Apple’s HomePod: a problem for Sonos and Amazon, or a niche for fans? Photo by nobihaya on Flickr from WWDC 2017.

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 13 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Why aren’t Google and Facebook enriching our lives? • Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

»

Let’s take Google as an example. Google knew that I was going to Moscow (itinerary emailed to my Gmail address). Google knew my schedule (Calendar). Google should know my various interests by now, from reading my Gmail messages and Docs content. Due to me being of such an advanced age that I still use email rather than text, Google definitely knows my real social network (the people with whom I correspond via email).

Why didn’t Google suggest to me a whole bunch of cultural events? People to meet? Groups to join? The stuff that Google tries to help with is stuff that was already pretty easy to do in the pre-Internet days, e.g., book a hotel or airline ticket. Even in those areas, Google is simply following the mid-1990s leaders such as Expedia.

I don’t think that one can argue that enriching lives is unprofitable and therefore these profit-seeking companies aren’t interested. Selling tickets to events should lead to commissions. Connecting people to meet in public places, such as restaurants or bars, should also lead to commissions. These could be a lot more lucrative than what Google gets from selling mouse clicks.

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I think this is what Google is trying to do – but people don’t trust companies yet with this stuff, do they?
link to this extract

Top-secret NSA report details Russian hacking effort days before 2016 election • The Intercept

Matthew Cole, Richard Esposito, Sam Biddle and Ryan Grim:

»

Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept.

The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very recently acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the U.S. election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light.

While the document provides a rare window into the NSA’s understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying “raw” intelligence on which the analysis is based. A U.S. intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive.

«

So it sorta was, or maybe not?
link to this extract

WSJ ends Google users’ free ride, then fades in search results • Bloomberg

Gerry Smith:

»

After blocking Google users from reading free articles in February, the Wall Street Journal’s subscription business soared, with a fourfold increase in the rate of visitors converting into paying customers. But there was a trade-off: Traffic from Google plummeted 44 percent.

The reason: Google search results are based on an algorithm that scans the internet for free content. After the Journal’s free articles went behind a paywall, Google’s bot only saw the first few paragraphs and started ranking them lower, limiting the Journal’s viewership.

Executives at the Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., argue that Google’s policy is unfairly punishing them for trying to attract more digital subscribers. They want Google to treat their articles equally in search rankings, despite being behind a paywall.

“Any site like ours automatically doesn’t get the visibility in search that a free site would,” Suzi Watford, the Journal’s chief marketing officer, said in an interview. “You are definitely being discriminated against as a paid news site.”

The Journal’s experience could have implications across the news industry, where publishers are relying more on convincing readers to pay for their articles because tech giants like Google and Facebook are vacuuming up the lion’s share of online advertising.

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link to this extract

Apple joins augmented reality fray with new app platform • FT

Tim Bradshaw:

»

Apple has jumped into the growing battle for the camera in Silicon Valley, with a new “augmented reality” app platform for developers that will face off against Facebook, Snapchat and Google.

The new “ARkit” capabilities being introduced in the next version of iOS will give Apple “overnight the largest AR platform in the world”, Craig Federighi, its software chief, told app makers at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday.

Demonstrations displayed at the event in San Jose showed an improved version of Pokémon Go, one of the biggest apps of last year. The ARkit toolset allows the game’s monsters to bounce around streets and parks in a more realistic fashion.

Apple framed its bid to bring digital images to the iPhone camera window’s view of the real world as a leap forward in user-interface design alongside the iPhone’s 10-year-old “multitouch” screen.

“With multitouch we’ve really changed the way that you interact with the world on the screen of your iPhone,” said Mr Federighi. “With the camera we’ve allowed you to capture the world around you. When you bring these together, the results can be profound.”

«

Coming in iOS 11, of course; the fact it’s a kit means it can be part of apps everywhere. And this will make iOS the world’s biggest AR platform within about a month of iOS 11’s release.
link to this extract

Apple unveils HomePod, its Siri smart speaker • Engadget

Devindra Hardawar:

»

The HomePod’s small, vase-like case houses a four-inch woofer and seven tweeters. It’s powered by Apple’s A8 processor, just like the iPhone. HomePod features “real-time acoustic modeling,” which allows it to tweak music to suit its environment. Apple is also targeting Sonos as a competitor, which is a sign that the HomePod’s audio quality will be better than what we’ve seen from Amazon and Google.

Of course, you can use the HomePod to access Siri with voice commands. But on this device, Siri is more than just a virtual assistant — it’s a “musicologist” that will help you find new tunes on Apple Music. You can also tell Siri you like a certain song, and it’ll remember your tastes. What’s most unique is that you’ll be able to ask Siri specific questions like, “Who’s the guitarist on this song?”

HomePod is coming in December for $349, which is significantly more than the Amazon Echo, Google Home and Sonos’s $300 Play:3. It’ll be available in white and Apple’s usual space grey.

«

December?! I guess it gives Sonos plenty of time to get its advertising in line. It’s got its own page on Apple’s site.
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Huawei, Xiaomi perform weaker than expected in notebook market; will continue to push new models • Digitimes

Monica Chen and Joseph Tsai:

»

Despite worldwide PC demand having declined for five consecutive years, Samsung Electronics, Huawei and Xiaomi have returned to the notebook market because of milder competition compared to the smartphone market.

However, sources from the upstream supply chain pointed out that Xiaomi and Huawei, which were originally expected to achieve good shipments, did not perform as well as expected because demand remains weak for consumer notebooks. For its first year, Xiaomi shipped less than 500,000 units and Huawei 700,000 units.

At the same time, Asustek Computer has also not performed well and has begun a business reorganization, looking to regain its momentum. Asustek is expected to start seeing shipment growth in the second half of 2017.

Sources from the upstream supply chain noted that Xiaomi and Huawei originally hoped to quickly expand into the notebook market with their strong brand recognition, advantages in shipments, and familiarity to the China market, but have not achieved the results they wanted so far.

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Xiaomi had apparently been targeting 2m units; it got a quarter of that. May be running out of ideas.
link to this extract

Fireball malware infects 20% of corporate networks worldwide • Infosecurity Magazine

Tara Seals:

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A browser-hijacker called Fireball has ignited concern, having already infected more than 250 million computers worldwide, and 20% of corporate networks globally. 

According to Check Point, it takes over target web browsers, turning them into zombies. However, Fireball also can be turned into a fully functioning malware downloader, and is capable of executing any code on the victim machines. That means it can carry out a wide range of actions, including stealing credentials and loading ransomware.

