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News Image The Slow-Burn Nightmare of the National Public Data Breach

Social Security numbers, physical addresses, and more—all available online. After months of confusion, leaked information from a background-check firm underscores the long-term risks of data breaches.

Crime and Courts Read on WIRED Security
News Image The Australian Breaker Who Broke the Internet

It’s been a week since Rachael Gunn, aka Raygun, competed in the breaking competition at the Paris Olympics. The memes—and the controversy—haven’t stopped since.

Entertainment Read on WIRED Culture
News Image 'Assassin’s Creed Shadows' and How ‘DEI’ Became Gamergate 2.0’s Rallying Cry

The forthcoming game’s inclusion of a Black samurai named Yasuke has caused a controversy in the gaming world, one that has a familiar ring to it.

Entertainment Read on WIRED Culture
Tapo’s new flagship doorbell camera does more for less

TP-Link’s Tapo D225 is a good $100 doorbell camera with 24/7 recording and smart alerts for people, packages, and pets — all without a subscription.

Business Possible ad Read on The Verge Reviews
HP’s OmniBook X 14 is a barely disguised business laptop with great battery life

This Snapdragon-powered laptop is a productivity machine, but unless work foots the bill, you can do better.

Business Read on The Verge Reviews
News Image Nearly All Google Pixel Phones Exposed by Unpatched Flaw in Hidden Android App

A fix is coming, but data analytics giant Palantir says it’s ditching Android devices altogether because Google’s response to the vulnerability has been troubling.

Business Read on WIRED Security
News Image A Single Iranian Hacker Group Targeted Both Presidential Campaigns, Google Says

APT42, which is believed to work for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, targeted about a dozen people associated with both Trump’s and Biden’s campaigns this spring, according to Google’s Threat Analysis Group.

Crime and Courts Read on WIRED Security
News Image Exclusive: Sonos considers relaunching its old app

Sonos has explored the possibility of rereleasing its previous mobile app for Android and iOS — a clear sign of what an ordeal the company’s hurried redesign has become. The Verge can report that there have been discussions high up within Sonos about bringing back the prior version of the app, known as S2, as the company continues toiling away at improving the performance and addressing bugs with the overhauled design that rolled out in May to a flood of negative feedback. (The new Sonos app currently has a 1.3-star review average on Google Play.) Letting customers fall back to the older software could ease their frustrations and reduce at least some of the pressure on Sonos to rectify every issue with the new app. At least for now, the redesigned version is all that’s available, which makes it impossible for some customers to avoid its flaws. The situation has gotten substantially better with recent updates and the app has turned a corner for many, but there’s still plenty of work to be done. CEO Patrick Spence has remained insistent that rebuilding the Sonos app from the ground up was the right choice and will make it possible for the company to innovate more frequently and expand into new product categories. But he has also readily acknowledged that Sonos severely let down its customers. “While the redesign of the app was and remains the right thing to do, our execution — my execution — fell short of the mark,” he said during last week’s earnings call. He went on to say: The app situation has become a headwind to existing product sales, and we believe our focus needs to be addressing the app ahead of everything else. This means delaying the two major new product releases we had planned for Q4 until our app experience meets the level of quality that we, our customers and our partners expect from Sonos. One of those two delayed products is the successor to the Sonos Arc soundbar — codenamed Lasso — and sources tell The Verge that Sonos still hopes to release that product sometime in October. (Sonos’ fiscal year ends in late September, so October would bring the company into fiscal year 2025 and line up with Spence’s statement.) Last week, Spence estimated that righting the ship is likely to cost between $20 and $30 million in the near term as Sonos works to assuage current customers and keep them from abandoning the company’s whole-home audio platform. The new app is being updated every two weeks with improvements, and Spence has said that cadence will continue through the fall. S2’s potential return would not change this. Restoring the old app could prove to be a technical headache since Sonos’ new software shifts a lot of core functionality to the cloud. This has unquestionably become one of the most turbulent times in Sonos’ history. In the span of just a few months, the company has gone from a well-regarded consumer tech brand to a painful example of what can happen when leadership pushes on new projects too aggressively. Spence himself admitted that the app controversy has completely overshadowed the release of Sonos’ first-ever headphones, the Sonos Ace. Just today, Sonos laid off around 100 employees as the fallout from its rushed app makeover continues.

Business Read on The Verge Exclusives
News Image Your Gym Locker May Be Hackable

Security researchers say they’ve extracted digital management keys from select electronic lockers and revealed how they could be cloned.

Crime and Courts Read on WIRED Security
News Image Gamergate’s Aggrieved Men Still Haunt the Internet

Ten years ago, much of the frustrations gamers were expressing came from anger over no longer being the target audience. Now those feelings are everywhere, from fandom to politics.

Entertainment Read on WIRED Culture
News Image Want to Win a Bike Race? Hack Your Rival’s Wireless Shifters

Please don’t, actually. But do update your Shimano Di2 shifters’ software to prevent a new radio-based form of cycling sabotage.

Politics Read on WIRED Security
OnePlus’ Pad 2 has a sharp display with a price tag that stings

The OnePlus Pad 2 continues to impress in many ways, but the upgrades don’t justify the price.

Business Read on The Verge Reviews
News Image Good luck with the PlayStation VR2 PC Adapter — you’ll need it

The biggest problem with Sony’s PSVR 2 virtual reality headset is the dearth of games. I’d hoped Sony’s PC adapter would change that. The chance to play Half-Life: Alyx, the best VR game made yet, seemed like reason enough for existing owners to justify the $60 adapter purchase.

Entertainment Read on The Verge Reviews
News Image Thousands of Corporate Secrets Were Left Exposed. This Guy Found Them All

Security researcher Bill Demirkapi found more than 15,000 hardcoded secrets and 66,000 vulnerable websites—all by searching overlooked data sources.

Business Read on WIRED Security
News Image The Hacker Who Hunts Video Game Speedrunning Cheaters

Allan “dwangoAC” has made it his mission to expose speedrunning phonies. At the Defcon hacker conference, he’ll challenge one record that's stood for 15 years.

Entertainment Read on WIRED Security
News Image Cyberattacks on clean energy are coming — the White House has a plan

