Fast-forward ten years, and what will be in the phone Apple unveils? We already have clues. Photo by portalgda 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. The last of the month! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Six things to know about Steve Ballmer, youth basketball coach • The Ringer

Zach Schwartz used to be on the year 3 (8-9 year-olds) basketball team in Bellevue, Washington state:

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Steve went beyond helping us develop the basic fundamentals. He worked on our shooting form and was the first coach who had us running sprints after practice to ensure that we would be ready to finish strong in the fourth quarter. Steve took coaching seriously and even brought in an NBA shooting coach to help us with our form. Steve loved the team, and we loved playing for Steve. He was running one of the most successful companies on earth and still making time to coach us. He never missed one of our games. Our team was legendary within Microsoft circles because of the lengths that Steve would go to in making sure that he attended our games. He’d do a video interview on CNBC from China on a Friday, then take a red-eye back to the States and head straight to the gym to coach us.

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It’s pretty easy to forget that people who have real drive spread that drive all through their life. Ballmer really is bigger than he appears. It would have been easy for him to shrug off some of the responsibility. He didn’t.
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Twitter finds hundreds of accounts tied to Russian operatives • The Washington Post

Elizabeth Dwoskin, Adam Entous and Karoun Demirjian:

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Twitter has shut down 201 accounts that were tied to the same Russian operatives who posted thousands of political ads on Facebook, the company told congressional investigators in a meeting Thursday and revealed in a blog in the afternoon.

The company also found three accounts from the news site RT — which Twitter linked to the Kremlin — that spent $274,100 in ads on Twitter’s platform in 2016.

The meeting between the company and Congressional investigators was part of a widening government probe into how Russian operatives used Facebook, Google, Twitter and other social media platforms to sow division and disinformation during the 2016 campaign. Those companies are under increasing pressure from Capitol Hill to investigate Russian meddling on their platforms and are facing the possibility of new regulations that could impact their massive advertising businesses.

Still, some lawmakers have raised questions over the tech industry grasps the serious nature of the problem.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said Twitter’s presentation to a closed door meeting of lawmakers from the Senate and House was “deeply disappointing” and “inadequate on almost every level.”

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Only 201? I’d have thought it would be about a thousand times more at least.
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iPhone XX futurology • Medium

Mike Rundle:

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Ten years from now, in 2027, an Apple executive will once again grace the stage to show eager fans the new iPhone. This iPhone will be the 20th anniversary model with 20 years of improvements, refinements and technological achievements under its belt.

In this piece I’ll lay out what I believe this iPhone XX will look like and how it will fit into an accelerating future of technology.

This is not a sci-fi article. The iPhone of 2007 and the iPhone of 2017 look generally similar to one another, so let’s talk about some off-the-wall futuristic iPhone ideas and why I don’t believe we’ll be seeing them in 2027.

Why still a rectangle and not a square? Or a circle? First, books are not squares or circles, they’re rectangles. Humans read text on a page in a particular way and I believe a portrait screen ratio will be sticking around for at least the next ten years.

Why still think there will even be an iPhone? What about AR glasses and VR goggles and flying cars? Technology doesn’t move as fast as people think. 100 years ago people were convinced we’d be living in colonies on Mars and food would materialize from pills. Instead we haven’t put a person on a new celestial body in 50 years and Soylent not only tastes bad but made people sick. The iPhone will still be around in 2027 and will still mostly look like the smartphones we use today.

That’s not to say that VR goggles and AR glasses won’t exist in 10 years, they just won’t be replacing the devices in our pockets.

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This is loooong but it’s all based on patents Apple has filed; ten years isn’t a long time in that timeframe. And previous patents pointed to how things would change.
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1992: the executive computer – ‘mother of all markets’ or a ‘pipe dream driven by greed’? • NYTimes.com

Peter Lewis, in July 1992:

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“We are writing Chapter 2 of the history of personal computers,” said Nobuo Mii, vice president and general manager of the International Business Machines Corporation’s entry systems division.

How rich is this lode? At one end of the spectrum is John Sculley, the chief executive of Apple Computer Inc., who says these personal communicators could be “the mother of all markets.”

At the other end is Andrew Grove, the chairman of the Intel Corporation, the huge chip maker based in Santa Clara, Calif. He says the idea of a wireless personal communicator in every pocket is “a pipe dream driven by greed.”

These devices are expected to combine the best features of personal computers, facsimile machines, computer networks, pagers, personal secretaries, appointment books, address books and even paperback books and pocket CD players — all in a hand-held box operated by pen, or even voice commands.

Stuck in traffic on a business trip, an executive carrying a personal communicator could send and receive electronic mail and facsimile messages from anywhere in the country. She could also call up a local map on a 3-inch by 5-inch screen, draw a line between her current position (confirmed by satellite positioning signals) and her intended destination, and the device would give her specific driving instructions (as well as real-time warnings about traffic jams or accidents). Certainly, these are just predictions for now, but they sure are fun to think about.

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I do hope you’re reading this on your personal communicator with a 3in by 5in screen while in traffic. The iPhone in particular was still 15 years away, but notice the difference in Apple’s and Intel’s view. This was, for most people, pre-internet too. Vision is difficult; patience to realise it, even more so.
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February 1985: Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs • Longform

David Sheff interviewed Jobs in 1985, at a time when hardly anyone had touched a PC, and the internet was still an academic pursuit:

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Playboy: Those are arguments for computers in business and in schools, but what about the home?

Jobs: So far, that’s more of a conceptual market than a real market. The primary reasons to buy a computer for your home now are that you want to do some business work at home or you want to run educational software for yourself or your children. If you can’t justify buying a computer for one of those two reasons, the only other possible reason is that you just want to be computer literate. You know there’s something going on, you don’t exactly know what it is, so you want to learn. This will change: Computers will be essential in most homes.

Playboy: What will change?

Jobs: The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people—as remarkable as the telephone.

Playboy: Specifically, what kind of breakthrough are you talking about?

Jobs: I can only begin to speculate. We see that a lot in our industry: You don’t know exactly what’s going to result, but you know it’s something very big and very good.

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Jobs was really good at describing big differences (mouse v keyboard: “If I want to tell you there is a spot on your shirt, I’m not going to do it linguistically: “There’s a spot on your shirt 14 centimeters down from the collar and three centimeters to the left of your button.” If you have a spot—“There!” [he points]—I’ll point to it. Pointing is a metaphor we all know.”) He was wise to give up the bow ties, though.
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FCC demands Apple ‘put the safety of the American people first’, activate iPhone FM radio • 9to5Mac

Zac Hall:

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FCC Chairman Pai’s statement comes on the same day as the NAB (via Bloomberg) similarly pushing for Apple to enable FM radio on iPhones:

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“Broadcasters are providing information on how to evacuate quickly, where flood waters are raging, how to get out of harm’s way if there’s a tornado or a hurricane,” said Dennis Wharton, a spokesman for the National Association of Broadcasters. “The notion that Apple or anyone else would block this type of information is something that we find fairly troubling.”

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While Apple isn’t commenting on the renewed requests, critics speculate that Apple’s thinking may be FM radio access would hurt its services business which includes Apple Music and streaming radio services over cellular.

In practice, FM radio access would likely still require a traditional antenna (the discontinued iPod nano featured FM radio access using the headphones as the antenna) and wouldn’t be as simple as just turning on the function.

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Apple’s response: the iPhone 7 onwards don’t have FM radio chips or the antennae to receive FM signals “so it is not possible to enable FM reception in these products”. Seems like the FCC chair is prone to being clueless.
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Emails show how an Ivy League prof tried to do damage control for his bogus food science • Buzzfeed

Stephanie Lee:

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The Smarter Lunchrooms Movement, a $22m federally funded program that pushes healthy-eating strategies in almost 30,000 schools, is partly based on studies that contained flawed — or even missing — data.

The main scientist behind the work, Cornell University professor Brian Wansink, has made headlines for his research into the psychology of eating. His experiments have found, for example, that women who put cereal on their kitchen counters weigh more than those who don’t, and that people will pour more wine if they’re holding the glass than if it’s sitting on a table. Over the past two decades he’s written two popular books and more than 100 research papers, and enjoyed widespread media coverage (including on BuzzFeed).

Yet over the past year, Wansink and his “Food and Brand Lab” have come under fire from scientists and statisticians who’ve spotted all sorts of red flags — including data inconsistencies, mathematical impossibilities, errors, duplications, exaggerations, eyebrow-raising interpretations, and instances of self-plagiarism — in 50 of his studies.

Journals have so far retracted three of these papers and corrected at least seven. Now, emails obtained by BuzzFeed News through public information requests reveal for the first time that Wansink and his Cornell colleague David Just are also in the process of correcting yet another study, “Attractive names sustain increased vegetable intake in schools,” published in Preventive Medicine in 2012.

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Who could have guessed that headline-friendly “science” might be flawed?
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August 2001: One on one with Larry Page, CEO of Google • San Francisco Business Times

Lizette Wilson, back in August 2001, when the dot-com boom (remember that?) had turned to the ashes of the dot-com bust, yet Google was still standing:

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Q: How do you come up with the relevancy search results?

LP: We use a whole bunch of techniques. We estimate the importance of the page, the font size, how close the words are together. We look at what other documents say about it at how good the links are. We probably do 30 such things like that.

Q: If you could make more money by doing paid placement in results, would you?

LP: No. We’d make money in the short term, but not the long term.

Q: How does advertising or “sponsored links” differ from paid placement in the eyes of the average user?

LP: It doesn’t and that’s the problem. We believe that advertising and editorial should be split. We do the best job we can with computers and such to give you best search result content. We don’t do pay for placement.

Q: Is that a moral stance or a business one?

LP: Both. We believe that the company that’s successful will be trusted. When people trust us, then we’ll make more money.

Q: What about advertising? Are you going after more of that revenue now?

LP: The sales part is fairly easy for us. We get a lot of incoming requests and generate a lot of incoming leads.

Q: Okay, what’s the hard part then?

It’s delivering amazing products for people and reading their minds and providing exactly what they want when they do a search.

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Why Google’s auction-based proposal does not comply with EC remedy requirements • Foundem

This is an interactive HTML presentation (hooray! The web lives!) by Foundem, the original – and successful – complainant against Google over how shopping searches are ranked.

Google, as noted previously, has suggested that to comply with the EC complaint, it will split its shopping service off from the rest of the business and bid for auctioned-off shopping ad slots.

This obviously doesn’t make any difference, unless it were to completely sell it off from Alphabet. Google wins if Google Shopping doesn’t win an auction slot, because it gets the ad revenue; Google wins if Google Shopping does get the auction slot, because people may click through. Google wins.

But there doesn’t seem to be any way to slice this satisfactorily if Google can sell shopping ad slots – as long, that is, as it suppresses shopping searches in the “organic” search results.
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Worldwide wearable device sales to grow 17% in 2017 • Gartner

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Apple will continue to have the greatest market share of any smartwatch provider. However, as more providers enter the market, Apple’s market share will decrease from approximately a third in 2016 to a quarter in 2021. The announcement of a new Apple Watch expected in September may enable direct cellular connectivity for interacting with Siri, texting and transferring sensor data when the phone or Wi-Fi is not present.

We expect other consumer electronics brands such as Asus, Huawei, LG, Samsung and Sony to sell only 15% of smartwatches in 2021, because their brands do not have as strong an appeal as lifestyle brands for personal technologies.

Two sub-categories that Gartner expects to perform well are kids’ smartwatches and traditional watch brands, which will emerge as significant segments for smartwatches. Gartner expects kids’ smartwatches to represent 30% of total smartwatch unit shipments in 2021. These devices are targeted at children in the 2-to-13 year-old range, before parents provide them with a smartphone.

The other sub-category, which will account for 25% of smartwatch units by 2021, is fashion and traditional watch brands. “Luxury and fashion watch brands will offer smartwatches in an attempt to attract younger customers,” said Ms. McIntyre. A final sub-category is represented by the startup and white-label brands (e.g., Archos, Cogito, Compal, Martian, Omate or Quanta), which will account for 5% of smartwatch unit sales in 2021.

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Gartner reckons the smartwatch market in 2021 will be 81m units – so if Apple has a quarter of it, that’s 20.3m units. Comparison now: Gartner expects all smartwatches will sell 41.5m units, and Apple has about a third – that’s 13.8m units. It’s growth, though hardly dramatic.

This analysis throws in everything, including Bluetooth headsets. Though note: “By 2021, we assume that almost all premium mobile phones will no longer have the 3.5 mm jack,” according to Angela McIntyre at Gartner.

Also, I wouldn’t expect many of the traditional Android OEMs still to be in the smartwatch market by 2021. Samsung yes, Huawei maybe. For the others, there’s too little volume.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

We have some bad (well, slow) news about Andy Rubin’s Essential phone – you know, the other phone that has a notch. Photo by portalgda on Flickr.

A selection of 12 links for you. That’s not a baker’s dozen. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Amazon slashes price of new Echo speaker, adds better sound • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

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The new speaker has a dedicated woofer and tweeter for improved music playback as well as a new set of far-field microphones to better hear what users are saying, Amazon said at an event in Seattle on Wednesday. The new version comes in six different colors, Amazon said.

The new Echo costs $99, a significant price drop from the current model’s $180 price. It’s available today from Amazon’s website, said Dave Limp, who runs the company’s Alexa and Echo lines. There will also be a two-pack available that saves consumers $50.

The better sound takes on new speakers from companies including Apple Inc. and Alphabet’s Google. Apple will release its HomePod speaker with Siri integration and loud speakers for Apple Music later this year, while Google is expected to unveil a smaller Home speaker in October.

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I wonder how big the market for Echo-style devices is. At one time, it seemed as though Kindles would take over the world; but they stopped dead at about a third of the total addressable market in the west (many given as gifts, and not really used), and are now shrinking. Amazon has definitely done clever work by grabbing the home space while Google and Apple were tying up the smartphone market.
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Google pulls YouTube from Amazon’s Echo Show device • Tech Narratives

Jan Dawson:

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Though Amazon says the decision was unilateral and unexplained, Google said the implementation of YouTube on the Echo Show violated its terms of service, which makes you wonder whether the companies launched in a hurry and agreed to settle terms later, or whether Amazon simply built the YouTube app without Google’s input and hoped it wouldn’t mind. My guess is that the ToS violation in question here revolves around the lack of options for managing a YouTube account – I sent my Echo Show back after testing it for a review, but if I recall correctly, many of the standard YouTube features on other platforms were not available there, which was reflective of the Echo Show’s broad limitations on interactivity and functionality, something I pointed out in my review. YouTube was in some ways very much behind a platform wall which Amazon erected in front of it, and it seems Google finally decided it had had enough.

It’s worth remembering that Google and Amazon compete directly across several areas and have limited their cooperation in several others as a result: they compete in voice assistants and devices, for starters, but also in cloud services, in product search, in tablets (albeit indirectly), in grocery deliveries, in TV boxes, and so on.

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Google gets very antsy about people not letting YouTube do everything it wants, especially grab data and show tons of ads.
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Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch: BayStreet • FierceWireless

Mike Dano:

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Essential Products has sold an estimated 5,000 phones since the gadget made its big retail debut in the United States earlier this month, according to estimates from BayStreet Research. That figure would put Essential well below market heavyweights like Apple and Samsung, which typically sell tens of millions of phones per quarter in the United States.

BayStreet tracks shipments of phones and other devices across the United States. Essential representatives didn’t respond to requests for comment on the BayStreet estimates.

Essential, the first major startup from Android founder Andy Rubin’s venture capital firm Playground, currently sells the $699 Android-powered Essential Phone through Sprint and promises to release the Essential Home smart-home hub later this year. Essential was named as one of FierceWireless’ top 15 startups to watch in 2017.

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And Sprint is the only major carrier selling it. The company is valued at over $1bn – on the basis of getting a $3m investment from Foxconn’s FIH Mobile for 0.25%. Might be a company to watch in 2018 to see if it survives.
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Satya and Anu Nadella open up about their family life • Good Housekeeping

Jane Francisco:

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“My childhood was full of joy,” says Satya, who was raised in India and moved to the United States in 1988 to get his master’s degree in computer science. “My parents created an environment where they let me set my own pace and pursue what I wanted. It’s important to focus on what [our kids] need to thrive.” Take note, Tiger Moms!

“I’m the IT administrator of our family,” says Satya. The Nadellas set limits on screen time for their kids and also on what sites the children can go to. “We get reports on what they’ve been doing on their computers, and they know that,” says Satya. “So it’s very transparent.” Adds Anu,”Technology for entertainment is always going to be a negotiation in our house. How many movies, what kinds of video games.”

“Technology kept Zain [their first child, who was born following in-utero asphyxia and is quadriplegic] alive,” says Anu. “It means more than just something to waste time on.” It also gives him more control in his life now: For instance, with a light tap of his head on a sensor, he can choose his own music. And Microsoft’s new app, Seeing AI, helps people with visual impairment. “They can hold up their phone and it’ll ‘see’ people — interpret their emotions, interpret a menu,” says Satya. “[You can] cook with a recipe, go grocery shopping, read labels or walk into a conference room with confidence.”

“We both think children should have dogs,” says Anu. “There is a different sense of companionship and responsibility that comes with it — that emotional sense that there is a being waiting for you to come back.” Their puppy, Winston, almost a year old, is more than a family pet: He provides important emotional support for Zain. “It was impossible for us to think about getting him before, given everything else going on in our lives,” says Satya. “It’s been such a joy.”

