Monthly Archives: October 2015

Start up: flat design problems , ad tech stocks drop, life inside HP, LG’s challenge, and more

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Google’s got a new motto. Photo by vizeur_photos on Flickr.

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A selection of 11 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Flat design: its origins, its problems, and why Flat 2.0 is better for users » Nielsen-Norman Group

Kate Meyer:

Google’s Material design language is one example of flat 2.0 with the right priorities: it uses consistent metaphors and principles borrowed from physics to help users make sense of interfaces and interpret visual hierarchies in content.

The Evernote app for Android is a good example of the possible benefits of flat 2.0. Despite having a mostly flat UI, the app provides a few subtle shadows on the navigation bar and the floating plus button (‘add new’). It also makes use of the card metaphor to display content as flat, layer-able planes in a 3D space.

As with any design trend, we advise balance and moderation. Don’t make design decisions that sacrifice usability for trendiness. Don’t forget that—unless you’re designing only for other designers—you are not the user. Your preferences and ability to interpret clickability signifiers aren’t the same as your users’ because you know what each element in your own design is intended to do.

Early pseudo3D GUIs and Steve-Jobs-esque skeuomorphism often produced heavy, clunky interfaces.Scaling back from those excesses is good for usability. But removing visual distinctions to produce fully flat designs with no signifiers can be an equally bad extreme. Flat 2.0 provides an opportunity for compromise—visual simplicity without sacrificing signifiers.

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Ad tech stocks keep falling » WSJ

Jack Marshall notes they’re down by 17%-50%:

Serious questions about the future of ad tech and online advertising are also mounting. Some online publishers say they’re now actively avoiding working with third-party ad tech firms, for example, because they argue the vendors devalue their ad space.

Meanwhile the industry is struggling to come to grips with major challenges such as the growth of ad-blocking technologies, and the ongoing problem of fraudulent or “non-human” Internet traffic.

The latter problem might be the one that really does for ad tech companies.
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Autonomy ex-boss Lynch tells of poisonous life within HP in High Court showdown » The Register

Neil McAllister:

The suit asserts that many parties within HP “viewed Autonomy negatively,” including HP CFO Cathie Lesjak, who had never liked how the merger looked on paper; HP’s then-software boss Bill Veghte, who hadn’t played a role in the acquisition and reportedly felt snubbed; and the bosses of HP’s hardware division, who viewed Apotheker’s software-centric strategy as a threat.

Even where there was no direct animosity at play, other HP divisions were given perverse incentives to undermine Autonomy, Lynch claimed.

“In Autonomy’s case, other HP business units did not receive ‘quota credit’ or commissions for sales of Autonomy products,” the suit reads. “As a result, HP business units were incentivized to market and sell competing third-party products rather than Autonomy software.”

When HP did sell Autonomy to its customers, the suit alleges, it often did so at deep discounts, without Autonomy’s knowledge. In other cases, HP sales teams would jack up Autonomy’s price tag to boost their own bottom line, which had the result of making competing software look like a better bargain.

Similarly, sales of HP hardware to Autonomy didn’t count toward the hardware division’s sales quota. Thus, Lynch’s suit alleges, the hardware group refused to certify Autonomy on its machines. Dealings with the hardware group were so fraught, the suit adds, that even obtaining HP hardware on which to demo Autonomy proved impossible, and the demo machines were ultimately sourced from competitors, such as Oracle.

Read all about it. Seems like quite standard corporate politics, especially in a sales-driven environment like HP.
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Apple’s clever tech makes the iPhone 6s nearly waterproof » WIRED

Brian Barrett:

The phones that have offered this level of water resistance, though, haven’t exactly been chart-toppers. The Samsung Galaxy S6 Active; the Sony Xperia Z3; the HTC Desire Eye; these are phones (or variants) you may have heard of, but their aquaphobia hasn’t demonstrably made them any more desirable. Besides which, the new iPhones aren’t necessarily more water-resistant than others, at least not in any way that’s easily perceivable to consumers; they’re just water-resistant in a more clever way.

Even if it’s largely invisible to its customers, that cleverness could pay off soon for Apple. “Now that you can pay a small monthly fee and get a new iPhone every year, Apple’s going to be getting a lot of iPhones back,” says Suovanen of the company’s new iPhone Upgrade Plan. “In the long run this may help them save money. Because the iPhones are less susceptible to water damage, they’re getting them back in better condition.”

That helps explain, too, Apple opting not to coat the case itself. The same features that make a waterproof case effective make it hell to take apart or repair.

“Nearly waterproof” is a nothing phrase; it’s like “nearly pregnant”. It’s water-resistant to a higher IP rating than previous models. That nothing has been bruited about this seems anomalous.
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Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ becomes Alphabet’s ‘Do the Right Thing’ » WSJ

Alistair Barr:

“Don’t be evil” is so 2004.

Alphabet Inc. posted a new code of conduct for its employees Friday, after Google completed its transformation into a holding company. There were few substantive changes in more than 20 documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission; the Alphabet code of conduct, posted on its website, is among them.

Google’s code of conduct, of course, is best-known for its first line, which was also included in Google’s 2004 filing for its initial public offering: “Don’t be evil.”

Alphabet’s code doesn’t include that phrase. Instead, it says employees of Alphabet and its subsidiaries “should do the right thing – follow the law, act honorably, and treat each other with respect.”

“Don’t be evil” marked Google’s aspiration to be a different company. But the phrase also has been held up by critics who say Google has not always lived up to it.

Google’s code of conduct is much longer than Alphabet’s. It includes idiosyncracies about drinking alcohol at work (OK but not too much) and taking pets to the office (dogs are cool but cats are discouraged).

The Alphabet code sticks to the basics: avoid conflicts of interest, maintain integrity and obey the law.

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Apple patent for iPhone with wraparound screen » Business Insider

Lisa Eadicicco:


The patent, which was published on September 29, is a continuation of various patents Apple has filed in the past. It’s not necessarily a new idea — Apple has been filing similar patent applications since 2013. Regardless, it’s still interesting to speculate that the company may still be experimenting with these types of ideas.

In the document, Apple says that a design like this could change the way we use our iPhones. If the screen of your iPhone were extended, you wouldn’t be limited to interacting with the device’s screen only on the front of the phone.

Apple notes that other aspects of the device found along the side — such as the mute switch, power, and volume buttons — can’t be used with apps since they’re only programmed to perform one task.

Apple’s been doing this since 2013, which implies it thinks it’s a fruitful thing to follow. Notice there’s no home button. (10yo’s opinion: “they haven’t thought this through. People drop their phones and if you have a wraparound one it will break.”)
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FBI: We unmasked and collared child porn creep on Tor with spy tool » The Register

Luis Escobosa, of Staten Island, admitted to Feds he broke federal child pornography laws by viewing depraved photos on a hidden Tor service. Unknown to Escobosa, the Feds were running the hidden server, and were using it to feed him spyware.

The child porn website’s systems were seized in Lenoir, North Carolina, after agents got a court order in February. The Feds continued to keep it in operation for two weeks afterwards to catch perverts using it. The site had nearly 215,000 users.

Because users had to use Tor to access the warped website, the web server’s logs were of little use to investigators – they simply listed the nodes of the anonymizing network. Instead, the FBI deployed a NIT – a “network investigative technique,” or what in the hands of criminals would be termed spyware.

The FBI has been using NITs for over a decade. While the Escobosa indictment doesn’t give details, other court documents have stated that the software was developed by adapting a tool written by white hat hacker HD Moore called the Metasploit Decloaking Engine.

A NIT works like this: a file, typically a Flash file, is hosted by a seized child porn website, and sent to web browsers when perverts visit the hidden service via Tor. This Flash file is run in Adobe’s plugin, and establishes a direct connection to an FBI-controlled server on the public internet without going through Tor.

The Feds can then, in most cases, read off the user’s real public IP address from this connection, unmasking the scumbag.

Hmm – maybe keep Flash just for Tor sites? Wait, this is complicated.
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Apple Pay’s grim reality » PaymentsSource

Daniel Wolfe:

Drilling down to individual financial institutions, there is still little movement among consumers, even at major debit issuers like SunTrust.

“Adoption numbers are pretty small at this point,” said Shannon Johnson, SunTrust’s senior vice president of consumer deposits and payments, in a separate presentation at PayThink. “At SunTrust, about 15% of iPhone 6 owners have provisioned their card and about 25% of those have done [at least one] transaction.”

First Financial Credit Union also presented Apple Pay adoption figures at the event. Of its 65,000 members, 9,000 use mobile banking and 48% of those use an iPhone. Of the iPhone users, just 8% – 345 members – use Apple Pay.

The lack of use stems, in part, from a lack of creativity among Apple partners, Johnson said. For most issuers, Apple Pay abruptly appeared on the scene with little warning but a clear message to get on board.

“Prior to that it was conceptual, the option of mobile wallets; it then became real,” she said. “We’re so early in the stages in terms of understanding the opportunity.”

Low use isn’t surprising, because until last week in the US you could just swipe your card to make a transaction: quicker than Apple Pay. Now, people will have to insert their cards into readers (“dip”) and sign, at least; or dip-and-PIN. This has already led to longer queues, apparently. So Apple Pay might appeal as a quicker way to do things. Being ready to catch markets just as they take off is the key.
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Apple CEO Tim Cook: ‘privacy is a fundamental human right’ » NPR

The full interview is on the page; there are short transcript extracts, including this:

Let me be clear. If you buy something from the App Store, we do know what you bought from the App Store, obviously. We think customers are fine with that. Many customers want us to recommend an app.

But what they don’t want to do, they don’t want your email to be read, and then to pick up on keywords in your email and then to use that information to then market you things on a different application that you’re using. …

If you’re in our News app, and you’re reading something, we don’t think that in the News app that we should know what you did with us on the Music app — not to trade information from app to app to app to app.

That latter part is the real distance between Apple and Google. Question is, which leads to the better customer experience over time?
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Will LG’s V10 flagship be able to shake China’s and India’s smartphone market? » Strategy Analytics

Woody Oh of the analysis company takes an overview of LG’s new phone:

it’s getting clear that LG has put the utmost efforts in creating V10 in the following aspects.

1. Dual Screens : While it is estimated to be an extremely hard task to implement dual screens with one LCD panel, LG did a great job in creating the small, but “always-on” secondary display where you can make your smartphone usage better and more diversified.

2. Dual Cameras (5MP+5MP, Front-facing) : While we have to wait for LG’s updates on the applicable usages by this dual front-facing cameras, the purported function to be able to widen the angle when taking the selfie would be regarded as a differentiator, requiring no need to bring the selfie stick when you are in a hurry.

3. Separate 32bit Hi-Fi Audio DAC (Digital to Analog Convertor) supporting 384kHz and Headphone AMP : Listening to music on smartphones are becoming a common habit for almost all smartphone users, young generation in particular, so users are naturally keen to seek for better audio quality while listening. LG’s new bid for integrating the separate Hi-Fi audio chip and headphone amplifier will be a clear differentiator in this respect as more and more people are inclined to carry only one multi-media focused device these days.

4. Professional Mode of Camera and Video: Needless to say, LG is one of the best smartphone makers who can create the best still image quality with its differentiated software, enabling an even novice to take the best picture with very easy mode setting. With V10, LG is expected to make a step further, making the common users become the best movie maker with its easy, but professional setting mode.

I look at that list, and I think: if Apple put those into a new phone, which would it make a noise about? Which would reviewers and customers make a noise about? I think the audio and “camera pro mode” things are gimmicks: you’ll never, ever, ever hear the difference in sound (young users have never, ever sought “better audio quality”; ironically, that’s for oldsters, whose hearing is already deteriorating). Camera pro modes are recipes for confusion.

The dual screen? Depends how useful it really is. The dual front cameras? Might be popular.

The real question is: what’s the difference between a truly useful feature and a gimmick? I don’t think it’s self-evident. (The whole SA note is worth reading for its points about branding too.)
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Taiwan market: Toshiba no longer selling consumer notebooks » Digitimes

Aaron Lee and Adam Hwang:

Toshiba has shifted its notebook marketing focus from consumer to business-use models in Asia, Latin America and Central Europe, and has stopped selling consumer notebooks in Taiwan, according to the vendor’s Taiwan sales agent Grainew.

However, Toshiba will maintain marketing of consumer and business notebooks in West Europe and North America markets because consumer models are still profitable there, Grainew said.

In the Taiwan market, Grainew sells about 1,000 units of a Toshiba high-end business notebook model a month currently and expects monthly sales to increase 10-20% in 2016, the company indicated. While unit sales has decreased after giving up the consumer segment, overall gross margin has increased significantly, Grainew said.

Tiny numbers; smaller companies like Toshiba will increasingly withdraw completely from the consumer PC market because the margins aren’t there.
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Start up: the Nexus puzzle, Stagefright 2.0 (bigger!), T-Mobile US data hack, Fiorina’s iPod miss and more

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How do you make cakes sell better if they make people feel guilty? Photo by ricardogz10 on Flickr.

You can now sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 12 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google’s Nexus phones are just ads » The Verge

Vlad Savov:

new Nexus phones are also profitless love letters to fans, designed to induce goodwill for the Google brand. How can a company that depends on making money from each unit of hardware sold hope to compete with that?

Motorola went all-out with the Moto X Pure this year, seeking to deliver the cleanest possible Android experience, best possible specs, and lowest possible price, all while operating independently of carrier interference. That’s as close to Google’s Nexus ideal as any Android manufacturer has ever come. So if Google’s Nexus motivation was truly to set a template of good practices to follow, to define a user experience benchmark, and to seed the development of a better Android ecosystem, it would have stopped and applauded Motorola for its efforts this year.

Instead, Google is undercutting the $399 Moto X Pure with the $379 Nexus 5X, which has the added benefit of a fingerprint sensor and matches the Moto X with a highly rated camera capable of 4K video. I don’t know whether to describe this as a knife in the back or an arrow to the knee, but Google’s actions are certainly doing violence to its Android partners’ best-laid plans.

Lenovo/Motorola’s mobile division loses money. So it’s pretty certain that if the Nexus phones undercut them, they lose money. That makes them deflationary to the Android ecosystem; it’s as though Microsoft were selling $150 full-spec PCs under its own brand. Savov hits the nail on the head (once more): the Nexus program just doesn’t make sense in a wider view.
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Stagefright 2.0: MP3 and MP4 can hack billion Android phones » Fortune

Robert Hackett:

It’s time to evacuate the Android dance floor—lest you be infected by the sound.

Two new critical vulnerabilities in Google’s mobile operating system announced by security researchers on Thursday put more than a billion Android devices at risk of being hacked. That means “almost every Android device” is affected, ranging from Android version 1.0 to the latest version 5.0, also known as “Lollipop,” the researcher said.

Attackers can exploit these computer bugs by tricking users into visiting websites that host malicious MP3 or MP4 files. Once a victim previews one of these infected multimedia files, which commonly package music or video, that person’s machine can swiftly be compromised. The issue involves how Android processes these files’ metadata through a media playback engine named Stagefright.

Yes, it’s Stagefright, and it’s back; it can once more access data, cameras, microphone and photos. But on pretty much any Android phone ever. It’s incredibly unlikely to be exploited by any but state-level hackers.

Still, Google was told on 15 August, and sent updates to OEMs and carriers on September 10. Have they rolled out? Find out by using Zimperium’s Stagefright detector app. (You have to love the reviews complaining that it shows “false positives”.)
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Amazon to ban sale of Apple, Google video-streaming devices » Bloomberg Business

Spencer Soper:

Amazon.com is flexing its e-commerce muscles to gain an edge on competitors in the video-streaming market by ending the sale of devices from Google and Apple that aren’t easily compatible with Amazon’s video service.

The Seattle-based Web retailer sent an e-mail to its marketplace sellers that it will stop selling Apple TV and Google’s Chromecast. No new listings for the products will be allowed and posting of existing inventory will be removed Oct. 29, Amazon said. Amazon’s streaming service, called Prime Video, doesn’t run easily on its rival’s hardware.

Filed under “strategy tax”. Possibly the profits on the Apple TV and Chromecast weren’t very high, but Amazon still sells smart TVs that don’t play Prime Video.
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CEO responds to Experian data breach » T-Mobile

John Legere:

We have been notified by Experian, a vendor that processes our credit applications, that they have experienced a data breach. The investigation is ongoing, but what we know right now is that the hacker acquired the records of approximately 15 million people, including new applicants requiring a credit check for service or device financing from September 1, 2013 through September 16, 2015. These records include information such as name, address and birthdate as well as encrypted fields with Social Security number and ID number (such as driver’s license or passport number), and additional information used in T-Mobile’s own credit assessment. Experian has determined that this encryption may have been compromised. We are working with Experian to take protective steps for all of these consumers as quickly as possible.

Obviously I am incredibly angry about this data breach and we will institute a thorough review of our relationship with Experian, but right now my top concern and first focus is assisting any and all consumers affected. I take our customer and prospective customer privacy VERY seriously.

Sure, you take it seriously, Mr Legere (and I mean that seriously) but there’s a single point of failure in the way that you trusted a third party with your customers’ data. That’s poor system design, which means that actually customer privacy wasn’t taken that seriously. Wonder if a class action will follow.
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Xiaomi confronts an unnerving time » WSJ

Li Yuan speaks to Xiaomi’s founder Lei Jun:

How Xiaomi responds [to new challengers] could offer a clue to how well China’s booming tech industry transitions to its next stage. Riding a wave of growing mobile Internet adoption, China’s technology sector has churned out significant global companies and minted fortunes. But growth is slowing across the board, presenting challenges to a new generation of entrepreneurs who must learn how to manage in tougher times.

Mr. Lei sees a five-year lull in smartphone innovation that will make “wow” moments harder to come by, and will require competitors to focus on user experience to differentiate and tap consumer niches. The key, he says, is to provide value.

“We’re doing what Uniqlo, Muji and Ikea have been doing,” he said. “Our ultimate goal is to make good but cheap things.”

That five-year lull is quite a thing to contemplate.
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The cost of mobile ads on 50 news websites » The New York Times

Gregor Aisch, Wilson Andrews and Josh Keller:

Ad blockers, which Apple first allowed on the iPhone in September, promise to conserve data and make websites load faster. But how much of your mobile data comes from advertising? We measured the mix of advertising and editorial on the mobile home pages of the top 50 news websites – including ours – and found that more than half of all data came from ads and other content filtered by ad blockers.

It’s a hell of a graphic. The “cost to load” data is eye-opening: it’s pretty much always far, far bigger than that of the editorial. (Why? I mean, one comes for the editorial, including pictures; why are ads so much bigger?) The Guardian comes a long way down the list – as in, it has a very low ad load – which might be, I suspect, because the US version of the site doesn’t yet have that many ads.

There’s an accompanying article by Brian X Chen, which also appeared in print.

Note too that articles like this fulfils one of my expectations ahead of the launch of iOS 9: it spreads the word of the existence of this facility on iOS, which will lead to Android users wanting to know how they can get it too.
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A creativity lesson from Betty Crocker » Psychology Today

Drew Boyd:

In the 1950s, General Mills launched a line of cake mixes under the famous Betty Crocker brand. The cake mixes included all the dry ingredients in the package, plus milk and eggs in powdered form. All you needed was to add water, mix it all together, and stick the pan in the oven. For busy homemakers, it saved time and effort, and the recipe was virtually error free. General Mills had a sure winner on its hands.

Or so it thought. Despite the many benefits of the new product, it did not sell well. Even the iconic and trusted Betty Crocker brand could not convince homemakers to adopt the new product.

General Mills brought in a team of psychologists. Something unusual was going on. The company needed to make its next move very carefully if it was going to get this product off the ground.

Why were consumers resisting it? The short answer: guilt. The psychologists concluded that average American housewives felt bad using the product despite its convenience. It saved so much time and effort when compared with the traditional cake baking routine that they felt they were deceiving their husbands and guests. In fact, the cake tasted so good that people thought women were spending hours baking. Women felt guilty getting more credit than they deserved. So they stopped using the product.

Now think carefully: what’s your next step? (Scrapping the line is not an option.) I wonder if there are any lessons for smartphone makers in this.
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How Steve Jobs fleeced Carly Fiorina » Medium

Steven Levy utterly destroys any claims to negotiating competence that would-be Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina might have, pointing to the many ways that Jobs steamrollered her (from the colour of the iPod to the pre-installation of iTunes on HP PCs). But this is the coup de grace:

The ultimate irony is that if Fiorina had been familiar with the assets of the company she ran, she might have had much more leverage to cut a better deal with Jobs. When she made her disastrous 2002 acquisition of Compaq, HP took possession of its patents, including those generated by the research division of the Digital Equipment Corporation, the iconic minicomputer company that Compaq itself bought in 1998. It turns out that researchers in DEC’s Palo Alto lab had created a hard-disk MP3 player — essentially inventing key parts of the iPod several years before Apple did. The project never got any love, though a clunky version of it had actually been announced at CES in 2000. Still, among the patents DEC secured were some very broad ones regarding the way music was drawn from the disk drive while conserving battery power. Had Fiorina known this, she might had been able to get a much better deal with Apple  —  because she could have credibly claimed that the iPod infringed on HP’s intellectual property.

Based on this, you’d have to (holds nose) vote for Trump. At least he has actually succeeded in negotiations, and created rather than destroyed shareholder value. If, that is, you think those are things that matter in presidential candidates. Which isn’t self-evident.
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EMV’s reality: more online fraud » PaymentsSource

Rurik Bradbury:

Only 22% of small to mid-sized retailers reported that they are prepared to meet the [October 1] deadline [when retailers have to make customers use EMV-compliant payment terminals]. And, according to a recent SoftwareAdvice.com study, 23% believe upgrading to EMV is unnecessary.

Additional data from a large research firm suggests that almost 50% of U.S. retailers will not be EMV-compliant by the end of 2015. These merchants, just under half of all U.S. retailers, will be in for a rude awakening when they start receiving chargeback bills for fraudulent transactions.

The shift to EMV should significantly reduce in-store fraud for retailers that upgrade their payments processing systems, as the new cards will have an embedded chip that generates a unique token for each transaction, making them extremely difficult or nearly impossible to counterfeit. However, fraudsters will not just throw in the towel and get day jobs, they will simply change their tactics to exploit less secure payment channels.

In many ways, criminal fraud is like running water, when one area is firmly sealed off, it simply flows to the next open gap, which in this case is e-commerce. In the digital world, only the card digits and Card Verification Value (CVV) are used, and chip technology cannot help, which will make digital payments an easier, more lucrative target for fraudsters to target. According to a study by the Aite Group, in Australia, online or card not present (CNP), fraud increased from $72.6 million AU in 2008 to $198.1 million AU in 2011 – a 100 percent increase in CNP fraud in three years following the EMV upgrade. A similar spike occurred in Canada and the UK after each country migrated to EMV terminals.

The same, or worse is expected to happen in the U.S.

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Apple’s software king Eddy Cue on streaming battles, the iPhone 6s and getting rid of roaming charges » London Evening Standard

Jimi Famurewa got some time just ahead of the iPhone launch. Most of the interview is straightforward, but for this snippet at the end:

[Cue] taps his phone and makes an offhand comment about “trying not to get roaming charges” while in London which, I note, proves how insanely expensive phone calls and data can be abroad. “It’s sad, it’s another problem,” says Cue. “We’re trying to fix it and we’re making a little bit of progress but you’ve got to convince a lot of people.” It sounds like an impossible task. But that, you would imagine, is where the famous flair will come in.

“We’re trying to fix it”? That throwaway remark is going to fuel a lot of “OMG Apple roaming MVNO” talk. But it’s certainly not an accident.
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The new Apple Maps vs. Google Maps: which is right for you? » Howto Geek

Chris Stobing:

If you’ve been using Google Maps for a number of years and your account already has all your contacts saved – great, go for Google. If you prefer to use Siri to launch your Maps application or want to be able to see where you’re going without having to unlock the phone, Apple Maps is on the job. There may have been a point in time when Google Maps held the crown as the best (and for awhile; only) real map app out there, but now Apple Maps lives alongside its legacy with just as much functionality and flexibility as the rest.

“Apple Maps in ‘no longer as bad as on first day'” shocker. (Plus “Google Maps unable to improve beyond where it was three years ago”.) The biggest gap is in public transport; while apps can close that, it’s still unsatisfying when your only offerings are cars or Shanks’s pony.
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Samsung TVs appear less energy efficient in real life than in tests » The Guardian

Arthur Nelsen:

The lab studies found that Samsung’s ‘motion lighting’ feature reduced the TV sets’ brightness – and power consumption – under international electrotechnical commission (IEC) test conditions. These involve the playback of fast sequences of varied material, such as recorded TV shows, DVDs and live broadcasts.

But under real-world viewing conditions, no reductions in power consumption were registered, making the sets’ power consumption, fuel bills and carbon emissions correspondingly higher.

After tests in February, a ComplianTV report, which did not name Samsung, said: “The laboratories observed different TV behaviours during the measurements and this raised the possibility of the TV’s detecting a test procedure and adapting their power consumption accordingly. Such phenomenon was not proven within the ComplianTV tests, but some tested TVs gave the impression that they detected a test situation.”

“Samsung is meeting the letter of the law but not the spirit of the law,” Rudolf Heinz, the project manager of ComplianTV’s product lab, told the Guardian.

Oh, come on, Samsung would never.. oh.
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Start up: Microsoft and Google make up, the social network paradox, adblocking v disability, and more

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Samsung Pay in action. Photo by TheBetterDay on Flickr.

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Google, Microsoft resolve global patent fight over phones, Xbox » Bloomberg Business

Susan Decker and Dina Bass:

Google and Microsoft have agreed to end their long-running patent feud over smartphones and video game systems, dropping about 20 lawsuits in the U.S. and Germany.

The two companies, which didn’t disclose financial terms, have been litigating over technology innovations for five years. Google’s former Motorola Mobility unit had been demanding royalties on the Xbox video-gaming system, and Microsoft had sought to block Motorola mobile phones from using certain features.

The companies pledged in a statement to work together in other ways related to intellectual property, including development of a royalty-free, video-compression technology to speed downloads, in an initiative that also involves Amazon.com Inc. and Netflix Inc. They will also lobby for specific rules on a unified patent system throughout Europe.

So all the patent wars of the past five years are pretty much done – aside from Samsung-Apple, which is limited now to the US but still putters along.
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The social network illusion that tricks your mind » MIT Technology Review

Network scientists have known about the paradoxical nature of social networks for some time. The most famous example is the friendship paradox: on average your friends will have more friends than you do.

This comes about because the distribution of friends on social networks follows a power law. So while most people will have a small number of friends, a few individuals have huge numbers of friends. And these people skew the average.