For now, it seems focused on adware. Fireball manipulates victims’ browsers and turns their default search engines and home pages into fake search engines, which simply redirect the queries to either yahoo.com or Google.com to generate ad revenue. According to Alexa’s web traffic data, 14 of these fake search engines are among the top 10,000 websites, with some of them occasionally reaching the top 1,000.

Fireball also installs plug-ins and additional configurations to boost its advertisement activity.

“It’s run by a Chinese digital marketing agency, called Rafotech,” Check Point noted in an analysis. “Rafotech carefully walks along the edge of legitimacy, knowing that adware distribution is not considered a crime like malware distribution is. Many companies provide software or services for free, and make their profits by harvesting data or presenting advertisements. Once a client agrees to the install of extra features or software to his/her computer, it is hard to claim malicious intent on behalf of the provider.”

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link to this extract

Amazon aims to put Fire Phone nightmare behind with ‘Ice’ smartphones • NDTV Gadgets360.com

Manish Singh:

»

Amazon plans to have another go at selling its own branded smartphones.

The ecommerce giant, which killed off its Fire Phone in 2015, is working on a new lineup of smartphones branded as “Ice”, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Unlike the Fire Phone — for which Amazon focused largely on the US and a couple of other western markets — the company is eyeing emerging markets like India for selling its new phones, said the sources.

Amazon’s upcoming smartphones run the latest version of Google’s Android operating system with Google Mobile Services (GMS) such as Gmail and Google Play, the people said.

Incorporating Google Mobile Services in its devices is a major change in strategy for Amazon, which currently offers a range of Android tablets without Google apps on them.

The smartphones are being referred to as ‘Ice’ internally, in what could be a move to distance itself from the disastrous Fire Phone brand, though it’s not clear if Amazon will eventually bring the devices under the Ice name. Amazon declined to comment.

«

If true, bad idea. It’s money down the drain.
link to this extract

Berkeley duo’s plan to solve traffic jams: hyper-fast lanes for self-driving cars • The Guardian

Benjamin Preston:

»

Hyperlane works a lot like existing dedicated commuter lanes, only instead of paying extra to use higher-speed, lower-congestion lanes in a human-driven vehicle, the separate lanes are only for autonomous vehicles. After entering an acceleration lane, Hyperlane’s central computer takes over the car’s functions and finds a slot for it in the already fast-moving traffic in the dedicated lanes. Barrs and Chen said vehicles would travel at speeds up to 120mph, and that the centralized computer control – which would be in constant communication with each vehicle using emerging 5G technology – would allow for a more tightly-packed traffic pattern.

“We liken the Hyperlane network to an air traffic control system,” Barrs said.

Sensors in the road would evaluate traffic density, weather hazards, accidents and other changes, prompting the system to adjust vehicle speed as necessary. Like Uber’s pricing structure, fees for Hyperlane would be based upon demand.

«

Hmm. Controlled by a central computer. No chance of that going wrong, and no risk with vehicles going at 120mph.
link to this extract

Giving up time as a parent • FlowingData

Nathan Yau:

»

One of the challenges of parenting is that you have to spend a lot of what was once your own time caring for your kids. This time must be taken from an existing activity. After all, there is a fixed number of minutes during the day. Where do parents usually draw from?

In the same spirit of looking at time use for working adults over all of adulthood, I counted the hours for people with one child under 18 in the house and compared the totals against those without a child in the house. For simplicity’s sake, I focused on employed people from age 25 to 43 (25 is the average age Americans have their first kid), and the comparison below shows differences for the same time span.

Between the age 18 to 43, a parent with one child spends 9,572 more hours caretaking than someone without a child in the house and 1,468 more hours on household work. These hours are pulled mostly from socializing, relaxing, and work.

«

Tell me about it. Great visualisation too.
link to this extract

Digital privacy is making antitrust exciting again • WIRED

Nitasha Tiku:

»

Relying on consumer prices to judge the openness of a market can also be misleading when regulating tech companies. “When more and more services are ‘free,’ you can see how that really renders antitrust feeble,” says Khan. After the rapid expansion in social networking and online search, it’s clear that financial power lies in data, not just price. “The Europeans hit on this,” says Stucke. “Data is the new lingua franca. That is the currency, and [tech platforms] can translate that data into dollars.”

This is evident in the European Union’s intensified scrutiny of how Silicon Valley tech platforms operate. Germany’s antitrust agency is investigating Facebook. The EU conducted an antitrust probe into Amazon’s e-books business deals (the company agreed to change its contract with publishers in May). Days before the Oxford conference, the EU fined Facebook $122m for making misleading privacy statements to the EU when it acquired WhatsApp for $19bn in 2014 about the ability to match Facebook and WhatsApp accounts. (The merger of the popular texting apps raised concerns that Facebook’s online advertising business could gain an unfair advantage.) Days before that, watchdogs in the Netherlands and France slapped Facebook on the wrist for privacy violations.

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There’s a growing feeling that current US antitrust law isn’t able to cope with the emerging problems created by the big companies, particularly Facebook and Google.
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Intel CEO Krzanich: self-driving cars will double as security cameras • CNBC

Chantel McGee:

»

The benefits of having self-driving cars go far beyond automatic parking or fewer accidents, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich told CNBC on Thursday.

Among those other benefits: Driverless cars will double as security cameras, he said from the sidelines of the Code Conference in California.

“I always say that the cars are going to be out there looking, so the next time an Amber alert comes up and they’re looking for a license plate, the cars should be able to find that license plate quite rapidly,” said Krzanich.

The idea could bring up concerns about privacy, but Krzanich has already thought of how to minimize those worries.

“We’ll have to put limitations on it,” he said. “We’ll have to encrypt that data and make sure I can’t tell that it’s John’s [car] necessarily,” said Krzanich.

«

Mass surveillance without a warrant! How delightful.
link to this extract

Xiaomi and Apple tie for the top position as the wearables market swells 17.9% during the first quarter • IDC

»

The worldwide wearables market maintained its upward trajectory during the first quarter of 2017 (1Q17) with Xiaomi and Apple leading all companies and multiple products experiencing double- and triple-digit growth. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker, companies shipped a total of 24.7m wearable devices during 1Q17, up 17.9% from the 20.9m units shipped in 1Q16.

“Fitbit finds itself in the midst of a transformation as user tastes evolve from fitness bands to watches and other products,” noted Ramon Llamas, research manager for IDC’s Wearables team. “This allowed Xiaomi to throttle up on its inexpensive devices within the China market and for Apple to leverage its position as the leading smartwatch provider worldwide. Now that Xiaomi and Apple have supplanted Fitbit, the next question is whether they will be able to maintain their position.

“However, by no means should Fitbit be removed from the wearables conversation,” continued Llamas. “With a user base of 50 million, a strong presence within corporate wellness, and assets that keep it top of mind for digital health, Fitbit is well positioned to move into new segments and markets.”