“When Satya steps in the house, Dad’s home,” says Anu. “And Dad does homework with the kids, sits with us at the table. When we go to public places, he’s recognized, and the girls see that, but has it affected their everyday peace? I don’t think so. Our private lives are pretty private.”

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It’s to promote his book “Hit Refresh”, but it’s an interesting interview. (Could have done with slightly less of Ms Francisco’s travel hassles at the start. But it’s probably hard to tell the editor she’s rambling on and you’re going to cut 200 words.)
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PSA: Here’s how to get access to 280-character tweets before Twitter rolls it out to all • 9to5Mac

Ben Lovejoy:

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The simplest approach, as TNW reported, is to run a Snippet in Chrome to instruct Tweetdeck to give you the new limit. Yep, you read that right: the limit is actually controlled on the client side, rather than on Twitter’s own servers.

Here are the site’s instructions:

• Load up Tweetdeck at tweetdeck.twitter.com.
• Head to View, hover over the Developer menu, and select Developer Tools.
• Find Sources and click on the » double chevrons to access Snippets.
• Once you open Snippets, click the ‘New Snippet’ button and copy/paste the following code in the empty window on the right.

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The code is something of a slog. My objections: (a) you have to run Tweetdeck (b) in a browser window c) to produce the hateful 280-character tweets, which are already a blight.
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Software is a long con • emptywheel

Quinn Norton:

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I had a conversation with a bridge engineer one evening not long ago. I said, “Bridges, they are nice, and vital, but they fall down a lot.”

He looked at me with a well-worn frustration and replied, “Falling down is what bridges do. It’s the fate of all bridges to fall down, if you don’t understand that, you don’t understand bridges.”

“Ok, I do understand that,” I replied. “But they fall down a lot. Maybe if we stepped back and looked at how we’re building bridges –”

“You can’t build a bridge that doesn’t fall down. That’s just not how bridges work”

I took a deep breath. “What if you could build a bridge that didn’t fall down as often?”

“Not practical — it’s too hard, and besides, people want bridges.” By now, he was starting to look bored with the conversation.

“I bet if you slowed down how you build bridges, you could make ones that lasted decades, even in some cases, centuries. You might have to be thoughtful, set more realistic expectations, do a lot more of the design of a bridge before you start building it, but..”

He interrupted me again. “Look, you’re not a bridge engineer, so you don’t really understand how bridges work, but people want bridges now. So no one is going to build a bridge like that, even if it were possible, and I’m not saying it is.”

“But people get hurt, sometimes die, on these bridges.”

“Bridges fall down. Sometimes people are on them when they do. That’s not my fault as a bridge engineer, that’s literally how gravity works,” he said…

…Just then, a friend of mine, also a writer, also interested in bridges, stopped by.

“Hey guys!” he said. “So it looks like there’s a crew of Russian bridge destroyers with hammers and lighters who are running around in the middle of the night setting fires to bridges and knocking off braces with hammers. They started in Ukraine but they’re spreading around the world now, and we don’t know if our bridges are safe. They’ve studied bridges carefully and they seem to be good at finding where they’re most flammable and which braces to knock off with their hammer.”

We both regarded my friend a long moment, letting it sink in. I turned back to the bridge engineer and said, “Maybe we need to make them out of non-flammable material and rivet them instead of using exposed braces and clamps.”

But he was already red in the face, eyes wide with anger and fear. “GET THE RUSSIANS!” he screamed.

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Of course that’s only the beginning.
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What’s going on With HEIF and Mac OS 10.13 “High Sierra” • The Shape Of Everything

Gus Mueller is author of Acorn, a terrific low-cost image-editing program for the Mac:

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This past summer at WWDC, Apple introduced a new (to iOS and Mac OS) compression format for images named HEIF. HEIF is pretty neat because it allows for better compression compared to JPEG, without sacrificing quality. It’s got some other fun properties as well, but it’s not relevant to this post.

If you have an iPhone with an A10 Fusion processor or later (iPhone 7 and 8), you can turn on support for taking pictures in this format via the Settings app. iOS 11 also obviously adds support for viewing these files and includes APIs for developers which can write new images in that format.

Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra includes support for decoding and viewing HEIF images. There are no OS supplied libraries for writing or converting images to the HEIF format.

And because of this, Acorn currently only allows reading for HEIF files, not writing.

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That’s.. weird. He has filed a Radar (bug report).
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I asked Tinder for my data. It sent me 800 pages of my deepest, darkest secrets • The Guardian

Judith Duportail:

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As I flicked through page after page of my data I felt guilty. I was amazed by how much information I was voluntarily disclosing: from locations, interests and jobs, to pictures, music tastes and what I liked to eat. But I quickly realised I wasn’t the only one. A July 2017 study revealed Tinder users are excessively willing to disclose information without realising it.

“You are lured into giving away all this information,” says Luke Stark, a digital technology sociologist at Dartmouth University. “Apps such as Tinder are taking advantage of a simple emotional phenomenon; we can’t feel data. This is why seeing everything printed strikes you. We are physical creatures. We need materiality.”

Reading through the 1,700 Tinder messages I’ve sent since 2013, I took a trip into my hopes, fears, sexual preferences and deepest secrets. Tinder knows me so well. It knows the real, inglorious version of me who copy-pasted the same joke to match 567, 568, and 569; who exchanged compulsively with 16 different people simultaneously one New Year’s Day, and then ghosted 16 of them.

“What you are describing is called secondary implicit disclosed information,” explains Alessandro Acquisti, professor of information technology at Carnegie Mellon University. “Tinder knows much more about you when studying your behaviour on the app. It knows how often you connect and at which times; the percentage of white men, black men, Asian men you have matched; which kinds of people are interested in you; which words you use the most; how much time people spend on your picture before swiping you, and so on. Personal data is the fuel of the economy. Consumers’ data is being traded and transacted for the purpose of advertising”…

…The trouble is these 800 pages of my most intimate data are actually just the tip of the iceberg. “Your personal data affects who you see first on Tinder, yes,” says [privacy activist Paul-Olivier] Dehaye. “But also what job offers you have access to on LinkedIn, how much you will pay for insuring your car, which ad you will see in the tube and if you can subscribe to a loan.”

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Exclusive: Google is cracking down on sketchy rehab ads • The Verge

Cat Ferguson:

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Around the country today, marketers in the $35bn addiction treatment industry woke up to an unpleasant surprise: Many of their Google search ads were gone. Overnight, the search giant has stopped selling ads against a huge number of rehab-related search terms, including “rehab near me,” “alcohol treatment,” and thousands of others. Search ads on some of those keywords would previously have netted Google hundreds of dollars per click.

“We found a number of misleading experiences among rehabilitation treatment centers that led to our decision, in consultation with experts, to restrict ads in this category,” Google told The Verge in a statement. “As always, we constantly review our policies to protect our users and provide good experiences for consumers.”

Google is the biggest source of patients for most treatment centers. Advertisers tell Google how much they want to spend on search ads per month, which keywords they’d like those ads to run against, and then pay Google every time someone clicks on their ad.

While many treatment centers market themselves ethically, there are also significant numbers of bad actors using deceptive and even illegal tactics to get “heads in beds.” [Early in September] The Verge published a story uncovering how marketers use the internet to hook desperate addicts and their families, from hijacking the Google business listings of other treatment centers to deceiving addicts about where a treatment center is located.

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All credit to Ferguson and The Verge for the original, important, story which seems to have grabbed Google’s notice – though now read on for the Bloomberg detail about it.
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Why it took Google so long to end shady rehab center ads • Bloomberg

Michael Smith , Jonathan Levin , and Mark Bergen:

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Anti-Google sentiment was palpable at the Austin conference [in May], especially after [Google contractor Josh] Weum [who had advised on the best AdWords to use to attract people seeking opioid addiction treatment] told the crowd that it was hard for Google to cut off shady treatment providers unless someone tipped off the company. 

As the discussion wound down, Jeffrey Lynne, a lawyer in Boca Raton, Fla., had heard enough. Lynne, who specializes in advising addiction treatment centers, stood up and accused Google of not only enabling a dirty business but actively profiting from it. “Google has a fundamental responsibility to stop making money hand over fist by jacking up these ad prices because of an algorithm,” Lynne said, drawing applause from the crowd. “We need you to step up to the plate,” he said. “Because people are using you to human-traffic our children.” 

Weum, who hawked AdWords products for two years at a myriad of industry conferences, including several on addiction treatment, says he was shocked by the sense of outrage from people in the Austin hotel ballroom. “It really felt like I was being blamed for it,” he says. “I felt the full brunt of the anger with patient brokering.” One man sitting next to Weum on the same panel, Dan Gemp, wasn’t surprised. Gemp is chief executive officer of Dreamscape Marketing LLC, a Columbia, Md., company that specializes in running ad campaigns for addiction treatment providers. He’d filed multiple complaints with Google about treatment center operators who did such things as hack his clients’ websites to hijack potential patients.

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The writers estimate that Google could have been pulling in around $1bn annually from these ads. But they also point out that people have been complaining to Google for ages about scams and crooks. The Verge writes a story and next week, poof.

There also seems to be a lesson here about big online advertising companies, self-service ad systems, and the lack of a tight customer feedback loop.
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Even this data guru is creeped out by what anonymous location data reveals about us • Fast Company

DJ Pangburn:

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Last fall [Buzzfeed vp of data science, Gilad] Lotan taught a class at New York University on surveillance that kicked off with an assignment like the one I’d given him: link anonymous location data with other data sets–from LinkedIn, Facebook, home registration and mortgage records, and other online data.

“It’s not hard to figure out who this [unnamed] person is,” says Lotan. In class, students found that tracking location data around holidays proved to be the easiest way to determine who, exactly, the data belonged to. “Basically,” he says, “visits to private homes that are owned and publicly registered.”

In 2013, researchers at MIT and the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium published a paper reporting on 15 months of study of human mobility data for over 1.5 million individuals. What they found is that only four spatio-temporal points are required to “uniquely identify 95% of the individuals.” The researchers concluded that there was very little privacy even in raw location data. Four years later, their calls for policies rectifying concerns about location tracking have fallen largely on deaf ears.

Lotan worries about the availability of the data. “I think something that is important to tell in this story is how many services have access to this information.”

“There are so many apps on an iPhone that run in the background and persistently track your location. They tell you that, but most people don’t know.”

Some apps do it even when you’ve specifically denied them access (see Accuweather); some have stopped tracking you when you’re not using them but only after user protest (see, recently, Uber). And see the bottom of the story for tips on how to protect yourself.

«

The tips are basically “turn off location tracking”. (Lotan has previously figured here on the topics of fake news, fake claims over Twitter bots, and the strange case of the imaginary Isis attack in Louisiana.)
link to this extract

Geekbench chief: Android stagnates while iPhone soars • Tom’s Guide

Mark Spoonauer:

»

“The thing that I don’t fully understand is why performance has seemed to stagnate on the Android side,” said John Poole, founder of Primate Labs [which developed the Geekbench 4 benchmark for phones]. “Where you don’t see these big leaps forward. I don’t understand what’s happening there.”

On the multicore portion of the Geekbench 4 test, the iPhone 8’s A11 Bionic processor scored 10,170. The fastest Android phone we’ve tested, the Note 8, hit 6,564. That’s 54% slower. The iPhone 8 also blew away the Android competition on the 3DMark graphics test and on our own 4K video-editing test…

If you look at the Geekbench 4 numbers, the iPhone 8 is technically faster than the 13-inch MacBook Pro with a 7th-gen Intel Core i5 processor, but is that really the case? Yes and no.

“Everybody looks at the A11 scores and they go, ‘Holy crap, this is . . . what does this mean? Are these even comparable?’ said Poole. “Well, yes, they’re comparable, but at the same time, you’re not going to use your phone to render a huge video because, simply, the form factor doesn’t lend itself to it.”

Poole is referring to the difference between burst performance and sustained performance. Laptops can keep up their speeds for a longer period of time because they have active cooling. With an iPhone or other smartphone, the processor will eventually generate more heat than the case can dissipate.

But that doesn’t diminish what Apple has accomplished with the A11 Bionic chip. Whether it’s for 5 minutes or 10 minutes, the performance gap between iOS and Android has suddenly widened.

«

The question many are asking is how relevant this is; if all you’re doing is a bit of light Facebooking, will it make a difference? Except that there’s lots of new processing of photos and, soon, video (in AR) to come. So performance is going to make a difference.

If you don’t believe that, try using the phone you used to use before your last upgrade. It will feel excruciatingly slow. Performance matters.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: On yesterday’s link about apps taking over from the mobile web on smartphones: as Stormyparis noted in a comment, a lot of that “app use” is probably people using Webviews – such as reading articles linked on Twitter or Facebook. That means that “mobile web” use, as in the viewing of sites via mobile devices, is probably higher than App Annie reports. There’s hope yet, web designers.

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

Twitter is looking to double the length of tweets. Is that seriously a good idea? Photo by Daniel Morrison on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Don’t freak out. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

App Annie: App usage doubles in 2 years as mobile web fades • Mobile Marketer

Robert Williams:

»

Mobile app usage has doubled in the past two years to an average of two hours per day, boosting it to 7x the amount of time users spend on mobile web browsers, according to a study by App Annie made available to Mobile Marketer. The top 20% of people who use apps for the longest periods spend more than four hours a day with mobile apps.

Native mobile apps accounted for 88% of the time and 93% of sessions on Android phones worldwide, with the remainder being spent in mobile browsers, the study found. The preference for apps was seen among all age groups, not just millennials and teens, in every country surveyed during the first half of 2017.

«

The mobile web has been over for a long time. It just doesn’t know it.
link to this extract

Google to create shopping service unit to satisfy EU • Bloomberg

Aoife White:

»

Google will create a standalone unit for its shopping service and require it to bid against rivals for ads shown on the top of its search page, in an effort to satisfy European Union concerns over the display of product results, three people familiar with the investigation said.

Google faces a Thursday deadline to comply with an EU antitrust order for it to give equal treatment in how the search engine shows competitors’ comparison-shopping sites, according to the people, who asked not to be named as the negotiations are private. While the shopping service will remain part of Google, it will operate separately and use its own revenues to bid for ads.

Google was ordered by regulators to stop promoting its own shopping search results over competitors’ and to make changes by Sept. 28 designed to give rivals a better chance to compete, the EU said in June when it fined the company €2.4bn ($2.8bn). The company could be fined up to 5% of daily revenue if it fails to comply…

…While Google Shopping can bid for those slots, it will be run separately to ensure that its bids reflect its own operating costs and aren’t subsidized by Google. Regulators have accepted that the panel is for advertising and slots cannot be given away, the person said. Each slot will be labeled with the name of the service providing the link, such as “By Google,” similar to pages that showed up on French and Dutch versions of Google last week.

«

Not sure that this is going to satisfy rivals. But it might satisfy the EU.
link to this extract

James Dyson to build electric car by 2020 • Business Insider

Mohammed Hadi:

»

James Dyson, the billionaire inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner, said his company was building a “radical” all-electric car for launch in 2020, with a commitment to spend £2bn ($2.7bn) on solid-state battery technology and vehicle design.

Dyson said a 400-strong team of engineers had already spent two and a half years working on the secret project in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, developing the batteries that will power the in-house designed electric motor for the car.

He said on Tuesday he had not yet decided where the vehicle would be manufactured, although he had ruled out working with any existing auto companies.

«

Hmm. Dyson said it was going to have a robot vacuum cleaner for a long time, and it took longer than that to come up with it; and it isn’t available everywhere.

It’s comparatively easy for a well-funded company to make an electric car. The tricky thing is making lots of electric cars, and making a profit from them.
link to this extract

Understanding Uber: it’s not about the app • London Reconnections

“John Bull”:

»

One of the primary responsibilities of the taxi regulator in most locations is the consideration of passenger safety. This is very much the case in London – both for individual drivers and for operators.

The expectation of drivers is relatively obvious – that they do not break the law, nor commit a crime of any kind. The expectation of operators is a bit more complex – it is not just about ensuring that drivers are adequately checked before they are hired (and that those checks are processed by a mutually approved company), but also that their activity is effectively monitored while they are working. Just as importantly, the operator is responsible for making sure that any customer complaints are taken seriously and acted upon appropriately.

The nature of that action can vary. The report of a minor offence may warrant only the intervention of the operator themselves or escalation of the incident to TfL via the regular (but slow) reporting channels. It is expected, however, that serious crimes will be dealt with promptly, and reported directly to the police as well.

On 12 April 2017, the Metropolitan Police wrote to TfL expressing a major concern. In the letter, Inspector Neil Bellany claimed that ULL were not reporting serious crimes to the police. They cited three specific incidents by way of example.

«

This is very long, and very detailed, and explains very well that this is not about “disliking Uber” and wasn’t “decided by Sadiq Khan”. It was a decision by TfL, prompted by the police, and it’s about regulation.

But it’s notable how right-wing reflexive reaction has been that it’s about “stifling innovation” and that it’s a “political decision”. It’s dangerous when companies which are breaking regulations try to get the public to back them in doing so. (Via Alex Hern.)
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Your tweets may not have to be that short anymore • WSJ

Georgia Wells:

»

Twitter Inc. on Tuesday said it would begin testing a new limit of 280 characters, double its current limit, as a concession to users who have been clamoring for changes to the short-messaging service.