The Biden administration released new priorities today for safeguarding clean energy infrastructure from possible cyberattacks. Smart grids and EVs can have big benefits when it comes to saving energy and cutting down pollution. But as more pieces of our lives become electric and digital, new cybersecurity challenges arise. That’s why the Biden administration is releasing guidance today on how to keep new parts of our energy infrastructure safe from harm. “We have a once in a generation opportunity to refresh our infrastructure — to get a bit of a mulligan on some parts of our infrastructure that were never designed for the level of digital / physical convergence that our world is hurtling towards,” Harry Krejsa, assistant national cyber director, says. In a fact sheet shared exclusively with The Verge before being released publicly, the Biden administration homes in on five technologies it deems critical to the near-term success of a clean energy transition and that deserve extra attention when it comes to cybersecurity. At the top of the list are batteries needed to store renewable energy and make sure it’s available even when sunshine fades and winds die down. Electric vehicles and charging equipment are also a priority, along with the batteries that power them. Then there are energy management systems for buildings — think smart thermostats, rooftop solar systems, and even smart lighting systems. So-called distributed control systems are another related priority. That encompasses controls for community microgrids and virtual power plants that harness the collective energy storage of fleets of EV or solar batteries. Inverters and power conversion equipment round out the list. “Digitization cuts both ways,” Krejsa says. On the one hand, it gives home and business owners and grid operators more control. It’s easier to adjust EV charging to specific times when renewable energy is more abundant or to turn up thermostats to save energy and avoid power outages during heatwaves. But those tools can become weak points to exploit without robust protections in place. President Joe Biden has already had to cope with criminal hackers targeting energy infrastructure during his term in office. A cyberattack in 2021 shut down the Colonial Pipeline, the largest pipeline system for refined oil products in the US. The ransomware attack took the pipeline offline for five days, leading to gasoline shortages, higher prices at the pump, and gridlocked traffic outside of gas stations. The Biden administration is also worried about state-backed threats. The Department of Homeland Security named cyber threats posed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) a top priority for protecting critical infrastructure through 2025 in a guidance document it published in June. PRC-sponsored cyber group Volt Typhoon has “compromised the IT environments of multiple critical infrastructure organizations” including energy and transportation systems, according to a Department of Homeland Security advisory issued in February. Protective measures can be as simple as keeping up good digital hygiene. Hackers reportedly used a compromised password to get into Colonial’s network in 2021. But there also need to be more systemic safeguards. The way energy systems operate today dumps too much responsibility “onto individuals, small businesses, local governments, frontline users who don’t have the resources to mount an adequate defense against the world’s most well-resourced and well-trained, malicious actors,” Krejsa says. “It’s just not a sustainable way to architect that ecosystem.” The fact sheet released today points to the need for “secure by design principles” that “prioritize the security of customers as a core business requirement.” The Biden administration also emphasizes the need to bring different branches of government together, along with businesses, researchers and even hackers, to design and implement better protections. The Department of Energy launched the Energy Threat Analysis Center (ETAC) as a pilot public-private partnership in 2023, for example. And Krejsa spoke to The Verge on a call from Las Vegas, where he’s attending the Def Con hacking convention and “issuing a call to action and asking the hacker community for help to say, ‘look at these priority technologies.’” With everyone on board, the Biden administration’s cybersecurity roadmap includes crafting technical standards and implementation guidance for new energy technologies. It also places a priority on research and development and training a workforce for cybersecurity. With the nation’s aging energy infrastructure already overdue for an overhaul to accommodate growing electricity demand and new sources of renewable energy, it’s also a good time to tack on a security update. “Where should we make critical infrastructure investments? These are decisions that are happening right now,” says Nana Menya Ayensu, special assistant to the president on climate policy, finance, and innovation. “When it comes to cybersecurity [we want] to make sure that that is a pillar of a more modern, more nimble, digitalized energy system.”

Environment Read on The Verge Exclusives
News Image She’s the New Face of Climate Activism—and She’s Carrying a Pickax

Sabotage. Property destruction. For Léna Lazare and her cohort, radicalized by years of inaction on the environmental crisis, these aren’t dirty words. They’re acts of joy.

Crime and Courts Read on WIRED Backchannel
News Image Every Microsoft employee is now being judged on their security work

Microsoft made it clear earlier this year that it was planning to make security its top priority, following years of security issues and mounting criticisms. Starting today, the software giant is now tying its security efforts to employee performance reviews. Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft’s chief people officer, has outlined what the company expects of employees in an internal memo obtained by The Verge. “Everyone at Microsoft will have security as a Core Priority,” says Hogan. “When faced with a tradeoff, the answer is clear and simple: security above all else.” A lack of security focus for Microsoft employees could impact promotions, merit-based salary increases, and bonuses. “Delivering impact for the Security Core Priority will be a key input for managers in determining impact and recommending rewards,” Microsoft is telling employees in an internal Microsoft FAQ on its new policy. Microsoft has now placed security as one of its key priorities alongside diversity and inclusion. Both are now required to be part of performance conversations — internally called a “Connect” — for every employee, alongside priorities that are agreed upon between employees and their managers. “It goes beyond compliance, as we are asking employees to prioritize security in all the work that they do and hold themselves accountable by capturing their impact for it whenever they complete a Connect,” reads Microsoft’s FAQ. Microsoft employees will have to demonstrate how they’ve made impactful security changes. For technical employees, that means incorporating security into product design processes at the start of a project, following established security practices, and making sure products are secure by default for Microsoft’s customers. Sign up for Notepad by Tom Warren, a weekly newsletter uncovering the secrets and strategy behind Microsoft’s era-defining bets on AI, gaming, and computing. Subscribe to get the latest straight to your inbox. $7/month Get every issue of Notepad straight to your inbox. The first month is free. $70/year Get a year of Notepad at a discounted rate. The first month is free. $100/person/year Get one year of both Notepad and Command Line. The first month is free. We accept credit card, Apple Pay and Google Pay. All Microsoft employees are expected to use the company’s Connect tool for performance reviews, including executives who will also have their own security priority to deliver on. Microsoft has already been overhauling its security efforts as part of a Secure Future Initiative (SFI) to better protect Microsoft’s networks, production systems, engineering systems, and much more. A lot of Microsoft’s security changes internally haven’t been public-facing, but some have impacted products like Outlook. Microsoft is ending support for Basic Authentication for Outlook personal accounts in September, and it’s removing the light version of the Outlook web application on August 19th. Outlook.com, Hotmail, and Live.com users will need to access their email accounts through apps using Modern Authentication on September 16th, potentially impacting some third-party email apps and older versions of Outlook, Apple Mail, and Thunderbird. Here is Hogan’s full memo: At Microsoft, we deliver mission-critical infrastructure that the world depends on to achieve more. With that trust in us comes a great responsibility: to protect our customers, our company, and our world from cyber threats. As Microsoft employees, we all have a role in that responsibility. As Satya referenced in his May 3 email and again during his FY25 kick off on July 9, security is our number-one priority, and everyone at Microsoft will have security as a Core Priority. When faced with a tradeoff, the answer is clear and simple: security above all else. Our commitment to security is enduring. New and novel attacks will require us to continue to learn, innovate, and defend. Yet working together, we will make nonlinear improvements, stay alert, and meet the expectations of our customers. They are counting on us, and our future depends on their trust. Our new Security Core Priority reinforces our commitment to security and holds us accountable for building secure products and services. It is now available in the Connect tool for most employees, and we are partnering with geo HR teams to expand access to all employees globally. The Security Core Priority is not a check-the-box compliance exercise; it is a way for every employee and manager to commit to—and be accountable for—prioritizing security, and a way for us to codify your contributions and to recognize you for your impact. We all must act with a security-first mindset, speak up, and proactively look for opportunities to ensure security in everything we do. The core priority will have two parts: Core and common elements that apply to all employees An optional section for employees to further specify how they will activate the Security Core Priority based on their role, team, org, etc. All employees will set their Security Core Priority as part their first FY25 Connect, with the intent that during regular Connect conversations, you and your manager will discuss your Security Core Priority progress and impact. This process will follow the same approach as our other company-wide core priorities for Diversity & Inclusion and Managers. You can learn more about the Security Core Priority here, including FAQs and Security Core Priority activation examples for three main types of roles: technical, customer and partner-facing, and all other roles. As we kick off our 50th year as a company, I know we all feel honored and humbled that we are still here—as a relevant and consequential company—pursuing our mission together. When we empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more, we take on society’s biggest challenges and empower the world. What a big, bold, and meaningful mission we have, and yet none of us can take this for granted. We are here because our customers trust us, and we must continue to earn their trust every day. Thank you for your commitment to our Security Core Priority that will help protect Microsoft, our customers, and our partners. Kathleen

Business Read on The Verge Exclusives
News Image Pump and Trump

Inside the MAGA-fueled fever dream of the 2024 Bitcoin Conference. There were rumors that Elon Musk would introduce former President Donald Trump before his keynote speech at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference. Musk had pledged to donate tens of millions to a Trump super PAC; he was close with JD Vance, Trump’s vice presidential nominee; he was into crypto and memes. People tracked Musk’s jet and noticed it was reducing altitude over Tennessee. It was happening. It would be historic. The Bitcoin Conference is an annual affair, and each year, it’s bigger and flashier than the one before. The last few were in Miami, Florida; this time, the conference was moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to take place only a week after the Republican National Convention. My seatmate on the flight down told me he never misses a conference. He and his friends call it “Bitcoin prom,” a weekend that is just as much about partying as it is about networking. But things were different this year: scheduled to speak at the conference were more than a half-dozen Republican politicians, prostrating themselves before the crypto gods, chasing money and support from a community that once defined itself by its resistance to the government. And then there was Trump, the centerpiece of it all, hoping to welcome the techno-libertarians and the finance bros into his ever-expanding coalition. The Bitcoiners were ready for Trump, and Trump was ready for their votes. But this marriage of cryptocurrency and the Republican political machine was off to a rocky start as the conference struggled to handle the logistics of hosting the former president and his retinue. It was, frankly, a shitshow. On the day that Trump was set to speak, I was told the Secret Service canceled Bitcoin Yoga. I was also told that Bitcoin Yoga had happened yesterday (it had; I was too tired from a late night of Bitcoin Topgolf to make it to yoga on time) and was not on the schedule for today (it was, in a timeslot an hour and five minutes before a session on “Self-Governance: Bitcoin and Beef”). As the staffers behind the help desk tried to get to the bottom of whether Bitcoin Yoga was actually on the schedule (it was), whether Bitcoin Yoga was happening (it wasn’t), and whether the Secret Service was responsible for its cancellation or there had just been some sort of miscommunication (a Secret Service spokesperson later told me the agency “did not request any cancellation of any conference events”), a Bitcoin Magazine writer inquired about his backpack, which he’d left in the “whale VIP room” overnight and which had since disappeared. He was told the Secret Service probably took it during their security sweep; maybe he could check the lost and found? At the press desk, a crypto beat reporter was indignant to learn he wouldn’t be getting a “green pass,” the mysterious, higher-tier credential that conference organizers were giving to select reporters that allowed them to skip to the front of the Secret Service line. A different crypto beat reporter I’d met at a party had also been snubbed; he was a “small fry,” he told me. I had originally been denied one of these passes as well, a problem that could only be resolved after a frenzy of phone calls and emails from multiple editors. The press desk staffers told me the distribution of the passes had been decided by the Secret Service and said there was nothing they could do to get me on the list. A Secret Service spokesperson later told me that the “issuance of media credentials and the selective distribution of media credentials” didn’t “fall under our purview,” claiming those responsibilities were handled by the conference staff. As far as I could tell, the publications that were getting the press pass fell into two buckets: big names like The New York Times and right-wing media. It felt these outlets were being prioritized over the trade publications that had been covering Bitcoin for years. Was the Bitcoin Conference even a Bitcoin conference anymore? This was the final day of the conference, and everyone was on edge waiting for Trump’s scheduled speech that afternoon. Every crypto cause célèbre and fever dream was a possibility. Maybe he’d announce a plan to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve, a bulwark against inflation. Maybe he’d promise to fire Gary Gensler, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose name had been uttered hundreds of times over the weekend, never without contempt. Maybe he’d promise to pardon Ross Ulbricht — the operator of the Silk Road, a covert marketplace that ran largely on Bitcoin — who is currently serving a life sentence in prison. Maybe he’d reveal himself to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious, reclusive creator of Bitcoin, who in these circles was regarded as a prophet or maybe a god. Maybe, probably, none of that would happen — but the man was here, with us, and that was all that mattered. A bullet had narrowly missed Trump’s skull at a rally two weeks prior, so security was extra tight. Around 8AM, eight hours before Trump was scheduled to speak, the line to get into the Music City Center spilled out the door and around the block. Everyone around me was wearing red MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hats or red $MAGAA memecoin hats or red BITCOIN MADE IN AMERICA hats or orange MAKE MONEY GREAT AGAIN hats, the latter of which, I’d learn, were being given out for free by a crypto retirement platform called Bitcoin IRA. There were shirts that said DONALD PUMP, shirts that showed Trump in the aftermath of being shot, his fist in the air, that said FIGHT! FIGHT!, and shirts that said FREE ROSS VOTE TRUMP that, like the orange hats, had been given away for free. The guards at the door said no bags or outside food or drinks were allowed. A quartet of well-coiffed women demanded to be let in with their handbags, security rules be damned — they had Secret Service clearance, they said. They were told to find someone inside with the campaign or the conference who could vouch for them. “This is not a regular day,” one of the guards barked at another woman who asked if she could bring in a sandwich. Banal contraband piled up outside the glass building like offerings before a temple: tote bags, half-full water bottles and coffee cups, the remnants of breakfast. This was only the first step. Getting to the main stage required passing through a metal detector, ascending a staircase and an escalator, and walking past a stage upon which a rotating cast of local musicians performed for an audience that mostly ignored them. From there, you would join the very back of a line that snaked through the expo floor. After a 45-minute wait and a second security screening — this one conducted by the Secret Service and the TSA — you’d be in the room where it happens, the Nakamoto stage. Leaving for any reason short of going to the bathroom, because thankfully there were bathrooms, meant doing it all over again: the line and the pat-down, the waiting, the anticipation. The lines had been even longer on Friday, before the implementation of the no-bag rule. Unlike other events with Secret Service protection that I’d covered in the past, the Bitcoin Conference had no dedicated media entrance. There was a makeshift press room downstairs stocked with free coffee, tea, and water, but there was no expedited entry for journalists who wanted to see the show on the main stage. Vivian Cheng, the media liaison, escorted me to the front of the Secret Service line on Friday and told me not to count on her help again; after this, I was on my own. As we walked past the hundreds of people who had waited — were still waiting — for hours to get in, I asked if the rumors about the no-bag policy on Saturday were true. She wasn’t sure. And laptops? Also unsure. Trapped amid what meager audience had made it past the screenings thus far, I attempted to make the best of the situation by listening in on panels I had planned on skipping. The tenor of the conversations was more politicized than the event descriptions had led me to believe. A panel that was ostensibly about the risks and rewards of public mining companies gave way to discussions of President Joe Biden’s “whole-of-government attack” on cryptocurrency, as Jason Les, the CEO of the Bitcoin mining company Riot Platforms, put it. “President Trump, on the other hand, has been very positive.” And what about the presumptive Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris? (She had been invited to the conference but declined to attend.) “Harris hasn’t commented, but her political perspectives have historically been more to the progressive side than President Biden,” said Fred Thiel, the CEO of Marathon Digital Holdings (no known relation to the Peter). What do Bitcoiners want? “We don’t need anything,” Les said. “We just need an active campaign to not fight against us.” This attitude tracked. The previous night, at a Bitcoin Topgolf party hosted by podcaster Crypto Megan and actor / alleged sex criminal T.J. Miller, a group of crypto attorneys complained to me about SEC regulations. The problem with crypto law, they told me between rounds, was that there were no laws, so the government just makes up whatever rules it wants to go after you. The oldest among them said the fact that Trump — someone who “legitimized white nationalism” — had embraced cryptocurrency wasn’t an entirely positive development. But we weren’t here to talk politics. One of the young lawyers handed me a golf club and told me to take a swing. Yet politics seemed to be all anyone could talk about inside the convention center. “Under a Trump administration, we’re going to see Bitcoin mining flourish,” Thiel said. “Under a Harris administration, we have no idea what the energy policies are going to be.” To ensure its ongoing success, the Bitcoin community needs to have “the right pro-Bitcoin politicians in office, no matter the side of the aisle,” Les said. One side of the aisle had sent its presidential nominee and several sitting members of Congress to court Bitcoiners. The sole representative for the Democratic Party was Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who had come to make the “progressive case for Bitcoin.” And then there was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., representing both and neither. Exhausted and hungry, I abandoned my post at the Nakamoto stage after realizing I could no longer sit in the cold, dim room without any caffeine or calories to sustain me. At a nearby coffee shop, I sipped on a cold brew and eavesdropped on a job interview; everyone involved had conference wristbands around their arms. One interviewer asked the interviewee his SAT score, and the group commiserated about the now-scrapped writing section, which was too subjective to be of any real use in college admissions. Back at the convention center, the line to get into the main stage area was the longest I had seen it yet, wrapping all the way around the expo floor. After a few minutes of waiting, I decided to try flashing my press credentials to the security guards working the door and asking if they’d let me skip the line, figuring the worst they could do was say no. (A spokesperson for the Secret Service later told me the decision to allow certain press pass holders to skip the line was not made by the agency.) I interrupted the guys behind me, who were having an impassioned conversation about the perils of DEI in the workplace, and asked them to hold my spot in case I came back. I got in without issue, somewhere near the middle of Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor’s diatribe about the power of holding your coin. Saylor spoke with messianic fervor: the people in this room would get rich, would stay rich, while everyone who failed to get on board would be left behind. Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) took the stage with Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) to talk about their love of country and Bitcoin and the liberatory power of cryptocurrency. (Lummis, who unveiled a draft bill that would require the Treasury secretary to establish a network of Bitcoin storage facilities across the country, was supposed to be joined by former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who was taken off the program at the last minute.) “Free at last, free at last,” Scott proclaimed, seemingly evoking Martin Luther King Jr. Edward Snowden took a more sober tone. He appeared virtually and was greeted with a standing ovation, before revealing that because of the technical setup, he could neither see nor hear the audience. (The crowd’s enthusiasm immediately deflated.) “I spoke recently at the Bitcoin Conference in Amsterdam and the things we talked about were very different. The last time, the topic was about how the game is rigged but we can’t leave,” Snowden said. The amount of political representation at this year’s conference, he said, was a “wonderful, remarkable thing,” but it was also cause for concern. “Cast a vote, but don’t join a cult,” he told the audience. “They are not our tribe, our personality — they have their own interests, their own values, their own things they’re chasing.” Snowden received far less applause when the speech ended, possibly because the crowd didn’t appreciate him killing the vibe, possibly because the audience knew he couldn’t hear them. Then it was time for RFK Jr. — introduced as “the next president of the United States” — who told the Bitcoiners that they have it all right. “Bitcoin is the currency of hope,” he declared to roaring applause. “It is the perfect currency. It is an elegant, poetic, beautiful, pure specie.” If you fix the money, he said, you fix the world. That night, I found myself at a party for Joe Allen, a tech correspondent for Steve Bannon’s War Room who had just published a book on transhumanism and the war against humanity. “What I see there,” he said of the Bitcoin Conference, “is an opportunity on the one hand, but it’s also a very dark temptation.” Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen are “every bit as perverse and Satanic” as the globalists toward whom Bannon and others on the nationalist right usually direct their ire, he said. “These guys represent an ideology that is fundamentally hostile to anything like traditional religion and anything like an organic, as we would know it, existence for human beings,” Allen told me later. However, he took a remarkably pragmatic view on the perverse and Satanic. “In the long term, I think we are fundamentally opposed. In the short term, politics is dirty business.” But not many at the convention center shared Allen’s sentiment; few questioned whether the MAGA tent was big enough to cover the tech futurists and the evangelical Christians, the cattle ranchers who just want the Department of Agriculture out of their business, and the crypto bros who want the SEC out of their wallets. The movement, it turns out, is big enough for all of them: their disagreements on certain subjects are less salient than their disdain for the regulatory state — their desire to liberate themselves from the authorities who want to tell them what to do and how to live, who want to take their money and give it to people who didn’t work for it. The bureaucrats want to implement central banking digital currencies, to track what we buy and who we buy it from, to cut dissidents off from the economy. Bitcoin isn’t just a way to get rich; Bitcoin is a way to break free. “Bitcoin is about decentralization, freedom, and getting to the source,” Grant, a 31-year-old from Arizona told me ahead of Trump’s speech. Neither side, he said, is going to stop printing money; the right is “pandering to voters” by taking a pro-Bitcoin stance, but it’s better than what the Democrats are doing. Like many of the other conference attendees, he proudly displayed his ideology on his shirt, which read STOP SUBSIDIZING VEGANS. The shirt, he explained, was merch from his company, CrowdHealth, a health insurance crowdfunding platform that describes itself as helping people “break free from corporate run sick care.” As we spoke, a woman approached us and asked how exactly we were subsidizing her vegan lifestyle. Then they, too, found common ground: both are RFK Jr. supporters and plan on voting for him in the presidential election. But most people I spoke to were not at the conference for the fringe player. They were there to see Trump, to hope the Republican presidential candidate would openly declare his allegiance to cryptocurrency. An hour before Trump was scheduled to speak, I got an email inviting me to watch the speech at the DNA House, a pop-up event space hosted by an asset management fund. “Skip the lines and yes you can bring a bag and have a drink,” the email read. Between the suffocating crowds, the harsh austerity of the Nakamoto stage, and the ominous alleged Secret Service seizures of other reporters’ backpacks, the invite was extremely tempting. I left. The convention center was full of politicians and grifters and hangers-on, as were the surrounding events. The weekend kicked off with Bitcoin Karate, which I skipped because it sounded annoying, only to learn that both RFK Jr. and the “Hawk Tuah” girl had been in attendance. By the time I got there, the expo floor had booths for Bitcoin coffee grown in El Salvador and a booth where an artist painted Pepe portraits of attendees. People working a booth operated by The Daily Wire, the conservative news website, handed out SCAMALA signs to people waiting in line to see Trump. Upon entering the main stage area, attendees were greeted by a man handing out signs that said BITCOIN 2024 on one side and IN SATOSHI WE TRUST on the other. Everyone was selling or promoting something. Milling around the conference floor, I saw Madison Cawthorn, the erstwhile Gen Z member of Congress outside the main stage, and interviewed no fewer than six people involved with different MAGA-adjacent altcoins. DNA House carried a promise of something different. I’d gone to a party there the night before after a brief interlude at a meetup for $EGIRL, a Musk-adjacent reactionary memecoin, at which I was one of approximately four women in attendance (not including a group of girls waiting to ride a mechanical bull). At DNA House, I was surprised to encounter a more or less “normie” crowd of crypto bros and finance types. The first man I met that night rattled off a list of his accomplishments: founder, chairman, cofounder, and so on. On the stairs outside, I smoked a cigarette with a compliance auditor who told me and a crypto beat reporter about his project to, if I understood him correctly, mine Bitcoin using hydrogen cells. Inside, people danced awkwardly to EDM and added each other on LinkedIn. There were very few women there, as was the case everywhere I went. In the light of day, DNA House was more intimate, though the crowd was no less male. One man told me this was where the “whales” were; another invited me to a private afterparty at “Taylor Swift’s recording studio.” There was a catered lunch — grilled salmon, broccoli, a rice pilaf situation — and an open bar, one screen set to the livestream of the conference, another displaying the live price of both Bitcoin and the $MAGAA memecoin. The people at DNA House may have been less overtly MAGA than those at the convention center, but only marginally so. I overheard a bearded man tell someone he works with Young Americans for Liberty. Before Trump’s speech, someone told me he and several others had attended a $3,000-a-person event at the Westin Hotel rooftop the night before hosted by the $MAGAA coin developers at which Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. both spoke. Trump was late, as he always was, and everyone assumed there had to be a good reason, maybe a special guest like Elon Musk. When he finally took the stage, around an hour after he was scheduled, Musk was nowhere to be found, and most of the people around me were too absorbed in conversation to notice that the stream had stopped working. We caught the highlights: in between his usual stump speech about the border and wokeness, Trump pledged to fire Gary Gensler and then repeated himself when he realized the audience had worked itself into a frenzy. It “sent the crowd into ecstasy,” a reporter friend who stayed behind at the convention center texted me. The same was true for the spectators at DNA House, though they were far less interested in the rest of Trump’s policies and couldn’t even spare a little applause for his promise to stop taxing tipped wages. (The audience at the convention center was much more impressed.) Still, they were hooked. Everyone was waiting for the same thing: for Trump to announce a plan to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve. He got close, danced right up to the line, and said that under his presidency, the US would never, ever sell its Bitcoin holdings. The room broke out in applause. People stood up. They pulled out their phones, ready to capture the moment their wealth doubled or tripled. “He’s going to announce it,” Scott Walker, a cofounder of DNA Fund said from a small stage. The price of Bitcoin shot up briefly, for a split second, then went back down. And then it was over. Trump moved on. He promised to commute Ross Ulbricht’s sentence and the audience at the conference roared again. There was a smattering of applause from the crowd at DNA House, too, but the mood in the room had shifted. People had put their phones away. “Have a good time with your Bitcoin, and your crypto, and everything else that you’re playing with,” Trump told an enthusiastic convention center audience. “We’re going to make that one of the greatest industries on earth.” The DNA House set was pleased but not thrilled; they were trying to manage their expectations. Sure, Trump hadn’t given them what they wanted, but he had come close. He wasn’t fighting them. He was still their guy. “Trump went out there, he kind of promised, or kind of came up with a minimum of a promise, but he did not follow through,” Walker said after Trump’s speech. After a weekend of anticipation, the pomp and grandeur of the conference, all the waiting and every interminable line, the Bitcoin diehards and tryhards had been let down. “I expect the market will react neutral at best,” Walker said. Trump had a much better night than the Bitcoiners who were hoping to see their assets appreciate, rather than (briefly) decline. That night, while the DNA Fund hosted another party, Trump raked in a reported $21 million at a fundraiser where seats sold for as much as $800,000 a person. The biggest players were staying the course. The market would adjust. And maybe the Democrats would, too. After the conference, I talked to Kyle Lawrence, a partner at Falcon Rappaport & Berkman, a crypto law firm based in New York City, whom I had met on the flight to Nashville. He’d watched Trump’s speech from an overflow room at the convention center, surrounded by people in MAGA hats, and told me that he hoped that rather than turning Bitcoin into a partisan issue, Trump’s speech would show Democrats the power of the crypto constituency. “It basically opened the door for Kamala Harris to change her party’s tune on cryptocurrency,” he said. Someone I spoke to at the DNA party the night of Trump’s speech put it more bluntly: if Harris promises to fire Gary Gensler, or if Biden does it now, the Democrats can claw back some support from the Bitcoiners. The morning after, almost everyone I saw at the Nashville airport had a hat or tote bag or shirt or wristband identifying them as a Bitcoin Conference attendee. Here we were, together, returning to reality, and everything still felt surreal. As I made my way to my gate, I walked past a man wearing a FREE ROSS VOTE TRUMP shirt who looked curiously like Martin Shkreli. It was the pharma bro himself, seemingly delighted to have been recognized. When I identified myself as a reporter and asked if he wanted to talk about the conference, he laughed and walked away. At the gate, a couple, both of whom were crypto content creators, asked what I thought of the conference. “The crowd was electric,” one of them said of the reaction to Trump’s speech. But, the other said, Trump didn’t fully deliver. Her fiancé disagreed; this was huge. Behind us, a man told his friend he skipped the entire conference on Saturday because he knew it’d be “such a shitshow” with Trump. The friend told him he’d missed out. “It was historic.” Correction, August 5th: An earlier version misstated the slogan on the Bitcoin IRA hats. It is “Make Money Great Again,” not “Make Bitcoin Great Again.”

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News Image The AI Keeps the Score

When Simone Biles saluted the judges and stepped onto the mat to vault at the Sportpaleis in Antwerp, Belgium, it seemed like every camera in the packed arena was trained on her. People in the audience pulled their smartphones to record. The photographers zoomed in from their media perches. One TV camera tracked her run on a high-speed dolly, all the way down the runway, as she hurdled into a roundoff onto the springboard. The spider cam, swinging above, caught the upward trajectory of her body as she turned towards the table and blocked up and off, twisting one and a half times before landing on the blue mat and raising her arms above her head. The apex of human athleticism and kinesthetic beauty had been captured. But there were other cameras that few other people watching in the arena were thinking about as they took in Biles’ prowess on the event: the four placed in each corner of the mat where the vault was situated. These cameras also caught the occasion but not with the purpose of transmitting it to the rest of the world. These were set up by the Japanese technology giant Fujitsu, which, since 2017, has been collaborating with the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) to create an AI gymnastics judging system. In its early days, the system used lidar (light detection and ranging) technology to create 3D composites of gymnasts in action. These days, it uses an even more sophisticated system, drawing from four to eight strategically placed hi-def cameras to capture the movement of the athletes, make 3D models, and identify whether the elements they are performing fall into the parameters established by the judging bodies inside the federation. But the computer system doesn’t make judgments itself. Instead, it is deployed when there is an inquiry from the gymnast or coaches or a dispute within the judging panel itself. The Judging Support System (JSS) can be consulted to calculate the difficulty score of an athlete’s exercise — a second opinion, rather than an initial prognosis. Currently, it is mostly used for edge cases. The JSS wasn’t necessary to evaluate the value of Biles’ vault in Antwerp. Her performance on that vault was too emphatic to be borderline. Still, the cameras positioned at the corners of the vault podium captured her 3D likeness as they did for all of the other athletes who competed through the 2023 World Gymnastics Championships. The technology distilled the legendary athlete and her performance down to straight lines and sharp angles; it showed the distance and height she traveled in numbers. The awe and wonder one feels when watching Biles perform could now be recognized by a computer — understood, though not exactly appreciated. Fujitsu and FIG announced JSS back in 2017 with the goal of having the system up and running by the Summer Olympics in 2021. A home Games in Tokyo would have been an ideal opportunity for the Japanese-based tech conglomerate to showcase this kind of technology, and it would’ve been a noteworthy achievement for Morinari Watanabe, the first Japanese president of the Lausanne-based FIG. But the JSS wasn’t ready; in fact, it would take another four years of work. At the 2023 world championships in Antwerp, the JSS was finally ready to go on all 10 artistic gymnastics apparatuses — six for the men and four for the women. This was all part of the “dream,” as Watanabe put it in the joint press conference hosted by FIG and Fujitsu heralding the technological breakthrough. “Today is a day of liberation in sports,” he proclaimed to the media and other gymnastics officials who showed up for the explainer that was held shortly before the start of the men’s all-around final. “The day has come when all athletes, not just gymnasts, will receive fair and transparent scoring.” This proclamation was a bit hyperbolic, especially given that this is not AI’s first foray into judging athletic competition. It has already been successfully applied in sporting contexts, often with approval from athletes and coaches themselves. Hawk-Eye Live, the electronic line-calling system, is used in lieu of line judges in tennis at two of the majors, and its calls are generally considered reliable. But in tennis, Hawk-Eye is being tasked with answering a yes / no question — is the ball in, or is it out? The JSS is being asked to perform a much more complicated task: it needs to be able to identify hundreds of skills in the Code of Points, and the ranges in which they’re done, across the whole span of gymnast body types — a complex undertaking, and one that changes regularly, as the FIG is updating its rules every four years. In a sport where the difference between first and fifth can be a mere tenth of a point, and when global rankings can mean the difference between being funded by your national federation or not, getting the score right is very important. The appeal to a technological solution to judging feels practically inevitable. Humans are fallible. That’s why deductions exist in the first place: to quantify the mistakes that the gymnasts make. But we’d never replace the human athletes with machines, regardless of how advanced Boston Dynamics’ back-flipping robot gets. The draw of gymnastics is watching mere mortals push the limits of athleticism. But the performance of the judges is a means to an end, not the end itself. For more than a century, human judgment was the only option, no matter how much this might’ve discomfited us, given the stakes. Now, there’s a potential technological solution that shows promise. But can AI judge human excellence better than a human? The JSS started, according to Watanabe and Hidenori Fujiwara, as a joke. It was late in 2015, about a year before Watanabe won his first FIG presidential election, making him the first non-European to helm the international federation since its inception in 1881. He suggested that Fujitsu should develop robots to judge gymnastics. Fujiwara, head of Fujitsu’s sports business development division, took the challenge seriously. “We developed a prototype system,” Fujiwara said, which he then showed to Watanabe, who was surprised by the progress. Watanabe clarified that what he’d said about robots had only been a joke, and yet here they were. This origin story for the JSS was emphasized during the press conference I attended in Antwerp shortly before the start of the men’s all-around final. There was, of course, a PowerPoint. An early slide in the presentation showed a comic with robots holding up score placards, as a male gymnast swings into a scissor-like movement on the pommel horse. The caption above the image read: “Joke come true!” (I didn’t get why it was funny; I guess you had to be there.) It’s a “joke” that Fujitsu has spent untold amounts of money, time, and energy on. Though the company wouldn’t disclose the cost of this whole undertaking, it’s hard to fathom, after strolling through their offices in the annals of the Sportpaleis and seeing the arena setup of the technology in the field of play — and off to the side — that it was anything short of a tremendously expensive and resource-intensive endeavor. But I couldn’t help but feel like it was a lot of effort for technology that, at least as pitched by Watanabe, would only ever amount to a slightly better version of judge-assisted video replay. Even ignoring the years of investing in R&D, the physical footprint of JSS appears expensive. During the competition, I glimpsed the backroom where there was a row of servers and another of monitors, a cluster of power packs, and tons of cable. Like so much of AI, its “magic” obscures copious amounts of energy-intensive hardware. Out on the floor, the JSS cameras were subtle, but a lot of human effort went into calibrating them. Before the start of the day’s competition and frequently in between sessions, you could watch as technicians took to the floor, placing large orange balls similar to exercise balls you’d find at the gym, mounted to tripod-like devices, at strategic spots on or near the equipment to make sure that the cameras were properly aligned. Sometimes, they waved these balls like wands around the apparatuses. And throughout the competition, several technicians monitored the event from behind six computer screens near the media box. Nothing about this can be done cheaply. The entire history of judging had created tragedies, Watanabe explained somewhat dramatically. But even if his remark to Fujiwara had been made in jest, the fact that FIG has doggedly pursued this venture with Fujitsu going on six years suggests that the joke hinted at something critical and true (as jokes often do): that he felt that there was something amiss in judging in the sport of gymnastics, and maybe technology could fix it. Watanabe didn’t specify any particular instance of judging malfeasance or error that created these personal tragedies. But he didn’t really have to. The conventional wisdom around the judged aesthetic sports, such as gymnastics and figure skating, is that there are and always have been issues with the scoring. During the Cold War, when both the US and the Soviet Union fought for the top spot in the Olympic medal rankings, there was fairly widespread cheating and collusion in gymnastics judging. Back in 1988, after former University of Utah