«

Puts Apple and Xiaomi level at 3.6m, though Xiaomi’s are bargain-basement bracelet-style trackers, a form factor which I think has already peaked.

The top five players (Xiaomi, Apple, Fitbit, Samsung, Garmin) have just over half the market, and none is Android Wear. I suspect the latter is barely growing its user base now.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Guess how long it will take identity thieves to try to use your data online? Photo by mag3737 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 9 links for you. Yeah, we’re carrying on as usual. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The great reckoning in digital attention • ThinkGrowth.org

Andrew Motalenti:

»

The attention economy is broken… [and] consumers — you and me — are the ones footing the bill. We see increasingly slow page load times for publisher pages which are bloated with ad tech vendor code; increasingly invasive ads from brands who are desperate to catch a click; and, a media trend toward outrage, rather than thoughtful debate.

On this last point: it is outrage, not truth, that prevails in an Internet economy built around attention capture and auction, which is how our programmatic digital advertising ecosystem works.

This is because outrage — through a quirk of societal and brain evolution — is more effective at capturing our time. Indeed, as we’ve been learning, outrage decoupled from truth is one of the most engaging forms of content on the web.

“Fake news” isn’t a Russian conspiracy to undermine our democracy; it is, instead, the end-state of an unhealthy race-to-the-bottom for consumer attention.

And yes, we’ve hit the bottom.

Just think through where we are now: Google perpetually records your voice, your search queries, your location, and your browser history. Facebook has enough data on you, your friends, and your personality to persuade you emotionally and politically.

Meanwhile, the rest of the web is frantically trying to catch up. That is, thousands of companies and hundreds of thousands of sites are trying to catch up to a state of complete and total digital surveillance. Even though this milestone has already been achieved — on multi-billion-user scale — by the top two players.

The first step to a solution is to admit this much: we have a problem. I think we can all agree we need to send digital advertising to rehab.

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link to this extract

How the Tories are paying to push anti-Corbyn ads into your Facebook feed • Buzzfeed

Jim Waterson:

»

The Conservatives are using Facebook to bombard key target seats with paid-for adverts attacking Jeremy Corbyn, according to data obtained by BuzzFeed News that reveals for the first time the full extent of the party’s under-the-radar online campaign blitz.

Dozens of different variations of Tory ads, some of which have already been viewed by millions of people, have been spotted online. The vast majority feature starkly negative messages and focus on Corbyn’s leadership style, his supposed inability to lead Brexit negotiations, and claims that he is a security risk who would put up taxes.

Voters in crucial constituencies such as Wirral West, Bath, and Twickenham have been targeted by the anti-Corbyn adverts, which enable national spending to be diverted to support what are essentially local campaigns without breaking electoral spending laws.

Seats the Conservatives hope to gain – including Walsall North, Hampstead and Kilburn, and Brentford and Isleworth – have been targeted by videos warning the UK faces a Brexit disaster if Corbyn is allowed to carry out negotiations.

Meanwhile, voters in York Central, Normanton, and Ynys Mons – all traditional Labour-leaning areas – have been shown adverts in their Facebook feeds emphasising Theresa May’s leadership qualities.

Paid-for online advertising is remarkably difficult to track and it is difficult for journalists to monitor the reach of these adverts. Data provided to BuzzFeed News by users of the Who Targets Me service allows us for the first time to see a sample of who is being targeted by the Conservative campaign.

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link to this extract

How fast will identity thieves use stolen info? • FTC

Ari Lazarus:

»

If you’ve been affected by a data breach, or otherwise had your information hacked or stolen, you’ve probably asked yourself, “What happens when my stolen information is made public?” At the FTC’s Identity Theft workshop this morning, our Office of Technology staff reported on research they did to find out.

First, they created a database of information about 100 fake consumers. To make the information realistic, they used popular names based on Census data, addresses from across the country, email addresses that used common email address naming conventions, phone numbers that corresponded to the addresses, and one of three types of payment information (an online payment service, a bitcoin wallet or a credit card).

They then posted the data on two different occasions on a website that hackers and others use to make stolen credentials public. The criminals were quick to pounce. After the second posting, it took only nine minutes before crooks tried to access the information.

«

The research slides really repay some reading: attempted credit card purchases running to thousands of dollars.
link to this extract

Alex Honnold climbs Yosemite’s El Capitan without a rope • National Geographic

Mark Synnott:

»

It’s hard to overstate the physical and mental difficulties of a free solo ascent of the peak, which is considered by many to be the epicenter of the rock climbing world. It is a vertical expanse stretching more than a half mile up—higher than the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. From the meadow at the foot of El Capitan, climbers on the peak’s upper reaches are practically invisible to the naked eye.

“This is the ‘moon landing’ of free soloing,” said Tommy Caldwell, who made his own history in 2015 with his ascent of the Dawn Wall, El Capitan’s most difficult climb, on which he and his partner Kevin Jorgeson used ropes and other equipment only for safety, not to aid their progress.

(What Caldwell and Jorgeson did is called free climbing, which means climbers use no gear to help them move up the mountain and are attached to ropes only to catch them if they fall. Free soloing is when a climber is alone and uses no ropes or any other equipment that aids or protects him as he climbs, leaving no margin of error.)

Climbers have been speculating for years about a possible free solo of El Capitan, but there have only been two other people who have publicly said they seriously considered it. One was Michael Reardon, a free soloist who drowned in 2007 after being swept from a ledge below a sea cliff in Ireland. The other was Dean Potter, who died in a base jumping accident in Yosemite in 2015.

«

I used to like soloing. Then I took a 30-foot fall onto solid ground. I recovered, but my enjoyment of soloing didn’t. I’m glad Honnold survived. There are some pictures if you want a vicarious moment of terror.
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Spigen accuses Andy Rubin’s company Essential Products of trademark infringement • Android Police

Scott Scrivens:

»

Andy Rubin has only just announced his much-anticipated new smartphone, but his company may already be in legal hot water over the infringement of intellectual property. It’s been brought to our attention that Spigen, the US case and accessory maker, already has a trademark for the term “Essential” and has written to Rubin’s organization to contest its use. The letter firmly compels Rubin’s fledgling company to “cease and desist from any and all uses of marks including the term “Essential”.”

Spigen, Inc. successfully registered the trademark (Reg. No. 5014095) as early as August 2016. It’s an International Class. 9 mark, the category which relates to computers and scientific devices, including smartphones and accessories. The trademark itself is incredibly broad, and Spigen seemingly only uses the designation for a range of battery packs and chargers, as well as some bluetooth headphones. Despite the vagueness, Essential’s use of the name still presents potential confusion for consumers, which is exactly what Spigen is alleging.

[Rubin’s] Essential had its own registration for the “Essential” term refused on the basis of likely confusion with Spigen’s trademark.

«

Seems like Rubin is trying to emulate Steve Jobs (who launched the iPhone when Cisco already owned the name) in another way. He might (almost surely will) be able to buy the trademark, but it’s an expense that could have been foregone.
link to this extract

‘Blame the internet’ is just not a good enough response, Theresa May • The Guardian

I wrote about Theresa May’s response to the London Bridge attack:

»

“The kneejerk ‘blame the internet’ that comes after every act of terrorism is so blatant as to be embarrassing,” commented Paul Bernal, a law lecturer at the University of East Anglia who has worked with the police. The pressure, he says, comes from the politicians. For an example look no further than John Mann, MP for Bassetlaw since 2001, who this morning said: “I repeat, yet again, my call for the internet companies who terrorists have again used to communicate to be held legally liable for content.”

Perhaps he has forgotten the 1970s, when in the pre-mobile phone era the IRA would use phones to organise its attacks – without anyone calling for (nor were there online social networks to “radicalise” would-be IRA members, but still they joined). The authoritarian sweep of Mann’s idea is chilling: since legal liability is meant to deter, the companies would need people to monitor every word you wrote, every video you watched, and compare it against some manual of dissent. It’s like a playbook for the dystopia of Gilead, in The Handmaid’s Tale (which, weirdly enough, most resembles Islamic State’s framework for living).

The problem is this: things can be done, but they open a Pandora’s box.

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link to this extract

‘Sensitive’ UK terror funding inquiry may never be published • The Guardian

Jessica Elgot:

»

An investigation into the foreign funding and support of jihadi groups that was authorised by David Cameron may never be published, the Home Office has admitted.

The inquiry into revenue streams for extremist groups operating in the UK was commissioned by the former prime minister and is thought to focus on Saudi Arabia, which has repeatedly been highlighted by European leaders as a funding source for Islamist jihadis.

The investigation was launched as part of a deal with the Liberal Democrats in exchange for the party supporting the extension of British airstrikes against Islamic State into Syria in December 2015.

Tom Brake, the Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman, has written to the prime minister asking her to confirm that the investigation will not be shelved.

The Observer reported in January last year that the Home Office’s extremism analysis unit had been directed by Downing Street to investigate overseas funding of extremist groups in the UK, with findings to be shown to Theresa May, then home secretary, and Cameron.

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link to this extract

2011: Anatomy of a crushing • Pinboard blog

Maciej Ceglowski in March 2011 recalls what happened the previous time Delicious got closed – or as good as closed:

»

A number of people asked about the technical aspects of the great Delicious exodus of 2010, and I’ve finally had some time to write it up. Note that times on all the graphs are UTC.

On December 16th Yahoo held an all-hands meeting to rally the troops after a big round of layoffs. Around 11 AM someone at this meeting showed a slide with a couple of Yahoo properties grouped into three categories, one of which was ominously called “sunset”. The most prominent logo in the group belonged to Delicious, our main competitor. Milliseconds later, the slide was on the web, and there was an ominous thundering sound as every Delicious user in North America raced for the exit. [*]

I got the message just as I was starting work for the day. My Twitter client, normally a place where I might see ten or twenty daily mentions of Pinboard, had turned into a nonstop blur of updates. My inbox was making a kind of sustained pealing sound I had never heard before. It was going to be an interesting afternoon.

Before this moment, our relationship to Delicious had been that of a tick to an elephant. We were a niche site and in the course of eighteen months had siphoned off about six thousand users from our massive competitor, a pace I was was very happy with and hoped to sustain through 2011. But now the Senior Vice President for Bad Decisions at Yahoo had decided to give us a little help.

I’ve previously posted this graph of Pinboard web traffic on the days immediately before and after the Delicious announcement. That small blue bar at bottom shows normal traffic levels from the week before. The two teal mountain peaks correspond to midday traffic on December 16 and 17th.

«

There’s lot of great detail for anyone who designs web databases for a living, or even amusement. And I think that Yahoo at that time had multiple Senior Vice Presidents for Bad Decisions.
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Eric Schmidt publicly defends Jared Kushner. Next day, Trump shutting DoL division investigating Google • Pando

Sarah Lacy:

»

What, you might wonder (and Google staff certainly did) would Schmidt or any Silicon Valley leader stand to gain from being one of the only on the record sources defending Kushner [in a New York Times article] just as the Russia scandal was engulfing the President’s son in law?

That’s a good question.

Because the very next day this stunning news broke:

»

The Trump administration is planning to disband the Labor Department division that has policed discrimination among federal contractors for four decades, according to the White House’s newly proposed budget, part of wider efforts to rein in government programs that promote civil rights.

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That’s right: As luck would have it, three days after the Department of Labor reminded Google that compliance with its anti-discrimination investigation was the price of being a government contractor, and just hours after Eric Schmidt issues his bizarre public defense of Jared Kushner, news broke that the Trump administration was planning to disband the organization doing the investigation…

…It is not a coincidence that many of the most powerful women in tech – Marissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg, Wojcicki – all built their careers and names at Google.

And yet, many of these same women have told me that Google wasn’t this way because of the founders or the male senior leadership. It was this way because it employed senior women early on, who advocated for other women. Google does this better than many companies, but there are still scores of stories of harassment, stealing credit from female employees, unwanted advances and discrimination.

«

I’m willing to think that Schmidt was just buttering up the utterly useless Kushner because buttering up people in powerful offices is what Schmidt does. But I also think that he might have previously let slip to Kushner – or people who actually do have some clout – that this Department of Labor investigation was such an obstacle to getting things done, and, well, he’d love for Google to be helping out with building the wall/opening coal plants/whatever, but… *turns up hands*.

And the White House, meanwhile, has blocked the release of who visits and how often, so you don’t know if Schmidt has been lobbying hard for this.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Google plans to make adblocking a default in Chrome next year. Photo by Mr Exploding 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 10 links for you. Hey, is it getting warmer in here? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Notes from an emergency • Idlewords

Maciej Ceglowski, in a transcript of a speech given in Berlin on May 10:

»

Facebook is the dominant social network in Europe, with 349 million monthly active users. Google has something like 94% of market share for search in Germany. The servers of Europe are littered with the bodies of dead and dying social media sites. The few holdouts that still exist, like Xing, are being crushed by their American rivals.

In their online life, Europeans have become completely dependent on companies headquartered in the United States.

And so Trump is in charge in America, and America has all your data. This leaves you in a very exposed position. US residents enjoy some measure of legal protection against the American government. Even if you think our intelligence agencies are evil, they’re a lawful evil. They have to follow laws and procedures, and the people in those agencies take them seriously.

But there are no such protections for non-Americans outside the United States. The NSA would have to go to court to spy on me; they can spy on you anytime they feel like it.

This is an astonishing state of affairs. I can’t imagine a world where Europe would let itself become reliant on American cheese, or where Germans could only drink Coors Light.

In the past, Europe has shown that it’s capable of identifying a vital interest and moving to protect it. When American aerospace companies were on the point of driving foreign rivals out of business, European governments formed the Airbus consortium, which now successfully competes with Boeing.

A giant part of the EU budget goes to subsidize farming, not because farming is the best use of resources in a first-world economy, but because farms are important to national security, to the landscape, to national identity, social stability, and a shared sense of who we are.

But when it comes to the Internet, Europe doesn’t put up a fight. It has ceded the ground entirely to American corporations. And now those corporations have to deal with Trump. How hard do you think they’ll work to defend European interests?

«

As ever with his talks, you should read it all. He says things you hadn’t realised, crystallises them until you can almost hold them in your hand. (And he has also bought Delicious – the bookmarking site which was bought for millions by Yahoo, dumped, given millions in VC funds, and left to go dark – for just $35,000. Hilarious triumph over the foolishness of big money.)
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Here’s how to track the smartphone apps that are tracking you • Fast Company

Glenn Fleishman:

»

The ReCon project publishes some data derived from a few hundred early users, listing apps, the kind of data they passed, a severity score, whether a developer was notified, and when misbehavior was fixed (if indeed it was).

For those who have installed the app, ReCon has a web-based console that allows users to block or modify information that’s sent. For instance, a user can block all examples of a given kind of PII, or block all location data sent from a given app. However, because some apps fail without location coordinates, the team is looking into coarsening GPS information instead of blocking it entirely. An app’s backend still gets relevant information, “but other parties aren’t able to pin down where you are to a few meters,” Choffnes notes.

Of course, examining a flow of data from users itself raises massive privacy red flags, which is part of the evolution of ReCon. Its creators don’t ask for passwords, try to avoid storing the values sent, and check only to see whether, say, a password is obviously being passed without encryption. The group ultimately wants to perform distributed machine learning without users disclosing private or secret information, such as domains they’re visiting.

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Identity manager OneLogin has suffered a nasty looking data breach • Motherboard

Joseph Cox: On Wednesday,

»

OneLogin—a company that allows users to manage logins to multiple sites and apps all at once—announced it had suffered some form of breach. Although it’s not clear exactly what data has been taken, OneLogin says that all customers served by the company’s US data centre are impacted, and has quietly issued a set of serious steps for affected customers to take.

“Today we detected unauthorized access to OneLogin data in our US region,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Notably, the public blog post omitted certain details that OneLogin mentioned to customers in an email; namely that hackers have stolen customer information.

“Customer data was compromised, including the ability to decrypt encrypted data,” according to a message OneLogin sent to customers. Multiple OneLogin customers provided Motherboard with a copy of the message.

The message also directed customers to a list of required steps to minimize any damage from the breach, which in turn gave an indication of just how serious this episode might be.

According to copies of those steps, users are being told to generate new API keys and OAuth tokens (OAuth being a system for logging into accounts); create new security certificates as well as credentials; recycle any secrets stored in OneLogin’s Secure Notes feature; have end-users update their passwords, and more.

“Dealing with aftermath,” one customer told Motherboard. “This is a massive leak.”

«

Go to OneLogin’s main page and see how long it takes you to find the announcement. Note also Cieglowski’s talk about castles of data, and the temptation they breed.
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Google will help publishers prepare for a Chrome ad blocker coming next year • WSJ

Jack Marshall:

»

Google has told publishers it will give them at least six months to prepare for a new ad-blocking tool the company is planning to introduce in its Chrome web browser next year, according to people familiar with the company’s plans.

The new setting, which is expected to be switched on by default within the desktop and mobile versions of Chrome, will prevent all ads from appearing on websites that are deemed to provide a bad advertising experience for users.

To help publishers prepare, Google will provide a self-service tool called “Ad Experience Reports,” which will alert them to offending ads on their sites and explain how to fix the issues. The tool will be provided before the Chrome ad blocker goes live, the people familiar with the plans say…

…Unacceptable ad types include those identified by the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group made up of various trade bodies and online advertising-related companies that says it aims to improve consumers’ experience with online advertising.

The group’s initial list of unacceptable ad types, released in March, included pop-ups, auto-playing video ads with sound and “prestitial” ads that count down before displaying content. Google is a member of the group, alongside fellow ad giant Facebook , and Wall Street Journal parent News Corp .

«

This is antitrust territory. Dominant search engine; dominant browser; a dominant advertising supplier. What’s the harm to the consumer? The lack of choice in what they see, and the inability to decide what ads they do and don’t see. I hope Margrethe Vestager is on this preemptively; I’m sure publishers in Europe will be at her door.
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Postscript: Frank Deford • The New Yorker

Nicholas Dawidoff on the sports writer who died last weekend aged 78:

»

Deford’s most celebrated pieces were all “bonuses,” the bonus being the coveted slot at the back of the Sports Illustrated reserved for the week’s long feature. Soon after I met him, Deford explained his theory of how to structure the bonus—a variation of Chekhov’s rifle. The Russian famously ordained that if in the first chapter (or act) a rifle is on the wall, before the end it must be brought down and fired. The man from Baltimore said that in a bonus, you began by telling the reader something that made him interested. Then, once the reader was completely engaged, you moved on to other matters, to the point where the reader forgot the first thing. Then, toward the end, you brought it up again. The act of forming, breaking, and reforming the chemical bond, he said, deepened the reading experience. I was in my early twenties at the time, and the notion that the magazine’s revered figure was sharing his sweetest science with me made me almost overwhelmed with gratitude. You could be good and also, well, good.

Several years later, we drove together in his car from New York City to his family’s home in Connecticut. Deford was as excited as I ever saw him, owing to something new. We would not need to stop, wait in a long line, and pay a toll at a booth along the highway, he said, because of a recent traffic innovation. There was now an electronic pass keyed to a collection sensor that enabled a driver to pay the toll by simply driving through the booth. It was hardly necessary even to slow down. I didn’t believe it? Just wait! Soon, he had me beyond excited in anticipation of such impossible, magical, laser-age technology.