The new longer limit will be tested on a small portion of users–a percentage in the single digits, according to a Twitter spokeswoman–and Twitter will be monitoring the experiment for several weeks before making a decision. A random sample of Twitter users would be included in the experiment, the spokeswoman said, and declined to comment on whether President Donald Trump would be part of the test group.

“We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we’re doing something new,” Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen and senior software engineer Ikuhiro Ihara wrote in a statement.

The 140-character limit was a barrier to some people using Twitter, Ms. Rosen and Mr. Ihara realized, particularly users tweeting in languages like English that use more words to express meaning. Users sometimes abandoned their tweets when they bumped up against the 140-character limit, they said.

«

Yeah, sure, people abandoned Twitter because they couldn’t say it in the typical length of a sentence. And isn’t it great to know that the problems of bots and sexist dogpiling has been solved?
link to this extract

Showtime’s websites may have used your CPU to mine cryptocoin while you binged on Twin Peaks • Gizmodo

Rhett Jones:

»

Over the weekend, a user on Twitter pointed out that two of Showtime’s websites had a script running in the background that’s used to hijack visitors’ CPUs to mine cryptocurrency. Other users and outlets later confirmed that the code was present. Now it’s gone, and Showtime refuses to answer questions.

Cryptocurrency miners have been in the news recently because The Pirate Bay caught some flak about a week ago for testing out a new service called Coinhive without informing users. The Coinhive miner uses the website visitors’ extra CPU power to generate a cryptocurrency called Monero (it’s like bitcoin but more private). This isn’t necessarily a nefarious thing to do. Coinhive is trying to present itself as a novel and legitimate way for websites to make some money from visitors. The company takes 30% of the Monero that’s mined by users’ CPUs and the website keeps the rest. It could be a nice way to avoid advertising—but it’s not cool to do this without getting users’ permission.

«

“Not cool” is one way of putting it. “Skeevy” is another.
link to this extract

Do tech companies really need all that user data? • Harvard Business Review

Walter Frick:

»

To determine whether storage of users’ personal data improves search results, [researchers] Chiou and Tucker looked at how search results from Bing and Yahoo differed before and after changes in the European Commission’s rules on data retention. In 2008 the Commission recommended that search engines reduce the period over which search engines kept user records. In response, Yahoo decided to strengthen its privacy policy by anonymizing user data after 90 days. In 2010 Microsoft changed its policy, and began deleting IP addresses associated with searches on Bing after six months and all data points intended to identify a user across visits after 18 months. In 2011 Yahoo changed its policy again, this time deciding to store personal data longer — for 18 months rather than 90 days — allowing the researchers yet another chance to measure how changes in data storage affected search results. (Google did not change its policies during this period, and so is not included in the study. Some of Tucker’s past research has been funded by Google.)

The researchers then looked at data from UK residents’ web history before and after the changes. To measure search quality, they looked at the number of repeated searches, a signal of dissatisfaction with search results. In all three cases, they found no statistically significant effect on search result quality following changes in data retention policy. In other words, the decision to anonymize or de-identify the data didn’t appear to impair the search experience. “Our results suggest that the costs of privacy may be lower than currently perceived,” the authors write, though they note that previous studies have come to different conclusions.

«

By using clickstream data, they should be getting enough to be relevant – but the problem is that the size of use is small compared to Google’s. A “private” Google v logged-in Google comparison would really tell us more.
link to this extract

Is beaming down in Star Trek a death sentence? • Ars Technica UK

Xaq Rzetelny looks at the fine detail of “first you’re here and then you’re there” in the iconic series:

»

“The way that the description of beaming is written, I would go for ‘you die and you’re reconstructed,'” said Michael Okuda, technical consultant for the various Trek shows and movies beginning with The Next Generation, on the Engage podcast. “I wish we had done some kind of dimensional transfer thing to be less ambiguous.”

Speaking to Ars, Okuda elaborated:

»

“Star Trek’s transporter has generally been thought of as a 3D version of a television. It is said to scan a person atom-by-atom, convert the atoms to energy, beam the energy to another location, then to convert the energy back to matter in the original pattern.
Some have suggested that this is the equivalent of destroying the person at the atomic level, then creating an identical duplicate at a different location. If this is true, then it seems possible that you have killed the original person and created a duplicate (who probably doesn’t remember dying).
…

“By the time Rick [Sternbach] and I wrote the TNG Tech Manual, the matter-energy conversion process had already been well-established in Trek lore, so I felt we needed to respect this notion. If we had written the book much earlier in Trek’s history, I think I would have pushed an alternate concept in which the continuity of a person’s existence is unambiguous.”

«

There it is, right from the horse’s mouth. The way it has been written, the transporter is a suicide box. Case closed.

A video on the subject by YouTuber CGP Grey presents a thought experiment to show viscerally why this is the case. Imagine that you step onto the transporter, only the part of the device that de-materializes you is broken. The transporter scans you and reconstructs you at the target location, only you haven’t been taken apart in the first place. Remember, there’s no need for it to take you apart; it can simply scan and reconstruct like a copying machine, leaving the original intact.

So the pre-transport “you” still exists at the same time as post-transport “you.” Would you then willingly step onto the de-materializer—and be destroyed to make room for your replacement—once Scotty’s fixed it? Probably not.

«

There’s a film in which David Bowie plays Nikola Tesla which plays with this idea. I won’t spoil it for you by naming it if you haven’t seen it. But if you have, you know what I mean.
link to this extract

China blocks WhatsApp, broadening online censorship • The New York Times

Keith Bradsher:

»

WhatsApp now appears to have been broadly disrupted in China, even for text messages, Nadim Kobeissi, an applied cryptographer at Symbolic Software, a Paris-based research start-up, said on Monday. The blocking of WhatsApp text messages suggests that China’s censors may have developed specialized software to interfere with such messages, which rely on an encryption technology that is used by few services other than WhatsApp, he said.

“This is not the typical technical method in which the Chinese government censors something,” Mr. Kobeissi said. He added that his company’s automated monitors had begun detecting disruptions of WhatsApp in China on Wednesday, and that by Monday the blocking efforts were comprehensive.

Facebook declined to comment, following past practice when asked about WhatsApp’s difficulties in China.

Lokman Tsui, an internet communications specialist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said that WhatsApp seemed to have been severely disrupted starting on Sunday. But he said that some WhatsApp users might still be able to use the service.

«

For China’s government (which is trying to tamp down dissent and discussion ahead of a big Communist party rally) it’s enough to make it difficult to use WhatsApp so that people use other services – which let the government see everything. Dictators hate encryption.
link to this extract

Verizon discontinues the Wear24 smartwatch after just four months • Android Police

Ryan Whitwam:

»

Verizon announced its very own Android Wear smartwatch earlier this year, powered by its LTE network. It started selling the Wear24 in May for $300 on contract and $350 without one. That seemed like an interesting proposition when consumers have shown little interest even in cheap smartwatches. Verizon didn’t let this product languish too long, though. We’ve confirmed with the carrier that Wear24 is dead.

Verizon didn’t actually announce the smartwatch was going away. If you try to visit the former product page, you are redirected to the support page for Wear24. We reached out to Verizon to see if the watch was indeed gone, and here’s the succinct reply we got.

»

Yes wear24 has been discontinued.

«

Okay, so that happened. The device was on sale for a little over four months before Verizon killed it.

«

What’s the betting that in four months from now Verizon will have sold more LTE-connected Apple Watches than it did of this device?
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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.

Look who’s come to save Telstra! Photo by Wired Photostream on Flickr.

A selection of 11 links for you. Really, they are. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Obama tried to give Zuckerberg a wake-up call over fake news on Facebook • The Washington Post

Adam Entous, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Craig Timberg:

»

For months leading up to the [November 2016 presidential] vote, Obama and his top aides quietly agonized over how to respond to Russia’s brazen intervention on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign without making matters worse. Weeks after Trump’s surprise victory, some of Obama’s aides looked back with regret and wished they had done more.

Now huddled in a private room on the sidelines of a meeting of world leaders in Lima, Peru, two months before Trump’s inauguration, Obama made a personal appeal to Zuckerberg to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation seriously, though the president did not single out Russia specifically. Unless Facebook and the government did more to address the threat, Obama warned, it would only get worse in the next presidential race…

…This account — based on interviews with more than a dozen people involved in the government’s investigation and Facebook’s response — provides the first detailed backstory of a 16-month journey in which the company came to terms with an unanticipated foreign attack on the U.S. political system and its search for tools to limit the damage.

Among the revelations is how Facebook detected elements of the Russian information operation in June 2016 and then notified the FBI. Yet in the months that followed, the government and the private sector struggled to work together to diagnose and fix the problem.

The growing political drama over these issues has come at a time of broader reckoning for Facebook, as Zuckerberg has wrestled with whether to take a more active role in combatting an emerging dark side on the social network — including fake news and suicides on live video, and allegations that the company was censoring political speech.

«

link to this extract

Steve Bannon sought to infiltrate Facebook hiring • Buzzfeed

Joseph Bernstein:

»

Steve Bannon plotted to plant a mole inside Facebook, according to emails sent days before the Breitbart boss took over Donald Trump’s campaign and obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The email exchange with a conservative Washington operative reveals the importance that the giant tech platform — now reeling from its role in the 2016 election — held for one of the campaign’s central figures. And it also shows the lengths to which the brawling new American right is willing to go to keep tabs on and gain leverage over the Silicon Valley giants it used to help elect Trump — but whose executives it also sees as part of the globalist enemy.

The idea to infiltrate Facebook came to Bannon from Chris Gacek, a former congressional staffer who is now an official at the Family Research Council, which lobbies against abortion and many LGBT rights.

“There is one for a DC-based ‘Public Policy Manager’ at Facebook’s What’s APP [sic] division,” Gacek, the senior fellow for regulatory affairs at the group, wrote on Aug. 1, 2016. “LinkedIn sent me a notice about some job openings.”

“This seems perfect for Breitbart to flood the zone with candidates of all stripe who will report back to you / Milo with INTEL about the job application process over at FB,” he continued.

“Milo” is former Breitbart News Tech Editor Milo Yiannopoulos, to whom Bannon forwarded Gacek’s email the same day.

“Can u get on this,” Bannon instructed his staffer.

«

Seems to have come to naught. But shows that the culture wars in the US are deeply e,bedded.
link to this extract

Apple switches from Bing to Google for Siri web search results on iOS and Spotlight on Mac • TechCrunch

Matthew Panzarino:

»

Apple is switching the default provider of its web searches from Siri, Search inside iOS (formerly called Spotlight) and Spotlight on the Mac. So, for instance, if Siri falls back to a web search on iOS when you ask it a question, you’re now going to get Google results instead of Bing. Updated below with a statement from Microsoft.

Consistency is Apple’s main motivation given for switching the results from Microsoft’s Bing to Google in these cases. Safari on Mac and iOS already currently use Google search as the default provider, thanks to a deal worth billions to Apple (and Google) over the last decade. This change will now mirror those results when Siri, the iOS Search bar or Spotlight is used.

“Switching to Google as the web search provider for Siri, Search within iOS and Spotlight on Mac will allow these services to have a consistent web search experience with the default in Safari,” reads an Apple statement sent this morning. “We have strong relationships with Google and Microsoft and remain committed to delivering the best user experience possible.”

…All of the search results that you see in these different cases will come directly from the search API, which means you’ll be getting the raw, ranked search results that start below all of the ads and Knowledge Graph stuff that appears on a regular Google home page. Worth noting, of course, that once you’ve clicked on a YouTube video, you’re still going to get served ads, so there is a revenue driver here for Google, even if it’s not direct.

«

Will Google ever push ads into those results? But it makes sense, as Panzarino notes, for the new version of Apple’s MacOS that’s just released. Microsoft is left with image search in Siri – not really a big source of demand. Sayonara, Bing. Hello, bigger TAC (traffic acquisition costs) for Google.

link to this extract

macOS High Sierra vulnerability allegedly allows malicious third-party apps to access plaintext keychain data • Mac Rumors

Juli Clover:

»

macOS High Sierra, released to the public today, could be impacted by a major security flaw that could allow a hacker to steal the usernames and passwords of accounts stored in Keychain.

As it turns out, unsigned apps on macOS High Sierra (and potentially earlier versions of macOS) can allegedly access the Keychain info and display plaintext usernames and passwords without a user’s master password.

Security researcher and ex-NSA analyst Patrick Wardle tweeted about the vulnerability early this morning and shared a video of the exploit in action.

«

But if it applies “potentially” on earlier versions.. what is the choice? Not much, apart from not running unsigned apps.
link to this extract

More Windows 10 S PCs, starting at $275, are on the way • ZDNet

Mary Jo Foley:

»

Microsoft’s PC maker partners are readying some new low-end devices running Windows 10 S, which they may be marketing as suited for “frontline” service workers.

New Windows 10 S devices are coming from Acer, HP, Lenovo and Fujitsu, starting at $275, and will be available later this year, Microsoft execs said today at the company’s Ignite IT Pro conference in Orlando.

Microsoft and partners will be hawking these devices as “Microsoft 365-powered.” Microsoft 365 is a bundle of Windows 10, Office 365 and Microsoft’s enterprise mobility and security services.

«

The plan is that these will be deployed in enterprises. Essentially, taking on Chromebooks.
link to this extract

$12b down and counting, Telstra’s Andy Penn hires Nokia’s burning man Stephen Elop • Sydney Morning Herald

Colin Kruger:

»

Telstra has lost about $12 billion in market value since Andy Penn stepped up as chief executive in May last year. 

So you can understand he’s looking to pull every lever he can to reverse the slide. 

A billion dollar bet on the Philippines? Sure, if there’s a taker. 

How about a flutter on whatever telco talent is currently floating about on the market? Other than Sol Trujillo, of course. 

So the telco giant announced on Wednesday that it has secured the services of former Nokia boss, Stephen Elop. And the telco industry’s man for all seasons, Kevin Russell, who has stints as Optus CEO, and Hutchison 3’s CEO, on his resume.

«

🤔
link to this extract

Fossil Group doubles number of doors for its smartwatches and connected hybrids • WatchPro

Rob Corder:

»

By the end of 2017, Fossil Group will have launched more than 300 connected watch styles across 14 brands. The devices are now also active in 50 countries and 21 languages.

“Today our wearables segment is the fastest-growing part of our business,” says Greg McKelvey, chief strategy and digital officer at Fossil Group.

“Customer demand is strong and getting stronger, and we’re just on the front end of this business evolution. Clearly, this distinct combination of the best design and the best tech is winning with fashion-conscious consumers, especially our female customers who were long neglected by other wearables brands,” he adds.

In the last 12 months, Fossil Group says it has doubled its points of distribution for its connected devices and more than doubled its sales of wearables.

Instead of battling with technology giants that want a chunk of the wearables market, Fossil Group is working with them. Google continues to be a key strategic partner for the company, supporting the expansion of products powered by Android Wear 2.0.

«

The key point here (as Benjamin Clymer pointed out) that whereas the watch companies have always been proud in the past of making their own internals, now they’re farming it out in this new segment – while Apple goes the opposite way. How’s that going to work out, long-term?
link to this extract

German election predictions • Dataswarm

»

We have been tracking the German election using social media since February, and 6.8 million tweets later we have some predictions. Our Data Analytics Engine (which had correctly predicted Brexit, the US Election and the latest British one against the polls’ opinions) is now predicting for Germany….well, pretty much what the German polls are saying – except for the AfD.

«

Dataswarm’s prediction: CDU+CSU 34%; SPD 27%; AFD 16% (but variable from 12%-20%); FDP 7%; Linke 9%; Greens 7%. All +/-2% apart from AFD.

Actual: CDU+CSU 33%; SPD 20.5%; AFD 12.6%; FDP 10.7%; Linke 9.2%; Greens 8.9%.

Low bot activity (languages defeat English speakers, it seems). Will be interested to see what they think of this; the miss was pretty much all about the SPD.
link to this extract

New theory cracks open the black box of deep learning • Quanta Magazine

Natalie Wolchover:

»

Last month, a YouTube video of a conference talk in Berlin, shared widely among artificial-intelligence researchers, offered a possible answer. In the talk, Naftali Tishby, a computer scientist and neuroscientist from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, presented evidence in support of a new theory explaining how deep learning works. Tishby argues that deep neural networks learn according to a procedure called the “information bottleneck,” which he and two collaborators first described in purely theoretical terms in 1999…

…One immediate insight that can be gleaned from the theory is a better understanding of which kinds of problems can be solved by real and artificial neural networks. “It gives a complete characterization of the problems that can be learned,” Tishby said. These are “problems where I can wipe out noise in the input without hurting my ability to classify. This is natural vision problems, speech recognition. These are also precisely the problems our brain can cope with.”

Meanwhile, both real and artificial neural networks stumble on problems in which every detail matters and minute differences can throw off the whole result. Most people can’t quickly multiply two large numbers in their heads, for instance. “We have a long class of problems like this, logical problems that are very sensitive to changes in one variable,” Tishby said. “Classifiability, discrete problems, cryptographic problems. I don’t think deep learning will ever help me break cryptographic codes.”

«

This isn’t a trivial read; but the conclusion is useful in thinking about what deep learning will and won’t do.
link to this extract

A small-screen iPod, an internet communicator and a phone • Asymco

Horace Dediu:

»

the Watch is effectively stealing usage from the iPhone. At first it took alerts, timekeeping, and basic messaging away. Now it’s taking basic phone calls and music and maybe maps.