Here’s an analogy. If you measure the height of all your male friends. you’ll find that the average is about 170 centimeters. If you are male, on average, your friends will be about the same height as you are. Indeed, the mathematical notion of “average” is a good way to capture the nature of this data.

But imagine that one of your friends was much taller than you—say, one kilometer or 10 kilometers tall. This person would dramatically skew the average, which would make your friends taller than you, on average. In this case, the “average” is a poor way to capture this data set.

Exactly this situation occurs in social networks, and not just for numbers of friends. On average, your coauthors will be cited more often than you, and the people you follow on Twitter will post more frequently than you, and so on.

Basically, it can mean that minority views espoused by those with many followers can be accepted easily as “widely true”. Which of course it isn’t. Sure you can think of many examples.
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How ad-blocking software could revolutionise disabled people’s lives » The Guardian

Anna Bawden:

For people with photosensitive epilepsy, frequently flashing or flickering images could trigger or increase the risk of a seizure, while automatic advertising can be distressing for those with learning disabilities because it hinders concentration and therefore comprehension of the content they are trying to consume.

Blind and visually impaired people can also have problems. “If you are blind or visually impaired and using text to speech software on your device, autoplaying animations or video that includes music or audio makes some web pages all but impossible to access,” says Robin Christopherson, head of digital inclusion at charity AbilityNet, in his latest blog. “The audio that automatically starts playing completely obscures the speech of the screen reader. This means that blind people can’t hear the screen reader and therefore they can’t navigate to the ‘stop’ button to stop the noise.”

Shall we call them disability unblockers?
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Digicel first mobile group to block ads in battle against Google » FT.com

Robert Cookson:

Mobile operator Digicel has started blocking advertisements on its networks in the Caribbean as part of a plan to force internet companies including Google, Yahoo and Facebook to pay to access its customers.

The company is controlled by Denis O’Brien, Ireland’s richest man, and is the first mobile operator to deploy the blocking technology against big Silicon Valley groups that rely on advertising.

Digicel suggested that if those companies want to unblock their ads, they should contribute to the costs of the mobile telecoms infrastructure required to deliver them.

“Companies like Google, Yahoo and Facebook talk a great game and take a lot of credit when it comes to pushing the idea of broadband for all — but they put no money in,” said Mr O’Brien. “Instead they unashamedly trade off the efforts and investments of network operators like Digicel to make money for themselves.”

This feels wrong – if the countries where it’s done have any sort of view on net neutrality, they would have to intervene over this.
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Review: Samsung pays where Apple can’t » WSJ

Geoffrey Fowler:

Samsung Pay is just as easy to use as Apple Pay and Android Pay—you don’t have to dig deep into your phone or type any long passwords. To launch it, even when your phone screen is dark, flick up from the bottom and place your finger on the fingerprint reader.

But Samsung Pay faces an unusual hurdle: awkwardness. Attempting to use it for the past few weeks, I got the stink-eye from many merchants, as if I were some kind of con artist or hacker. Here’s a typical encounter at a downtown San Francisco bakery:

Me: “I’m going to pay with my phone.”

Clerk: “Sorry, we don’t have Apple Pay.”

Me: “This isn’t Apple Pay. It’s like a credit card on my phone.”

Clerk: “We don’t have that.”

Me: “It’s something new called Samsung Pay. It will work.”

Clerk: “No, it won’t.”

It did, but the US is still stuck somewhere in the 20th century when it comes to banks, cards and payments. (Among other things.) Samsung’s hybrid solution, which works with terribly insecure swipe card readers, but securely as Apple or Android Pay, is a good in-between. The US is meant to be implementing chip/sign (it was too cowardly to do chip/PIN) from October; let’s see how that goes.
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The state of JavaScript on Android in 2015 is… poor » Discourse Meta

Jeff Atwood:

In a nutshell, the fastest known Android device available today – and there are millions of Android devices much slower than that out there – performs 5× slower than a new iPhone 6s, and a little worse than a 2012 era iPhone 5 in Ember. How depressing.

We’ve done enough research to know this issue is not really specific to Ember, but also affects Angular and most other heavy/complex JavaScript on Android. Why?

Part of it is indeed Chrome/V8 JavaScript optimization issues on Android as you can see from this AnandTech Galaxy S6 review. Note the browser used:


It’s also partly because single core performance on Android is falling way, way behind iOS. Notice that the flagship Android device barely has the single core grunt of an old iPad Mini based on the old A7 core. Compare single core Android GeekBench versus single core iOS GeekBench:


It seems the Android manufacturers are more interested in slapping n slow CPU cores on a die than they are in producing very fast CPU cores. And this is quite punishing when it comes to JavaScript.

This is becoming more and more of a systemic problem in the Android ecosystem, one that will not go away in the next few years, and it may affect the future of Discourse, since we bet heavily on near-desktop JavaScript performance on mobile devices. That is clearly happening on iOS but it is quite disastrously the opposite on Android.

I am no longer optimistic this will change in the next two years, and there are untold millions of slow Android devices out there, so we need to start considering alternatives for the Discourse project.

Attwood’s suggestions include just focussing on iOS users. A native Android app is too time-consuming/expensive, and the problem he’s seeing with Discourse-based sites running slowly comes despite sending only half as much page content to Android phones compared to iOS.

Lots of frustration expressed by others in the comments too. Though as one says, if you’ve never tried the other OS, you’ll never know (or care) what you’re missing – good or bad.
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Apple Watch India launch delayed due to lack of interest » India Today

Sahil Mohan Gupta:

Sources in the supply chain have revealed to IndiaToday.in that the delay is more to due to lack of interest in Apple’s channel partners in India. They aren’t convinced about the product and no one is willing to take on a massive inventory for a product, which belongs to a category that’s not yet developed in India.

As per the IDC, Apple has shipped 3.6m units of the Apple Watch in the last quarter trailing only FitBit which shipped 4.4m units. IDC estimates that the Cupertino-based company will ship around 22 million units of the product in the calendar.  

Apple is tailed by Chinese start-up Xiaomi, which shipped 3.1m units of its Mi Band. The wearable market is expected to be the next growth category for technology companies. 72.2m wearables will be shipped in 2015, estimates IDC, which will be massive 173% jump over 26.4m units in 2014.

Apple faces stiff competition from Android Wear based wearables which after a recent update also work with the iPhone.

In India, the wearable market hasn’t taken off.

So that’s stiff competition from products in a market that hasn’t taken off?
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What it means to be great » Asymco

Horace Dediu:

Looking at new features like 3D Touch, Live Photos, and better cameras, one can observe how easily acceptable and desirable they are to those who first see them. As were Siri, FaceTime, Touch ID and iCloud, making something meaningfully better is a sign of sustaining innovation which does not over-serve.

Paradoxically, the improvements are not usually things that users ask for. Surveys always show that consumers want “better battery life” or a “bigger screen” but delivering something else entirely which nevertheless leads to mass adoption shows an uncanny insight into what really matters. Indeed, those who deliver only what customers ask for end up marginalized and bereft of profit.

To see improvements which lead to ever-increasing success in the marketplace year after year proves that this is not a transient event. This is no flash-in-the pan. This is not a stroke of genius. This is a process, a factory, a machine. The consistency and relentlessness of success is evidence of something at work that is more permanent.

There are lots of OEMs which offer better battery life than the iPhone (Apple rolled the potential into the iOS 9 software update) and have offered bigger screens for longer than Apple has. And there are OEMs which have offered new functions, yet not integrated into an overarching view of how the device will function now and in the future.
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In schools, Google’s laptops will soon outnumber all other devices combined » BuzzFeed News

Molly Hensley-Clancy and Matthew Zeitlin:

There will be more Google Chromebooks in American classrooms by the end of the year than all other devices combined, Google said today at a company event in San Francisco.

The figure is a striking indication of how quickly, and thoroughly, Google has come to dominate the massive education technology market. In 2012, Chromebooks made up just 1% of devices in American schools; iPads had a more than 50% market share. But by 2014, according to market research firm IDC, Chromebooks were outselling iPads in education.

About 30,000 Chromebooks have been activated every day since the beginning of the school year this September, mostly in schools, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the event. In schools, “by the end of this year, there will be more Chromebooks than every other device combined,” Pichai said.

Chromebooks were able to overtake iPads in education because they’re far cheaper — sometimes under $200 — have keyboards, and don’t require additional software because they only run Google’s Chrome browser.

If Pichai is correct (note: don’t rely on Google to give correct information in public statements) then a hell of a lot of Windows PCs must have been junked, along with a ton of iPads and Macs.

I’m dubious. In 2008, there were 15.4m PCs in schools, rising by about 1m every year. In August, the NYT Bits blog said 13.2m systems were shipped in 2014, up 33% on 2013, with Chromebooks making up about a third of them.

On that basis, unless every school is dumping their Windows PCs and iPads for Chromebooks since August, I don’t see how Chromebooks will make up more than 50% of the installed base by January. They might be over 50% of the ongoing sales, though.

That’s not to say they aren’t perfect for schools; only that installed base and sales (market) share are two very different things.
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