«

Dawidoff, en route to a neat payoff. Deford inspired me: I used to type out his pieces and analyse them to try to understand why they worked so well. It turned out to be a combination of great reporting and clever construction. If you remember tennis’s 1985 US Open, this is a pretty good description of it. And it’s pretty good even if you don’t.
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How to fight the bloatware of AI • Medium

Peter Sweeney is an entrepreneur and inventor of AI technologies, and he takes issue with the idea that we need a human-like AI. What we need, he argues, is one which narrowly does the rational part we’ve only recently learned to do:

»

it’s only within the past few centuries, beginning with the scientific revolution, that humans began making consistent, predictable progress through the creation of good knowledge. Earlier humans produced a wealth of bad knowledge, most of it long forgotten.

This isn’t to say humans were incapable of producing good knowledge. The point is that good knowledge creation was exceedingly rare. We wouldn’t model flight using a bird that failed to fly at such a spectacular rate. As a model for machine intelligence, shouldn’t humans be subject to the same standard of criticism?

We can further hone our expectations for good knowledge to scientific disciplines. According to Gary Marcus, “What society most needs is automated scientific discovery.” Demis Hassabis [founder and CEO of Google’s DeepMind] holds similar ambitions. “I’ve always hoped that A.I. could help us discover completely new ideas in complex scientific domains.”

We expect machines to embody superhuman intelligence. Only scientific progress embodies the sort of revolutionary knowledge creation that we imagine for our machines. It’s knowledge that arrives in conjectural leaps, defies our past experiences, and redefines what’s possible.
This process of knowledge creation is a human invention, not a natural phenomenon. Yet on closer inspection, our knowledge of how scientific knowledge is created is younger still! It was only in the 20th century, with Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, that there emerged a strong consensus of how scientific knowledge is created.

Naturally irrational humans are deeply flawed knowledge creation machines. We’ve only recently acquired the skills we need from machines and our knowledge of how we do it has not been broadly disseminated. Nature doesn’t provide a model of what we want from intelligent machines, namely revolutionary scientific knowledge, nor is the process that humans use to create this knowledge a naturally occurring phenomenon.

«

Or as Lewis Wolpert used to put it, “science isn’t common sense. It’s usually the direct opposite.” (Think of Earth revolving around the sun, or the reason for gravity. Common sense doesn’t predict them.)
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How to lose $8k worth of bitcoin in 15 minutes with Verizon and Coinbase.com • Medium

Cody Brown had his phone account, and then his email, and then his bitcoin wallets hacked:

»

Before we begin, its worth mentioning that yes, yesssssssssssssssssssss, I did not have enough protection around my Gmail account. I’ve used Google Authenticator before, for my personal account and for various work emails, but I stopped using it at a certain point out of convenience. I deeply regret doing so and you can certainly say, “HA, YOU HAD THIS COMING TO YOU DUDE, MY BITCOIN IS ON AN ENCRYPTED THUMBDRIVE IN A SECRET UNDERGROUND LOCKBOX COLD STORAGE FACILITY.” But there are many coin spectators out there with a similar vulnerability and, as more novices join, this vulnerability will only become more of a problem.

Of all the things that went down in the factors that lead to this hack, Verizon Wireless is what I was massively unprepared for. After talking at length with customer service reps, I learned that the hacker did not need to give them my pin number or my social security number and was able to get approval to takeover my cell phone number with simple billing information. This blew my mind and seemed negligent beyond all possible reason but it’s what they do. The main thing that struck me by the hack was the extraction speed possible in the current cryptocurrency ecosystem. $8,000 in 15 minutes is faster and more lucrative than robbing a suburban bank.

«

The key failing (besides his lack of two-factor non-SMS authentication on his Gmail account) was Verizon letting someone in effect take over his SIM. He had SMS authentication on his account. Guess what happened when the hackers tried to log in to his account? They could reset the password and get an SMS sent to “his” number. Cue disaster.

Coinbase (which has become a target for such hacks) is not above a lot of criticism either.
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The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure • Bloomberg

Noah Smith:

»

There is reason to suspect that high US costs are part of a deeper problem. For example, construction seems to take a lot longer in the US than in other countries. In China, a 30-story building can be completed in only 15 days. In Japan, giant sinkholes get fully repaired in one week. Even in the US of a century ago, construction was pretty fast – the Empire State Building went up in 410 days.

Yet today, it takes the US many years to spend the money that Congress allocates for infrastructure. New buildings seem to linger half-built for months or years, with construction workers often nowhere to be found. Subways can take decades. Even in the private sector, there are problems – productivity in the homebuilding sector has fallen in recent decades.

That suggests that US costs are high due to general inefficiency – inefficient project management, an inefficient government contracting process, and inefficient regulation. It suggests that construction, like health care or asset management or education, is an area where Americans have simply ponied up more and more cash over the years while ignoring the fact that they were getting less and less for their money. To fix the problems choking US construction, reformers are going to have to go through the system and rip out the inefficiencies root and branch.

Unfortunately, this is going to be hard, given all the vested interests and institutional inertia blocking deep reform of the construction sector. As [Matt] Yglesias ruefully notes, a study by the Government Accountability Office looking into the problem of high train-construction costs was recently killed by Congress, with no explanation given.

«

Before you kneejerk, the article goes through possible culprits (salaries; unions; land acquisition costs; geography) and finds none explains it. A side-by-side comparison of two projects, one in the US and one elsewhere, would be educative. But it seems the GAO has been told not to look into this either.
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Keeping your company data safe with new security updates to Gmail • Google Blog

Andy Wen is senior product manager for Counter abuse technology:

»

Machine learning helps Gmail block sneaky spam and phishing messages from showing up in your inbox with over 99.9% accuracy. This is huge, given that 50-70% of messages that Gmail receives are spam. We’re continuing to improve spam detection accuracy with early phishing detection, a dedicated machine learning model that selectively delays messages (less than 0.05% of messages on average) to perform rigorous phishing analysis and further protect user data from compromise.

Our detection models integrate with Google Safe Browsing machine learning technologies for finding and flagging phishy and suspicious URLs. These new models combine a variety of techniques such as reputation and similarity analysis on URLs, allowing us to generate new URL click-time warnings for phishing and malware links. As we find new patterns, our models adapt more quickly than manual systems ever could, and get better with time.

«

I see very, very few phishing emails on my Gmail account. I see a fairly constant amount of spam on it, though, despite marking the stuff (always claiming to be from department stores, and not being addressed to my ur-address) as junk consistently.

That spam hasn’t become a bigger, or even overwhelming slice of email is a success for all the organisations such as Spamhaus fighting it.
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About Newcastle libraries’ data • Newcastle City Council

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In Newcastle Libraries we are endeavouring to open up as much of our data as possible. As library workers sharing and facilitating access to knowledge and information is part of our role; here we apply this principle to the information we collect about your library service. We believe that we are only the custodians of this information, and by publishing it in the public domain (under Creative Commons Licence 0) we are simply giving it back to you.

«

Newcastle Libraries has better open data policies than the US White House. Let that sink in.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Twitter doesn’t have a business incentive to get rid of bots – and that’s a problem for the rest of us. Photo by Rog01 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 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Apple is manufacturing a Siri speaker to outdo Google and Amazon • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman and Alex Webb:

»

Apple is already in your pocket, on your desk and underneath your television. Soon, a device embossed with “Designed by Apple in California” may be on your nightstand or kitchen counter as well.

The iPhone-maker has started manufacturing a long-in-the-works Siri-controlled smart speaker, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple could debut the speaker as soon as its annual developer conference in June, but the device will not be ready to ship until later in the year, the people said. 

The device will differ from Amazon.com’s Echo and Alphabet’s Google Home speakers by offering virtual surround sound technology and deep integration with Apple’s product lineup, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss products that aren’t yet public.

Introducing a speaker would serve two main purposes: providing a hub to automate appliances and lights via Apple’s HomeKit system, and establishing a bulwark inside the home to lock customers more tightly into Apple’s network of services. That would help combat the competitive threat from Google’s and Amazon’s connected speakers: the Home and Echo mostly don’t support services from Apple. Without compatible hardware, users may be more likely to opt for the Echo or Home, and therefore use streaming music offerings such as Spotify, Amazon Prime Music or Google Play rather than Apple Music.

«

“Started manufacturing” would suggest an autumn release. Still waiting for the really persuasive reason to use these things. (Might be the sort of thing that would work for people who don’t have an Apple Watch, I guess.)
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Windows 10 on Snapdragon 835: a promising demo • Mobile Geeks

Myriam Joire:

»

Today at Computex 2017, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 835 Mobile PC Platform to help with Microsoft’s effort to bring Windows 10 to ARM-based devices. In addition, ASUS, HP, and Lenovo have committed to launching Snapdragon 835-based Windows 10 products in the next few months. These will be sleek, fanless, and always connected 2-in-1 mobile PCs with all day battery life aimed squarely at the productivity market.

In case you forgot, Microsoft recently announced that Windows 10 now features an emulation layer that lets users seamlessly run x86 apps on ARM devices. With the Snapdragon 835, Qualcomm already offers a powerful, efficient, tiny (10nm process), and always connected (Gigabit LTE) platform for standalone VR/MR headsets and flagship smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Essential Phone, so it’s a no-brainer to extend support to mobile PCs running Windows 10.

In other words, Snapdragon 835 is eating the world.

«

Interesting little challenge for Apple here. Second time around for Microsoft, but seems to be getting the pieces right this time – and ARM, as an architecture, has come a long way.
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All thumbs: why reach navigation should replace the navbar in iOS design • Medium

Brad Ellis:

»

Oh my gosh, so many great reasons to use a navbar in your project. Except, damn! It’s hard to get your thumb up there now.

That being the case, let’s talk some Navbar cons:

• It’s harder to go back. You can swipe from the edge, as long as the view you’re on doesn’t have anything that scrolls horizontally, but if it does then you’re in stretch-town.
• Naming all the views is a pain. Not all screens need a persistent title, and some require labels too long to fit. Leaving a blank navigation area wastes screen space and looks barren.
• Navigating requires two hands. If you can hold a device in one hand, you should be able to operate the device with one hand. It feels better, and it’s more convenient in a world full of shopping carts to push, and babies to carry.
• Simple apps become more complex than necessary. Navbars tend to lead to information architecture that runs deep. It’s easy to develop for horizontal progressive disclosure, which means it can be a battle to expand inline or use a sheet.

All right. Now we know how navbars can be crap. So what are we doing?

«

Design is evolving quite rapidly, though it feels like this should have been obvious a couple of years ago.
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The autonomous vehicle ‘trolley problem’ will be solved by lawyers, not ethicists • WIRED

Aarian Marshall:

»

In a paper published in Northwestern University Law Review, Stanford University researcher Bryan Casey deems the trolley problem irrelevant. He argues that it’s already been solved—not by ethicists or engineers, but by the law. The companies building these cars will “less concerned with esoteric questions of right and wrong than with concrete questions of predictive legal liability,” he writes. Meaning, lawyers and lawmakers will sort things out.

“The trolley problem presents already solved issues—and we solve them democratically through a combination of legal liability and consumer psychology,” says Casey. “Profit maximizing firms look to those incentivizing mechanisms to choose the best behavior in all kinds of contexts.” In other words: Engineers will take their cues not from ethicists, but from the limits of the technology, tort law, and consumers’ tolerance for risk.

Casey cites Tesla as an example. Drivers of those Muskian brainchildren can switch on Autopilot and let the car drive itself down the highway. Tesla engineers could have programmed the cars to go slowly, upping safety. Or they could have programmed them to go fast, the better to get you where you need to be. Instead, they programmed the cars to follow the speed limit, minimizing Tesla’s risk of liability show something go awry.

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Twitter has a serious problem—and it’s actually a bigger deal than people realise • Mother Jones

AJ Vicens:

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Bots make it easy to spread a given message, but that also creates a problem: Twitter followers often don’t know they’re retweeting or forwarding deliberately false information from unknown sources, which can then potentially further polarize the populace and overstate a message or a candidate’s actual support. In his opening statement to the committee, Clint Watts, a former FBI special agent, explained the influence campaign was part of a yearslong Russian effort to undermine US institutions. “Tailored news feeds from social media platforms have created information bubbles where voters see only stories and opinions suiting their preferences and biases,” he said, “ripe conditions for Russian disinformation campaigns.”

Whatever the source of the bots, it seems unlikely that the state-sponsored disinformation variety will be stopped anytime soon. Twitter didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. But Nu Wexler, a former public policy spokesperson for Twitter, tells Mother Jones that as long as users aren’t violating Twitter’s content rules, they’re not going to be censored.

“Twitter’s agnostic when it comes to political content and nationality,” Wexler said. “Accounts in compliance with the Twitter Rules are allowed to stay up, whether they’re in France, Mexico, or Russia. Suspending pro-Trump bots and allowing anti-Trump bots would just invite charges of political bias.”

«

Perverse incentive in the business model: showing adverts to bots generates money just like showing them to humans. Therefore no business reason to remove bots.
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Lexmark patent racket busted by Supremes • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

Patent law grants patent holders a limited monopoly on their goods for the duration of the patent. But when the goods are sold, patent rights are said to be exhausted, which allows third parties to resell the items without obtaining a license from the patent holder.

Lexmark wanted to prevent competitors from buying used ink cartridges, refurbishing them, and selling them to its printer customers – presumably because it would make more money by controlling that market.

So the company imposed contractual terms to limit resale of ink cartridges obtained through its cartridge Return Program in the US. What’s more, it tried to prevent ink cartridges obtained abroad from being resold in the US through claimed patent rights.

In 2010, the printer maker began filing a series of lawsuits in Ohio to enforce its claims against ink cartridge recyclers who acquired cartridges outside the US. Most of the defendants in those cases chose to settle, agreeing not to obtain Lexmark cartridges abroad.

In 2013, Lexmark sued Impression Products, based in Charleston, West Virginia, for violating its patent rights by reselling contractually controlled Return Program cartridges and by reselling ink cartridges bought abroad.

In 2016, the Federal Circuit Court agreed with Lexmark’s position.

The Supreme Court, however, has overturned that decision. It ruled that while Lexmark may have an enforceable claim under contract law for Return Program ink cartridges acquired in the US and resold there, the company may not make a patent claim.

«

I thought that this might have some reading on Apple’s patent row with Qualcomm, but people on Twitter are telling me no. Even so, this is momentous.
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The addicts next door • The New Yorker

Margaret Talbot with a hugely detailed look at the place in the US with the highest ratio of opioid deaths:

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Recently, Martinsburg has begun to treat the heroin crisis more openly as a public-health problem. The police chief, a Chicago transplant named Maurice Richards, had devised a progressive-sounding plan called the Martinsburg Initiative, which would direct support services toward children who appeared to be at risk for addiction, because their families were struggling socially or emotionally. In December, Tina Stride and several other local citizens stood up at a zoning meeting to proclaim the need for a detox center. They countered several residents who testified that such a center would bring more addicts, and more heroin, to their neighborhoods. “I’m here to say that’s already here,” a woman in favor of the proposal said. “It’s in your neighbor’s house, in the bathroom at Wendy’s, in our schools.” She added, “We’re talking about making America great again? Well, it starts here.”

That night, the Board of Zoning Appeals voted to allow a detox center, run by Peter Callahan, the psychotherapist, to occupy an unused commercial building in town. People in the hearing room cheered and cried and hugged one another. The facility will have only sixteen beds and won’t be ready for patients until December, but the Hope Dealer women were thrilled about it. Now they wouldn’t have to drive halfway across the state every time an addict called them up.

John Aldis, who was sitting next to me during the vote, breathed a sigh of relief. He said later, “It’s like that Winston Churchill quote: ‘This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’ ”

«

One notable quote is about making Narcan (which can bring people out of an opioid coma) free: there’s some opposition from people who blame addicts for their problems.
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Apple registers new Macs and iPads in Eurasia ahead of WWDC on June 5 • Macrumors

Tim Hardwick:

»

Just five days ahead of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, where it is widely expected to announce new Macs, French website Consomac has discovered a new Russian-language regulatory filing, in the Eurasian Economic Commission database, that points towards at least five new models running macOS Sierra launching soon.

The five new Macs, identified only with the model numbers A1289, A1347, A1418, A1419, and A1481, are likely to be new 13in and 15in MacBook Pros alongside a new 12in MacBook, with the outside chance of a new upgraded MacBook Air also in the frame. At the same time, it’s worth noting that these numbers differ from the AXX prefixes attributed to current MacBook models, so nothing is completely certain until Apple makes its announcements.

As well as spare parts for the Macs, the discovered numbers also include a possible new wireless keyboard (model A1843) and four numbers classified under iOS 10 (A1671, A1709, A1670, and A1701), pointing to the possible launch of a rumored new iPad Pro model.

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All good to hear; wireless keyboard even more interesting. Would it have TouchID (as on the MacBook Pros) and how would that be implemented?
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Crispr causes many unwanted mutations, small study suggests • New Scientist

NAME:

»

Most studies have found few if any unwanted mutations with [the amazing new gene editing technique] CRISPR. However, almost all of these studies looked for off-target changes by predicting what these were likely to be, and then seeing if they could find them.

Stephen Tsang of Columbia University Medical Center and his team have now used a more extensive method, sequencing the whole genomes of two CRISPR-edited mice, and comparing these with a non-edited control. In this way, they identified more than a thousand common mutations in the two edited mice that they think were caused by CRISPR.

This is a very small study, and we don’t know yet if other teams will get similar findings when they use the same technique.

Even if the results are replicated, the issue could turn out to be with the specific way that CRISPR was used in this instance. But if further experiments suggest there is a problem with CRISPR in general, this should still be solvable. Other teams have already modified the CRISPR/Cas9 system to reduce the risk of off-target changes, and there are many potential alternative proteins to try using with CRISPR which might turn out to have fewer unwanted effects.

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But it’s not quite what we wanted to hear, even so.
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American retail’s fast, furious decline • National Review

Kevin D. Williamson:

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The migration of retail out of shops and onto the Internet has been significant — last year saw online retail pass a symbolically important milestone, accounting for 51% of all purchases — but it wasn’t radical or unexpected. In fact, the retail building boom really kicked off at the same time as the rise of online commerce: in the middle to late 1990s. Which is to say, the retail-space bubble inflated in parallel with two other important bubbles: the dot-com bubble and the much more significant housing bubble.

When housing prices were skyrocketing around the turn of the century, Americans did not use all that new wealth to pay down household debt or start high-tech enterprises in their garages or anything like that: They monetized that equity and bought gigantic televisions. They bought new furniture and clothes and shoes, and the consumer-goods market began to look like another one of those can’t-miss propositions that come along and cause trouble every few years. Retailers and developers responded by building new shops and strip malls, taking advantage of millennial-era cheap money to leverage the hell out of themselves in the quest for growth and volume. They loaded themselves up with debt that is perfectly bearable when profit margins are 11% but deadly when they’re 7%.

In addition to cheap money, they also took advantage of a lot of free money: Note that even as it struggles with a zombie mall and high vacancy rates in nearby retail centers, Midwest City is using tax dollars to subsidize the development of yet more retail space on the other side of town, the world of Panera and Starbucks. More retail space means more sales-tax revenue, and if you take a short-term and relatively narrow view — the typical political view — then spending a few million dollars to make sure that whatever new conglomeration of Pei Wei, HomeGoods, and Lane Bryant is getting built gets built in your taxing jurisdiction rather than the one next door looks like a pretty good investment. Which it is.

Until it isn’t.

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Again, the collapse of US retail is going to be one of the stories that will come upon people gradually, and then suddenly, and the economic effects have a wide blast radius. People lose jobs. Cities lose tax revenue from people and retailers. You don’t have to pull on that thread for long to see bad effects.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified