs, has compensated for Russia’s failure, at least so far, to produce and deploy new, advanced weapons such as the T-14 Armata tank that theoretically could rival the U.S.-made Abrams and German-made Leopards that the West has given Ukraine.

U.S. officials initially believed the war in Ukraine had seriously degraded Russia’s military. But Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli, the top U.S. commander in Europe, testified in Congress this month that Moscow now had more soldiers than at the start of its invasion, and that its armed forces have “shown an accelerating ability to learn and adapt to battlefield challenges both tactically and technologically.”

Late last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin approved a record increase in military spending for 2024, planning to spend around $115 billion, nearly one-third of the country’s total annual budget and double the amount allocated for the military in 2021, the year before the invasion of Ukraine.

In recent months, top Russian officials, including Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, have claimed record numbers, reporting to Putin that the military-industrial complex has quadrupled production of armored vehicles, quintupled the supply of tanks and boosted manufacturing of drones and artillery shells by nearly 17 times.

These numbers, including a claim that 1,500 tanks were built in 2023, cannot be verified because the government does not disclose statistics about military production and the costs of the war and because the military often uses creative accounting, conflating new and rebuilt materiel, to show positive results.

“My impression is that Shoigu’s numbers and the figure of 1,500 tanks supplied over 2023 is technically correct, but it also includes refurbished stuff,” said Michael Gjerstad, land warfare analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a London-based think tank. “There could also be a percentage of tanks that are being cannibalized and their parts used to make other tanks, which could also be added into the statistics.”

Gjerstad said he believes Russia can manufacture up to 330 tanks a year but is actually building half that. Still, Russia managed to replenish about 1,140 tanks that it is estimated to have lost in 2023 by dusting off and refurbishing old armor taken from storage.

Experts note that the supply of existing gear is limited and that a key challenge for Russia is to develop capacity to build new fighting vehicles when it runs out of old models to upgrade.

The last new hull for the T-80 tank was built decades ago. Instead, Russia has gutted and refurbished hundreds that were made more than 50 years ago. But in the fall, Russian military commanders ordered a renewal of production at Omsktransmash, short for Omsk Transport Engineering Plant, where the T-80 is built.

“This is the task at hand,” Alexander Potapov, the CEO of Omsktransmash’s parent company, tank maker Uralvagonzavod, told the state-run Zvezda news outlet, at the time.

In 2019, the plant’s engineers told state media that it takes about a month to remodel one tank.

But Pavel Aksenov, a military expert and defense correspondent for the BBC’s Russian service, said the effort so far had yielded nothing. “They have not been able to restart this serial manufacturing,” Aksenov said. “It is a lot easier to boost the rates of existing production.”

It is similarly unlikely that Russia can supply its army with more modern hardware, like the T-14 Armata tank, which debuted with an array of new fighting vehicles at the 2015 Victory Day parade and infamously got stuck during rehearsals.

In early 2023, Russian state media published reports citing unnamed military officials that the Armata had been tested on Ukrainian front lines, prompting speculation it would soon be supplied to units there.

But last month, the head of Russia’s defense manufacturer, Rostec, Sergei Chemezov, said the Armata will not be deployed in Ukraine because of its high cost.

“Of course, it is much superior to other tanks in terms of functionality, but it is too expensive,” Chemezov said, according to state media. “Therefore, the army is unlikely to use it now. It’s easier to buy T-90.”

Neither the manufacturer, Uralvagonzavod, nor officials have disclosed the cost of the tank, but in 2011, Russian experts estimated it to be around $7.9 million, compared with about $3.6 million for the T-90S modification.

Aksenov said there is no proof that production of the Armata was ever finalized.

“They didn’t have enough time to nail it down before the war,” he said. “And although it was logical to begin that level of modernization, because Soviet technology is very outdated, and the invasion showed this, a war requires a different approach.”

“You need reliable equipment steadily supplied to the front line, one that is well-known to the troops, has no childhood diseases and plenty of spare parts to fix it,” Aksenov continued.

Gjerstad said Russia has sought to offset supplies of advanced Western equipment to Ukraine by prioritizing quantity and allocating better tanks to better trained units while supplying older T-55 and T-62 machines to units composed of conscripts and ex-convicts.

“Would you rather have three Fords or one Cadillac,” Gjerstad said. “That’s been the Russian thinking … it’s been like a crutch for them.”

In Ukraine, drones — or unmanned aerial vehicles — are even more vital than tanks.

To increase supply, Russia struck a deal with Iran to set up a factory for Shahed drones in Tatarstan, about 500 miles east of Moscow, and has pushed for a major increase in production of Russia’s Lancet self-detonating drone, manufactured by a subsidiary of Russian arms giant Kalashnikov Concern.

“They’ve been converting old shopping centers into drone production facilities, where they were apparently able to scale up the production quite a bit,” said Fabian Hinz, a drone expert with IISS.

“Russia doesn’t have to become the most innovative army in the world,” Hinz added. “If they managed to get a few systems that work well, like the Lancet, and then they managed to just brutally force through production, that’s already dangerous enough.”

To circumvent sanctions, Russia has forged new supply chains to obtain Western components for high-tech military equipment, with parts routed through Turkey, China and Kazakhstan, experts said, as the West has struggled with enforcement.

A recent report by the Kyiv School of Economics concluded: “Russia continues to be able to acquire large amounts of the inputs that it needs for its military production.” Imports of priority goods are down just 10 percent since sanctions were imposed, the report found.

Russia also has sought basic raw materials. Officials in the Baltics last month called for banning sales of manganese ore, a key component in steel and alloy production, after Estonian media reported that supplies to Russia had surged — often via Estonian and Latvian ports.

Russia has also managed to acquire supplies of nitrocellulose, a compound needed to produce explosives such as artillery shells, according to a report by Ukraine’s Center for Defense Strategies, including from Germany, Taiwan and China.

Catherine Belton in London contributed to this report.

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Biden moves to protect public lands with sweeping conservation rule - The Washington Post
Thursday April 18th, 2024 at 10:07 PM

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For decades, the federal government has prioritized oil and gas drilling, hardrock mining and livestock grazing on public lands across the country. That could soon change under a far-reaching Interior Department rule that puts conservation, recreation and renewable energy development on equal footing with resource extraction.

The final rule released Thursday represents a seismic shift in the management of roughly 245 million acres of public property — about one-tenth of the nation’s land mass. It is expected to draw praise from conservationists and legal challenges from fossil fuel industry groups and Republican officials, some of whom have lambasted the move as a “land grab.”

Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, known as the nation’s largest landlord, has long offered leases to oil and gas companies, mining firms and ranchers. Now, for the first time, the nearly 80-year-old agency will auction off “restoration leases” and “mitigation leases” to entities with plans to restore or conserve public lands.

“Today’s final rule helps restore balance to our public lands as we continue using the best-available science to restore habitats, guide strategic and responsible development, and sustain our public lands for generations to come,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement.

Under President Biden, the BLM has put a greater emphasis on protecting public lands from the twin threats of climate change and development. Tracy Stone-Manning, the bureau’s director, has warned that hotter, drier climates are driving longer and more intense wildfires and drought across the American West. At the same time, development has fragmented and destroyed wildlife habitat and migratory corridors.

“We oversee 245 million acres, and every land manager will tell you that climate change is already happening. It’s already impacting our public lands,” Stone-Manning said during a Washington Post Live event last year. “We see it in pretty obvious ways, through unprecedented wildfires.”

The fossil fuel industry, a frequent foe of the Biden administration, has chafed at the BLM’s approach. It has called the public lands rule an example of regulatory overreach that will stifle domestic energy production, even as the United States pumps more oil than any nation in history.

Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, which represents oil and gas companies, said the group plans to challenge the BLM rule in court. She said the policy appears to violate the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, the 1976 law that tasked the bureau with overseeing “multiple uses” of public lands for current and future generations.

“We have no choice but to litigate,” Sgamma said. “These conservation leases seem to be designed to preclude energy development on federal lands.”

The BLM’s proposed rule released last year sparked especially intense outrage in Wyoming, an energy powerhouse that accounts for nearly one-tenth of U.S. fossil fuel production. Some Wyoming Republicans have claimed that the BLM is colluding with liberal environmental groups to put millions of acres off-limits to development.

Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said Thursday he plans to introduce legislation to repeal the BLM rule using the Congressional Review Act, which allows lawmakers to overturn regulations by a simple majority vote. “With this rule, President Biden is allowing federal bureaucrats to destroy our way of life,” Barrasso said in a statement.

Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, an advocacy group, said some Republican officials have spread “disinformation and conspiracy theories” about the rule. He noted that during a House Natural Resources Committee hearing last year, South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R) claimed the draft rule would allow Chinese citizens to purchase leases on U.S. lands.

Unlike the proposed rule, the final rule clarifies that “leases cannot be held by foreign persons.” It also offers “restoration leases” and “mitigation leases” rather than “conservation leases” — a linguistic tweak that seems designed to skirt the politicization of the word “conservation,” Weiss said.

Mitigation leases will allow lease holders to offset the impact of their activities. For example, a rancher whose cattle grazing is degrading the land could be required to purchase a mitigation lease during the permitting process. The rancher could then work with a local conservation group to restore nearby habitat for the greater sage grouse, an imperiled bird of the West.

Renewable energy developers won’t be immune from the rule. They could buy mitigation leases if their wind or solar farms are affecting wildlife or watersheds, said Danielle Murray, vice president of conservation policy at the Conservation Lands Foundation.

The final rule also directs the BLM to prioritize landscape health for the first time and to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into its decision-making. The latter is a top priority of Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary and lead a department that once oversaw the removal of Indigenous people from their land.

The Trump administration took a vastly different approach to managing public lands than Biden officials. President Donald Trump briefly moved the BLM’s headquarters from Washington to Grand Junction, Colo., a hot spot for natural gas production. More than 87 percent of the affected employees either resigned or retired rather than move to Colorado, depriving the agency of expertise and disrupting its operations.

To lead the BLM, Trump tapped William Perry Pendley, a conservative lawyer who had previously advocated for selling off public lands across the country. Pendley, who was never confirmed by the Senate, pushed the bureau to maximize oil, gas and mineral development.

Should Trump return to office, “the priority has to be oil and gas,” Pendley said in a recent interview.

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2024 West Africa Submarine Cable Outage Report - Internet Society
Thursday April 18th, 2024 at 9:50 PM

Internet Society
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On 14 March 2024, a suspected underwater rock slide off the coast of Cote d’Ivoire resulted in the following submarine cables being offline:

  • ACE – Africa Coast to Europe
  • SAT-3 – Submarine Atlantic 3/West Africa Submarine Cable
  • WACS – West Africa Cable System
  • MainOne

The outage did not directly impact Seacom, whose network spans the East African and South African coastlines. However, due to outages to its partner networks on the West Coast—WACS and MainOne—it had to reroute traffic to other links.

This report focuses on the 14 March 2024 outage, not the outage along the Red Sea that affected Seacom/TGN-EA, EIG, and AAE-1 submarine cables on 24 February 2024. According to an article from 2 April 2024, repairs were still ongoing. There are no reports of the fiber cut on 24 February 2024 causing outages in Africa.

The outage impacted 13 African countries located on the West African seaboard, causing either degraded services or near-total Internet outages.

The following map and table show the countries (shaded red in the map) that were directly affected by the outages on the four submarine cables.

Countries with submarine cable diversity could maintain a level of uptime, indicating resiliency. Cross-border terrestrial fiber links were crucial in facilitating connectivity to operational submarine fiber cables for landlocked countries.

This map shows that all four affected submarine cables converge along the coast of Cote d’Ivoire, where the rockslide is reported to have happened. This can be deemed to be a single point of failure for the four cables.

It is unclear if other single points of failure exist in other countries where the cables converge or whether the cable operators have built-in protection in different areas along their cables. Submarine cable providers do not provide details about their cable routes for what is believed to be security reasons.

It should be noted that cable outages occur occasionally — usually affecting individual cables. Estimates are that there are about 100 fiber cuts a year. This incident is unique because multiple cables were damaged due to their convergence at a single physical point.

Google’s Equiano cable does not terminate in Cote d’Ivoire and was vital to maintaining uptime for several affected countries.

Maroc Telecom West Africa or MoovAfrica’s cable terminates in Cote d’Ivoire but was not affected by the rockslide and remained operational. This shows that they likely used a different path for their fiber cable, which helped Cote d’Ivoire maintain connectivity.

More submarine and terrestrial cables and diverse cable landing points are needed to help improve redundancy and resiliency across Africa.

Several reports indicate that countries with access to Google’s Equiano cable and MTWA/MoovAfrica cables, unaffected by the reported rockslide, could maintain uptime during the outage.

Local operators used cross-border terrestrial fiber links in West Africa to reroute traffic to the Equiano cable, which saw a fourfold increase in traffic.

SEACOM South Africa also rerouted traffic to Google’s Equiano cable to provide traffic to networks that relied on its West African partner network via WACS and MainOne.

Microsoft reported outages of their services in the EMEA region on 14 March. Countries in Africa that were not directly affected by the submarine cable outage could not use services such as Microsoft Teams and Office365, among others. Microsoft services were restored later that day following a successful rerouting by Microsoft.

Niger, which still uses satellite connectivity, was able to maintain uptime over satellite and terrestrial fiber via Burkina Faso into Benin.

Cote d’Ivoire, the center of the outage, experienced a near-total Internet outage. The Moov Africa cable (also known as the Maroc Telecom West Africa or MTWA cable) remained operational and provided connectivity.

The cable operators of the affected submarine cables have provided the below estimates to restore services:

  • SAT-3 from 29 March to 5 April (fully restored as of 6 April)
  • ACE from 4 to 14 April
  • WACS from 25 April to 5 May
  • MainOne from 5 to 16 May

As of publishing, information from affected countries shows that IXPs remained operational, meaning content available via IXPs has remained reachable.

Niger’s IXP is not operational at the moment. As mentioned, available terrestrial fiber and satellite connectivity are believed to have helped avoid the total outage of local and international traffic.

We will share more information about how the IXPs reacted to the incident as it comes to light.

The Internet Society has carried out many activities to support the establishment and/or growth of IXPs in the countries affected by this fiber cut. These activities have included training workshops under the AXIS Project, equipment donations, cache fill grants, and hosting peering forums to strengthen the local IXP community.

Below is a summary of these activities and their respective impacts from the year 2011:

The below map (Figure 2) shows the Internet Society’s IXP support activities in Africa from 2020. These have included:

  • Hardware support (HS) — equipment donations to the IXP.
  • Peering forums (PFs) — in-person events that bring together and strengthen the local IXP community.
  • Cache fill (CF) grants — a grant support program that provides connectivity support to fill CDN caches hosted at IXPs.

The following Internet Society Chapters shared various articles and updates on the outage:

  • Ghana Chapter: One of the chapter members and Internet Society alumni published an article assessing the state of Internet resilience in Ghana and what needs improvement. The article was shared on the Internet and in a local newspaper.
  • Togo Chapter: The chapter published a communique, and Radio France International interviewed the Chapter President. The Togo Chapter also shared an update on its website about the outage.
  • Cameroon Chapter: The chapter joined the Cameroon IXP (CAMIX), Cameroon NOG (CAMNOG), and a coalition of local IT service providers and ISPs to publish a joint communique with recommendations to the Cameroon Government on actions to improve Cameroon’s Internet resilience. They used the data from Internet Society Pulse to support their recommendations.
  • Somalia Chapter: The chapter issued a statement on the future of submarine fiber cables following the outage.

Internet Society staff members Jean-Baptiste Millogo and Dr. Dawit Bekele both gave their views on the outage as follows:

Dawit Bekele was interviewed by the French newspaper Jeune Afrique, which is widely read in Francophone Africa. The article provided public awareness of the Internet Society’s Internet measurement project, notably the Pulse Internet Resilience Index. It also discusses the importance of Internet resilience in avoiding the negative impacts of this kind of cable outage. It also denounces some myths, such as the one that says that government control of fiber cables increases Internet resilience.

Jean-Baptiste Millogo was interviewed on BF1 and RTB, two national TV stations in Burkina Faso with regional audiences. During both interviews, he discussed the importance of IXPs, restoration times for damaged submarine cables, how operators and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) provide services, the impact of the outage on Burkina Faso’s Internet ecosystem, and long-term solutions to improve Internet resilience and the impact of future outages in Burkina Faso.

These recent events have shown the importance of having upstream redundancy, whether it be submarine or terrestrial cables, satellite and/or more locally cached content, and IXPs allowing local Internet connectivity to continue when connections to the outside world are broken.

More submarine and regional terrestrial fiber cables are coming live in Africa shortly, including:

  • 2Africa cable, which is reported to be the longest subsea cable ever, is coming live in 2024.
  • Trans-Sahara Optical Fibre Backbone cable, which connects Niger, Algeria, Chad, and Nigeria, is expected to be live in 2024. This will significantly boost Niger and Chad, which are both landlocked countries.
  • South Sudan and Djibouti have agreed to lay a cable between them through Ethiopia.
  • The Djoliba cable, unveiled in 2020, will be the first pan-West African fiber cable to connect Burkina Faso, Cote D’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, and Senegal. This will help maintain connectivity within the West African region and help provide redundant paths to other connectivity sources in the event of submarine cable disruptions. 

Starlink continues to increase availability over Africa. Though licenses have not been granted in all countries, it presents an alternative option to fiber connectivity in the highly diverse region. Hopefully, more affordable LEO satellite services like Starlink will be available shortly to help boost redundancy.

More investment in locally hosted content and Internet services in Africa will also help mitigate the impact of submarine cable cuts. Recent growth in data center investment is a positive sign of more locally available content being made available via IXPs.

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1 public comment
acdha
20 hours ago
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Neat to see those support activities paying off
Washington, DC
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