gymnastics head coach Greg Marsden’s brief foray into international elite gymnastics, he let slip to the media that, at the previous year’s world championships, there was judging collusion between the US and Romania, with the coaches exchanging scores before their athletes took to the mat. And in the years since the Cold War ended and the old judging alliances started to break down, the issues became more mundane but no less consequential. It was mostly human error, confusing rules and processes, with a dash of bias — racial, national, or both — that created most of the problems. Elements of subjectivity can be found in most sports, and these judgment calls can end up having major consequences when it comes to competitive outcomes. In basketball, for example, a referee might make a bad call that affects the outcome of the entire game, like this year’s Women’s Final Four matchup between UConn and Iowa that featured a controversial offensive foul call in the final seconds of the game. But in general, the way of amassing points is fairly straightforward and has remained consistent over many years. The lines on the court, except in the case of the free throw, determine the point value of any given shot, and this didn’t change when Stephen Curry started nailing deep three-pointers. A shot from well behind the three-point line is objectively more difficult — and impressive — than one made closer to the basket. But the NBA hasn’t painted another line on the court to reward the higher difficulty level of shots taken from well behind the arc. Nor did the league change the rules to make Curry’s threes harder. Players simply learned to shoot from further back. This is not how gymnastics operates. As gymnasts introduce new elements, the FIG has to assess them for their difficulty value, and there is no upward limit, at least in theory, as there is with basketball shots. In gymnastics, a half-court shot isn’t worth the same as one from right behind the arc. Skill valuations can change from one Olympic cycle to the next; requirement groups can be added or removed. A bad score in one cycle might be a good one in the next. The rules are not stable as they are in other sports, and it can be baffling, without highly specialized knowledge, to understand the difference in difficulty from one skill to the next. The most significant change to the rules came in 2006 when the FIG scrapped the Perfect 10 scoring paradigm in favor of an open-ended approach that gives the gymnasts two marks that are added together — the difficulty score, which starts at zero and builds, depending on the fulfillment of requirements and the skills the athlete performs; and an execution one that starts at 10 and is reduced as the judges apply deductions for mistakes the athlete makes. The immediate catalyst for this particular change was the scoring controversies of the 2004 Olympics, particularly the miscalculated start value of Yang Tae-young. The South Korean gymnast was erroneously docked a tenth of a point, which led to him missing out on the gold medal in the men’s all-around. This mistake has meant that Yang, who is now a coach, doesn’t receive a gold medalist’s pension from the South Korean government. Watanabe was not wrong about how errors in judging can have serious ramifications for athletes, even years after the fact. Judges still make mistakes on the D-score, which is the updated name for start value. But, unlike with the execution mark (aka the “how well you did it” score), a gymnast or coach has the right to appeal the difficulty calculation. This is where JSS can help. Like in the earlier iterations of Hawk-Eye in tennis (and still at Wimbledon), players can challenge the call of a line judge, and the computer will override any human error. Fujitsu’s system enables something similar, albeit much slower and more bureaucratic. Several times over the course of the world championships in Antwerp, I heard an announcement over the PA that an inquiry had been submitted for one gymnast’s beam score or a different athlete’s bars mark. The large scoreboard to my back would show the athlete’s name and “under review” right next to it. Judges would consult video replay and the new JSS system, though it was unclear under which conditions the JSS, rather than video review, was used. Often, inquiries were only a few minutes, though, in an already long competition, it felt like a drag waiting for the eventual resolution to be announced. In most cases, the gymnast’s score remained unchanged. If AI was used in these inquiries, it functioned solely to validate the work of the human judges. When I sat down with the Fujitsu technicians in Antwerp in a room somewhere in the bowels of the Sportpaleis, I got to see just how precise the JSS can be. I was shown recordings of the switch ring leap, a skill that was also highlighted during the press conference the day before. This element is notoriously tricky to perform and to judge. The gymnast has a lot of boxes to tick: split of the legs, the position of the back leg relative to the crown of the head (they have to be at roughly the same level), the arch of the back, and the head release. The judge has to be able to register all of that in the split second the skill appears before them on the balance beam. JSS looked a lot like video replay, except that the gymnast is transformed into an unclothed mannequin performing the elements. The apparatus is there, but all of the trappings of the gymnasium are gone; the rendering is set against what looks like the holodeck set on Star Trek before the computer program fills in the details, a black space, with white lines running parallel and perpendicular. To the side, you can see key measurements, such as angles, to help determine whether the gymnast met the demands of the element — all of the color and flare stripped out down to the nuts and bolts. In the first clip, the gymnast did not fulfill the requirements. At the apex of the leap, her back foot didn’t line up with the crown of her head. The technician applied one tool, a blue horizontal plane, which made it quite clear that her back leg wasn’t high enough. “It’s minus 40 centimeters,” she said, pointing her cursor at the upper right corner of the screen. Next, she played a recording of another switch ring, at normal speed. “What do you think?” she asked. I responded that I thought it was performed within acceptable parameters. Turns out I was right. Don’t give me too much credit here, though; the reason I could see it easily is because the gymnast had performed it exceptionally well. Her split was oversplit; her back foot went so high that it was well above the crown of her head. As much fun as I had playing around with the system — and talking about the finer points of gymnastics with the experts — I wasn’t entirely convinced that the JSS, at its current stage of development, had made a compelling case for its necessity as a decision support system. It felt like a solution in search of a problem. Steve Butcher, former head of the men’s technical committee and technical coordinator for FIG, said initially he shared my same skepticism. He knows better than most people how hard judging can be, having spent 40 years doing it. But Butcher said he was won over quickly. All it took was a short demonstration showing a gymnast doing an iron cross, a static strength hold, gripping the rings with their arms extended to the sides so they’re completely parallel to the floor. Ideally, the athlete will create a perfectly straight line across, from wrist to wrist. “They showed me one arm, he has three degrees of deviation. And the other arm, he has one degree of deviation,” Butcher said, noting it was not perceptible by the human eye. Since that demo, he has worked with Fujitsu on behalf of FIG to help the company address the gymnastics needs and has remained a consultant on the project even though he left his full-time position with the gymnastics federation in 2022. But was this really an improvement over plain ol’ video review? How would seeing the angles of someone’s arms to this degree — a difference of two degrees, to be specific — actually improve the judging? In the example that Butcher cited, the knowledge that the JSS provided was interesting, but it wouldn’t have changed the valuation for the gymnast: he would’ve been credited the skill because he had performed it very close to the platonic ideal. At the top end of the performance, those minute flaws, if they rise to the deductible level, would be sorted out by the execution judges. The JSS isn’t up to that particular task yet. To provide an example where the JSS could’ve potentially outperformed the judges — and certainly video review — Butcher brings me back to 2012, to the moment when the men’s team finals in London had medals on the line. It was the final rotation, last routine, last gymnast up. Kohei Uchimura, then the three-time world all-around champion, was on the pommel horse, the event where Butcher was the apparatus supervisor. Uchimura’s routine went off as planned, clean and smooth, until the dismount. As he swung up from the pommel to the handstand, his arms seemed to buckle, legs akimbo; he spun wildly and slipped off the apparatus, somehow landing on the mat on his feet, albeit chest down. He walked off the podium, seemingly bemused and confused as to what just happened. This last mistake created a dilemma for the D judges: did Uchimura successfully reach a handstand — or get close enough to it — in order to receive credit for doing a dismount? If the judges didn’t give him credit for it, he would lose the value of the skill and miss a requirement group. The hit to his — and, by extension, Team Japan’s — overall score would be massive. Butcher did not give credit for the handstand, nor did the other two D judges. Uchimura’s mark put Japan in fourth place, behind Great Britain and Ukraine. Both teams started celebrating medals they thought they had just won. The Japanese team, however, immediately submitted an inquiry. The superior jury watched the video replay several times, in slow motion, frame by frame. The TV cameras hovered by the shoulders of the judges as they studied Uchimura’s routine. The action in the North Greenwich Arena had shifted from the athletes to a bunch of men in gray blazers, staring at a laptop. Finally, the superior jury decided Uchimura was close enough to a handstand. The reversal of the D panel’s original call added seven-tenths to Uchimura’s score. Japan shot from fourth to second. Great Britain ended up with the bronze, and Ukraine, to their utter devastation, was bumped off the podium. Butcher, however, still stands by what he and the two other D judges decided over 10 years ago. “We have to remember, they’re not looking at any exact angles. They’re looking at a foot here, a leg there, and looking in a video, freezing it, with no true measurements being applied,” Butcher pointed out. The decision to award credit or to withhold it was something of a very educated coin flip. “In that situation, I would have loved to have been able to have the Fujitsu system and be able to have that as the primary decision-maker,” he said. When I watched the video of Uchimura’s London performance, I found myself agreeing with the original call. That was not a handstand. He never even managed to straighten his arms completely. But like the judges of the superior jury, I wasn’t working with any precise measurements. I was basing this strictly off of my gut. It was an aesthetic judgment as much as a technical one. But in gymnastics, there’s long been a feedback loop between the technical and aesthetic; what is technically sound is often most aesthetically pleasing, and vice versa. Of course, none of this matters to AI. It doesn’t “know” things in the way that humans do. Facial and object recognition technology doesn’t recognize what a “labrador” is; it’s been shown millions of photos of that dog and has been told that this is, in fact, a labrador, or at least the sum average of a labrador. Apply the same logic of what an AI “knows” to a handstand in gymnastics, and it recognizes what a handstand is based on a series of rules and parameters of what a handstand is supposed to be. At the same time, it knows when the articulations of a body aren’t doing a handstand. That distinction may seem trite, but it also turns the sport into the color-negative version of itself. Which presents the weird irony of AI-assisted judging, a system that cannot understand or appreciate the beauty of the sport: Butcher and his panel could have used a system like JSS to back an aesthetic opinion with hard numbers. In many industries, AI has been used as an excuse to cut down on labor expenses. That’s not the case here with JSS since its implementation is strictly to support human judges. Besides, judging gymnastics isn’t a full-time career for anyone, not even at the very highest levels, so that particular objection to AI doesn’t play. But the fact that judging gymnastics events is a sporadic activity points to another issue with the JSS’s application: there isn’t a lot of opportunity to use this expensive system. It will judge even less frequently than humans do. The majority of gymnastics events are decidedly low-tech affairs. Not every competition venue will have the necessary infrastructure to support the JSS. And all meets, except the biggest ones, are a couple of days long, if that, hardly worth the time, energy, and costs that go into the setup. Fujitsu said that it took about a dozen people to set up and run the JSS in Antwerp. When asked about the next competition this much-ballyhooed system will be used at, Fujitsu didn’t answer. They said it would be decided jointly by them and FIG. Of course, it would be foolish to assume that it will always be this costly or difficult to set up the JSS in a competition format. The technology should improve over time and get cheaper, too. That opens up the possibility for what Butcher believes is its best use case: as a training aid. He told me that this was his first thought when Fujitsu first presented the JSS to him. “Somebody’s doing a triple back off the high bar but you can see that their body’s slightly skewed in the air and you can measure that angle, you can see that they [are] landing heavier on one side of their body than the other.” Being slightly off like this in the air doesn’t change the valuation of the skill. It will still be regarded as a triple-back. But in the hands of the athlete and the coach, this kind of information can prevent an almost imperceptible defect from blooming into an injury. In this example, the JSS is merely a sophisticated measuring tool. Butcher said that some national federations have expressed interest in aligning the JSS with their pre-existing video systems, which Fujitsu confirmed, adding that they plan to unveil a version specifically for training in July. Throughout the week in Antwerp, and in follow-up calls with experts, this was the most persuasive use case that I came across. Right after the Fujitsu press conference, I encountered Donatella Sacchi, the president of the women’s technical committee, who had been on the panel, along with her counterpart on the men’s side. She’s a compact woman, on the short side — but who isn’t in gymnastics? — with cropped hair, and speaks exuberantly, often standing to make her point and to demonstrate what she means by using her whole body. Sacchi was very excited at the potential of the JSS but raised the specific issue that AI couldn’t intuitively understand things the way a person with gymnastics experience could. A lot of work needed to be done — and continues to be done — to “parameterize” everything just so JSS could “see” things like a human, though not make errors like one. Sacchi pointed to a couple of issues that the system has not yet been able to overcome. When we spoke again about a month after the world championships, Sacchi told me that the JSS cannot determine whether two skills done consecutively on the beam are actually connected in one continuous movement. This is one of the ways that gymnasts rack up tenths, linking different skills for connection bonus or value (CV). This is one of the most challenging aspects for human judges to evaluate since not all credited connections feature the transfer of speed and momentum from one skill into the next, which would make the connection easy to perceive. This is especially true if you change direction in a series or if you’re combining dance and acrobatic skills. There’s usually some sort of pause or hesitation, however slight. It’s up to the gymnast to move briskly between elements, even if the skills don’t lend themselves to seamless connections. If you’re going to have a system like the JSS around to help determine difficulty scores, it needs to be able to handle connections, especially since on an event like beam, they are the most contested part of the D-score, and isn’t that what the JSS is there to address, after all? I asked Ayako Kawahito, a former gymnast and current judge who is working as a manager in the Human Digital Twin division of Fujitsu, about the beam connection problem. The issue, she said, is not about movement but about stillness. Kawahito pointed out that a person can appear to be completely still, according to the human eye, but if you subjected them to an MRI, their “joint coordinates are always moving around.” In order for the JSS to be able to assess connection value, Fujitsu and the FIG have to agree on the “(amount of) movement that can be considered a stop by a human judge,” she said. Movement that can be considered a stop. Sounds a bit like an oxymoron, but it’s the kind of question that must be answered if the JSS will be able to help the judges in the places they need it the most. If you were in Antwerp at the world championships and wandered into the Fujitsu booth, you’d be forgiven for temporarily forgetting you were at a gymnastics competition. There was very little inside to suggest that you were even at a sporting event of any kind. Monitors were hung on the bare white walls, but they didn’t show videos of gymnasts performing routines or even single elements, overlaid by JSS analysis. Instead, they showed how the technology behind the JSS could be used for fraud and theft prevention. Though this might come as something of a surprise, it’s not really the left turn that some might imagine it to be. There’s a long tradition of the Games being used as a showcase for new surveillance and security technology. “The Olympics are often used to be kind of a showroom,” Dennis Pauschinger, a researcher at the University of Neuchâtel, told me in 2019 when I was working on a story about the global anti-Olympic movement. The Fujitsu booth experience began with a simplified version of the JSS that you could play around with. I stood in front of a camera, which projected my movements onto a large screen and labeled them appropriately. It would say which hand you raised and what it was doing. “The judging system is based on what we call ‘pose estimation,’” Mike Fournigault, a Fujitsu AI architect, explained to me. “With cameras, we are able to reconstruct the pose of the body of people and to understand where are the hands, where are the arms, what are they doing with their hands, with their arms, with their legs?” This is the kind of technology that is used for self-driving cars, with incredibly mixed results. In 2018, Uber’s self-driving car could delineate between a person walking and a person riding a bike but could not reconcile the existence of a 49-year-old woman walking her bike in Tempe, Arizona; the vehicle struck and killed her. At least the stakes for JSS aren’t life and death — though, to the athletes, it can sometimes feel that way. I was shocked how much of Fujitsu’s booth was dedicated to crimes — not of the sports judging variety, but actual chargeable offenses. The monitors showed how this pose estimation might be applied to situations outside of sports. One showed how it could help prevent car theft; the other demonstrated how it can discern whether people were getting up to no good in the self-checkout line, such as putting an item in their bag without first scanning it. In the press conference, there was also mention of its applications in healthcare and rehab settings, which is not hard to imagine with a technology that can measure body movements and angles as precisely as the JSS can. “There has been increasingly this sense that we can’t just end with gymnastics because, you know, obviously it was a very expensive process to develop JSS,” Andrew Kane, then Fujitsu’s deputy head of international public relations, told me in Antwerp. Fujitsu’s end goal was never gymnastics. Later, I follow up with Fujitsu and receive a somewhat evasive answer. “We demonstrated different solutions related to Human Motion Analytics (HMA), which were for more than just gymnastics/sports,” Yuka Hatagaki of Fujitsu’s global PR wrote in an email about the booth’s contents. “The HMA technology that can analyze human movement with high precision cultivated through JSS can be applied to various industries, such as healthcare, ergonomics, and entertainment besides monitoring and theft prevention.” JSS was being developed as a means of capturing the body, to synthesize the great range of human motion into something that could be understood by a computer. What gymnastics offered was a massive set of training data to help train the AI. Fujitsu mentioned additional uses in follow-up correspondence, including applications for physical therapists to develop hyper-specific programs for patients and using gait analysis to detect early signs of dementia in the elderly, which sounds very promising, especially as someone with a mother in cognitive decline. All of this technology is built on the back of what I was witnessing around me in Antwerp. The heights of athleticism — and the competition as a whole — were used to feed a system that is repurposed and resold as a tool of surveillance. A solution in search of profit. On the morning of the final day of competition in Antwerp, I was allowed to sit in the beam judges seat while the JSS was being calibrated and the arena was being set up for the evening’s competition. The field of play was clean, not yet covered in a white, chalky film, as it would be later when the gymnasts arrived to warm up. Some athletes mark the beam with chalk as a cue for where to start their acrobatic series. All of them douse themselves in the white stuff to mop up sweat on their feet and hands, both of which they need to grip the apparatus. It’s even worse over at the uneven bars where the whole apparatus is covered in the stuff. At a gymnastics meet, magnesium is always in the air. In person, the beam seems smaller than it does on TV. When you’re watching on television, the camera zooms in on the apparatus and athlete. It’s practically all you see. Live, the equipment and the gymnast are set against the massive arena. You don’t get a sense of that scale on your screen. Still, the action seems more impressive in person, even if everything and everyone appears smaller. The added dimension really makes a difference. And in some cases, so does the massive arena. There are gymnasts out there, like Simone Biles, who, despite her diminutive stature, seem to be able to truly fill the space. As an exercise, I tried to imagine what it would be like to actually rigorously evaluate a routine, to look at it piece by piece, and find favor or fault with it when medals are on the line. Imagining that burden left me with a queasy anxiety. Years of watching and analyzing the sport, mostly from the comfort of my couch, qualified me to do exactly what I was in Antwerp to do — report on a gymnastics competition — and little more, my success at identifying the credited switch ring notwithstanding. “You cannot duplicate [that pressure] when you sit in your chair and in front of you are the best gymnasts, maybe trying to qualify for the Olympic Games,” Sacchi told me. She said that even after all of her years as a judge, she is still nervous before big events. At least the JSS can’t experience anxiety. I get why, with so much on the line, you’d reach for a technology that promises to overcome human limitations. What the JSS offers is not only the promise of accuracy but also consistency, across rounds of competition, across several days of competition. It will not tire after a 12-hour judging day the way that human judges are wont to do. Gymnasts and coaches don’t like competing in the earliest subdivisions for a reason: the judges are fresh, and their figurative pencils — they actually use tablets — are sharp, and as a result, the execution scores tend to be lower. (The JSS doesn’t yet address the execution score, but I imagine that this is the eventual goal for the technology and would make the system more useful in the long term.) Some of the hopes that are being pinned on the JSS, such as increased transparency, which Watanabe mentioned in his opening remarks at the conference, seem misplaced. Yes, the JSS can provide a lot of detailed information, but that is not the same thing as transparency. The FBI collects lots of information on US citizens, often through high-tech means, but no one would accuse it of being transparent. (Any journalist that has tried to get info from the FBI knows that it’s actually a black hole.) The fact that the JSS is collecting all this data doesn’t mean it will be shared with the gymnastics community. Ultimately, transparency is not a question of technology but of policy. The yearslong process that it took to create the JSS illuminated the complexity of the judging task, which simultaneously calls for technological intervention and impedes it at every turn. Some of that complexity is unavoidable, even desirable. It shows a sport that is constantly evolving, its athletes always innovating. And some of it points to opportunities to streamline and improve the rules. Later that day, when I was back in the media section where I belonged, I watched the eight women who qualified for the beam final. Biles won the gold there, her performance clean and surefooted. Her pace was brisk, moving from one element to the next with only the most minor of adjustments. She competed with the nonchalance of someone who has been there many times before. In second was Chinese gymnast Zhou Yaqin, a newcomer who showed a lot of style and precision in her world championship debut. She was rewarded with a 14.7 for her efforts, just a tenth behind Biles. Zhou’s coach immediately filed an inquiry because they had been anticipating a higher D-score, based on what she had been previously awarded. It would all come down to the question of those frustrating connections, the ones that the JSS is not yet able to adjudicate. After a few minutes, the announcer told the audience that there had been no change. Biles would remain in first, Zhou in second. From my seat, a few rows above the judges, this result seemed fair — though, if it had gone the other way and Zhou had received the additional tenth, tying Biles, I might’ve felt the same way. With so little separating gymnasts, who wins and who loses can, at times, feel more like a judgment call. Everything can be endlessly debated on social media. This can have the effect of making it feel like no results are ever truly final. One of the hopes for the JSS is to offer finality to the outcomes so that when an athlete looks back on their careers, the counterfactuals they might spin have nothing to do with the competency of the judges evaluating them that day. “When I speak to coaches, judges, administrators, [I] say the job of the judge is to separate gymnasts,” Butcher said. The judges’ job is to slice finely, to find the difference between gymnasts, and rank them accordingly. Judging and scoring in gymnastics can certainly be improved, and perhaps the JSS can help along that trajectory. But we’ll never escape human judgment altogether, no matter how discomfiting that thought might be.

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