It’s fitting therefore to remember how the iPhone was launched; as a tentpole troika: a wide-screen iPod, an Internet Communicator and a Phone. Today the new Watch is a small-screen iPod, an Internet Communicator and a Phone.

So not only is the Series 3 Watch more powerful than the original iPhone but it is also poetically capable of the same tentpole jobs. But it’s not just a miniature iPhone. It has a new, completely orthogonal attack on non-consumption and market creation: fitness and health. This is a key point. The iPhone was born a phone but grew up to be something completely unprecedented, unforeseen by its creators and, frankly, undescribable in the language of 2007.

The Watch was born a timepiece but it is traversing through the early iPhone and pulling in a new direction all of its own. The fact that we are talking about “Resting Rate”, “Arrhythmia” and “Atrial fibrillation” at a timekeeping launch event indicates that new behaviors will follow and so will the language we’ll use to describe this child-like product once it grows up.

«

Notable how the link in “tentpole troika” goes back to a piece he wrote in 2014, with the introduction of the Watch, and its symmetry to how the iPhone has changed. I think there will be plenty of people who will miss the point of the Watch (and smartwatches) on the basis that “the screen’s really small – how can you work on that?” Remember, much the same used to be said of the iPhone.
link to this extract

Fujitsu to sell its handset business – will there be more to follow? • Counterpoint Research

Jene Park:

»

Rumors are spreading that Japan’s Fujitsu has decided to sell its subsidiary operating the mobile phone business. The bidding process may start next month. Fujitsu already categorized its mobile phone business as non-core and spun-off the division into a subsidiary in February 2016. Fujitsu has now decided to sell-off the entire handset business.

In early 2000, there were about 11 Japanese companies involved in the handset sector, including Fujitsu. Japanese handset makers grew to almost 20% of the global handset market at its peak. The domestic market was dominated by these local brands. Japanese brands ruled the local market with more than 80% for a long time. Since 2009, however, Japanese makers began to struggle due to the rapid growth of Apple. Japanese makers slowly exited the global market and their share declined. This happened even in the Japanese market to around 30%.

Japan handset market share by OEM origin
 
Macroeconomic factors of the Japanese economy seem to have influenced the Japanese mobile phone companies to some extent. The aging of the Japanese society progressed rapidly and Japanese companies showed a tendency to avoid big changes. Japanese makers focused more on feature phones, despite the fact that smart phones were already attracting attention. And this tendency of Japanese companies continued until 2016…

…Analysis of the handset market share in the Japanese market [now] clearly shows that the market is changing. In 2016, Fujitsu’s market share in Japan was about 7%, ranking fourth, and Fujitsu’s main products were targeting the >$400 price band. Customers belonging to the >$400 price band will likely be absorbed by Apple, Sony and Samsung.

«

I suspect the struggle since 2009 has been more to do with the rapid rise of Android than Apple. Though who can forget Wired’s fabulously wrong insight from February 2009 about “Why the Japanese hate the iPhone“? (Since updated with a note about, well, OK, some Japanese might like it, but not many. OK, quite a few. Oh, really, nearly half of all buyers?
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

Is Amazon really helping people build bombs – or something less dangerous? Photo by ollyj 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 13 links for you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Anatomy of a moral panic • Idle Words

Maciej Cieglowski on the “Amazon helps you build bombs story”:

»

just how many people does Channel 4 imagine are buying bombs online? For a recommendations algorithm to be suggesting shrapnel to sulfur shoppers implies that thousands or tens of thousands of people are putting these items together in their shopping cart. So where are all these black powder bombers? And why on earth would an aspiring bomber use an online shopping cart tied to their real identity?

A more responsible report would have clarified that black powder, a low-velocity explosive, is not a favored material for bomb making. Other combinations are just as easy to make, and pack a bigger punch.

The bomb that blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma City, for example, was a mixture of agricultural fertilizer and racing fuel. Terrorists behind the recent London bombings have favored a homemade explosive called TATP that can be easily synthesized from acetone, a ubiquitous industrial solvent.

Those bombers who do use black powder find it easier to just scrape it out of commercially available fireworks, which is how the Boston Marathon bomber obtained the explosives for his device. The only people carefully milling the stuff from scratch, after buying it online in an easily traceable way, are harmless musket owners and rocket nerds who will now face an additional level of hassle.

The shoddiness of this story has not prevented it from spreading like a weed to other media outlets, accumulating errors as it goes.

The New York Times omits the bogus shrapnel claim, but falsely describes thermite as “two powders that explode when mixed together in the right proportions and then ignited.” (Thermite does not detonate.)

«

And more where those came from. I have one issue: he thinks bad reporting comes from the desire to get clicks. It’s been around a lot, lot longer than the internet. But like all of his articles, this one has killer blows. (Thanks John Naughton for the link.)
link to this extract

Diversification (aka how to survive a crash) • AVC

Fred Wilson is pretty sure a crash in cryptocoin is inevitable:

»

I have advocated many times on this blog that people should have some percentage of their net worth in crypto. I have suggested as much as 10% or even 20% for people who are young or who are true believers. I continue to believe that and advocate for that.

But we don’t have that much of our net worth in crypto. We probably have around 5% between direct holdings and indirect holdings through USV and other crypto funds. I think that’s a prudent number for a portfolio like ours.

I know a lot of people who are true believers in crypto and have made fortunes in it. They are “all in” on crypto and have much of their net worth (all in some cases) invested in this sector. I worry about them and this post is aimed at them and others like them. It is fine to be a true believer and being all in on crypto has made them a lot of money. But preservation of capital is about diversification and I think and hope that they will take some money off the table, pay the taxes, and invest it elsewhere.

«

Bet you didn’t know how little of his holdings are in cryptocoin.
link to this extract

CCleaner malware outbreak is much worse than it first appeared • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

Because the CCleaner backdoor was active for 31 days, the total number of infected computers is “likely at least in the order of hundreds,” researchers from Avast, the antivirus company that acquired CCleaner in July, said in their own analysis published Thursday.

From September 12 to September 16, the highly advanced second stage was reserved for computers inside 20 companies or Web properties, including Cisco, Microsoft, Gmail, VMware, Akamai, Sony, and Samsung. The 20 computers that installed the payload were from eight of those targeted organizations, Avast said, without identifying which ones. Again, because the data covers only a small fraction of the time the backdoor was active, both Avast and Talos believe the true number of targets and victims was much bigger.

The second stage appears to use a completely different control network. The complex code is heavily obfuscated and uses anti-debugging and anti-emulation tricks to conceal its inner workings. Craig Williams, a senior technology leader and global outreach manager at Talos, said the code contains a “fileless” third stage that’s injected into computer memory without ever being written to disk, a feature that further makes analysis difficult. Researchers are in the process of reverse engineering the payload to understand precisely what it does on infected networks…

…The group behind the attack remains unknown. Talos was able to confirm an observation, first made by AV provider Kaspersky Lab, that some of the code in the CCleaner backdoor overlaps with a backdoor used by a hacking group known both as APT 17 and Group 72. Researchers have tied this group to people in China.

«

This is a hell of a thing.
link to this extract

EU buried its own $400,000 study showing unauthorized downloads have almost no effect on sales • Techdirt

Glyn Moody:

»

The 304-page document (pdf), made available on the netzpolitik.org site, contains all the details of the questions that were put to a total of 30,000 people from Germany, France, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the UK, their answers, and exhaustive analysis. The summary reveals the key results:

»

In 2014, on average 51% of the adults and 72% of the minors in the EU have illegally downloaded or streamed any form of creative content, with higher piracy rates in Poland and Spain than in the other four countries of this study. In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements. That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect. An exception is the displacement of recent top films. The results show a displacement rate of 40% which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally.

«

That is, there is zero evidence that unauthorized downloads harmed sales of music, books and games. Indeed, for games, there was evidence that such downloads boosted sales…

«

So it clearly shows that there is an effect on films, and there might be one for all the others (though not games). High prices were essentially to blame: where prices aren’t high, piracy recedes.
link to this extract

App that paid users to exercise owes nearly $1m for not paying users to exercise • Gizmodo

Rhett Jones:

»

In the capitalistic nightmare we live in, everything has to be a transaction. So, when Pact launched its fitness app that let you make money for working out—or else pay a fee for failing to do so—it seemed to be the perfect motivational tool. There was just one problem: The company apparently wasn’t that great at paying up, and was it too good at collecting fees.

On Thursday, the FTC announced that it has settled its complaint against the makers of Pact for failing to live up to their agreement with users. A $1.5m judgment will be partially suspended based on Pact’s apparent lack of funds, the FTC writes, but Pact will be required to pay out $948,788 to customers who were wronged by the company.

«

link to this extract

Google experiment tests top 5 browsers, finds Safari riddled with security bugs • BleepingComputer

Catalin Cimpanu:

»

The Project Zero team at Google has created a new tool for testing browser DOM engines and has unleashed it on today’s top five browsers, finding most bugs in Apple’s Safari.

The tool — named Domato — is a fuzzer, a security testing toolkit that feeds a software application with random data and analyzes the output for abnormalities.

Google engineer Ivan Fratric created Domato with the goal of fuzzing DOM engines, the browser components that read HTML code and organize it into the DOM (Document Object Model), which is then “painted” and displayed inside the browser window that human users view on their screens.

Google: DOM engine bugs should be a priority
Fratric says he focused on DOM engines because it’s “a rare case that a vendor will publish a security update that doesn’t contain fixes for at least several DOM engine bugs,” showing how prevalent they are today.

He also argues that while Flash bugs provide a cross-browser attack surface, once Flash reaches end-of-life (in 2020), attackers will focus their efforts on DOM engines, the browser’s biggest attack surface.

With Domato he wants to help browser vendors test and patch as many security bugs in their respective DOM engines before it is too late.

«

After 100m tests: 17 bugs in Safari. Edge found 6, IE and Firefox 4, Chrome has 2. “Riddled” might be overstating it. Google has given a copy of Domato to all the browser makers.

Ah, but has also open-sourced Domato. So every hacker can have a go and find the bugs. In the matter of security, Project Zero gives and it takes away.
link to this extract

Fitbit Ionic review: A great fitness tracker, a mediocre smartwatch • Macworld

Michael Simon:

»

Fitbit has leveraged its Pebble acquisition to create a brand new foundation for apps, and you’ll get a handful of them at launch: Weather from AccuWeather, Pandora, Starbucks, and Strava, along with a few stock Fitbit apps, including Exercise, Coach, Wallet, Timers, Alarms, Relax, Settings, and Today.

That’s a pretty weak selection to start with, but it might be easier to overlook if any of the non-fitness-related apps did something useful. Aside from Timers and Alarms, which do what you’d expect, Ionic’s apps are frustratingly limited, with most offering single-page and in some cases, single-use functionality. For example, the Starbucks app is nothing more than a place to store your card. And the Wallet app (the logical place for your Starbucks card) merely offers instructions for how to make payments (by holding the left button).

That’s right, Ionic includes an NFC chip for on-the-go payments. The means yet another payment service (Fitbit Pay, natch), and it works like any other: pull up a card and hold the screen up to a checkout reader. But you can’t add cards without the phone app and Ionic only stores one at a time. It’s clearly designed for athletes who want to leave their wallet behind when on a run rather than someone who wants to abandon cash and credit cards.

You might have noticed a few key smartwatch apps that are missing from Ionic: messages, phone, mail, and maps. As it stands, you can’t do any of those things on the watch. Notifications will alert you to incoming messages and calls, but you’ll need your phone handy if you want to interact with them. It’s a very hands-off affair that might have been novel with the first Pebble way back when, but today’s smartwatches are much more than mere conduits for our phones.

«

The Ionic seems to have lots to recommend it on the fitness front, and the music storage and NFC elements. It’s the compatibility with smartphones which creates the problem for Fitbit. That, and Apple selling products with better “smartwatch” functionality above and below its $300 price.
link to this extract

2017 US music sales are up 17%; streaming is up 48% • Recode

Peter Kafka:

»

More than 30 million people are now paying for a subscription streaming service in the U.S., which pushed streaming revenue up 48%, to $2.5 billion, in the first half of the year. Streaming now accounts for 62% of the U.S. music business.

And that’s pushing the overall music business back up again, after a fall that started in 1999, with the ascent of Napster, and didn’t stop until a couple years ago. Retail sales were up 17%, to $4bn, and wholesale shipments were up 14.6%, to $2.7bn.

Meanwhile, iTunes-style digital download sales continue to fall. They’re down 24 percent. Because why buy songs for a dollar when you can legally stream (almost) anything you want for a price that ranges between zero and $10 a month?

One surprise: Physical sales — things you buy that you can hold in your hand, like in the olden days — are nearly flat, down just 1%. That’s partly because of you hipsters and your facial hair, who pushed vinyl sales up 3%. But it’s also because some of you still like CDs, and maybe you’re always going to like CDs. Those sales were only down 3%.

«

What I find puzzling is that anyone is paying for downloads, given that Spotify has a free tier. Except, I guess, the instances where albums are only released for download. But that can’t be a substantial number.
link to this extract

The LTE Apple Watch is a glimpse into the not-so-distant future • BirchTree

Matt Birchler got an Apple Watch Series 3, and has a mobile connection set up, and he’s really happy with making calls and sending messages while not having to carry a phone on his run:

»

AirPods also behaved swimmingly on this workout. I’d never paired them to this Apple Watch before, but since they’re both linked to my iCloud account, the watch was able to see the AirPods and connect to them without a fuss. Interacting with AirPods is nice and easy too. I have mine set up where tapping the left will play/pause and tapping the right will skip to the next track. watchOS 4 helpfully displays your media controls on screen and in the Workout app, but being able to just tap my ear to move onto the next song is a little easier to do mid-run.

And like I said, because my Apple Watch has an LTE connection, I was also able to place and receive messages during this workout, I could check when the Packers were playing the next day, and even place a call (just to see if I could). The only smartphone thing I really missed was the camera. It was a night run, so I would not have taken any pictures anyway, but I do sometimes shoot quick photos while out in the world on a workout, and I would hate too miss a cool moment because =I simply didn’t have a camera with me. God help me, I think I want a camera on the next Apple Watch!

As any Android fan will tell you, Apple is not the first to this game. There have been LTE Android Wear watches for a couple years now, so I’m just an Apple fanboy who has never left the Apple bubble and thinks Apple does everything first even though they’re years behind. So left me make it clear, I have a drawer full of Android phones that I use regularly, and I have had the uh, pleasure of using an LTE-equipped Android Wear watch and I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt the experience was far more clunky and less enjoyable than my experience last night. My short time doing similar things with all Android devices made me think “maybe we will always need smartphones for everything, because this sucks” while the watchOS experience left me literally giddy with excitement for the future.

«

(That point about being able to specify what taps on each AirPod will do might have passed you by, but it’s new in iOS 11.)

The integration of the Watch and AirPods is remarkable, and this is definitely what Apple sees as a tempting possibility – but is it limited only to those who want to exercise?
link to this extract

It’s official – B&N has thrown in the towel on the Nook • The Digital Reader

Nate Hoffelder:

»

People want to shop online, and they want to buy ebooks, and for a brief while it looked like B&N could give customers what they want. But that illusion was slowly stripped away as Nook entered its death spiral following the 2012 holiday season.

Nook revenues have since declined to the point that Kindle Unlimited is far larger (and the new version of B&N’s website is so painful to use that online sales are also declining). While one estimate said  Nook ebooks sales exceeded Kobo ebook sales in 2016, you shouldn’t bet money on things staying that way.

Instead, the more likely scenario is that B&N is going to strike a deal with Kobo to let the latter either run Nook or simply take over Nook customer accounts. In either case, B&N will got from being a potential player to being little more than one of Kobo’s retail partners – think Indigo, only in the US.

B&N probably winces every time they are compared to Indigo, but that Canadian bookseller is the perfect example of what Barnes & Noble could have done.

«

Yes, like you I thought “Nook is still going in any shape or form?”
link to this extract

Push for gender equality in tech? Some men say it’s gone too far • NYTimes.com

Nellie Bowles:

»

as the nation’s technology capital — long identified as one of the more hostile work environments for women — reels from a series of high-profile sexual harassment and discrimination scandals, these conversations are gaining broader traction.

One of those who said there had been a change is James Altizer, an engineer at the chip maker Nvidia. Mr. Altizer, 52, said he had realized a few years ago that feminists in Silicon Valley had formed a cabal whose goal was to subjugate men. At the time, he said, he was one of the few with that view.

Now Mr. Altizer said he was less alone. “There’s quite a few people going through that in Silicon Valley right now,” he said. “It’s exploding. It’s mostly young men, younger than me.”

Mr. Altizer said that a gathering he hosts in person and online to discuss men’s issues had grown by a few dozen members this year to more than 200, that the private Facebook pages he frequents on men’s rights were gaining new members and that a radical subculture calling for total male separatism was emerging.

“It’s a witch hunt,” he said in a phone interview, contending men are being fired by “dangerous” human resources departments. “I’m sitting in a soundproof booth right now because I’m afraid someone will hear me. When you’re discussing gender issues, it’s almost religious, the response. It’s almost zealotry.”

«

I for one totally support their right to colonise the moon or Mars. In future years, they’ll make a great case study in how cults emerge.
link to this extract

Zuckerberg nixes new Facebook share class after shareholder lawsuit

Tom Hals:

»

Facebook chairman Mark Zuckerberg abandoned plans on Friday to create a new class of company stock with no voting power, which was meant to be a way for Zuckerberg to retain control over the company he founded while fulfilling a pledge to give away his wealth.

Zuckerberg on Friday said that he could meet the charity pledge and maintain voting control of Facebook without the change. His decision followed a shareholder lawsuit opposed to the creation of a new class of stock.

Zuckerberg said in a post on Facebook that the company’s stock had performed well enough that he could fund his philanthropy by selling stock for at least 20 years and still retain voting control of the company. In December 2015 Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician, pledged to give away 99% of their Facebook shares to charity.

«

Odd how it took him until the lawsuit to figure out that 20 years thing.
link to this extract

I helped create Facebook’s ad machine. Here’s how I’d fix it • WIRED

Antonio García Martínez:

»

modern digital advertisers constantly tweak and experiment with ads. When big brands requested the ability to post lots of different creative, it posed a real problem. Brands wanted to show a dozen different ad variations every day, but they didn’t want to pollute their page (where all posts necessarily appear). ‘Dark posts’ were a way to shoehorn that advertiser requirement into the Pages system, allowing brands to create as many special, unseen posts as they’d like, which would only be seen by targeted audiences in their Feeds, and not to random passers-by on their page. The unfortunate term ‘dark post’ assumed a sinister air this past election, as it was assumed that these shady foreign elements, or just certain presidential candidates, were showing very different messages to different people, engaging in a cynical and hypocritical politicking.

Zuckerberg’s proposes, shockingly, a solution that involves total transparency…

As big a step as the transparency feature sounds, I don’t see how Facebook can launch it until these Pages product concerns are worked out. The Facebook Pages team product managers must be sitting right now in a conference room frantically scrawling new design ideas on a whiteboard. I’d bet anything that the Ads Quality and Pages teams are prioritizing that as you read this. This is one scandal Facebook isn’t going to weasel its way out of with generic appeals to “openness” and “community”…

…If democracy is to survive Facebook, that company must realize the outsized role it now plays as both the public forum where our strident democratic drama unfolds, and as the vehicle for those who aspire to control that drama’s course. Facebook, welcome to the big leagues.

«

link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Now feasible through a neat bit of hacking. Photo by rcousine 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.

Apparently Google marked yesterday’s Overspill as “junk” for some people because it contained a “bad link”. We don’t know which that was. We only do well-behaved links. But please go and retrieve it and mark it “Not Spam”.

A selection of 12 links for you. No bad links! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How I hacked hundreds of companies through their helpdesk • FreeCodeCamp

Inti De Ceukelaire:

»

Months ago I discovered a flaw hackers can use to access a company’s internal communications. The flaw only takes a couple of clicks to potentially access intranets, social media accounts such as Twitter, and most commonly Yammer and Slack teams.

The bug is still out there. It isn’t something that can be fixed right away. Over the past few months, I contacted dozens of companies and affected vendors as part of their bug bounty programs in order to get their setup fixed. Due to the number of affected companies it was not possible to contact everyone. On the recommendation of some of my hacker heroes, and with approval of the affected vendors, I’m publishing this blog so everyone affected can act immediately. Introducing what I’ve been calling Ticket Trick.

«

Haven’t seen this replicated. However, pretty much every amateur hacker on the planet will presently be trying to get into every company’s Slack systems as of, oh, about ten days ago when this was published.
link to this extract

“The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason” • Almost looks like work

Jason Cole:

»

Intriguing title, no? These are the first eleven words of Neal Stephenson’s novel Seveneves, which set up the remaining 600 pages as an extended treatise on the future of humanity as it copes with certain annihilation. I thoroughly recommend it, as long as you can deal with hundreds of pages of orbital mechanics. In this post I will numerically explore this post-lunar age, to verify for myself if it would be as deadly as described.

In the novel, one day the moon breaks up into 7 roughly equal-sized pieces. These pieces continue peacefully orbiting the Earth for a while, and eventually two pieces collide. This collision causes a piece to fragment, making future collisions more likely. The process repeats, at what Stephenson says is an exponential rate, until the Earth is under near-constant bombardment from meteorites, wiping out (nearly) all life on Earth.

How likely is this? Let’s simulate the process numerically.

«

Now I want to read the book.
link to this extract

Instagram uses ‘I will rape you’ post as Facebook ad in latest algorithm mishap • The Guardian

Sam Levin:

»

Instagram used a user’s image which included the text “I will rape you before I kill you, you filthy whore!” to advertise its service on Facebook, the latest example of social media algorithms boosting offensive content.

Guardian reporter Olivia Solon recently discovered that Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, made an advertisement out of a photo she had posted of a violent threat she received in an email, which said “Olivia, you fucking bitch!!!!!!!” and “I Will Rape You”.

Instagram selected the screenshot, which she posted nearly a year ago, to advertise the photo-sharing platform to Solon’s sister this week, with the message, “See Olivia Solon’s photo and posts from friends on Instagram”.

«

Yeeaah. You can see what happened. It got loads of “engagement” – as in, people responding. So that means it must be good, right? Unfortunate for IG that it did it now, and did it with a Guardian reporter.

link to this extract

Islamic State backers find ephemeral platform in Instagram • Associated Press

Lori Hinnant:

»

Researchers say Islamic State supporters have found an ephemeral platform to share propaganda: Using Instagram’s “stories” feature, which causes posts to disappear in 24 hours.

With successive military defeats in Iraq and Syria, many of its recruits dead or on the run and its Twitter and Facebook accounts being shut down, the group’s propaganda drive is increasingly homemade. But a recent analysis found the networks of people inspired by the group remain strong elsewhere.

The software analysis identified more than 50,000 accounts linked to Islamic State supporters posting Instagram stories, according to Andrea Stroppa, who is part of the software research group called Ghost Data. Of those 50,000, just over 10,000 are described as strongly-linked to IS — they follow core IS accounts and are followed back, and about 30% of their posted content is about the group.

“They send a message that they know will disappear but they know who the audience is. They are using these stories because they know it is a safe channel to share information,” said Stroppa, who is also affiliated with the World Economic Forum.

There is no sign that the majority of the posts are from Islamic State’s central propaganda units — rather, they tend to be personal snapshots with little production value, like a clip of the IS trademark black flag, or a bloody photo showing what happens to “traitors.”

«

50,000 is still quite a lot, given that those actually fighting will be one-tenth of that or less.
link to this extract

What we’re doing about political ads • Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook

The Zuck is back from holiday, and he’s getting to work:

»

Here are 9 things we’ll be working on over the next few months:

1. We are actively working with the US government on its ongoing investigations into Russian interference. We have been investigating this for many months, and for a while we had found no evidence of fake accounts linked to Russia running ads. When we recently uncovered this activity, we provided that information to the special counsel. We also briefed Congress — and this morning I directed our team to provide the ads we’ve found to Congress as well. As a general rule, we are limited in what we can discuss publicly about law enforcement investigations, so we may not always be able to share our findings publicly. But we support Congress in deciding how to best use this information to inform the public, and we expect the government to publish its findings when their investigation is complete.

2. We will continue our investigation into what happened on Facebook in this election. We may find more, and if we do, we will continue to work with the government. We are looking into foreign actors, including additional Russian groups and other former Soviet states, as well as organizations like the campaigns, to further our understanding of how they used our tools. These investigations will take some time, but we will continue our thorough review.

3. Going forward — and perhaps the most important step we’re taking — we’re going to make political advertising more transparent. When someone buys political ads on TV or other media, they’re required by law to disclose who paid for them. But you still don’t know if you’re seeing the same messages as everyone else. So we’re going to bring Facebook to an even higher standard of transparency. Not only will you have to disclose which page paid for an ad, but we will also make it so you can visit an advertiser’s page and see the ads they’re currently running to any audience on Facebook. We will roll this out over the coming months, and we will work with others to create a new standard for transparency in online political ads.

«

There’s more, but note that the transparency is completely unlike what Facebook argued in 2011. Moved fast, broke things, now trying to fix them.
link to this extract

Lying to machines: how Apple’s new “Do Not Disturb while driving” feature will shape your soul • Don’t Eat The Fruit

John Dyer:

»

I’d like to think that the “Do Not Call While Driving” feature will at least cause drivers to think about how much they use their phones in the car. But my prediction is that in the next few weeks, millions of people will begin doing the exact same thing that I, to my shame, did. It’ll start small with a “legitimate” purpose, but eventually it’ll snowball and people will just tap “I’m Not Driving” as unthinkingly as we all check the “I’ve Read the Terms and Conditions” box.

Unfortunately, this will come quite naturally to us, not because we’re liars, but because of the way computer user interfaces (UI) are designed. Over the past few decades of computer use, we’ve been presented with thousands of buttons that say “OK” and checkboxes that say “I’ve read …” This has taught us that interacting with computers and devices means tapping whatever button is in the way of what we want.

This probably wasn’t terribly significant when the stakes were low, and it might seem hyperbolic to call it “lying.” But when we bend the truth about reading the Terms and Conditions, there aren’t kids in the roads or oncoming vans full of people.

«

It starts with the little things, then it grows, and pretty soon you’re president.
link to this extract

Apple Watch Series 3’s “LTE problems” are actually an existing Wi-Fi bug • iMore

Serenity Caldwell:

»

Like your iPhone, your Apple Watch has a Wi-Fi antenna inside of it, which allows it to connect directly to Wi-Fi networks (or via your iPhone) rather than always using your cellular data.

Where the two devices differ is in how they can connect: The Apple Watch doesn’t have an Auto-Join Wi-Fi screen, or a place to select networks. Nor does it have an option to dictate or Scribble in passwords. In short: Your Apple Watch can’t connect to Wi-Fi unless your iPhone has first connected to it.

Essentially, when your iPhone connects to a Wi-Fi hotspot and enters in the password while you’re also connected to Apple Watch, your iPhone syncs that information over to your Watch.

Apple Watch can then access that information and connect to a network — even if you visit that location in the future with only your watch. That way, you can use all of your Apple Watch’s online capabilities in Wi-Fi areas (like Messages, Maps, and any third-party apps) whether you have a GPS + Cellular model or a Series 0 Apple Watch.

Sounds easy enough, right? Unfortunately, there are a few limitations.

«

It seems like it grabs onto open Wi-Fi networks (eg Starbucks) that you’ve previously joined, but can’t authenticate, and so gets stuck. Neil Cybart, though, points out that the people who had trouble with the LTE calling were using AT&T – and thinks there’s something going on there. We’ll have to see how things go in the UK.
link to this extract

Craig Federighi says 3D Touch app switcher gesture will return in future update to iOS 11 • Mac Rumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

Federighi, replying to an email from MacRumors reader Adam Zahn, said Apple had to “temporarily drop support” for the gesture due to an unidentified “technical constraint.”
Question from Zahn: Could we at least make the 3D Touch app switch gesture an option in iOS 11 so that I could retain the ability to switch apps that way instead of having to double tap the home button?

Response from Federighi: Hi Adam,

We regretfully had to temporarily drop support for this gesture due to a technical constraint. We will be bringing it back in an upcoming iOS 11.x update.

Thanks (and sorry for the inconvenience)!

– craig

On devices that support 3D Touch running iOS 9 or iOS 10, users can press deeply on the left side of the screen, drag to the right, and release to quickly access the App Switcher.

«

This is interesting; I thought that it had been removed because on an edge-to-edge screen (ie, the iPhone X) it would be too easy to trigger. Apparently not.
link to this extract

Food Environment Assessement Tool (FEAT)

»

The Food environment assessment tool (Feat) has been developed by CEDAR [Centre for Diet and Activity Research) and the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge. It allows for detailed exploration of the geography of food retail access across England.

Feat is underpinned by the latest scientific evidence about how food access in our neighbourhoods affects our dietary choices, body weight and health. It will allow you to map, measure and monitor access to food outlets at a neighbourhood level, including changes over time.

It is designed around the needs of professionals in public health, environmental health and planning roles, locally and nationally. Use it to:

• generate local evidence for use in the development of Obesity Strategies, Local and Neighbourhood Plans, JSNAs and Strategic Planning Documents.
• support planning decisions
• compare food access between neighbourhoods, and see where is changing fastest
• target interventions, and test the effectiveness of planning policies

«

Most of us though will just use it to see first, what they know about places near us, and second, which places eat a lot of chips. The map data is from OpenStreetMap.
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Toshiba reaches tentative deal to sell microchip unit • The New York Times

Jonathan Soble:

»

The Japanese company said the microchip unit would be sold for 2 trillion yen, or roughly $18bn. The structure of the deal is complicated, and Toshiba said it would retain partial control of the business. It was not clear on Wednesday how much would end up being owned by outside investors.

Those investors primarily include Bain Capital, the American buyout firm, and two organizations controlled by the Japanese government, the Innovation Network Corporation of Japan and the Development Bank of Japan.

While they were the only buyers identified by Toshiba on Wednesday, others, including Apple and the South Korean semiconductor company SK Hynix, are negotiating to potentially purchase smaller stakes, the person close to the deliberations said.

The business, Toshiba Memory Corporation, is an important manufacturer of flash memory chips, which are used in millions of smartphones and other digital devices.

Toshiba needs money from the sale to repair its tattered finances. A gaping hole in its balance sheet caused by bad bets on American nuclear power projects has threatened the future of the technology company, one of Japan’s biggest and most storied.

The deal’s more convoluted elements appeared to stem from Toshiba’s desire to retain a significant degree of control over the chip business.

One way that will happen is that Toshiba said it would join Bain and its partners in creating the special purpose company that will buy the unit. In effect, that means it will keep a portion of the unit for itself, though it did not say how much. Many analysts expect it to be a minority stake.

«

DRAM is so strategic now that nobody wants to cash out. Apple fronted $7bn to be in this and to win it: it needs chip prices to go down, or at least be predictable. Samsung makes its own chips – which puts it in a powerful position when there’s a world shortage of memory.

If you’re wondering why: consider that there used to be about 350m PCs sold, which would have around 8-16GB of RAM.

Now consider a world with 1.5bn smartphones sold, each having a minimum of 2GB of RAM. It’s an order of magnitude bigger. Those who saw that ramp coming are coining it – except Toshiba’s nuclear business screwed the rest of it.
link to this extract

Touchscreens in cockpits would improve airliner safety, research shows • WSJ

Andy Pasztor:

»

The findings, portions of which were to be made public Wednesday at an international avionics conference in St. Petersburg, Fla., are the culmination of a four-year study intended to help reduce pilot workload and devise eye-tracking technology to identify pilot mistakes. Dutch government researchers, engineers from French equipment maker Thales SA and a host of other international experts also are developing cutting-edge systems able to alert pilots if they become distracted, sleepy or stray from normal procedures.

Without such advances, “the crew is no longer able to manage all the information” today’s jetliners spew out, Eric Parelon, a senior Thales manager, told an international safety conference in Brussels earlier this year. To further improve safety and enhance pilot decision making, he said, various touch-screen variants are essential because “information has to be provided in a completely different way” than in the past.

Pilots from more than 60 carriers participated in extensive simulator sessions run by the Netherlands Aerospace Centre depicting airborne emergencies, unexpected changes in runway assignments and other stressful situations. Sometimes with only one or two swipes of cockpit displays, pilots were able to respond—even setting up complex instrument approaches for entirely new destinations—while maintaining situational awareness and reducing workload, according to Wilfred Rouwhorst, a senior Dutch researcher.

«

And this is even in turbulence. But probably won’t come in for a decade. Though younger pilots are apparently keen on it.
link to this extract

HTC messed up its Google deal • Bloomberg Gadfly

Tim Culpan:

»

The transfer [of about 2,000 HTC staff] to Google [for a $1.1bn payment] will reduce headcount by about 19%, according to Bloomberg Gadfly calculations. Those are probably among the most expensive people on the payroll; arguably they also add the most value. To be clear, HTC still has a solid team of engineers that works on its branded devices, such as its flagship U11 smartphone, which isn’t touched by the sale. “Powered by HTC” is the division primarily tasked with building products for non-HTC brand devices, such as the Google Pixel.

For HTC, the main point of this deal is to cut costs. It will do that with a 30% to 40% reduction in operating expenses, Shen said.

Unfortunately, based on financial results for the past six quarters, a 40% improvement in op-ex [operating expenditure] still isn’t enough to swing HTC to profit. Deeper cuts are needed. A 35% cut in the second quarter would have put the company in the black (barely) for that period, but revenue for the most recent two months indicate that this June quarter bounce was a fluke rather than a trend. HTC may well move in and out of profit, but there’s nothing to indicate this can be sustained.

«

If HTC management thinks it can still make money on smartphones, they’re deluded. The Vive is the only hope, but it’s going to be quite the tightrope walk. Google, meanwhile, has yet to show it can be a player in the smartphone world.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Cord cutting – abandoning cable subscriptions – is accelerating in the US. Photo by Jason Rosenberg on Flickr.

A selection of 11 links for you. Virtually. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

A week on the wrist: the Apple Watch Series 3 Edition • Hodinkee

Benjamin Clymer reviews mechanical watches; and now he’s reviewing the Apple Watch:

»

In the few days I’ve been using the Series 3 Edition as my only communication device, I’ve found myself checking Instagram less. Texting less. Dickin’ around on the web less. I use the watch to text or make phone calls when I need to – and that’s it. My definition of “need” has changed completely – and frankly I don’t miss having my phone in my pocket at all.

Is it more cumbersome to respond to emails and texts? Sure, but Siri in the new watchOS 4 is so dialed-in that mistakes seldom happen in dictation, and there is a nice “scribble” function where you can essentially write what you want to say with your finger – it’s definitely good enough for quick responses – and, as I’ve strangely discovered over the last few days, life goes on if emails go unanswered for an hour or two…

…I think this Friday, as the Apple Watch Series 3 begins to deliver all over the world, we are about to begin a new chapter for smartwatches and perhaps for watches in general. Will Swiss watchmaking do as Nokia did with the iPhone and downplay the threat until it’s far too late? Or will Swiss watchmaking thrive due to the very reason that it stands for hand-craft, longevity, and multi-generational appeal – the very antithesis of most digital products? The answer is likely neither one nor the other. The watch industry doesn’t move as a whole – some resist, some accept. Now the question becomes where each brand will stand as the dust settles on what is very likely a new era for the watch world, all ushered in by the Apple Watch Series 3.

«

link to this extract

Apple acknowledges cellular connectivity problem in new Watch • WSJ

Tripp Mickle:

»

Apple acknowledged problems with cellular connectivity in its newest smartwatch, raising questions about the device’s most significant feature days before it goes on sale in stores in the U.S. and other countries.

In a statement Wednesday, Apple said the problem connecting to cellular networks occurs when the Apple Watch Series 3—the first watch from Apple to feature an LTE chip for cellular service—joins “unauthenticated Wi-Fi wireless networks without connectivity.” Apple said it is “investigating a fix for a future software release.”

Apple issued the statement after reviewers from The Wall Street Journal and the Verge encountered problems at times making calls, connecting with the Siri virtual assistant and maintaining a cellular-network connection. The Journal ran into issues across multiple wireless carriers…

…The new Apple Watch with LTE goes on sale in stores Friday for $399, and been available for preorder online since Sept. 15. The promise it can operate independently of an iPhone or Wi-Fi has raised sales expectations…

…What is holding the watch back from mass-market appeal is that it is still too focused on health and fitness, said Jitesh Ubrani, a smartwatch analyst with IDC. Apple needs developers to make different kinds of apps so the watch can become a “need to have” device. Cellular capability “gives them a chance,” he said.

«

link to this extract

Turning off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in iOS 11’s Control Center doesn’t actually turn off Wi-Fi or Bluetooth • Motherboard

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

»

when you toggle Bluetooth and Wi-Fi off from the iPhone’s Control Center—the somewhat confusing menu that appears when you swipe up from the bottom of the phone—it actually doesn’t completely turn them off. While that might sound like a bug, that’s actually what Apple intended in the new operating system. But security researchers warn that users might not realize this and, as a consequence, could leave Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on without noticing.

“It is stupid,” Collin Mulliner, a security researcher who’s studied Bluetooth for years, told Motherboard in a Twitter chat. “It is not clear for the user.”

To be clear, and to be fair, this behavior is exactly what Apple wants. In its own documentation, the company says that “in iOS 11 and later, when you toggle the Wi-Fi or Bluetooth buttons in Control Center, your device will immediately disconnect from Wi-Fi and Bluetooth accessories. Both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth will continue to be available.” That is because Apple wants the iPhone to be able to continue using AirDrop, AirPlay, Apple Pencil, Apple Watch, Location Services, and other features, according to the documentation.

Motherboard tested this behavior on an iPhone with iOS 11 installed and verified that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi remain on in the settings after turning them off in the Control Center, as some users have started to notice.

«

OK, so let’s get all the iOS 11 bugs/features (this one’s intentional) out of the way early on.
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ARise is an AR puzzle-platformer for ARKit • UploadVR

Jamie Feltham:

»

Unlike VR, AR’s rise in relevance hasn’t largely been fuelled by gaming (save for the enormous success of Pokemon Go). That’s why we’re so interested to see the first games for Apple’s new ARKit. Arise is one of those games.

This is the latest project from Climax Studios, the developer of VR games like Lola and the Giant, Balloon Chair Death Match and even some Google Tango apps. It looks like a clever evolution of puzzle-platformer games like Echochrome using the new positional tracking featured in ARKit. You help clear a path for a tiny knight that journeys through virtual levels that appear in the real world through your phone. Check out the first trailer below.

«

As a side note, I think that UploadVR will find itself writing many more AR stories in the near future.
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Fake Russian ads could have very real implications for Facebook • AdExchanger

Allison Schiff:

»

“One of the radical things Facebook has done is to take the interfaces and dashboards that only people in ad tech ops used to look at and make them available to anyone with a credit card,” [professor of media design at The New Schoo, and Facebook critic David] Carroll said. “And now we’ve seen the effects of putting industrial-strength ad targeting tools into the hands of ordinary people and even foreign state adversaries.”

But that’s not to say Facebook puts out the welcome mat for anything and everything. Facebook’s ad quality team, which is now headed by ad tech vet Rob Leathern, is constantly vetting content in an never-ending game of cat and mouse.

“That’s why you’re not seeing nudity or iPad fill-out-this poll scams like you used to, and why people under 21 or people in Saudi Arabia don’t see ads for alcohol,” said former Facebook exec and “Chaos Monkeys” author Antonio Garcia Martinez, who led the team that built Facebook’s ad exchange and also helmed the ad quality crew in 2012, right around the time of the second Obama election.

“This content is tagged using machine learning and goes to a special workflow,” Garcia Martinez said. “There’s no reason Facebook couldn’t do this with political content as well.”

Facebook has long demurred that it’s a platform rather than a publisher. But current events are pushing Facebook to take more responsibility for the news and ad content it distributes, as well as to be more proactive in finding out who’s making money off the content or paying for ads.

«

Martinez’s intervention is notable.
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Yet another report says the rate of TV cord cutting is worse than anybody thought • Techdirt

Karl Bode:

»

we’re slowly but surely reaching the point where the rise of the streaming video revolution can’t be denied, with data indicating it’s worse than anybody thought. While the pay TV sector lost another 1 million subscribers last quarter, those totals don’t factor in those that bought a new home or rented a new apartment, but chose not to sign up for cable. Many of these folks are dubbed “cord nevers,” having never bought into the value proposition of paying $130 more per month for a bloated bundle of largely-unwatched reality TV channels from a company that treats paying customers with disdain.

Meanwhile, a new report by eMarketer this week indicates that the pace of customer defections is notably higher than most previous estimates. The firm notes that it was forced to reduce its estimate for US TV ad spending due to faster-than-expected growth in cord-cutting:

»

“eMarketer expected a slowdown this year in TV ad sales, after 2016 benefited from both the Olympics and US presidential election,” said Monica Peart, eMarketer’s senior forecasting director. “However, traditional TV advertising is slowing even more than expected, as viewers switch their time and attention to the growing list of live streaming and over-the-top [OTT] platforms.”

«

All told, the firm predicts that by the end of this year, there will be 22.2 million consumers over the age of eighteen that have cut the cord, up 33.2% since 2016. And while there’s still a whopping 196.3 million US adults that subscribe to traditional pay TV (cable, satellite, or telco), that tally is down 2.4% over 2016 levels, with the defection rate only accelerating. The cause? A strange idea known as competition and, by proxy, lower prices…

«

US TV probably hasn’t had to realise how awful it is for years. The growth of rivals – free (YouTube) and paid-for (Netflix et al) – is exposing its structural weaknesses, and particularly the intrusiveness of its advertising.
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Still a long road ahead in fight against digital extremism • Demos

Alex Krasodomski-Jones critiques The Policy Exchange’s new report “The New Netwar“:

»

the increasing difficulty of finding Islamist material on major platforms, and the growing importance of alternative platforms like Telegram (referred to by Fisher as a “multiplatform zeitgeist”) could be hailed as a success on the part of Twitter. Indeed, the recommendations make this explicit, calling for the big companies to drive the extremist content off their platforms.

The long and short of it is that moderating platforms of this scale is extraordinarily difficult. It becomes even more difficult when dealing with the content described. A simple example of this emerges from the report itself: one survey question asked respondents to ‘draw the line’ on extreme content – does it, for instance, contain murder, assault, or even just hateful speech without incitement to violence? The report recommends the Commission for Countering Extremism draw up a definition of extremism based on promoting violence or hatred.

But what about the thousands of images of tractors and shopping centres circulated by Islamic State and shown in the research supporting the recommendations? Only a small percentage of content circulated by these extremist groups is actually violent, focusing instead on utopian arguments of state-building and victimhood narratives. What do we do about this stuff? The language of extremism is nuanced, ever-changing and far from universally violent. This is not only a challenge to law and law enforcement, but a challenge to designing technology.

«

link to this extract

Equifax just sent hack victims to a fake phishing site • Mashable

Jack Morse:

»

Following a data breach of this size, it’s not unusual to see websites pop up that mimic official help pages. Typically, the goal of these phishing sites is to trick worried consumers into handing over their personal information. In this case, Equifax created a very real site — https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com — where people can enter their last name along with the last six digits of their social security number to see if they were affected by the hack. 

Unsurprisingly, someone cloned that site and hosted that copy at a very similar URL: https://securityequifax2017.com. The two sites, one real and one fake, look the same to the casual observer. In fact, they are so easily confused that Equifax itself apparently can’t tell the difference. 

If you look closely at the above pictured Twitter exchange, you’ll see that someone operating the Equifax account named Tim linked to the fake website. The timestamp on the tweet is from September 19, and the tweet was still up as of the morning of September 20 (it was deleted during the course of writing this story). 

«

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Google to buy part of phone maker HTC • WSJ

Dana Mattioli, Jack Nicas and Dan Strumpf:

»

Alphabet Inc.’s Google is set to buy part of struggling Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC, according to people familiar with the situation, part of the search giant’s latest effort to crack the handset market.

The acquisition, which could be announced as soon as Wednesday afternoon, is for HTC’s mobile-phone original design operations, according to the people. Google chose HTC, a longtime Google supplier, as its contract manufacturer for the high-end Pixel phone that Google launched last year, partly as a challenge to Apple Inc.

HTC, based in Taiwan, suspended trading of its shares Wednesday pending an announcement. HTC’s market capitalization is about US$1.9bn. The value or size of the division Google is set to buy is unclear…

With the acquisition, Google may get deeper access to HTC’s research and development, as well as sales and distribution channels, analysts said. That could help Google as it seeks to make a bigger splash in the increasingly competitive smartphone market as it prepares to launch an updated version of the Pixel this fall.

The deal shows “Google is very serious about building its own hardware,” said Jan Dawson, chief analyst at Jackdaw Research.

Taiwanese media previously reported the planned deal.

Google’s interest in the HTC unit extends beyond the Pixel, one of the people said, as the assets could also come into play for future Google products. HTC’s virtual-reality headset, called Vive, is one of the top sellers in the nascent category. It isn’t clear if any Google acquisition would include Vive.

«

Compared to the amount Google lost on the Motorola acquisition and disposal (I reckon a couple of billion), HTC is chickenfeed.
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Here is the Pixel 2 in “Kinda Blue,” White, and Black – starting at $649 • Droid Life

“Kellen:

»

From what we can tell, it’ll arrive in three colorways and match the Pixel 2 XL in terms of storage, while sticking to prices very similar to last year’s original smaller Pixel.

The Pixel 2 will arrive in Kinda Blue, Just Black, and Clearly White. It’ll be sold with 64GB and 128GB of storage and priced at $649 and $749, respectively. Like the Pixel 2 XL, financing will be available for each storage option. The 64GB Pixel 2 will cost $27.04/mo over 24 months and the 128GB model will cost $31/21/mo.

«

The XL will cost $840 (64GB) and $949 (128GB). These are made by LG, rather than HTC. Any arguments that this is a Veblen good?
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Uk PC prices have risen 30% in a year since the EC referendum • The Register

Paul Kunert:

»

The average trade price of computers in Britain shot up by almost a third in the past year since the EU referendum, though a weakened pound might not tell the whole story.

According to distributor data collated by channel analyst CONTEXT, average sales prices (ASPs) for desktops, notebooks and workstations reached £480 in July and August, up 30% on the same months in the prior year.

Component shortages in areas including memory, a shift to higher-spec machines and fewer sales to lower-margin retailers were also behind the hike, Marie-Christine Pygott, CONTEXT senior analyst, told The Reg.

“But it looks like currency issues had the biggest impact,” she said. The average price of PCs sold by distributors in the Eurozone went up 12% year-on-year during the period in question.

«

Note that this is trade price. But PCs are now getting squeezed by the demands of smartphones for memory and components.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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.

It’s not an iPhone. But do they share a pricing strategy? Photo by cocoate.com 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

BlueBorne Bluetooth vulnerability ‘exposes almost every connected device’ • Betanews

Mark Wycislik-Wilson:

»

The only requirement for a successful attack is that Bluetooth is enabled — something most people have enabled at least on their phone, and often on their computers and laptops. Armis Labs describes BlueBorne as being “out of the traditional kill chain” as it is incredibly hard to detect.

The company says:

»

BlueBorne is an attack vector by which hackers can leverage Bluetooth connections to penetrate and take complete control over targeted devices. BlueBorne affects ordinary computers, mobile phones, and the expanding realm of IoT devices. The attack does not require the targeted device to be paired to the attacker’s device, or even to be set on discoverable mode. Armis Labs has identified eight zero-day vulnerabilities so far, which indicate the existence and potential of the attack vector. Armis believes many more vulnerabilities await discovery in the various platforms using Bluetooth. These vulnerabilities are fully operational, and can be successfully exploited, as demonstrated in our research. The BlueBorne attack vector can be used to conduct a large range of offenses, including remote code execution as well as Man-in-The-Middle attacks.

«

Armis Labs has already communicated with Microsoft, Google, Linux, Apple and Samsung, and patches are being issued in most cases — with the possible exception of Samsung which failed to respond to the notification.

«

Mitigated in Windows 10 as of July 11; fixed in iOS 10; pushed in an Android update on August 7, included in the September security update for Android. Still leaves a lot of Android devices potentially vulnerable.
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How Apple’s pricey new iPhone X tests economic theory • WSJ

Josh Zumbrum and Tripp Mickle:

»

Apple and Samsung have found themselves here partly by necessity. Smartphone makers are running out of new customers. Data from IHS Markit estimates there are just under 100 smartphones per 100 people in the U.S. and about 92 smartphones per 100 people in Europe. (Many people own more than one phone.) By 2020, there will be about 84 smartphones per 100 people globally, IHS projects.

To generate more revenue the big smartphone makers increasingly need to push on price.

“They can create a super-premium model and perception of super-premium that pushes those buyer types into the stratosphere,” said Steven Haines, chief executive of Sequent Learning Networks, which advises companies on product management. “This is classic product management.”

Such segmentation is normal in mature industries, said Mr. Haines, comparing smartphones to what happened with the auto industry, where luxury cars with high prices became a status symbol as car ownership became commonplace.

«

Zumbrum and Mickle are trying to argue that the iPhone [X] is a Veblen good – where demand rises as the price goes up. Neil Cybart takes this argument to pieces in his latest newsletter (sign up on aboveavalon.com). He points out that iPhone starting prices now range from $349 (iPhone SE) to $999 (iPhone X):

»

Apple didn’t establish the preceding price range in order to push specific “luxury” models, like iPhone X or iPhone 8 Plus. It’s not that the higher-end models are priced in such a way as to stoke demand and interest simply because of a higher price. Instead, iPhone pricing is based on capability [such as camera, processor speed, screen size].

«

Handbags or Vertu phones (which recently went bust) aren’t priced on their capability. Vertu phones were arguably less capable than far cheaper devices.
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Why Canadian cell phone bills are among the most expensive on the planet • National Post

Tristin Hopper:

»

The more likely reason for the high prices is that the people setting these prices don’t have any reason not to.

As Michael Geist put it in 2013, cell phone carriers raise prices “because they can.”

They’re not a cartel, which would be illegal. Rather, Canadian telecoms are in a situation in which there’s no real incentive to undercut each other. The three companies know they are better off when Canadians are paying among the world’s highest rates for cell phone usage.

As industry watchers have noted, these companies have a strange habit of raising their prices in tandem. In January 2016, Bell hiked its monthly plans by $5 per month. Within a week, Telus and Rogers had independently followed suit.

These are not the normal actions of an industry. When Air Canada hikes prices, WestJet and NewLeaf don’t follow suit within a matter of hours. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: By constantly trying to grab market share from each other, the competing airlines force prices to a bare minimum.

But Canadian cell phone providers don’t have to worry about a WestJet or a NewLeaf. The awesome costs and regulatory barriers of starting a competing Canadian wireless company are so prohibitive that telecoms can rest assured that they won’t suddenly be challenged by an ambitious startup.

«

Weird that Canada’s regulators haven’t thought of providing some sort of incentive to encourage another carrier to move in, perhaps simply by forcing the sharing of infrastructure. This is similar to the problem in the UK where there’s no competitor to BT for landlines because of the cost of infrastructure.
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All that’s needed to hack Gmail and rob bitcoin: a name and a phone number • Forbes

Thomas Fox-Brewster:

»

Hackers have proven just how urgently a gaping flaw in the global telecoms network, affecting what’s known as Signalling System No. 7 (SS7), needs to be fixed. In a video demonstration, shown to Forbes ahead of publication today, benevolent hackers from Positive Technologies were able to take control of a Coinbase bitcoin wallet and start pilfering funds via the SS7 flaws.

SS7 weaknesses, despite fixes being available for years, remain open. They allow anyone with access to that part of the telecoms backbone to send and receive messages to and from cellphones, with various attacks allowing silent interception of SMS texts, calls and location data. (Typically, the SS7 network is used by telecoms companies to talk with one another, normally for shifting customers between operators when roaming).

In their attack, the Positive researchers first went to Gmail, using Google’s service to find an email account with just a phone number. Once the email account was identified, the hackers initiated a password reset process, asking one-time authorization codes to be sent to the victim’s phone. By exploiting SS7 weaknesses they were able to intercept text messages containing those codes, allowing them to choose a new password and take control of the Gmail account. They could then simply head to the Coinbase website and do another password reset using the email they’d compromised.

«

SS7 has weaknesses, though it’s difficult to access; Positive got access “for research to help mobile operators make their networks more secure”. For hackers, slightly harder – but far from impossible.
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The iPhone 8: a worthy refinement before the next generation • The New York Times

Farhad Manjoo:

»

So here’s my conclusion, after nearly a week testing the 8 and 8 Plus: The 8s feel like a swan song — or, to put it another way, they represent Apple’s platonic ideal of that first iPhone, an ultimate refinement before eternal retirement.

«

This is the perfect review. The platonic ideal of iPhone (2007-September 2017) reviews. OK, the actual piece is somewhat longer, but this says it beautifully.
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watchOS 4: the BirchTree review • BirchTree

Matt Birchler:

»

I will say up front that this is not the same type of giant update like we got last year. While I have to acknowledge that it’s unreasonable to expect massive changes every year, watchOS is still a young platform and has a lot of room to grow. This contrast sums up much of my feelings towards watchOS 4. This is a satisfying update that improves on the previous version in almost every way, but it doesn’t move the needle as much as some, including myself, would like.

And it’s not just a matter of quantity over quality. watchOS 3 sported a huge list of improvements and I would argue 99% of them were objective improvements over what came before. watchOS 4 has a shorter list of new features, but I don’t think Apple’s success rate is as high as it was last year. They didn’t “blow it” on any specific feature, but there are definitely some questionable choices made this year that made me grumble more than a few times.

Of course you should update your Apple Watch if you own one, it’s free and makes the Apple Watch a better product than it was yesterday. But set your expectations properly because this release will make your Apple Watch better, but it will not change your life.

«

This is a thorough review; might not make a lot of sense if you don’t yet own a Watch. The Workout app rewrite looks like a particular improvement – the targets on the old one were too small for fat fingers. The change to the Dock (which now shows what you’ve previously used, not a set of apps you choose) seems retrograde – though Birchler has his own idea for why they changed it: because people weren’t using it.
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Technology companies should publish political advertising files online • Sunlight Foundation

Alex Howard and John Wonderlich:

»

The United States of America has now fallen off the online disclosure cliff that Sunlight has warned of for years: the lack of transparency for political ad spending and related activity online created a significant vulnerability in our public accountability laws. While more transparency was rendered to TV stations, “dark ads” have flourished online. Last week’s reporting confirms that Facebook was used by Russians used to influence the 2016 election. The full extent of that interference is still not understood publicly, even now.

As we told Buzzfeed, highly targeted online ads now present a significant vulnerability for liberal democracies, especially since they are not covered by the comparatively strong legal oversight and public visibility that traditional radio, TV, and print ads are.

The Federal Communications Commission approved rules in 2016 that required TV stations and radio stations to publish their political advertising files online. This has added a digital twist to a decades-old requirement that political ad spending be publicly disclosed, in near real time, while technology companies, newly relevant as political ad vendors, continue to get a pass altogether from analogous public protections.

As the share of political advertising spent by campaigns on digital platforms grows, and more public time is spent on social networks, disclosure’s importance increases.

«

There’s no basis to disagree: people spend more time on social media than reading newspapers or watching TV news.
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Toys ‘R’ Us seeks bankruptcy, crushed by debt and online rivals • Bloomberg

Dawn McCarty and Daniela Wei:

»

The bankruptcy filing is the latest blow to a brick-and-mortar retail industry reeling from store closures, sluggish mall traffic and the gravitational pull of Amazon.com Inc., which has revolutionized the way people consume with affordable online offerings and global home delivery service.

A dozen-plus major retailers have filed for creditor protection this year, including Payless Inc., Gymboree Corp. and Perfumania Holdings Inc., all of which are using the Chapter 11 process to close underperforming stores and expand online operations. 

The shakeout is also reverberating across American malls and shopping districts. More than 10% of U.S. retail space, or nearly 1 billion square feet, may need to be closed, converted to other uses or renegotiated for lower rent in coming years, according to data provided to Bloomberg by CoStar Group.

The troubles at Toys “R” Us come as retailers and suppliers ramp up for the all-important holiday shopping season. In an emailed statement, Mattel Inc. said, “As one of our most important retail partners, we are committed to supporting Toys ‘R’ Us and its management team as they work through this process, particularly as we approach the holiday season.”

The bankruptcy filing by the company also may have global implications, especially for Chinese toy manufacturers. Some 38% of the company’s revenue came from overseas markets in the latest fiscal year. “It’s a loss for the long-term benefit of the entire industry,” said Lun Leung, chairman of Hong Kong-based Lung Cheong Group, a toy supplier for Hasbro Inc. He said Toys “R” Us accounted for less than 5% of the group’s sales.

The company listed debt and assets of more than $1 billion each in Chapter 11 documents submitted Monday at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Richmond, Virginia. Prior to filing, the chain secured more than $3 billion in financing from lenders including a JPMorgan Chase & Co.-led bank syndicate and certain existing lenders to fund operations while it restructures, according to a company statement. The funding is subject to court approval.

«

Gradually, and then suddenly. The debt mattered – the leveraged buyout was in 2005, when dumping a ton of debt on a retail store looked reasonable. (Or not unreasonable.) Ten years later, it turns out to have been a calamitous decision. Financial analysts will be looking at the gearing (debt ratio) of lots of retailers from here.
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Samsung’s Bixby button is structural bloatware • The Verge

Vlad Savov:

»

the most common reason for pressing the Bixby button to date has been an accidental click when people have wanted to turn the phone’s volume down (because the volume rocker is just above). The moment the Galaxy S8 was announced, prospective users were already asking if they could re-purpose the button to activate Google Assistant, but Samsung has resolutely and stringently denied them that possibility. The company’s present climbdown to just disable the button rather than allow us to use it otherwise is embarrassingly user-hostile.

Isn’t Bixby pushy enough even without the button? You can’t set up a Galaxy smartphone without being informed about Bixby and urged to sign up for the requisite Samsung account. Swipe left from the home screen and a sort of champagne-bubble animation kicks in as Bixby starts to wake… I usually swipe frantically back to the right to avoid further prompts. Most onerous of all is Samsung forcing its Bixby camera-assisting features on me every time I open the camera app. I gave in after just half a day trying to shoot photos for our Galaxy S8 review. So well done, Samsung, you forced your horrible piece of self-serving bloat on me, and in the process you extracted some additional personal information. Are you feeling proud of bullying your users into this?

I know that Google works on similar principles to those underpinning Samsung’s Bixby: make a new data-hungry feature a core part of the software and tirelessly nudge people into using it until they do. But the Google difference is that its services are actually superior and useful…

«

As he says, it’s indicative of a company which – despite charging premium prices for the phones with this built in – is at heart not user-centric. It’s product-centric.

Savov’s coda sums it up:

»

there’s not a human on Earth (that I know of, anyway) who is honestly lauding Bixby as a unique advantage. Most are just asking for it to go away, and for the newly vacant button to be customizable to our own preferences. Is that too much to ask when you spend hundreds of dollars on a phone?

«

What chance Bixby goes away in a year or two?
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A Kinect sensor. Soon you can put one in your pocket. Photo by bm.iphone 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 11 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The iPhone X’s notch is basically a Kinect • The Verge

Paul Miller:

»

Apple’s iPhone X provides a nice little illustration of how sensor and processing technology has evolved in the past decade. In June 2009, Microsoft unveiled this:

In September 2017, Apple put all that tech in this:

Well, minus the tilt motor.

Microsoft’s original Kinect hardware was powered by a little-known Israeli company called PrimeSense. PrimeSense pioneered the technology of projecting a grid of infrared dots onto a scene, then detecting them with an IR camera and acsertaining depth information through a special processing chip.

«

Terrific observation. (And Apple did buy Primesense, in 2013.)
link to this extract

Samsung finally lets us disable the Bixby button • SamMobile

Adnan F:

»

The dedicated Bixby button on the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ didn’t really serve any meaningful purpose until last month when Bixby Voice was rolled out globally. Before the global release of Bixby Voice, the dedicated button could only be used for Bixby Home.

Most users didn’t feel the need for Bixby Home to have a dedicated key. Third-party apps were developed that allowed them to remap the button to launch any app of their choice. Samsung was quick to clamp down on those apps for reasons that our editor in chief explained in great detail.

I bemoaned recently that the Bixby button was driving me nuts and many of our readers agreed with me. I don’t like how it gets in the way and that you can’t avoid accidental presses of the button. However, it’s time for us to rejoice.

Samsung is finally allowing us to disable the Bixby button, to an extent.

«

Hooray? Except further down the story..

»

The implementation appears to be random right now. Some of our devices have got this toggle after the update. Some haven’t.

«

link to this extract

Apple’s removal of the App Store from iTunes screws over users, publishers, and developers • BirchTree

Matt Birchler:

»

Take a website like MacStories. This is a great website for discovering new iOS apps, and this week will especially be big since iOS 11 is coming out and tons of your favorite apps will be updated to take advantage of new features.

Here’s the thing though, you really shouldn’t read MacStories on a desktop anymore. Why? Well, because if you are on your MacBook Pro and read an article about an app you think looks great and want to buy, you have no course of action to actually get that app. Your 3 options are:

• Remember the app name and search the App Store on your iOS device for that app (and hope the App Store search brings up the right one)
• Remember the URL for the MacStories page, load that on your iOS device, and tap the link from the article on that device
• Save the App Store link to a read later service like Pocket and open the link on your iPhone or iPad

None of those options are great for the users or MacStories. Each option is worse than it was before, where you could tap/click an App Store link from any device and install the app from there. In this new reality, users have to do more work to get new apps if they don’t discover them on their iOS device, and the most likely solution (searching the App Store manually) cuts out the affiliate link MacStories used in their article.

«

Um.. AirDrop the link to yourself? (Drag the URL to the AirDrop page on Finder. On the phone you get the option to save it to iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Slack, and any other URL-capable app) Message it to yourself? But yes, things are broken at present.
link to this extract

‘We’ve been breached’: inside the Equifax hack • WSJ

AnnaMaria Andriotis, Michael Rapoport and Robert McMillan:

»

Although investigators are still grappling with who might be behind the Equifax break-in, the scale of the breach, sophistication of the hack and nature of the stolen data all point toward a state-sponsored actor, says a person familiar with the investigation.

In March, the Justice Department charged two officers with Russia’s Federal Security Service, alleging the hack was part of an information-collection operation. A Russian official said the charges were part of an attempt to raise “the theme of ‘Russian hackers’ in the domestic political squabbles in the U.S.”

“Credit bureaus are the tracks that the [credit] trains run on, and we should make sure those roads and tracks are sound if we’re going to run a whole economy over them,” said Louis Hyman, a consumer-credit historian at Cornell University…

…One large firm that links credit-card networks, merchants and lenders saw a spike in fraudulent activity from late May to early June, according to people familiar with the matter.

The firm was getting phone calls from people who said they had an account there and provided all four pieces of personal information typically needed for identity verification: name, address, date of birth and Social Security number. Equifax has said the same type of information was exposed.

Callers then asked the large firm to change the bank-deposit number for what they claimed was their business, people familiar with the matter say. The callers said the change was needed because they had changed banks.

The firm usually gets about a dozen such calls per year, but it was suddenly getting a dozen per week, these people say.

«

So likely a lot of people have been hit already. The state-sponsored idea is novel.
link to this extract

Hackers compromised free CCleaner software, Avast’s Piriform says • Reuters

Joseph Menn:

»

More than 2 million people downloaded tainted versions of Piriform’s program, which then directed the computers to get instructions from servers under the hacker’s control, Piriform said.

Piriform said it worked with law enforcement and cut off communication to the servers before any malicious commands were detected. This came after security researchers at Cisco Systems Inc (CSCO.O) and Morphisec Ltd alerted Piriform’s parent Avast Software of the hack last week.

The malicious program was slipped into legitimate software called CCleaner, which cleans up junk programs and advertising cookies to speed up devices.

CCleaner is the main product made by London’s Piriform, which was bought in July by Prague-based Avast, one of the world’s largest computer security vendors. At the time of the acquisition, the company said 130 million people used CCleaner…

…In a blog post, Piriform confirmed that two programs released in August were compromised. It advised users of CCleaner v5.33.6162 and CCleaner Cloud v1.07.3191 to download new versions. A spokeswoman said that 2.27 million users had downloaded the August version of CCleaner while only 5,000 users had installed the compromised version of CCleaner Cloud.

«

link to this extract

After crisis and collapse, Jack Heuer’s time has come again • FT

Simon de Burton:

»

Mr Heuer [as in Tag Heuer, the watches] has already experienced one calamity in the watch industry. In 1958, at the age of 26, he had gone to work for Heuer, the company founded in 1860 by his great-grandfather, Edouard. Twenty years later, the “quartz crisis”, when Japanese companies’ cheap quartz-powered watches destroyed historical Swiss brands, brought a 22% drop in Swiss watch exports and coincided with a 20% fall in the value of the Swiss franc against the dollar. In 1982, the financial situation defeated him: Heuer-Leonidas was sold to the first of a succession of owners, before being taken over by TAG. As he writes in his autobiography: “I was five months away from my 50th birthday and ruined.”

Now, almost four years after officially retiring as TAG Heuer’s honorary chairman, a role he had held since 2001, he will step aside for good at the end of this year. So how does he compare the difficulties faced by today’s watch industry to those he battled 35 years ago?

“I think the big difference this time is that there is both a technical challenge from the smartwatch [comparable to the arrival of quartz] and a mental slowdown with the end consumer — people have become used to being able to see the precise time on their mobile phones and perhaps feel they no longer have a need for a traditional watch.

“To me, that is a more disturbing factor than the competition from the smartwatch. In fact, I think it could be a potential killer for the industry because, unlike the smartwatch, the mobile phone does nothing to help the worldwide development of wristwatch sales — and I don’t think that danger has yet been fully addressed.”

«

link to this extract

iPhone X: the demo gods are cheeky • Monday Note

Jean-Louis Gassée:

»

Over time, I came to see how random the correlation between a demo’s success and the market’s reaction to the product is. Two good examples are the well-received Mac Portable demo where I assembled the machine on stage or, even better, the BeBox demo performed at the Agenda conference by my colleague Steve Horowitz that got a standing ovation. Market success didn’t follow.

On the other hand, we have Steve Jobs’ exquisitely edited and rehearsed Apple 2.0 demos. The best example is the January 2007 iPhone intro; a thrilling demo that marked the beginning of a new era, of more than one billion iPhones sold. The video is here, a resonant classic, the master at the top of his expository powers.

This brings us back to the aptly named iPhone X, ten years later. As it turns out, Face ID didn’t fail Federighi. A stagehand had unwittingly and repeatedly triggered Face ID when arranging the device before the presentation. As designed, a security algorithm kicked in when the camera had seen too much of the stagehand’s unrecognized face and thus it sent Federighi to the security code entry screen. Both disconcerting and reassuring.

I haven’t had the opportunity to form a Third Impression of the new iPhone X, that is putting my money on the table, getting the product and using it long enough to reach a stable gut-level feel, the one that triggers the ultimate marketing weapon: Word of Mouth.

«

It is very interesting to listen to John Gruber’s podcast with Craig Federighi, Apple’s software chief, who has been using the iPhone X for some time, and who says you get completely used to face-unlocking being automatic.

And I don’t want to seem fulsome, but Federighi’s recovery at the iPhone X onstage demo – when it didn’t unlock after what had probably been a summer when it unlocked every time for him – was one of the all-time presentation recoveries. Imagine how unnerving it would be if something that had always worked suddenly didn’t. Yet he had the presence of mind to not go with the passcode, but switch to the backup. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen him wrongfooted, and he handled it with aplomb.
link to this extract

There isn’t a long waiting list for the iPhone 8 yet • Business Insider

Kif Leswing:

»

If you were to log on to Apple.com on Monday and order the newest iPhone, you wouldn’t have to wait very long until you received your new device.

In fact, some iPhone 8 models will still arrive by Friday, the first day it hits retail stores, even if it was ordered several days after pre-orders started.

This suggests there will be no shortage of iPhone 8 models this fall and that the iPhone 8 will be easier to find than previous new iPhone models. 

“The pre-order lead times are playing out as we expected with similar to the lead times as the smaller size iPhone’s over the past three years, but shorter lead times than the larger Plus sizes,” Loup Ventures founder Gene Munster wrote in a research post on Monday.

«

Anyone would think they had an entirely different phone coming out soon.
link to this extract

Google offers to auction off shopping ad spaces to rivals • WSJ

Natalia Drozdiak:

»

Google has proposed overhauling its shopping search results so that rivals can bid for space to display products for sale, as part of the tech giant’s efforts to comply with the European Union’s antitrust order, according to people familiar with the matter.

Under the proposal, Google would bid against rivals to display products for sale in the space above its general search results, according to the people. Google would set itself a price cap that it wouldn’t be able to bid above, but competitors could do so if they wished.

Rival shopping sites have hit back, saying an auction-based remedy wouldn’t assuage the EU regulator’s demands that the company treat its competitors’ offerings and its own shopping service equally.

The European Commission ordered Google to make the changes to its search results by late September as part of its decision to fine Google a record €2.42bn ($2.89bn) in June for discriminating against rival comparison-shopping sites in its search ranking…

…“While we have yet to see details of Google’s proposal, it seems unlikely that Google could have devised an auction-based remedy that does not fall far short of the equal treatment standard stipulated by the [commission’s] decision,” said Shivaun Raff, chief executive of Foundem.co.uk, a comparison-shopping website that was the first company to file a formal antitrust complaint about Google to the EU.

The auction-based remedy could force Google’s competitors to bid away the majority of their profits to Google, Ms. Raff said. Google could set a high price cap for its own bids, pushing the bids of competitors higher.

«

As the story points out, this is essentially the same failed proposal Google made a few years ago with the previous competition commissioner, and it’s just as absurd. Competitors want access to the free spot at the top of the organic results, which Google presently awards to its Shopping site in a sort of technological nepotism. Competitors like Foundem argue that there should be a clear algorithmic explanation of how that top spot is chosen, so everyone can compete fairly for it.

This will cause another round of complaints, and meanwhile the rivals are ground down further by Google’s monopoly.
link to this extract

How Baidu will win China’s AI race—and, maybe, the world’s • WIRED

In August, Jessi Hempel interviewed Qi Lu, who left Microsoft to become chief operating officer at Baidu, having seen Microsoft’s Cortana effort fall behind Amazon’s (to the surprise of many at Microsoft, and Google):

»

Hempel: don’t you think that Amazon’s handicap is on its back end, in that it can’t keep up on the technology side with Google and Microsoft?

Qi Lu: I worked on Cortana four and a half years ago. At the time we all were like, “Amazon, yeah, that technology is so far behind.” But one thing I learned is that in this race to AI, it’s actually more about having the right application scenarios and the right ecosystems. Google and Microsoft, technologically, were ahead of Amazon by a wide margin. But look at the AI race today. The Amazon Alexa ecosystem is far ahead of anybody else in the United States. It’s because they got the scenario right. They got the device right. Essentially, Alexa is an AI-first device.

Microsoft and Google made the same mistake. We focused on Cortana on the phone and PC, particularly the phone. The phone, in my view, is going to be, for the foreseeable future, a finger-first, mobile-first device. You need an AI-first device to solidify an emerging base of ecosystems.

It’s become so much clearer, living in China, what AI-first really means. It means you interact with the technology differently from the start. It has to be voice or image recognition, facial recognition, in the first interactions. You can use a screen or touch, but that’s secondary.

At Baidu [headquarters], it’s all face recognition-based. At the vending machine at Baidu, you can buy stuff with voice and a face. And we’re also working on a cafeteria project. Our goal is, when you go to a cafeteria, you walk away with food…

…JH: How does the US market for voice technology compare to the Chinese market?

QL: The home environment is very different. Because we’re talking about voice interactions. The acoustic environment, the pattern of noises, will be very different. Alexa, Echo, and Cortana are optimized for American homes. In my view, this only works in North America and maybe a portion of Europe. Essentially, the assumption is that you have spacious homes; you have several rooms. In China, that’s not the case at all. For our target, even for the young generation with high incomes, typically they have 60 square meters [645 square feet], sometimes 90 square meters [970 square feet].

We have better opportunities to globalize DuerOS, because guess what? A home in Japan, a home in India, or a home in Brazil, is a lot closer to a home in China than a home in North America.

«

link to this extract

Video autoplay policy changes • Google Developers

»

As you may have noticed, web browsers are moving towards stricter autoplay policies in order to improve the web experience for users, minimize the incentives to install extensions that block ads, and reduce data consumption on expensive and/or constrained networks.

With these new autoplay policies, the Chrome team aims to provide a greater control to users over content playing in their browser. Those will also benefit publishers who have legitimate autoplay use cases.

Chrome’s autoplay policies are simple:

• Muted autoplay is always allowed.
• Autoplay with sound is allowed if any of the following conditions are met:
– User has interacted with the site (click, tap, etc.)
– Media Engagement Index threshold is crossed (desktop only)
– Site has been installed using the “Add to Homescreen” flow (mobile only)
• Top frame can delegate autoplay permission to their iframes to allow autoplay with sound.

«

The link to “noticed” is to the Safari team’s noticed about how they’re making video policies even tighter. Not only are people annoyed by autoplay videos; they’re also the source of a huge amount of ad fraud (autoplaying videos with sound off with display positions far off your screen). Chrome ought to be ahead of Safari on this, since it’s in Google’s interest if there isn’t ad fraud – isn’t it?

link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Do you want AI to be outing people without their consent? Photo by the_gain_card 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. Handle with care. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook’s heading toward a bruising run-in with the Russia probe • Talking Points Memo

Josh Marshall:

»

I believe what we’re seeing here is a convergence of two separate but highly charged news streams and political moments. On the one hand, you have the Russia probe, with all that is tied to that investigation. On another, you have the rising public backlash against Big Tech, the various threats it arguably poses and its outsized power in the American economy and American public life. A couple weeks ago, I wrote that after working with Google in various capacities for more than a decade I’d observed that Google is, institutionally, so accustomed to its customers actually being its products that when it gets into lines of business where its customers are really customers it really doesn’t know how to deal with them. There’s something comparable with Facebook.

Facebook is so accustomed to treating its ‘internal policies’ as though they were something like laws that they appear to have a sort of blind spot that prevents them from seeing how ridiculous their resistance sounds. To use the cliche, it feels like a real shark jumping moment. As someone recently observed, Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ are crafted to create the appearance of civic concerns for privacy, free speech, and other similar concerns. But they’re actually just a business model. Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ amount to a kind of Stepford Wives version of civic liberalism and speech and privacy rights, the outward form of the things preserved while the innards have been gutted and replaced by something entirely different, an aggressive and totalizing business model which in many ways turns these norms and values on their heads. More to the point, most people have the experience of Facebook’s ‘internal policies’ being meaningless in terms of protecting their speech or privacy or whatever as soon as they bump up against Facebook’s business model.

«

link to this extract

Mueller investigation into Facebook ads may be a big deal • NY Mag

Benjamin Hart:

»

The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Facebook had turned over much more information to Special Counsel Robert Mueller about Russian-backed advertisements during the 2016 election than the company had shared with Congress:

»

The information Facebook shared with Mr. Mueller included copies of the ads and details about the accounts that bought them and the targeting criteria they used, the people familiar with the matter said. Facebook policy dictates that it would only turn over “the stored contents of any account,” including messages and location information, in response to a search warrant, some of them said.

«

CNN confirmed on Saturday that Mueller had indeed obtained the information with the help of a warrant.

Legal experts said that the news could signal a potentially explosive new phase in Mueller’s investigation. In a tweetstorm, Yale Law School associate dean Asha Rangappa said that to obtain the warrant, Mueller would have had to believe that a crime was committed – it is illegal for foreign people or entities to make contributions connected to American elections – and that the offense would need to be connected to “specific accounts” on Facebook.

Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti also focused on the warrant in a series of tweets, arguing that its presence meant that Mueller was “close to charging specific foreign people with a crime,” and that if Trump associates were part of the planning behind it, they could face serious charges as well.

«

A senior person who I know at Facebook said “that was quite a week”. There might be some more coming.
link to this extract

The AI “Gaydar” study and the real dangers of big data • The New Yorker

Alan Burdick on the reaction to the study which took pictures from Tindr and applied AI to guess – well, calculate – whether they were gay or straight:

»

Historically speaking, the hair-trigger response to the study was understandable. Regardless of the accuracy of the method, past schemes to identify gay people have typically ended in cruel fashion—pogroms, imprisonment, conversion therapy. The fact is, though, that nowadays a computer model can probably already do a decent job of ascertaining your sexual orientation, even better than facial-recognition technology can, simply by scraping and analyzing the reams of data that marketing firms are continuously compiling about you. Do gay men buy more broccoli than straight men, or do they buy less of it? Do they rent bigger cars or smaller ones? Who knows? Somewhere, though, a bot is poring over your data points, grasping for ways to connect any two of them.

Therein lies the real worry. Last week, Equifax, the giant credit-reporting agency, disclosed that a security breach had exposed the personal data of more than a hundred and forty-three million Americans; company executives had been aware of the security flaw since late July but had failed to disclose it. (Three of them, however, had off-loaded some of their Equifax stock.) The collection and sale of consumer data and buying patterns has become a vast business of which consumers are largely unaware, although they actively contribute to it by clicking on ads, accepting cookies, and agreeing to be tracked. But each new security breach reveals again that the data-collection farms feel little obligation toward us; their customer is the data buyer, not the data source.

«

link to this extract

Google will delete Android backups after two months of no device usage • Android Police

Ryan Whitwam:

»

It turns out Google won’t keep your Android backups forever. In fact, it only gives you about two months.

Android has been able to sync some apps and data to a new phone since the Eclair days, but the system was vastly improved in Marshmallow. Now, you have backups for your Android devices in a Google Drive folder, and the process of restoring is somewhat reliable. It’s far from perfect, but it usually works… unless your backup is expired. As someone on Reddit recently reminded us, Google deletes unused backups after two months. All that app and settings data is gone, and there’s no way to save it even if you’re paying for Google Drive storage.

You can see which backups of yours, if any, are set to expire by checking the backup folder in Google Drive. Backups for any device inactive for more than two weeks should have an expiration date. This is only showing up for me in the Android app, which seems especially problematic since you might not be using an Android device at all.

«

To me this tells us more about how Google views (and what it knows about) device usage, and backup retrieval, than anything else. A backup that hasn’t been touched for two months is probably for a dead device – supplanted, forgotten, lost, stolen. I’d bet that the amount of data stored is minimal. Even though 2 billion devices can add up to a lot of stored data, Google has plenty of storage for it. Except that the Reddit user who raised this had been using a “temporary” iPhone.

Apple’s use of never-expiring backups becomes odd in this context. Do you really need that two-year-old backup?
link to this extract

Every major advertising group is blasting Apple for blocking cookies in the Safari browser • Adweek

Marty Swant:

»

In an open letter expected to be published this afternoon, the groups describe the new standards as “opaque and arbitrary,” warning that the changes could affect the “infrastructure of the modern internet,” which largely relies on consistent standards across websites. The groups say the feature also hurts user experience by making advertising more “generic and less timely and useful.”

“Apple’s unilateral and heavy-handed approach is bad for consumer choice and bad for the ad-supported online content and services consumers love,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by Adweek this morning. “Blocking cookies in this manner will drive a wedge between brands and their customers, and it will make advertising more generic and less timely and useful. Put simply, machine-driven cookie choices do not represent user choice; they represent browser-manufacturer choice.”

Of course, the digital advertising world has a lot to lose if hyper-targeting becomes more diluted. According to an eMarketer report released in March, digital ad spending in the US is expected to reach $83bn in 2017, up nearly 16% from last year.

«

Apple’s response as given to John Gruber and others:

»

“Apple believes that people have a right to privacy — Safari was the first browser to block third party cookies by default and Intelligent Tracking Prevention is a more advanced method for protecting user privacy.

Ad tracking technology has become so pervasive that it is possible for ad tracking companies to recreate the majority of a person’s web browsing history. This information is collected without permission and is used for ad re-targeting, which is how ads follow people around the Internet. The new Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature detects and eliminates cookies and other data used for this cross-site tracking, which means it helps keep a person’s browsing private. The feature does not block ads or interfere with legitimate tracking on the sites that people actually click on and visit. Cookies for sites that you interact with function as designed, and ads placed by web publishers will appear normally.”

«

They thought adblocking on iOS would end the world too. Hasn’t, so far.
link to this extract

Interview: Apple’s Craig Federighi answers some burning questions about Face ID • TechCrunch

Matthew Panzarino:

»

One anecdotal thing: If you lift your phone and swipe up immediately, there’s a good chance that the Face ID system will have performed its authentication fast enough to have unlocked your device by the time you finish your swipe. That’s how fast it is.

But the speed isn’t the only question. Sunglasses, for instance, are fairly commonly worn outdoors. Federighi had mentioned in an email to a user that “most” sunglasses would work fine.…

…Face ID requires that it be able to see your eyes, nose and mouth. This means there are scenarios where it just won’t work.

“If you’re a surgeon or someone who wears a garment that covers your face, it’s not going to work,” says Federighi. “But if you’re wearing a helmet or scarf, it works quite well.”

This means that Face ID is not going to be a viable option for people who wear a mask for work or wear a niqab, for instance. They would need to use a passcode. Federighi notes that this limitation is similar to Touch ID, which simply didn’t work if you wore gloves or had wet fingers.

Another common question is about what kind of angles and distances you can be at in relation to your iPhone to get it to unlock.

“It’s quite similar to the ranges you’d be at if you put your phone in front-facing camera mode [to take a picture],” says Federighi. Once your space from eyes to mouth come into view that would be the matching range — it can work at fairly extreme angles — if it’s down low because your phone is in your lap it can unlock it as long as it can see those features. Basically, If you’re using your phone across a natural series of angles it can unlock it.”

«

The question all becomes one of “what does ‘look’ at your phone mean?” From the demos I’ve seen it’s not a fixed stare. It’s a lot more casual than that.
link to this extract

Changes in the new iTunes • Apple Support

»

The new iTunes [on desktop; version 12.7] focuses on music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, and audiobooks. Apps for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch are now exclusively available in the new App Store for iOS. And the new App Store makes it easy to get, update, and redownload apps—all without a Mac or PC.

You’ll find these changes in the new iTunes:
• Apps: Looking for your past iOS app downloads? Learn how to redownload apps on your iOS device.

• iTunes U: Collections of iTunes U content appear in the Podcasts section of iTunes. 

• Internet Radio: Your Internet Radio stations appear in your music library’s sidebar. Click Edit in the sidebar to show or hide Internet Radio.

• Ringtones: iOS 11 supports redownloading ringtones directly to your iOS device, without the need to use iTunes on your Mac or PC.

•Books on Windows: Books on iTunes for Windows are managed in iBooks for iOS. Learn how to redownload books on an iOS device.

«

It’s been a long run, iTunes – 16 years of syncing with Apple’s top portable devices! – but it’s finally time to cut the cord.
link to this extract

Equifax hired a music major as chief security officer and she has just retired • MarketWatch

Brett Arends:

»

When Congress hauls in Equifax CEO Richard Smith to grill him, it can start by asking why he put someone with degrees in music in charge of the company’s data security.

And then they might also ask him if anyone at the company has been involved in efforts to cover up [former chief security officer] Susan Mauldin’s lack of educational qualifications since the data breach became public.

It would be fascinating to hear Smith try to explain both of those extraordinary items.

If those events don’t put the final nails in his professional coffin, accountability in the U.S. is officially dead. And late Friday Equifax said both Mauldin and the company’s chief information officer have retired effective immediately [in an announcement which didn’t name either].

Equifax “Chief Security Officer” Susan Mauldin has a bachelor’s degree and a master of fine arts degree in music composition from the University of Georgia. Her LinkedIn professional profile lists no education related to technology or security. Late last week, her LinkedIn page was made private and her last name replaced with “M.”

This is the person who was in charge of keeping your personal and financial data safe — and whose apparent failings have put 143 million of us at risk from identity theft and fraud. It was revealed this week that the massive data breach came due to a software vulnerability that was known about, and should have been patched, months earlier.

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Arends allows, fairly, that Mauldin’s music training might have equipped her for computer security. There just isn’t anything in her LI profile that would lead you to conclude she’s best-suited for the job. (Then again, there’s no responsibility to curate your LI profile to show such detail.) It would be good to have some more detail about Mauldin’s experience before this.

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Experts say the use of private email by Trump’s Voter Fraud Commission isn’t legal • ProPublica

Jessica Huseman:

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President Donald Trump’s voter fraud commission came under fire earlier this month when a lawsuit and media reports revealed that the commissioners were using private emails to conduct public business. Commission co-chair Kris Kobach confirmed this week that most of them continue to do so.

Experts say the commission’s email practices do not appear to comport with federal law. “The statute here is clear,” said Jason R. Baron, a lawyer at Drinker Biddle and former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration.

Essentially, Baron said, the commissioners have three options: 1. They can use a government email address; 2. They can use a private email address but copy every message to a government account; or 3. They can use a private email address and forward each message to a government account within 20 days. According to Baron, those are the requirements of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which the commission must comply with under its charter.

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Private emails are also at risk of hacking, too.
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Sign language interpreter used gibberish, warned of bears, monsters during Hurricane Irma update | AL.com

Leada Gore:

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Officials in Manatee County, Florida are under fire after an interpreter for the deaf warned about pizza and monsters during an emergency briefing related to Hurricane Irma.

The interpreter, Marshall Greene, a lifeguard for the county, has a brother who is deaf, according to the DailyMoth, a video news site that provides information via American Sign Language. Greene was used as the interpreter for a Sept. 8 press conference regarding the incoming storm and possible evacuations.

Members of the deaf community said Greene mostly signed gibberish, referencing “pizza,” “monsters,” and using the phrase “help you at that time to use bear big,” during the event. Other information signed to viewers was incomplete, experts said.

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One always suspects this about the sign language interpreters. Never expects it to be true. (Apparently the interpreter had said previously he didn’t feel confident about doing this.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified