Is it a helicopter? Is it a rifle? You might be able to fool an AI on this topic. Photo by Defence Images on Flickr.

This is the last Overspill of the year. It will return on Monday January 15, 2018.

Charity time: ahead of Christmas, I’m encouraging readers to make a donation to charity; a different one each day.
Today’s is:
Shelter, the UK charity for the homeless. It’s a difficult time to be homeless.
(If you’re not in the UK, and want to donate to a charity nearer home, please search on “homeless charity [your country].)

• Thursday’s charity was Wikipedia.
• Wednesday’s charity/ies was/were:
– UK readers: The National Deaf Children’s Society
– US readers: American Society for Deaf Children
– Australian readers: Deaf Children Australia
(In other countries try a search on “deaf children [your country]”.)

• Tuesday’s charity was The Internet Archive, which preserves web content that might otherwise be lost (or conveniently scrubbed). It’s in the middle of a $6m funding drive, and is presently at $3.6m. (The average donation is $41.)

• Monday’s charity was BookTrust: give £10 and a child in social care will receive books for Christmas.)
Please donate as you see fit.

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.

A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The work of art in the age of algorithmic reproduction • Medium

Thomas McMullan:

»

Anna Ridler’s Fall of the House of Usher unspools, rooms and bodies spreading half-seen across the frames of this 12-minute film like gossamer. A woman appears to walk down a hallway, then melts into a moonlit sky. A face appears in the dark, contorts into shapes. The animation is based on a 1929 film version of Edgar Allen Poe’s story, but its inky and strange visuals are the result of something altogether more modern: machine learning.

Each moment of Ridler’s film has been generated by artificial intelligence. The artist took stills from the first four minutes of the 1929 movie, then drew them with ink on paper. These versions were then used to train a generative adversarial network (GAN), teaching it what sort of picture should follow on from another. The GAN uses this information to create its own procession of stills, based around a pair of networks that work in competition with each other — one as a generator, one as a discriminator, evaluating the work of the former like an algorithmic critic.

‘Fall of the House of Usher,’ by Anna Ridler. Photo: Anna Ridler

The result is an AI-generated animation based on drawings that are based on the opening minutes of a 1929 film, which is based on an 1839 short story about a decaying lineage. It is a project that uses machine learning techniques not to showcase the technology, but as a way to engage with ideas of memory, the role of the creator, and the prospect of degeneration. It is primarily an artistic work, leveraging artificial intelligence as a medium in a way another artist may use acrylics or videotape.

«

I like this. On the other hand…

link to this extract

Researchers made Google’s image recognition AI mistake a rifle for a helicopter • WIRED

Louise Matsakis:

»

algorithms, unlike humans, are susceptible to a specific type of problem called an “adversarial example.” These are specially designed optical illusions that fool computers into doing things like mistake a picture of a panda for one of a gibbon. They can be images, sounds, or paragraphs of text. Think of them as hallucinations for algorithms.

While a panda-gibbon mix-up may seem low stakes, an adversarial example could thwart the AI system that controls a self-driving car, for instance, causing it to mistake a stop sign for a speed limit one. They’ve already been used to beat other kinds of algorithms, like spam filters.

Those adversarial examples are also much easier to create than was previously understood, according to research released Wednesday from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. And not just under controlled conditions; the team reliably fooled Google’s Cloud Vision API, a machine learning algorithm used in the real world today.

«

There’s that need for oversight, except if these things are classifying colossal numbers of objects how will we know when it makes a false negative? (The false positives should stick out a mile.)
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Security firm Keeper sues news reporter over vulnerability story • ZDNet

Zack Whittaker:

»

Keeper, a password manager software maker, has filed a lawsuit against a news reporter and its publication after a story was posted reporting a vulnerability disclosure.

Dan Goodin, security editor at Ars Technica, was named defendant in a suit filed Tuesday by Chicago-based Keeper Security, which accused Goodin of “false and misleading statements” about the company’s password manager.

Goodin’s story, posted December 15, cited Google security researcher Tavis Ormandy, who said in a vulnerability disclosure report he posted a day earlier that a security flaw in Keeper allowed “any website to steal any password” through the password manager’s browser extension.

Goodin was one of the first to cover news of the vulnerability disclosure. He wrote that the password manager was bundled in some versions of Windows 10. When Ormandy tested the bundled password manager, he found a password stealing bug that was nearly identical to one he previously discovered in 2016.

«

Wouldn’t expect this to get far given the reality that Goodin’s story was updated in a timely fashion.
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Facebook is getting rid of its fact-checking label and replacing it with this • Buzzfeed

Craig Silverman:

»

Facebook will stop flagging content that’s been declared false by external fact-checkers, and will instead surface fact-checks as related articles in the News Feed, the social media giant announced Wednesday.

The move represents the biggest outward facing change to Facebook’s year-old partnership with fact-checkers. The company said this new approach will be more effective in stopping the spread of misinformation, while also making it easier to scale its effort to other markets and content types.

Tessa Lyons, a News Feed product manager, told BuzzFeed News that surfacing fact-checks as related articles proved more effective in tests than applying a disputed flag to stories in the News Feed.

“Related articles outperformed disputed flags in giving people more information so they could understand what was true or false,” she said. “Hoaxes that had related article fact checks had fewer shares than those with the disputed flag.”

«

This is much better. Pity it’s about two or more years too late.
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Google might want to follow Apple’s lead and force developers to disclose loot box odds • AndroidAuthority

Williams Pelegrin:

»

In a move that I think Google should follow with the Play Store, Apple revised its App Store guidelines to force developers to disclose the odds of people receiving each type of item from them.

The updated guidelines are a tad vague, in that they do not say exactly where developers should display those odds, though they state that the odds need to be displayed before folks buy loot boxes:

Apps offering ‘loot boxes’ or other mechanisms that provide randomized virtual items for purchase must disclose the odds of receiving each type of item to customers prior to purchase.
For the uninitiated, loot boxes contain a variety of virtual items that contain everything from common to rare in-game items. Some, if not most, games are designed so that you cannot pick up these items separately — you can only get them in loot boxes.

The problem is that many folks see these loot boxes as a predatory and manipulative business model that get people to spend more money on games. More significant, you can purchase loot boxes either with in-game or real-world currency, which, along with their randomness, have forced people to wonder whether loot boxes constitute gambling.

«

“Forced” people to wonder? I think they’ve led people to wonder that. Anyway, yes, it would be an excellent move if Google were to follow Apple’s lead here. An even better one just to ban the damn things, but let’s win the small victories first.
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Smart speakers to outsell wearables during U.S. holidays, as demand for wearables slows • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Smart speakers will likely outsell wearable devices this holiday season. That’s the latest prediction from analysts at eMarketer, which forecasts a slowing growth rate for devices like fitness trackers and smartwatches here in the US. The wearable market is continuing to grow, to be clear, but it’s struggling to reach the mainstream. Next year, only 20% of the U.S. adult population will use a wearable devices at least once a month, the firm says.

Note that eMarketer is looking at wearable usage and market penetration here, not sales.

That being said, the firm is estimating that usage of wearable will grow just 11.9% in 2018, rising from 44.7m adult wearable users in 2017 to 50.1m in 2018. As a percentage of the population, that’s a climb from 17.7% to 19.6%.

Things won’t improved much in the next few years, either, if the forecast holds out. The growth rate will slow to single digits in 2019. By 2021, eMarketer is estimating 59.5m adult wearable users, representing 22.6% of the population.

The firm attributes the majority of the growth in the sector – a market today that’s dominated by fitness trackers – to new users of smartwatches, like the Apple Watch…

…“Other than early adopters, consumers have yet to find a reason to justify the cost of a smartwatch, which can sometimes cost as much as a smartphone,” eMarketer forecasting analyst Cindy Liu said. “Instead, for this holiday season, we expect smart speakers to be the gift of choice for many tech enthusiasts, because of their lower price points.”

«

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Unlike others at Fox, Cavuto uninterested in Trump interview • Associated Press

David Bauder:

»

[Neil] Cavuto, who anchors one hour each weekday on Fox News Channel and two on the Fox Business Network, revealed in an on-air commentary that he won’t ask for an interview. He said he spoke publicly after some viewers and administration officials remarked that things he had done weren’t helping his chances of speaking to the president. The Trump campaign had not appreciated a Cavuto interview with Mitt Romney attacking Trump. Cavuto has criticized Trump’s use of Twitter and suggested he needs to show loyalty in order to receive it.

He said he’s been called an “Obama toady” for saying that former President Barack Obama improved the economy.

“I’m a numbers nerd,” Cavuto said in an interview. “He came into a meltdown and a mess, and the numbers when he got out were a lot better. You can credit him, or you can say he got lucky. But did it happen under his watch? Yeah. These are the numbers we use as business journalists to judge the success or failure of a presidency.”

Presidential interviews are often unproductive because they have a limited amount of time and are skilled at filibustering when there are subjects they want to avoid, Cavuto said.

Trump adds other complications. A study in The New York Times on Sunday said Trump had made 103 “demonstrably and substantially false statements” during his first 10 months in office, compared with 18 by Obama during his eight-year presidency.

“Any interview would require me to get clarifications on many of the president’s own statements,” Cavuto said. “I could conceivably be spending half the allotted time just trying to have him explain his saying this is the largest tax cut in history when it isn’t or that he inherited the biggest economic mess ever when he didn’t. Just trying to set the record straight, I’d run straight into a wall and the interview would be over.”

«

I’d agree with Cavuto: unless you can get the time to demonstrate that a lying liar is lying, or challenge them substantially, there isn’t much point in the exercise. Multiple interviews with Trump show that normal discourse just doesn’t work.
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Long Island Iced Tea soars after changing its name to Long Blockchain • Bloomberg

Arie Shapira:

»

There’s a new leader in the sweepstakes for the zaniest name change in the crypto craze.

Long Island Iced Tea Corp. shares rose 238% after the company rebranded itself Long Blockchain Corp. It’s the latest in a near-daily phenomenon sweeping the stock market, where obscure microcap companies reorient to focus on some aspect of the mania sparked by bitcoin’s 1,600% rally this year.

Long Blockchain, whose business has been selling non-alcoholic beverages, says it will now seek to partner with or invest in companies that develop the decentralized ledgers known as blockchain, the technology that underpins bitcoin.

As with many of the recently christened crypto companies — a list that includes former makers of juice, sports bras and sofas — Long Blockchain so far has little to show for its aspirations. It has no agreements with any blockchain firms, and says “there is no assurance that a definitive agreement with these, or any other entity, will be entered into or ultimately consummated.”

«

I think they mean the shares tripled and that bitcoin has gone up 15-fold this year, but with percentages over 199, who knows?

Also this is completely redolent of the dot-com bubble when if you didn’t dot-com, then don’t-come to the stock market.
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Fooling Windows 10 facial authentication with a photo • HOTforSecurity

Graham Cluley:

»

Maybe you’re one of those people who care enough about the security and privacy of your computer that you enable the facial recognition feature built into versions of Windows 10, but find it too much of a pain to set up a password.

If so, you’re potentially at risk of having your computer unlocked by an attacker holding a modified low resolution laser-printed photograph of you in front of your webcam.

As described on the Full Disclosure mailing list, a team of German penetration testers discovered it was all too easy to trick a locked Windows 10 system into letting them login using a “modified printed photo of an authorised user.”

Windows Hello is a feature currently only shipping in Windows 10, allowing PCs with the necessary hardware to use special imaging techniques to let you sign in with just a look.

The researchers tested the spoofing attack against a Dell Latitude E7470 laptop running Windows 10 Pro (Version 1703) with a Windows Hello compatible webcam, and against a Microsoft Surface Pro 4 device running Windows 10 Pro (Version 1607) with a built-in camera.

«

Microsoft has included updates to try to stop this in its October update, but you’d ideally set up your facial authentication all over again.

Presently, this does leave Apple’s iPhone X as the only one where I haven’t seen video of two different non-twin adults unlocking someone else’s phone using facial recognition.
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Is SEO opportunity growing or shrinking? • Rand’s Blog

Rand Fishkin on data from Jumpshot about how much searching and clicking people do on Google in the US:

»

I wanted to understand how many clicks per search are happening each month, so I made a new chart that illustrates that trend:

The metric of “clicks / ten search queries” helps us avoid seasonality biases and look instead at the rate of queries that lead to traffic opportunity. Here, the reality is sobering.

• The high point was the first month of the graph, November 2015
• Since then, there have been two significant declines in organic clicks/query (12/2015 and 11/2016) and one significant decline in paid clicks/query (01/2016, though it’s now nearly recovered)
• The 5.41 clicks/10 queries in October, 2017 is 23% lower than the 6.97 clicks/10 queries we had back in November, 2015. That’s a lot of lost SEO opportunity
• I haven’t yet tried to tie the drops back to noted changes in the SERPs, but I suspect the growth in featured snippets, instant answers, and knowledge panels in the results are at least partially responsible
• The growth of search volume has made up for much of the lost click opportunities, but this is a tough trend chart to see as an SEO
• That said, SEO still gets ~20X more traffic than PPC, and it doesn’t cost anything close to as much, so there’s still a massive advantage to ranking organically.

My conclusion from this — we’re living in a world with slightly less SEO opportunity and a trendline over the last couple years that worries and frustrates me.

«

There’s also a really interesting graph of “no-click seaches” for mobile v desktop (ie, someone does a query but then doesn’t visit a result) which indicates that Google changed something in November 2016 to dramatically increase those numbers on mobile, but not desktop.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What’s the best way to get usably fast broadband to rural homes in the shortest time? Photo by Craig A Rodway on Flickr.

Charity time: ahead of Christmas, I’m encouraging readers to make a donation to charity; a different one each day.
Today’s is
Wikipedia. (Even if you disagree with or dislike its internal politics, its ability to provide as-far-as-possible neutral information on world events and situations is sorely needed these days.)

Wednesday’s charity/ies was/were:
• UK readers: The National Deaf Children’s Society
• US readers: American Society for Deaf Children
• Australian readers: Deaf Children Australia
(In other countries try a search on “deaf children [your country]”.)

• Tuesday’s charity was The Internet Archive, which preserves web content that might otherwise be lost (or conveniently scrubbed). It’s in the middle of a $6m funding drive, and is presently at $3.6m. (The average donation is $41.)

• Monday’s charity was BookTrust: give £10 and a child in social care will receive books for Christmas.)
Please donate as you see fit.

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. Also, only one more day of it this year, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

A selection of 11 links for you. Sufficient unto the day. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Nobody is going to wear the Magic Leap headset • Business Insider

Dave Smith:

»

After years of intense secrecy, high-profile augmented reality startup Magic Leap has finally unveiled a prototype of its futuristic headset.

But unless the device, dubbed the Magic Leap One, gets a major makeover before it’s released to the public, you can expect it to bomb when it hits store shelves, even if it is a technological breakthrough. Why? Because it looks ridiculous.

Check it out for yourself:

Would anyone ever feel comfortable leaving the house wearing this headset?

That question — Would anyone wear this? — is typically the crucial one when it comes to the fate of wearable technologies. Successful products like the Apple Watch are fashionable, or blend in well; they look like things that anyone would wear. By contrast, failed wearable products — most notably, Google’s Glass — look too nerdy, like gadgets only a geek could love.

«

Snap Spectacles, Hololens, Google Glass – the ancestry isn’t good on this. Note too that this is after a billion dollars or so in venture funding.
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BT’s £600m rural broadband offer rejected • FT

Nic Fildes:

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The government is to reject an offer from BT to connect 1.1m rural homes to superfast broadband in favour of giving homeowners in remote areas the legal right to demand an upgrade.

The government has been weighing up the respective benefits of BT saying it would improve broadband speeds in sparsely populated areas, or pushing ahead with a so-called universal service obligation system similar to that used for fixed-line telephone services.

Three people with direct knowledge of the situation said the government would on Wednesday opt to push on with a USO model that aims to give people the legal right to access a broadband connection of at least 10 Mbps by 2020.

The move will require secondary legislation to set out the design of the USO. Ofcom, the telecoms regulator which said last week that 1.1m homes and offices still don’t receive a decent broadband connection, will also work with the government on how best to connect rural areas.

«

I’m definitely one of those 1.1 million. Here’s the thing: BT has promised to upgrade the speed literally for years. But then the timing for improvement gets pushed back, and back. It won’t publish timetables – you can imagine it doesn’t want rivals to know its schedule.

What this USO plan doesn’t do is improve things for rival telcos/ISPs. It forces BT to do things; how does that create the competition that we need at the local level? I’d suggest BT should be obliged to let rivals access its ducts and poles at zero cost. That would give it an incentive to get broadband to people before rivals.
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North Korea is suspected in bitcoin heist • WSJ

Timothy W. Martin, Eun-Young Jeong and Steven Russolillo:

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Investigators in South Korea are looking into North Korea’s possible involvement in a heist from a bitcoin exchange that collapsed here on Tuesday, according to people familiar with the situation, as the sanctions-choked regime develops new ways to raise money.

The investigation into the hack, led by South Korean law enforcement and a state cybersecurity agency, is still in its infancy and a review of the malware code could take weeks, the people said.

But the people said there were telltale signs and historical evidence that North Korea, which has turned in recent years to increasingly sophisticated financial warfare, was behind the hack of Seoul-based exchange Youbit.

The same cryptocurrency exchange, operating under a different name, was targeted in April by North Korean hackers, several of the people said. Yapian, the company that operates Youbit, suspended trading and filed for bankruptcy after Tuesday’s hack.

The bitcoin heist follows similar suspected Pyongyang-directed offensives against other South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges—and an increasing number of attempts to steal from individual investors.

«

Particularly now that bitcoin is at such a crazy price, it’s a natural for North Korea’s hackers. It’s almost untraceable – almost, if you use the right exchanges – and it’s directly usable as foreign currency, which North Korea badly needs. (It doesn’t have any access to debt markets.) I’d expect to hear a lot more about NK hackers targeting bitcoin both in future and in the past.
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Why a bursting bitcoin bubble isn’t worrisome • Yahoo Finance

Julia La Roche:

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In the last week, the price of the cryptocurrency has jumped more than 40%. Year-to-date, it’s up more than 1,900%. It was last priced above $15,078 on Friday afternoon. Bitcoin’s current market cap is about $252.6 billion, according to Yahoo Finance’s cryptocurrency tracker.

“There are several channels through which a bursting of an asset price bubble can have macroeconomic consequences, but none is a major risk in the case of bitcoin. First, there may be a hit to household spending as people who have invested suffer losses. But bitcoin’s market [capitalization] is too small for this to be a worry,” according to the report.

What’s more, a complete bitcoin crash would be the equivalent of just a 0.6% fall in U.S. stocks, the report said. Furthermore, most of the investors in the cryptocurrency got in early, which would make those losses much smaller.

Another reason cited is that bitcoin is not woven into the banking system.

“While a bursting bubble can affect the economy via the banking sector, this is not much of a risk either, precisely because bitcoin is held and traded outside the banking sector. Also, there is no evidence that investment in bitcoin is being financed by the equivalent of sub-prime mortgages.”

«

I guess the point that there are very few people holding it is the key here.
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Mashable financial statements paint bleak picture • Business Insider

Maxwell Tani:

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Weighed down by large long-term expenses like the high rent on its offices in New York, London, and Singapore, Mashable ended September with about $4.65m in cash on hand, down from $8.4m at the start of the year, the documents show. Its loss for the three months through September was $4.2m and the financial statements suggested revenue growth was slowing.

The company essentially auctioned itself off, soliciting bids from 40 potential bidders. But it received only what it considered to be two serious offers, including the one it ultimately settled on, from Ziff Davis. Mashable’s board believed the sale was preferable to subjecting shareholders to the “risks and uncertainties of the company’s business plan and prospects,” according to the documents.

While management and major investors saw some of the $50m the company sold for, outstanding stock options provided to employees at various points during Mashable’s ascension were completely worthless in the sale, the documents show…

…Roughly 72% of Mashable’s revenue came from digital ads in the last three months before the sale; the next largest revenue source was distributed content, which accounted for 15% of revenue.

Though Mashable’s distributed revenue is about average — premium publishers generated around 14% of their overall revenues from distributing their content on third-party platforms in the first half of 2016, according to Digital Content Next — other revenue sources that could’ve buoyed the site were too small to make a significant impact.

E-commerce accounted for just 2% — or about $163,000 — of Mashable’s revenue in the latest three months. Events made up 7% and licensing made up 3%. By comparison, Gizmodo Media Group expects e-commerce to make up a third of its total revenue this year, while other digital-media publishers say that events may make up 20% of their revenue by next year.

«

Too reliant on advertising, which isn’t buttering the bread these days. Note that this is the second round of layoffs Mashable has made; in April 2016 it announced a “strategic shift towards video” and got a $50m infusion from Turner Broadcasting to build said video content. Didn’t work out so well.
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esports: Where will the marketing dollars come from? • DIGITS to DOLLARS

Jonathan Goldberg:

»

we read an interview with the head of publishing for our favorite mobile esports title, Vainglory. Scroll down a bit and he mentions an interesting statistic – that the most viewed esports event (the League of Legends Worlds Championships) generates a third of the audience of the Superbowl but only 1/20th of the economics. We can back up some of his stats, and believe he is right in his thesis. Then ESPN aired an episode of its esports podcast that touched on a similar theme, about the changing sponsor ecosystem for esports. (If you care about esports, you really need to be following ESPN’s team.) Most recently, we had a conversation with someone familiar with the vibrant China esports scene who had similar questions. And all the while, there is a growing list of anecdotal evidence that major US advertisers are dipping ever more toes into esports.

As far as we can tell, the industry is in a bit of a developing stasis field. US advertisers are aware of esports, but are still unsure about how and how much to commit. They seem to all be sponsoring individual events, a championship series here, a team there, but no broad embrace. Their hesitation is understandable. Esports is still a new and in many ways immature industry.

«

Could get interesting if esports can get its act cleaned up, which seems to be – from the rest of Goldberg’s post – what’s holding them back, at least in the US.
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Apple plans combined iPhone, iPad & Mac apps to create one user experience • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

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The Mac App Store is a ghost town of limited selection and rarely updated programs. Now Apple plans to change that by giving people a way to use a single set of apps that work equally well across its family of devices: iPhones, iPads and Macs.

Starting as early as next year, software developers will be able to design a single application that works with a touchscreen or mouse and trackpad depending on whether it’s running on the iPhone and iPad operating system or on Mac hardware, according to people familiar with the matter. 

Developers currently must design two different apps — one for iOS, the operating system of Apple’s mobile devices, and one for macOS, the system that runs Macs. That’s a lot more work. What’s more, Apple customers have long complained that some Mac apps get short shrift. For example, while the iPhone and iPad Twitter app is regularly updated with the social network’s latest features, the Mac version hasn’t been refreshed recently and is widely considered substandard. With a single app for all machines, Mac, iPad and iPhone users will get new features and updates at the same time.

Unifying the apps could help the iOS and macOS platforms “evolve and grow as one, and not one at the expense of the other,” says Steven Troughton-Smith, an app developer and longtime voice in the Apple community. “This would be the biggest change to Apple’s software platform since iOS was introduced.”

Apple is developing the strategy as part of the next major iOS and macOS updates, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss an internal matter. Codenamed “Marzipan,” the secret project is planned as a multiyear effort that will start rolling out as early as next year and may be announced at the company’s annual developers conference in the summer. The plans are still fluid, the people said, so the implementation could change or the project could still be canceled.

«

Quite the scoop. How will it work? How do you get something designed for touch to work on a mouse-driven interface? How do you get something designed for a mouse-driven interface to work on touch? Nor is it going to solve the problem of getting people to pay for apps on iOS – that ship has sailed and foundered.
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Apple addresses why people are saying their iPhones with older batteries are running ‘slower’ • TechCrunch

Matthew Panzarino:

»

The short-form version of what Poole’s benchmarks are showing is the result of a power curve-smoothing algorithm that Apple rolled out last year to mitigate iPhone shutdown issues. I wrote about it here [in February 2017]; you can read that and come back.

Basically, iPhones were hitting peaks of processor power that the battery was unable to power and the phones were shutting off. Apple then added power management to all iPhones at the time that would “smooth out” those peaks by either capping the power available from the battery or by spreading power requests over several cycles. This is clearly shown in Poole’s charts in his post:

Also, to be clear, Poole’s charts appear to be accurate — nor is Apple saying this isn’t happening.

Some users who have had older batteries replaced also said they’ve seen improved benchmarks after replacing their batteries. Well, yeah. Of course. As batteries age, they stop working as well. Period.

And that age isn’t just about years or charge cycles — heat is a huge killing factor for batteries, for instance. If your iPhone gets left out in the sun a lot or gets hot a bunch, then your battery will kick the bucket a lot sooner.

As that battery ages, iOS will check its responsiveness and effectiveness actively. At a point when it becomes unable to give the processor all the power it needs to hit a peak of power, the requests will be spread out over a few cycles.

«

As others have said, the problem here is Apple’s terrible messaging about the fact it’s doing this. People complaining that their phones have slowed down happens every year. And Apple hasn’t got it out there that it’s intentional, to save their battery.

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Apple HomePod’s high-priced road to nowhere • Bloomberg Gadfly

Shira Ovide:

»

Google and Amazon aren’t necessarily trying to turn a profit from their devices, and that is why they’re engaging in a price war to the bottom on the lowest-priced versions of their home speakers.

Those companies view the speakers as a gateway to hook people on Amazon’s collection of Prime membership benefits or to lure them to Google apps and internet services. Not surprisingly, the lowest-priced speakers appear to be selling the best. Amazon has said its Echo Dot, discounted to $30 from $50, was the best-selling item across its entire product catalog over the Thanksgiving shopping period.

Apple doesn’t necessarily want to sell more gadgets than anyone else. Market share didn’t matter when Apple could grab the lion’s share of profits without having the best-selling hardware. Its gross margin, or the share of revenue remaining after production costs, has been roughly 38% to 40% for years – a level that generates envy among hardware makers. 

But if Apple truly wants to become more than a hardware company, it needs to think different – to steal from a Steve Jobs advertising campaign. It needs the quality of its digital music service, mapping app, Siri, future web video products and more to be up to par and not only good enough to help differentiate its hardware from that of rivals. Apple doesn’t necessarily need to sell $50 Siri speakers. But if Apple wants its software and internet offerings to stand on their own, then it needs to borrow from Amazon and Google and make the hardware a means to an end — and rethink gadget prices, too.

«

Amazon has a reason to sell Echos: to get people on Prime. Google has a reason to sell Home: to get people to use it to do searches, which they don’t do so much on mobile as they did on desktop. Apple’s reason to sell HomePods is.. to get them to use Apple Music more? In which case the music quality thing makes sense.
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Google Maps’s moat • Justin O’Beirne

»

So Google seems to be creating AOIs [areas of interest] out of its building and place data. But what’s most interesting is that Google’s building and place data are themselves extracted from other Google Maps features.

As we saw earlier, Google’s buildings are created out of the imagery it gathers for its Satellite View:

And as we saw in “A Year of Google & Apple Maps”, Google has been using computer vision and machine learning to extract business names and locations from its Street View imagery:

In other words, Google’s buildings are byproducts of its Satellite/Aerial imagery.6 And some of Google’s places are byproducts of its Street View imagery…

…so this makes AOIs a byproduct of byproducts:

This is bonkers, isn’t it?

Google is creating data out of data.

«

A very long post with tons of illustrations. Shows that Google is definitely miles ahead through its use of satellite data, which it interprets use machine learning systems. Remarkable.
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We’re getting into French Revolution territory • The Outline

Paul Blest:

»

All of this will, eventually, go horribly wrong. We’re still living with the effects of the Reagan tax cuts, which sought to end public services as we know them and replace them with charity. Trickle down economics have proven to be a miserable failure, as the idea that companies would pump more money back into the economy and hire more workers at higher salaries if they just had lower tax rate has been proven to be a complete myth. As Sarah Anderson noted for The New York Times in August, AT&T — whose CEO, Randall Stephenson, has been a major proponent of cutting the corporate tax rate to 20% — “enjoyed an effective tax rate of just eight% between 2008 and 2015, despite recording a profit in the United States each year, by exploiting tax breaks and loopholes.”

That should mean more jobs, right? Wrong: AT&T downsized its workforce by nearly 80,000 jobs in the last eight years, according to Anderson and the Institute for Policy Studies, and spent $34bn to purchase its own stock, money that could have been ostensibly used to hire more workers. In the same study, the IPS found that average CEO pay among 92 publicly held companies studied — all of which paid less than a 20% effective federal tax rate — rose 18% between 2008 and 2016; private sector worker pay, they noted, only increased by 4% over the same period. Corporations are making more money than ever before, and they’re keeping it.

Jobs, contrary to Trump’s central argument for the tax cuts, aren’t provided to people by corporations out of the kindness of their hearts when they have the extra money. It doesn’t matter how much money they make; if there’s no need to employ workers, a company like AT&T just won’t.

«

The point about that money not trickling down is going to be made thoroughly in the next few years.

link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Wannacry ransomware was a North Korean attack, the US says. Why announce that now? Photo by portalgda on Flickr

Charity time: ahead of Christmas, I’m encouraging readers to make a donation to charity; a different one each day. Today’s is
• UK readers: The National Deaf Children’s Society
• US readers: American Society for Deaf Children
• Australian readers: Deaf Children Australia

(Apologies, in other countries you might want to try a search on “deaf children [your country]”.)

• Tuesday’s charity was The Internet Archive, which preserves web content that might otherwise be lost (or conveniently scrubbed). It’s in the middle of a $6m funding drive, and is presently at $3.6m. (The average donation is $41.)

• Monday’s charity was BookTrust: give £10 and a child in social care will receive books for Christmas.)

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.

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

Trump admin calls out North Korea hackers, stays mum on Russia’s • Daily Beast

Joseph Cox:

»

On Monday the Trump administration publicly attributed the WannaCry cyberattacks—which locked down computers in businesses, health-care institutions and governments around the world—to North Korea. Thomas P. Bossert, President Trump’s Homeland Security adviser, made the announcement in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, and held a White House press conference Tuesday, complete with maps showing which countries were infected by the malware epidemic.

This fanfare could not be much further from how the Trump White House has addressed the issue of Russian hacking throughout the 2016 election and beyond, even though the same intelligence agencies likely contributed to both conclusions.

“It’s striking that a campaign that for so long denied the possibility of attribution has turned into an administration that now treats it as routine enough to do it in the newspaper—when the adversary is not Russia,” Ben Buchanan, a fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center Cyber Security Project, told The Daily Beast.

«

As part of the book I’ve been writing about hacking, I’ve looked into the John Podesta hack. What’s remarkable is the sheer volume of straightforward attributions from both private and security groups saying that the DNC and Podesta hacks were the work of Russian groups. What’s also remarkable is how the media largely ignored them, and focussed instead on the content released by those hacks. As Cox also points out, the NotPetya attack in June is attributed to Russia; howcome the Trump administration isn’t calling them out?

The other question: why now? GCHQ and CERT had this pinned down to North Korea back in June. What’s held up the US attribution? The logical conclusion is that this is trying to publicly make an even greater enemy of North Korea, and to make it look less foolish and more crafty – and dangerous.
link to this extract

Checkmate: how do climate science deniers’ predictions stack up? • The Guardian

Graham Readfearn:

»

some [people] remain convinced that the whole thing is an elaborate hoax and readily find a home for their conspiracy theories and pseudoscience in conservative media outlets and, too often, on publicly funded ones too.

Climate-science deniers love to fling around accusations that climate change models are massively over-egging the global warming pudding and should not be trusted (climate scientist Zeke Hausfather has a great technical explainer on this).

While many pseudo-sceptics are quick with an unfounded criticism, it’s rare for them to put their own alchemy to the test by making firm projections about what’s to come.

But sometimes they do and the results are often spectacularly and comically bad. Let’s have a look at a few.

«

This is an overlooked point: what do climate sceptics predict? They’re so busy denying that anything’s happening, or that it’s for other reasons, they don’t get asked what they think will happen. This is the tactic to take with deniers: ask them what they forecast, and hold them to it. (Thanks Walt for the pointer.)
link to this extract

Lessons learned from the Minitel era • Web Informant

David Strom on the French phone-based computer system of the 1980s which figured out third-party payments, e-government, online dating, emojis and more:

»

what can we learn from Minitel going into the future? While most of us think of Minitel as a quaint historical curio that belongs next to the Instamatic camera and the Watt steam engine, it was far ahead of its time. Minitel was also a cash infusion that enabled France to modernize and digitize its aging phone infrastructure. It was the first nationalized online environment, available to everyone in France. It proved that a state subsidy could foster innovation, as long as that subsidy was applied surgically and with care.  As the authors state, “sometimes complete control of network infrastructure by the private sector stifles rather than supports creativity and innovation.”

«

Try telling that to Americans and…
link to this extract

Harry Potter and the Porrait of what Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash •Botnik Studios

»

Chapter 13: The Handsome One…

…”LOCKED”, said Mr Staircase, the shabby-robed ghost. They looked at the door, screaming about how closed it was and asking it to be replaced with a small orb. The password was “BEEF WOMEN”, Hermione cried…

«

You might be able to guess that this is generated by a machine learning system which has read all the Harry Potter books. JK Rowling’s job is safe for a bit.
link to this extract

‘Our relationship with Facebook is difficult’: The Guardian’s David Pemsel says the platform doesn’t value quality • Digiday

»

Jessica Davies: What’s next for publishers’ relationship with Facebook and Google?
David Pemsel, CEO of the Guardian Media Group: We have a close relationship with Google from [CEO] Sundar [Pichai] down. They recognize the role of quality news within their ecosystem. So we’ve collaborated a lot around video, VR funding, data analytics and engineering resources. It’s a valuable strategic relationship.

JD: What about Facebook?
DP: Facebook is a different picture. Our relationship with them is difficult because we’ve not found the strategic meeting point on which to collaborate. Eighteen months ago, they changed their algorithm, which showed their business model was derived on virality, not on the distribution of quality. We argue that quality, for societal reasons, as well as to derive ad revenue, should be part of their ecosystem. It’s not. We came out of Instant Articles because we didn’t want to provide our journalism in return for nothing. When you have algorithms that are fueling fake news and virality with no definition around what’s good or bad, how can the Guardian play a role within that ecosystem? The idea of what the Guardian does being starved of oxygen in those environments is not only damaging to our business model but damaging to everyone.

JD: Should Google and Facebook be regulated?
DP: Regulation ensures there isn’t negative impact from market dominance, which there is with those organizations, especially in advertising. But you can’t sound anti-platform or anti-digital or anti-Google or Facebook because it’s the future. News organizations have had this narrative of “it’s unfair, look what they’re doing.” But regulation needs to be used appropriately to ensure there is fairness.

«

link to this extract

Scrooge’s emails • Lost Opinions

Mark Brownlow:

»

So the challenge was to retell “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens in the form of an email inbox. This is the result. As always, start at the bottom…

«

Neat.
link to this extract

The surprising use case that has made Google Wifi one of the company’s sleeper hits • CNBC

Jillian D’Onfro:

»

“It’s not necessarily sexy, but it’s super useful,” Ben Brown, head of Google Wifi told CNBC.

Brown has led the connectivity team through the release of its OnHub router to this latest product. He says that one of the unexpectedly popular use cases that surfaced after Wifi launched was how much people used it to curb their bad digital habits.

“We’ve been so successful in terms of actual quantity of sales because there are a lot of people that are from a non-traditional segment,” he says. “We’re not just marketing to tech enthusiasts, for sure — we know that from all of our engagement with customers and usage data. A lot of what’s driving people to the product is the ability to be a better parent.”

It’s turned out to be a key selling point. Google Wifi lets users pause the Wi-Fi access of specific devices for periods of time or block certain websites. With a few taps in an app, a parent could stop their kids from using their phones during dinner or streaming videos after bedtime.

“[People are] coming to a need they have in the home that has nothing to do with Wi-Fi itself,” he says.

Other mesh Wi-Fi systems, like Eero and Luma, have similar features.

«

But Google outsells them.
link to this extract

Hurricane Maria killed 64 Puerto Ricans. Another 1,000 died because the disaster response was inadequate • The Washington Post

Jeremy Konyndyk analyses the New York Times report:

»

the Federal Emergency Management Agency was not built to tackle this kind of challenge: a major disaster in a setting with widespread poverty, weak local response capacity and extreme logistical obstacles. FEMA is designed, under the government’s National Response Framework, to support relatively capable state-level disaster managers. But disaster management capacity in Puerto Rico is weaker than in Texas or Florida, meaning that FEMA had take a much stronger lead role than it is accustomed to.

And so FEMA struggled to adapt, falling short in a number of ways identified in the Times’s report. Puerto Rico’s excess deaths have come mainly from sepsis and respiratory problems, classic post-disaster health problems when there is not enough clean water, safe shelter and adequate health care. Available clean water was so inadequate that as excess deaths were spiking, Puerto Ricans were reportedly turning to sewage-contaminated rivers, condemned wells and Superfund cleanup sites for water. Health-care coverage was so weak that the Navy took the rare step of deploying one of its hospital ships to Puerto Rico. But the ship was poorly suited to Puerto Ricans’ actual health needs — reliant on a bureaucratic referral process that proved difficult to navigate — and ultimately saw very few patients. And it took so long to deliver emergency roofing kits that families stayed in unlivable homes for weeks and months, exposed to the rainy season and creeping mold. Even three months into the response, shelter remains woefully inadequate: FEMA reports that it has sheltered only 28% of those who need it, with just over 20,000 emergency shelter kits installed — leaving more than 50,000 households still in need.

«

Konyyndyk is a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, and from 2013 to 2017 was the Obama administration director for foreign disaster assistance at USAID. So would things have been different under a different administration?

»

“…the Trump administration could have gotten creative: deploying its own international responders at scale, or seeking help from international partners. Inexplicably, it did neither. And the response suffered as a result.”

«

I feel that the inadequate response is going to come back to bite this administration in an as-yet unpredictable way.
link to this extract

iPhone performance and battery age • Geekbench

John Poole:

»

I believe (as do others) that Apple introduced a change to limit performance when battery condition decreases past a certain point. Why did Apple do this? kadupse on Reddit offers the following explanation:

»

Many iPhone 6s devices were shutting down unexpectedly, even after the battery replacement program (Which many people weren’t entitled to use). Because degraded batteries last much less and end up with a lower voltage Apple’s solution was to scale down CPU performance, it doesn’t solve anything and is a bad experience… but it’s better than having your device shutdown at 40% when you need it the most.

«

Apple acknowledged the sudden shutdown issue that affected the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s earlier this year. However, does the same issue affect the iPhone 7? Apple appears to have added a similar change to iOS 11.2.0 for the iPhone 7.

If the performance drop is due to the “sudden shutdown” fix, users will experience reduced performance without notification. Users expect either full performance, or reduced performance with a notification that their phone is in low-power mode. This fix creates a third, unexpected state. While this state is created to mask a deficiency in battery power, users may believe that the slow down is due to CPU performance, instead of battery performance, which is triggering an Apple introduced CPU slow-down.

«

So this could well be the answer to “why is my iPhone slower now I’ve upgraded?” Older batteries.

link to this extract

Standalone VR headset shipments to top 1.5 million in 2018 as Oculus, HTC and Lenovo prepare to enter the market • Canalys

»

Canalys forecasts standalone smart VR headset shipments will pass 1.5m in 2018, and grow with a CAGR of 140% to reach 9.7m units in 2021. Oculus, HTC and Lenovo are launching new standalone headsets aimed at different market segments, which will drive rapid market growth. Standalone VR headsets are expected to help push the VR headset market to 7.6m units in 2018, twice the shipments forecast for this year…

…The recently announced HTC Vive Focus headset with six degrees-of-freedom (6DoF) tracking retails from CNY3,999 (US$600) in China, a similar price to a premium smartphone there. “With its new Vive Focus, HTC is well placed to attract high-value consumers and, more importantly, businesses to its VR platform,” said Canalys Analyst Jason Low. “HTC is clearly not chasing volume, but moving toward the more important value segment, which is the future of VR. Consumer adoption of VR beyond gaming is still shaky but business use-cases are emerging quickly.”

«

I still don’t see the consumer use (compare Facebook’s $2bn purchase of Oculus with its $1bn purchase of Instagram: which was better value?) but can entirely believe there are good business uses. Same as with Google Glass, really.
link to this extract

Huawei, Oppo, Vivo cut smartphone orders by over 10%, say sources • Digitimes

Sammi Huang and Joseph Tsai:

»

China-based smartphone brand vendors including Huawei, Oppo and Vivo (BBK) are taking about less 10% of smartphone shipments than their original orders from the supply chain makers for the fourth quarter of 2017, according to sources from related upstream suppliers.

The reduction came as worldwide smartphone demand has become weaker than expected recently, which has also resulted in rising inventories at channels.

Smartphone vendors’ orders to the supply chain makers for the first quarter of 2018 are also likely to be lower than expected, affecting the performance of most upstream supply chain players during the period.

However, Xiaomi Technology appears to have continued enjoying stable sales for its smartphones and is one of a few smartphone vendors that are able to stay out of the influence of the unfavorable market trends thanks to its strong operations in both offline and online operations.

«

A cloud on the horizon no bigger than a man’s hand. Why would smartphone demand slow down so far, so quickly?
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Done a lot of content moderation? You might find doing this hard afterward. Photo by Broad Bean Media on Flickr.

Charity time: ahead of Christmas, I’m encouraging readers to make a donation to charity; a different one each day. Today’s is The Internet Archive, which preserves web content that might otherwise be lost (or conveniently scrubbed). It’s in the middle of a $6m funding drive, and is presently at $3.6m. (The average donation is $41.)
Please donate. You can make a one-off or recurring payment.

(Yesterday’s charity was BookTrust: give £10 and a child in social care will receive books for Christmas.)

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.

A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Blackout nightmare at Atlanta airport shows grid vulnerability • Bloomberg

Mark Chediak:

»

A sudden power failure at the world’s busiest airport that stranded thousands of passengers and snarled US holiday air traffic underscores the vulnerability of the nation’s grid.

The 11-hour outage was caused by a fire in an underground electrical facility that also cut backup supplies to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, said Southern Co.’s Georgia Power utility. Frustrated passengers were left scrambling in the dark while more than a thousand flights were canceled.

“This highlights two things,” said Paul Patterson, a utility analyst for Glenrock Associates LLC. “One, the grid is vulnerable. Secondly, it shows how dependent the modern economy is on reliable electric power.”

The airport blackout comes on the heels of hurricanes and wildfires that knocked out electricity service to millions of people from Florida to California. Earlier this year, power disruptions in New York City and San Francisco delayed commuters. Utilities say billions are needed to upgrade the nation’s aging infrastructure and make it more robust by investing in equipment sensors and other technologies that can be used to track and quickly resolve power failures.

«

US infrastructure is in a parlous state, though this was a classic “single point of failure” error: running everything you rely on through a single place where it can go wrong. (The train crash in Seattle on Monday, though, was on brand-new infrastructure, being tried for the first time. That’s not encouraging.)
link to this extract

Google thinks i’m dead • The New York Times

Rachel Abrams:

»

I’m not dead yet.

But try telling that to Google.

For much of the last week, I have been trying to persuade the world’s most powerful search engine to remove my photo from biographical details that belong to someone else. A search for “Rachel Abrams” revealed that Google had mashed my picture from The New York Times’s website with the Wikipedia entry for a better-known writer with the same name, who died in 2013.

My father pointed this out in a quizzical text message, but the error seemed like an inconsequential annoyance best ignored indefinitely. To anyone who knows me, it is clearly not me — I am not married, my mother’s name is not Midge, and I was not born in 1951.

But when an acquaintance said she was alarmed to read that I had passed away, it seemed like an error worth correcting.

And so began the quest to convince someone at Google that I am alive.

«

As Nick Carr comments,

»

“Google’s cavalier willingness to allow its algorithms to publish misinformation and nonsense does raise important questions, both epistemological and ethical. Is it OK to run an AI when you know that it will spread falsehoods to the public — and on a massive scale? Is it OK to treat truth as collateral damage in the supposed march of progress?”

«

link to this extract

It’s time for YouTubers to diversify their revenue streams • Medium

Simon Owens:

»

Philip DeFranco. H3H3 Productions. Vlogbrothers. All have uploaded videos about what they’ve dubbed the “adpocalypse” and how many of them have seen their YouTube ad revenue wiped out.

The adpocalypse, if you’re not familiar with the term, started earlier this year when several media outlets discovered that YouTube was showing pre-roll video ads on channels that were publishing extremist, hateful content. After some of the world’s largest ad buyers temporarily paused their ads on YouTube, the company quickly rolled out an algorithmically-driven vetting system that would scan a video and determine whether the video was deemed “safe” for ads.

As can be expected, this led to some YouTubers waking up and seeing their advertising revenue decimated virtually overnight. And while sometimes it was obvious why a video was demonetized, in many instances YouTubers who went to great lengths to sanitize their videos and bleep out anything remotely controversial still found themselves caught in the algorithm’s unflinching and uncompromising net.

«

link to this extract

AirPods sold out from Apple and other retailers until 2018, frustrating last-minute holiday shoppers • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

As we enter the final stretch of holiday shopping this week, Apple’s AirPods are again facing supply issues. After once improving to 3-5 day delivery, and even quicker in some cases, you now won’t get them in time for Christmas if you buy straight from Apple…

If you head to Apple’s Online Store, you’ll see that the company is quoting delivery in the first and second weeks of January – well past the holiday season. This means you’ll have to look elsewhere if you waited until the last-minute to buy AirPods for that special someone this year.

When it comes to buying online, your options are pretty sparse at this point. Best Buy, Verizon, and Sprint all list early January delivery dates or no availability at all. B&H also shows AirPods as back-ordered. AT&T seems to have some availability for 2-day shipping, but be sure to act fast as that could change within a few minutes.

«

Second year in a row of not meeting demand. Remarkable; this has to be a demand excess.
link to this extract

Artificial intelligence is killing the uncanny valley and our grasp on reality • WIRED

Sandra Upson:

»

Progress on videos may move faster. Hany Farid, an expert at detecting fake photos and videos and a professor at Dartmouth, worries about how fast viral content spreads, and how slow the verification process is. Farid imagines a near future in which a convincing fake video of President Trump ordering the total nuclear annihilation of North Korea goes viral and incites panic, like a recast War of the Worlds for the AI era. “I try not to make hysterical predictions, but I don’t think this is far-fetched,” he says. “This is in the realm of what’s possible today.”

Fake Trump speeches are already circulating on the internet, a product of Lyrebird, the voice synthesis startup—though in the audio clips the company has shared with the public, Trump keeps his finger off the button, limiting himself to praising Lyrebird. Jose Sotelo, the company’s cofounder and CEO, argues that the technology is inevitable, so he and his colleagues might as well be the ones to do it, with ethical guidelines in place. He believes that the best defense, for now, is raising awareness of what machine learning is capable of. “If you were to see a picture of me on the moon, you would think it’s probably some image editing software,” Sotelo says. “But if you hear convincing audio of your best friend saying bad things about you, you might get worried. It’s a really new technology and a really challenging problem.”

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link to this extract

BT InLink in London: building a privatised “smart city” by stealth • Adrian Short

»

BT’s network of InLink kiosks is planned to replace the majority of the capital’s phone boxes in the next few years. Over 50 are already installed and hundreds more are working their way through the planning process. The headline features of these silver monoliths are free wifi funded by digital advertising screens front and back. Add on to that free phone calls and texts, USB charging for your phone and a tablet screen where you can browse maps and the local council’s website. All this is provided without users or the public purse shelling out a penny.

Street advertising isn’t new. Nor is public wifi. What makes InLink unique is the scale of the planned network and the flexibility of the kiosks. InLink is about much more than helping Londoners get online and helping brands flog them stuff. It’s about building a citywide urban sensor network to monitor and respond to environmental conditions and human activity (what are you up to?) at a far finer grain than current systems. Will our privacy be protected? Will our lives be improved? Who will really be in control? We don’t really know, because the InLink network as a whole is getting no more scrutiny than, well, a bunch of phone boxes…

…Software upgrades and algorithm changes back at InLink central (a company called Intersection, which is owned by Sidewalk Labs, which is owned by Alphabet Inc, the company formerly called Google) mean that significant new capabilities with their attendant concerns can be deployed at any time without even touching the box. And, of course, without the public being any the wiser let alone in control of what’s scooped up by the system from our own streets.

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link to this extract

‘The basic grossness of humans’ • The Atlantic

Alexis Madrigal:

»

[Rochelle] LaPlante [who works on Amazon Mechanical Turk and is an organiser for people who work on it] drew attention to the economic conditions under which workers are laboring. They are paid by the review, and the prices can go as low as $0.02 per image reviewed, though there are jobs that pay better, like $0.15 per piece of content. Furthermore, companies can reject judgments that Turkers make, which means they are not paid for that time, and their overall rating on the platform declines.

This work is a brutal and necessary part of the current internet economy. They’re also providing valuable training data that companies use to train machine-learning systems. And yet the people doing it are lucky to make minimum wage, have no worker protections, and must work at breakneck speed to try to earn a living.

As you might expect, reviewing violent, sexual, and disturbing content for a living takes a serious psychological toll on the people who do it.

“When I left Myspace, I didn’t shake hands for like three years because I figured out that people were disgusting. And I just could not touch people,” Bowden said. “Most normal people in the world are just fucking weirdos. I was disgusted by humanity when I left there. So many of my peers, same thing. We all left with horrible views of humanity.”

When I asked her if she’d recovered any sense of faith in humanity, a decade on, Bowden said no. “But I’m able to pretend that I have faith in humanity. That will have to do,” she told me. “It’s okay. Once you accept the basic grossness of humans, it’s easier to remember to avoid touching anything.”

«

Also worth reading: a history of the development of content moderation.
link to this extract

Have you been ‘pwned’ in a data breach? Troy Hunt can tell • The New York Times

»

Hunt was invited to appear before Congress in late November to help lawmakers wrestle with this growing crisis of consumer data theft. In just the past two years, attackers have stolen sensitive information about hundreds of millions of people from the credit bureau Equifax, popular online services such as Uber and too many other companies to count.

Much of that stolen data flows directly into the black market. “Data breaches are another commodity, like heroin,” Hunt testified Thursday before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Hunt’s unlikely path from Queensland’s Surfers Paradise Beach to what he describes as “fancy government things” on Capitol Hill has been a running joke since his invitation to testify was announced. Virginia Republican Rep. Morgan Griffith, introducing Hunt to lawmakers, noted that he “put on a suit and tie for us when he normally wears jeans and a black T-shirt.”

Hunt said he splurged on the brand-new Hugo Boss suit and Australian outback-style boots because he didn’t have anything else to wear. He also downloaded an app that instructed him on how to tie his necktie.

“Doing my best ‘no really, I’m a professional’ impersonation,” he tweeted from the U.S. Capitol steps shortly before the hearing. “Did it work?”

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link to this extract

Amazon Music makes giant strides against Apple and Spotify • Bloomberg

Shira Ovide:

»

We know Amazon.com Inc. has become a virtual mega-mall for shopping, a creator of gadgets for our daily commutes and our homes and a mover-and-shaker in entertainment. Less well known is how quickly the online retailer has become a force in digital music.

A little over a year after Amazon started to offer people access to web-streaming songs for a monthly fee, the company is the world’s third-largest digital music service by subscribers behind Spotify and Apple Music, according to Midia Research’s Mark Mulligan, a music industry analyst. He also estimates that weekly listening on Amazon’s music service is second-highest among the paid music services, behind Spotify and ahead of Apple Music…

…Members of Amazon’s Prime shopping club for several years have been able to listen to a couple million songs for no additional cost. Amazon spiffed up the music hangout for Prime members, and the company added an “unlimited” option with a bigger catalog of songs and more features starting at $8 a month for Prime members or $10 for everyone else. For $4 a month, Prime members can still subscribe and listen only on Amazon’s Echo voice-activated home speakers.

Amazon’s product segmentation gave it relatively low-cost options for the vast majority of Americans who had never paid for Spotify, Apple Music or other subscription services that let people play virtually any song on a whim. And Amazon leveraged the people shopping on its websites, or buying CDs or digital music downloads from Amazon, to try to hook them on streaming music as well.

«

Any listening is listening as far as the music business is concerned.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Some Americans are receiving packages from China they didn’t order. Why? An e-commerce scam. Photo by Crouching Donkey on Flickr.

Charity time: ahead of Christmas, I’m encouraging readers to make a donation to charity; a different one each day. Today’s is:
BookTrust: give £10 and a child in social care will receive books for Christmas.

A selection of 14 links for you. Got your tree yet? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook conceded it might make you feel bad. Here’s how to interpret that • The New York Times

Farhad Manjoo:

»

The blogpost pointed out several recent and coming changes to Facebook that the company said encouraged active interactions on the service. That’s the real message: Once you discover how much more you can get out of Facebook with this new stuff, you’ll feel super.

O.K., sure, the post can be read this way. But I’m more optimistic about it, because it’s in line with an evolving corporate posture from the company.

After initially dismissing Facebook’s role in the 2016 election, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, has spent much of the last year publicly grappling with Facebook’s role in the world. He published a lengthy letter to Facebook’s community attempting to establish new social goals for the company. He apologized for glibly dismissing the idea that Facebook could have altered the outcome of the election. And in the company’s last earnings report to investors, he said he was willing to risk the company’s profitability to improve its community.

To be sure, Facebook is putting its own favorable spin on these studies. Yet its willingness to shine a light on critical research, and its pledge to take the findings into account when it designs its products, has to be welcomed as something new.

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link to this extract

Silicon Valley techies still think they’re the good guys. They’re not • WIRED

Erin Griffith:

»

Talking to tech founders every day, it’s clear how little their lives have changed in the last year, even as the world around them has shifted. Even top bosses who’ve noticed the change in public opinion aren’t willing to adjust. On his blog, Y Combinator president Sam Altman argued that political correctness was damaging the tech industry. “This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics,” he wrote. On the ground, the startup kings haven’t changed their behavior. They’re still pitching me their companies with the same all-out exuberance. They’re continuing their quest to move fast and break things—regardless of what broken objects are left in their wake.

Outside the bubble, things are different. We’re not egging on startups that willingly flaunt regulations. We’re wary of artificial intelligence and its potential to eliminate jobs. We’re dubious of tech leaders’ promises to make their products safe for their kids to use. We are all sick of the jokes that no longer feel funny: lines about the lack of women in tech, about obscenely rich 20-somethings, about awkward coders with bad people skills, about “hustling” and growth at any cost. It all feels inappropriate.

But this backlash against tech is difficult to see from inside the Silicon Valley bubble. And it’s not hard to understand how we got here. In the late 2000s, just after the financial crisis, the world was eager to hear positive stories about tech. The fast rise of services like Twitter and Facebook was thrilling—a spot of optimism in the gloomy aughts—and their geek genius founders made better heroes than the greedy Wall Street jerks that had just tanked the economy.

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link to this extract

Google Tango augmented reality project is shutting down • Business Insider

Matt Weiberger:

»

Google has announced that it will be “turning down” Tango, its ambitious augmented-reality project for redefining what a smartphone camera can do, in March 2018.

First launched in 2014, Tango (formerly Project Tango) was a design for a camera that could actually detect depth and motion, opening up all kinds of new applications. The problem, and Tango’s biggest obstacle to success, was that you needed a special, high-tech, Tango-compatible camera to take advantage — a normal camera just wouldn’t do.

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A formality – Google has shifted to doing this on any (capable) smartphone with ARCore. The losers are Lenovo and Asus, which put time and (perhaps?) money into building Project Tango hardware which absolutely nobody bought. Unless Google subsidised it, which I would have thought the OEMs might have asked for.
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March 2017: Maybe Android tablet apps will be better this year • The Verge

Dieter Bohn, back in March:

»

There’s a new Android tablet you can go and buy, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S3. Here’s our review of it, where Jake notes that apps freeze if they’re not in the foreground. Which is a good reminder: Android apps on tablets have never really been very good. They usually end up feeling like stretched-out phone apps.

Things have gotten better in the past couple years, but it’s still a problem. In fact, it has always been a problem. I wonder if anybody ever told Google that it was a problem and it should try to do a better job incentivizing developers to make apps that work better on tablets.

Oh, wait, somebody has.

«

There follows a list of times when it’s been pointed out since 2011 that Android’s tablet apps really could do better. One concludes this isn’t going to happen, if it hasn’t happened in six-plus years.
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Criteo tumbles on impact of latest iPhone web ad limiting tech • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

»

Web advertising company Criteo SA dropped the most in more than two years after announcing that its previous forecast underestimated the effect of Apple Inc.’s latest iPhone software update on its business.

In September, Apple released new versions of its iOS and macOS operating systems, the software that runs on iPhones, iPads, and Macs, that included a feature called Intelligent Tracking Prevention in the Safari web browser. The feature limits advertisers’ abilities to collect data on users such as the websites they visit. Criteo, and other ad targeting companies, collect user data in order to show people ads more relevant to their interests.

Criteo said Nov. 1 it anticipated Apple’s changes to have a 9% to 13% net-negative impact on its 2018 revenue, but now expects the impact to be about 22% net-negative. Apple’s iOS 11.2 software update, released earlier this month, “disables the solution that some companies in the advertising ecosystem, including Criteo, currently use to reach Safari users,” Paris-based Criteo said Thursday in a statement. However, the security changes began rolling out in September with the release of iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra.

«

That’s really pretty big; suggests that Criteo must be very reliant on the US market.

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Scientists link Hurricane Harvey’s record rainfall to climate change • The New York Times

Henry Fountain:

»

Two research groups found that the record rainfall as Harvey stalled over Texas in late August, which totaled more than 50 inches in some areas, was as much as 38% higher than would be expected in a world that was not warming.

While many scientists had said at the time that Harvey was probably affected by climate change, because warmer air holds more moisture, the size of the increase surprised some.

“The amount of precipitation increase is worse than I expected,” said Michael J. Wehner, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and an author of a paper on his group’s findings, which included the 38% figure. Based on how much the world has warmed, Dr. Wehner said, before the analysis he had expected an increase of only about 6 or 7%.

The other study, by an international coalition of scientists known as World Weather Attribution, found that Harvey’s rainfall was 15% higher than would be expected without climate change. Geert Jan van Oldenborgh of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and the lead author of the second study, said that climate change also made such an extreme rainstorm much more likely.

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Important finding – this sort of determinism is unusual. (But did it have to be Henry Fountain?)
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AI can be a tough sell in the enterprise, despite potential • WSJ

»

Artificial intelligence and machine learning tools are expected to boost productivity across all industries in the years ahead. Yet, as many early-stage applications falter, they can run into resistance in the workplace, from the shop floor to the executive suite.

Take Monsanto Co., which expects a vast majority of its early AI and deep-learning projects to fail, says Anju Gupta, the agricultural giant’s director of digital partnerships and outreach.

A 99% failure rate with a current slate of 50-plus deep-learning projects is acceptable because “that 1% is going to bring exponential gain,” Ms. Gupta told a crowd of enterprise IT managers gathered here at an AI industry conference.

The stakes are high, according to Heath Terry, a managing director at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. It estimates that AI-enabled processes will result in up to $20bn in annual savings in the agricultural sector alone, he said.

Across the board, Goldman Sachs expects AI to add between 51 to 154 basis points to U.S. productivity by 2025, the most significant boost in productivity in decades, Mr. Terry said. Already, he adds, 13% of S&P 500 firms have mentioned AI in earnings calls, as of the second quarter, while venture capital funding for AI has doubled this year to more than $10bn.

Still, failures in early tests can risk creating a backlash to AI deployments across a company, despite the potential gains, Ms. Gupta said.

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Amazon’s fake review problem • Brian Theodore Bien

Bien was looking for a sunrise alarm clock:

»

Here, we see both the top and bottom review with the sentence,

The light can be pretty bright, you can adjust it where it’ll be dim and slowly brighten 30 minutes before the alarm time.

Did “Becky” and “Dione Milton” really both happen to write a review with the exact same 23-word sentence? Or, is it more likely that they are agents sourcing reviews from a script, and they sloppily pasted their reviews without rewriting them (as they were presumably instructed to do)? Note also the post dates: December 12, 2017. “Becky” and “Dione Milton” both had private profiles, where their 5-6 reviews were hidden – very similar looking.

Amazon – who has some of the world’s most advanced ML – really needs to step up its review fraud detection game. Imagine how great the Amazon shopping experience would be if we could trust its reviews.

Third party meta review sites like Fakespot will identify problems for us (in this case, the product got an “F” grade) – so why doesn’t Amazon?

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As one of the commenters says, Amazon has a problem just like Google had – has? – a spam problem back in 2010 or so.
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Americans are receiving unordered parcels from Chinese e-criminals – and can’t do anything to stop them • Forbes

Wade Shepard on an e-commerce method called “brushing”:

»

Chinese agents shipping ridiculous amounts of hair ties to [Pennsylvania resident Heaven] McGeehan is merely an unscrupulous way for them to fraudulently boost sales and obtain positive feedback for their clients’ products on e-commerce sites.

Basically, a “brushing” firm somehow got hold of McGeehan’s name and address – she imagines this happened from placing legitimate orders on AliExpress, the international wing of China’s Alibaba – and then created user profiles for “her” on the e-commerce sites that they wish to have higher sales ratings and favorable reviews on. They then shop for orders via the fake account, compare prices, and mimic everything an actual customer would do, before finally making a purchase from their client’s store. When delivery is confirmed, they then leave positive reviews that appear to the e-commerce platform as “verified.”

The hair ties that McGeehan receives are more than likely not the actual items the Chinese brushers are leaving reviews for. Basically, they are low cost stand-ins for the real products. It doesn’t really matter what is shipped in the packages in this case, as the person receiving it has nothing to do with the exchange. But at least McGeehan is actually receiving packages that contain something. I’ve also been receiving reports from unsuspecting and often confused people in the U.S. whose mailboxes are being filled with parcels from China which contain nothing.

Due to the unbalanced pricing policies of the United Postal Union and subsidies from the U.S. Postal Service, it costs people in China virtually nothing to ship small packages to the U.S. That, combined with the super cheap price they pay for the junk they ship, makes brushing a quick and cost effective way to move up the sales rankings – which means everything for e-commerce merchants.

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Volvo’s Drive Me takes detour on road to full autonomy • Automotive News

Douglas Bolduc:

»

Volvo’s Drive Me autonomous driving project is taking some detours compared with promises the automaker made when it announced the program four years ago, but Volvo says the changes will make its first Level 4 vehicle even better when it arrives in 2021.

In early announcements about Drive Me, Volvo promised to have 100 self-driving vehicles on the road but that has been downgraded. Volvo now says it will have 100 people involved in the Drive Me program within the next four years. Initially, the people taking part in Drive Me will test the cars with the same Level 2 semiautonomous assistance systems that are commercially available to anyone who purchases the vehicle in markets such as Europe and the U.S.

Drive Me is a public autonomous driving experiment that now includes families in Sweden and will be extended to London and China later. The goal is to provide Volvo with customer feedback for its first model with Level 4 autonomy, which means the car can drive itself but still has a steering wheel and pedals so that the driver can take control when needed.

«

“When needed”? I don’t like that phrase. How quickly might I be needed?
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There never was a real tulip fever • Smithsonian

Lorraine Boissoneault:

»

According to popular legend, the tulip craze took hold of all levels of Dutch society in the 1630s. “The rage among the Dutch to possess them was so great that the ordinary industry of the country was neglected, and the population, even to its lowest dregs, embarked in the tulip trade,” wrote Scottish journalist Charles Mackay in his popular 1841 work Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. According to this narrative, everyone from the wealthiest merchants to the poorest chimney sweeps jumped into the tulip fray, buying bulbs at high prices and selling them for even more. Companies formed just to deal with the tulip trade, which reached a fever pitch in late 1636. But by February 1637, the bottom fell out of the market. More and more people defaulted on their agreement to buy the tulips at the prices they’d promised, and the traders who had already made their payments were left in debt or bankrupted. At least that’s what has always been claimed.

In fact, “There weren’t that many people involved and the economic repercussions were pretty minor,” [professor of early modern history at Kings College London, Anne] Goldgar says. “I couldn’t find anybody that went bankrupt. If there had been really a wholesale destruction of the economy as the myth suggests, that would’ve been a much harder thing to face.”

That’s not to say that everything about the story is wrong; merchants really did engage in a frantic tulip trade, and they paid incredibly high prices for some bulbs. And when a number of buyers announced they couldn’t pay the high price previously agreed upon, the market did fall apart and cause a small crisis—but only because it undermined social expectations.

«

OK, a tulip flu then? But one can see parallels with bitcoin: there’s only a small number of people who own it, and yet the coverage of it is bonkers.
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q2vq2 • Ghostbin

“Dr Cyborkian a.k.a. janit0r, conditioner of ‘terminally ill’ devices”:

»

I am now here to warn you that what I’ve done was only a temporary band- aid and it’s not going to be enough to save the Internet in the future.

The bad guys are getting more sophisticated, the number of potentially vulnerable devices keep increasing, and it’s only a matter of time before a large scale Internet-disrupting event will occur. If you are willing to believe that I’ve disabled over 10 million vulnerable devices over the 13-month span of the project then it’s not far-fetched to say that such a destructive event could’ve already happened in 2017.

YOU SHOULD WAKE UP TO THE FACT THAT THE INTERNET IS ONLY ONE OR TWO SERIOUS IOT EXPLOITS AWAY FROM BEING SEVERELY DISRUPTED. The damage of such an event is immeasurable given how digitally connected our societies have become, yet CERTs, ISPs and governments are not taking the gravity of the situation seriously enough.

ISPs keep deploying devices with exposed control ports and although these are trivially found using services like Shodan the national CERTs don’t seem to care. A lot of countries don’t even have CERTs. Many of the world’s biggest ISPs do not have any actual security know-how in-house, and are instead relying on foreign vendors for help in case anything goes wrong. I’ve watched large ISPs withering for months under conditioning from my botnet without them being able to fully mitigate the vulnerabilities (good examples are BSNL, Telkom ZA, PLDT, from time to time PT Telkom, and pretty much most large ISPs south of the border).

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HE seems to be the author of “Brickerbot”, an IoT-attacking malware strain which just seems to wreck them. If history is a guide, he’s releasing the code for this (linked earlier in his post) because law enforcement is close enough that he’s about to be caught, so he wants deniability – he uploads the code somewhere and then downloads it, and denies he wrote it. (Paras Jha, who recently pleaded guilty with others to writing the Mirai IoT bot, did the same.)
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25,000 children in Britain are problem gamblers, report finds • The Guardian

Rob Davies:

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Fruit machines remain the most common introduction to gambling for young people at 24%, followed by the National Lottery at 21%.

But the Gambling Commission said children were increasingly being exposed to gambling in less traditional ways, such as through eSports (computer games competitions) and via social media.

The report found that 11% of children took part in skins betting, whereby online gamers can bet using in-game items, such as weapons or outfits, which can have real monetary value if traded.

Skins betting, an industry worth up to $5.1bn (£3.8bn) last year according to one US report, is a common feature of games such as Counter Strike: Global Offensive.

And earlier this year, two men were convicted for running a website that allowed children to bet on the Fifa series of online football games.

More than one in 10 children reported having played casino-style games, which simulate roulette or fruit machines, on Facebook or smartphone apps.

The commission’s statistics indicate that children who play such games, many of which have a PEGI (Pan European Game Information) 12 age rating, are more likely to gamble in real life.

«

A downward spiral, started early. There’s a lot of nonsense pleading by the companies that run the gambling machines, and gaming generally, about “jobs at risk”. Gambling like this quickly goes out of control, and puts livelihoods at risk.
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The Amazon machine • Benedict Evans

Evans points out that a key to big companies is how well they’re able to make the things that make the things they offer; in Amazon’s case, it’s teams to sell stuff:

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Amazon, then, is a machine to make a machine – it is a machine to make more Amazon. The opposite extreme might be Apple, which rather than radical decentralization looks more like an ASIC, with everything carefully structured and everyone in their box, which allows Apple to create certain kinds of new product with huge efficiency but makes it pretty hard to add new product lines indefinitely. Steve Jobs was fond of talking about saying ‘no’ to new projects – that’s not a very relevant virtue to Amazon.

For both Amazon and Apple (and indeed Google or Facebook), this means that there are certain kinds of project that they can deliver very well and very repeatably and predictably, but also, crucially, that there are certain kinds of project that they are much less well suited to deliver. Google doesn’t tend to be better at cloud platforms than Apple and worse at UIs because there are better or worse people in each team, but because each company is set up to deliver certain kinds of things, and the closer a project is to that machine’s direction the more reliable the result. If the machine is designed to do X, it will struggle at Y no matter how clever the people. A lot of the story of Amazon for the last 20 years is of how many Ys turned out to by Xs – how many categories that people thought could not be sold online and could not be sold as commodities turned out to be both.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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.

The US FCC killed net neutrality, sorta kinda. What next? Photo by silver marquis on Flickr.

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.

A selection of 11 links for you. On time, unlike yesterday’s. (You’ll get two today.) I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How democracy ends • Talking Politics

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Worst-case scenarios for democracy – especially since Trump’s victory – hark back to how democracy has failed in the past. So do we really risk a return to the 1930s? This week David argues no: if democracy is going to fail in the 21st century, it will be in ways that are new and surprising. A talk based on his new book coming out next year. Recorded at Churchill College as part of the CSAR lecture series.

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This is an hour-long talk by David Runciman, professor of politics at the University of Cambridge. It’s a remarkable outlining of the blind spots that we aren’t aware of, the traps in our thinking that make us think history repeats – rather than rhymes.

Countries to think about in terms of “democracy”: Turkey, Venezuela, Brazil. (He doesn’t mention any of them, but they’re worth considering.) If you need a technology fix, he does talk about Facebook – and whether robots can make up for Japan’s falling fertility rate. Click through to the page for the player link, or find the podcast “Talking Politics” on iTunes/Acast/Stitcher. (This is episode 71.)

(David is a friend, via my time spent at the Technology & Democracy project at Cambridge. I’d certainly be recommending this even if he weren’t.)
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E pur si muove • Sam Altman

Altman thinks that it’s harder to talk about radical ideas in San Francisco than China:

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Restricting speech leads to restricting ideas and therefore restricted innovation—the most successful societies have generally been the most open ones. Usually mainstream ideas are right and heterodox ideas are wrong, but the true and unpopular ideas are what drive the world forward. Also, smart people tend to have an allergic reaction to the restriction of ideas, and I’m now seeing many of the smartest people I know move elsewhere.

It is bad for all of us when people can’t say that the world is a sphere, that evolution is real, or that the sun is at the center of the solar system.

More recently, I’ve seen credible people working on ideas like pharmaceuticals for intelligence augmentation, genetic engineering, and radical life extension leave San Francisco because they found the reaction to their work to be so toxic. “If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment, so people working on this must be really unethical” was a memorable quote I heard this year.

To get the really good ideas, we need to tolerate really bad and wacky ideas too.

«

This seems a fundamental confusion of two things. Talking about radical ideas is one thing; they’re not unethical in themselves. If they’re bad you refute them. But genetic manipulation could have dramatic, far-reaching physical effects that you can’t reverse – it’s not like changing a law on same-sex marriage. Meanwhile, Anil Dash eviscerates Altman’s suggestions in a Twitter thread which deals much more directly with the “speech” (rather than “doing stuff”) idea.
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Uber reduces ambulance usage across the country, study says • Mercury News

Tracy Seipel:

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In what is believed to be the first study to measure the impact of Uber and other ride-booking services on the U.S. ambulance business, two researchers have concluded that ambulance usage is dropping across the country.

A research paper released Wednesday examined ambulance usage rates in 766 U.S. cities in 43 states as Uber entered their markets from 2013 to 2015.

Co-authors David Slusky, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Kansas, and Dr. Leon Moskatel, an internist at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego, said they believe their study is the first to explain a trend that until now has only been discussed anecdotally.

Comparing ambulance volumes before and after Uber became available in each city, the two men found that the ambulance usage rate dipped significantly.

Slusky said after using different methodologies to obtain the “most conservative” decline in ambulance usage, the researchers calculated the drop to be “at least” 7%.

“My guess is it will go up a little bit and stabilize at 10% to 15% as Uber continues to expand as an alternative for people,’’ Moskatel said.

«

Here’s the kicker for Britons saying “huh? Ambulances are free though”:

»

Slusky added, with health care taking a big chunk out of most people’s budgets, many consumers these days have to weigh a few factors before calling an ambulance. “They have to think about their health — and what it’s going to cost me,” he said. “And for many of us with high-deductible plans, an ambulance ride would cost thousands of dollars.”

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This is how visiting a porn site can make you a pawn in an ad fraud scheme • Buzzfeed

Craig Silverman:

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The technique used by DingIt, as well as a growing number of mainstream sites, is outlined in a presentation published this week by [ad fraud researcher Augustine] Fou. He has for weeks been documenting what he calls “Bot-Free Traffic Origination Redirect Networks.”

Fou told BuzzFeed News these networks can “originate traffic out of thin air” and direct it to a specific site thanks to code that instructs them when to load a specific webpage, and how long to keep it open before automatically loading the next website in the chain. No human action is required to load webpages or redirect to the next site — it’s a perpetual-motion machine for web traffic and ad impressions.

Ad fraud detection company Pixalate documented this activity in a recent investigation and dubbed the web properties using it “zombie sites” due to their ability to automatically generate traffic without human activity.

This form of ad fraud was also detailed in two recent BuzzFeed News investigations, which serve to highlight how the technique is growing in popularity and is now being used on more mainstream sites.

In one case, Myspace and roughly 150 local newspaper websites owned by GateHouse Media said they were unwittingly part of redirect networks that racked up millions of fraudulent video ad impressions. Both companies told BuzzFeed News the offending subdomains on their sites were managed by third parties, and that Myspace and GateHouse received no revenue from any fraudulent impressions. The pages have since been shut down.

“How were [these subdomains] getting all those video views? Well, they just originated it. A user is not doing anything, but the page is just redirecting by itself,” Fou said…

…On porn sites, as well as on many illegal streaming and file-sharing sites, it starts with a visitor clicking anywhere on the page. Regardless of what they meant to click, the site clickjacks the action and uses it to open a pop-under window behind the user’s main browser tab.

As the user watches porn or other content in the main window, unscrupulous ad networks use the hidden window to load different websites at timed intervals, racking up views and ad impressions. A user often has no idea this is happening in the background, and in some cases porn sites load the pop-under as an invisible window that can’t be seen. (That window will load websites and ad impressions until the entire browser is closed, or until the computer loses its internet connection.)

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Switching views on consoles • Bloomberg Gadfly

Tim Culpan:

»

Apparently the games console isn’t dead. Yet.

Despite numerous distractions for consumers – from smartphone games to Netflix – Nintendo Co.’s Switch has a chance of becoming the Japanese company’s best-selling gaming machine in a decade.

With the 10 million mark recently surpassed and Christmas ahead, it’s possible Switch may beat the 17 million mark set by the Nintendo 3DS in the 2011/12 fiscal year. Selling another 7 million units in the next four months will be a stretch, but even even if it comes within a few million, Nintendo will be able to celebrate.

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The Switch is a strange beast: it’s a very portable console, but also works as a stationary one. And it’s got a hell of a battery. No wonder it’s selling so well. Yet without the Nintendo content – hello, Mario – it would be nowhere.
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You can log out, but you can’t hide • Axios

»

A new study from Ghostery, an anti-tracking tool, shows that an overwhelming majority (79%) of websites globally are tracking visitors’ data — with 10% of these sites actually sending user data to 10 companies or more.

• Tracking scripts from Google and Facebook are by far the most pervasive. Together, those two companies collect more data than most other companies combined.

• The US, Russia and UK have more trackers per page load than the global average, while Germany, France and India have fewer. (Germany and many European countries are known for their culture of strong data privacy.)

• The advertising supply chain represents the vast majority of tracking companies.

New regulatory efforts to protect consumer privacy will significantly hinder these companies’ ability to collect data via tracking scripts. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which goes into effect next year in Europe, will require companies to get explicit permission from consumers to collect their data.

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Android Oreo review: conclusion • BirchTree

Matt Birchler:

»

Honestly, if I could run all of my iOS apps on the Android operating system I think I’d feel a lot better about Android. It’s a lack of consistent quality software on the platform that really drives me away. The vast difference in quality software from non-Google companies is just depressing for someone coming from the iOS world. Websites like MacStories exist almost completely to talk about third party apps on iOS, and there is enough new and exciting software coming out on a regular basis that they can make a business of it. You simply don’t have that on the Android side, as Android-centric sites instead focus mostly on hardware, sales, and what updates Google themselves are making. In the past 2 months with the Pixel 2, the only “exciting” app releases have been AR Stickers for the Pixel 2 camera app and a new file management app made by Google.

As I return to iOS full time, I do intend to keep carrying the Pixel 2 with me for a while. I’ll carry it mostly for the camera, which is indeed quite excellent, but there will also be a few Android features I’ll miss. I’ll miss the superior notification management. I’ll miss the far superior do-not-disturb options. I’ll miss having Google Assistant as my main digital assistant. And I’ll miss picture-in-picture on my phone. I will miss these things, but as I think is very clear by now, I’ll miss those things less than I missed all the goodies iOS brings me.

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Nails it about Android news sites. There’s really very little to chew on there. (Still waiting for David Ruddock’s article about what he doesn’t like about iOS after using Android for 10 years. Perhaps it’ll land next week.)
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Ajit Pai thinks you’re stupid enough to buy this crap [Update: one of the 7 things is dancing with a Pizzagater] • Gizmodo

Tom McKay:

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The [net neutrality] plan is immensely unpopular, even with Republicans. This type of situation would typically call for a charm offensive, though Pai has apparently decided to resort to his time-honored tactic of being incredibly condescending instead. In a video with the conservative site Daily Caller’s Benny Johnson—the dude who got fired from BuzzFeed for plagiarizing Yahoo Answers—Pai urged the country to understand that even if he succeeds in his plan to let ISPs strangle the rest of the internet to death, they’ll let us continue to take selfies and other stupid bullshit.

“There’s been quite a bit of conversation about my plan to restore Internet freedom,” Pai says in the cringe-inducing clip. “Here are just a few of the things you will still be able to do on the Internet after these Obama-era regulations are repealed.”

Pai then pantomimed things users will supposedly still be able to do, like being able to “gram your food,” “post photos of cute animals, like puppies,” “shop for all your Christmas presents online,” “binge watch your favorite shows,” and “stay part of your favorite fan community.”

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Pai’s backstory is interesting: he’s a lawyer who was appointed to the FCC by Obama at the urging of Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell. He’s no slouch, and he has had a consistent position on this.

The GIF stuff is stupid; he’s badly advised.
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Facebook will launch pre-roll video ads in 2018 • Recode

Peter Kafka:

»

For years, Facebook executives have said they don’t want to run “pre-roll” ads — ads that run before you get to watch the video you want to play — because users don’t like them.

Now, Facebook is going to start running pre-roll ads.

Important: That doesn’t mean your News Feed is going to be full of video ads you didn’t ask to see. The pre-rolls, which will run for up to six seconds, will only appear on videos in Facebook’s “Watch” hub, where it is hoping you will go and hang out because you want to watch Facebook videos.

Facebook says it will start formally testing the format next year. (Ad Age first reported the change.)

Facebook launched its Watch hub earlier this year, using “mid-roll” ads (another ad format Facebook tried to avoid for a long time). The fact that they have added pre-rolls — the format used around the web and the one advertisers are most comfortable with — should be read as an admission that the mid-roll ads aren’t generating significant revenue for Facebook or the publishers putting video into Watch.

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I wonder – just an idea here – whether it could just be that video isn’t actually the saviour of everyone’s business model?
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The FCC just killed net neutrality. Now what? • WIRED

Klint Finley:

»

Most immediately, the activity will move to the courts, where the advocacy group Free Press, and probably others, will challenge the FCC’s decision. The most likely argument: that the commission’s decision violates federal laws barring agencies from crafting “arbitrary and capricious” regulations. After all, the FCC’s net neutrality rules were just passed in 2015. Activists and many members of Congress, including at least six Republicans, pushed for a delay in the vote, but apart from a brief delay due to a security issue, the vote occurred as planned.

But as capricious as the current FCC’s about-face may seem, legal experts say the challenges won’t be a slam-dunk case. Federal agencies are allowed to change their minds about previous regulations, so long as they adequately explain their reasoning. “It’s not carte blanche,” says Marc Martin, chair of law firm Perkins Coie’s communications practice. “You can’t make it obvious that it’s just based on politics.” Martin says the burden of proof will be on net neutrality advocates challenging the agency.

The FCC’s main argument for revoking the 2015 rules is that the regulations hurt investment in broadband infrastructure. But, as WIRED recently detailed, many broadband providers actually increased their investments, while those that cut back on spending told shareholders that the net neutrality rules didn’t affect their plans.

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That the US has more competition in wireless than wired broadband say to me that the wired market has reached an end state. Not a good one, either. The FCC’s tinkering here isn’t going to make a difference. The US needs proper local loop unbundling so that ISPs and telcos can compete at the local level; in that case it doesn’t matter whether you impose net neutrality because someone will offer it.

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Amazon to start selling Apple TV and Google Chromecast • CNET

Ben Fox Rubin:

»

Amazon said Thursday that it will again be selling Apple TV and Google Chromecast devices, two video-streaming gadgets the e-commerce giant removed from its site two years ago and that compete with its own Fire TV products.

“I can confirm that we are assorting Apple TV and Chromecast,” an Amazon spokeswoman told CNET on Thursday, referring to the company’s plans to stock up on the devices. She offered no further statements.

Amazon added product listing pages for the Apple TV and two versions of the Apple TV 4K, as well as the Google Chromecast and Chromecast Ultra. The gadgets aren’t available for sale yet, but customers should expect they will be shortly.

Apple and Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Background: Amazon hasn’t been selling these for ages; then Google pulled YouTube from Amazon hardware (Fire Stick, Echo Show); then Amazon tried to reinstate them; then Google really blocked them.

And now Amazon seems to have blinked. Expect the next move to be YouTube being reinstated on Amazon devices.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified. You didn’t even complain about my posting yesterday’s post 8hr late.

The Mirai botnet was initially built to attack Minecraft servers. Then things grew and people got arrested. Photo by John Baichtal on Flickr.

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.

A selection of 12 links for you. 0.7% approve. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Net giants ‘must pay for news’ from which they make billions • Agence France-Presse

»

Nine European press agencies, including AFP, called Wednesday on internet giants to be forced to pay copyright for using news content on which they make vast profits.

The call comes as the EU is debating a directive to make Facebook, Google, Twitter and other major players pay for the millions of news articles they use or link to.

“Facebook has become the biggest media in the world,” the agencies said in a plea published in the French daily Le Monde.

“Yet neither Facebook nor Google have a newsroom… They do not have journalists in Syria risking their lives, nor a bureau in Zimbabwe investigating Mugabe’s departure, nor editors to check and verify information sent in by reporters on the ground.”

“Access to free information is supposedly one of the great victories of the internet. But it is a myth,” the agencies argued.

“At the end of the chain, informing the public costs a lot of money.”

News, the declaration added, is the second reason after catching up on family and friends for people to log onto Facebook, which tripled its profits to $10bn (€8.5bn) last year.

«

One to watch.
link to this extract

Buying a Chromebook? Here’s what you need to worry about • WSJ

Wilson Rothman notes that Chromebook sales have doubled in the US, and that they’re cheap, but note:

»

When students log into a Chromebook using their school-issued accounts, the school’s settings govern how they use the Google apps, and Google doesn’t target educational accounts for advertising. Yet that login doesn’t necessarily prevent children from visiting unsafe websites.

For now, if you want to lock down a Chromebook, you have to create supervised user accounts, which let you add websites to naughty or nice lists, monitor history, block apps and extensions, and tweak other settings.

But they’re too hands-on: There are no simple filters built on a child’s age, nor anything resembling Apple’s iOS restrictions, which let you turn off a wide array of specific services, from cameras to in-app purchases.

What Google really needs to do is add Chromebooks to its Family Link, a new user-friendly way to monitor and set limits on children’s internet use. At press time, Family Link was compatible only with Android devices, but the surge in Chromebook sales should pressure Google to expand it. Kan Liu, Google’s Chrome OS product-management director, said Google is thinking about how to integrate Family Link into Chromebooks.

(Note: Built-in parental controls are ideal, but there are also third-party controls like Circle for your home network.)

«

link to this extract

We messed up. We’re sorry, and we’re not rolling out the fees change • The Patreon Blog

Jack Conte is CEO of Patreon:

»

We’ve heard you loud and clear. We’re not going to rollout the changes to our payments system that we announced last week. We still have to fix the problems that those changes addressed, but we’re going to fix them in a different way, and we’re going to work with you to come up with the specifics, as we should have done the first time around. Many of you lost patrons, and you lost income. No apology will make up for that, but nevertheless, I’m sorry. It is our core belief that you should own the relationships with your fans. These are your businesses, and they are your fans.

I’ve spent hours and hours on the phone with creators, and so has the Patreon team. Your feedback has been crystal clear:

• The new payments system disproportionately impacted $1 – $2 patrons. We have to build a better system for them.
• Aggregation is highly-valued, and we underestimated that.
• Fundamentally, creators should own the business decisions with their fans, not Patreon. We overstepped our bounds and injected ourselves into that relationship, against our core belief as a business.

«

Better late than never, but some people have lost sponsorship from this already.
link to this extract

No, Google’s Pixel Buds won’t change the world • 1843

Leo Mirani:

»

I took the Pixel Buds to Buckow, in Brandenburg in eastern Germany, with the intent of trying them out in the wild. Reader, they remained in my bag. This is not, therefore, a conventional product review. It is small contribution to the vast corpus of complaints about what happens to product design when an engineer’s focus on problem solving blinds them to the norms of the social interaction. However effective a gadget is, it will fail if it makes its user feel like a chump.

It is bad enough that mobile-phone signal when roaming in the EU can often be spotty (the translation service needs internet connectivity to work). It is worse that Germans possess an inherent distrust of Silicon Valley firms so asking them to speak into a phone while you’re wearing earphones is an invitation for abuse. But worst of all is the sheer awkwardness of the whole thing: hang on a second while I put in these ridiculous things, fire up the app, make sure everything’s synced up, and then speak into my phone while holding it up to your ear, bitte, just so I can hear your response in my own ear.

Danke, but nein danke. This is not how human beings interact with each other. It is telling that this product comes from the same people who brought us Google Glass, an ugly, invasive face-mounted camera that evoked hostility wherever it was worn.

«

link to this extract

Popular destinations rerouted to Russia • BGPmon

Andree Toonk:

»

Early this morning (UTC) our systems detected a suspicious event where many prefixes for high profile destinations were being announced by an unused Russian Autonomous System.

Starting at 04:43 (UTC) 80 prefixes normally announced by organizations such Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitch, NTT Communications and Riot Games were now detected in the global BGP routing tables with an Origin AS of 39523 (DV-LINK-AS), out of Russia.

Looking at timeline we can see two event windows of about three minutes each. The first one started at 04:43 UTC and ended at around 04:46 UTC. The second event started 07:07 UTC and finished at 07:10 UTC.

Even though these events were relatively short lived, they were significant because it was picked up by a large number of peers and because of several new more specific prefixes that are not normally seen on the Internet. So let’s dig a little deeper.

One of the interesting things about this incident is the prefixes that were affected are all network prefixes for well known and high traffic internet organizations. The other odd thing is that the Origin AS 39523 (DV-LINK-AS) hasn’t been seen announcing any prefixes for many years (with one exception below), so why does it all of sudden appear and announce prefixes for networks such as Google?

«

I won’t pretend to understand this, but they don’t think it’s good.
link to this extract

The big melt: the Alps and artificial snow • Time

Jeffrey Kluger:

»

From 1960 to 2017, the Alpine snow season shortened by 38 days—starting an average of 12 days later and ending 26 days earlier than normal. Europe experienced its warmest-ever winter in the 2015–16 season, with snow cover in the southern French Alps just 20% of its typical depth.

Last December was the driest in 150 years of record keeping, and the flakes that did manage to fall didn’t stay around long. The snow line—the point on a slope at which it’s high enough and thus cold enough for snow to stick—is about 3,900 ft., which is a historic high in some areas. But worse lies ahead as scientists predict melt even at nearly 10,000 ft. by the end of the century.

All this is doing terrible things not just to Alpine beauty but to Alpine businesses—especially ski resorts. Globally, the ski industry generates up to $70 billion per year, and 44% of all skiers—and their dollars—flock to the Alps.

Imagine the Caribbean culture and economy without beaches and water; that’s the Alpine culture and economy without snow…

…the Dolomites have changed—their snow quickly vanishing—and that transformation is what caught the eye of Italian photographer Marco Zorzanello. A onetime student of literature, he found himself growing less interested in the lit part of his education and more interested in the human part—particularly the damage humans as a whole are doing to ourselves and to our world through climate change.

«

They’re remarkable pictures, and quite eerie; and scary if you like skiing.
link to this extract

Mirai IoT botnet co-authors plead guilty • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs, who named two of the people he believed – through online sleuthing – were behind the original Mirai botnet (which is not the one that knocked Twitter, Reddit et al offline last year; the original was built to attack Minecraft servers):

»

In addition, the Mirai co-creators pleaded guilty to charges of using their botnet to conduct click fraud — a form of online advertising fraud that will cost Internet advertisers more than $16bn this year, according to estimates from ad verification company Adloox. 

The plea agreements state that Jha, White and another person who also pleaded guilty to click fraud conspiracy charges — a 21-year-old from Metairie, Louisiana named Dalton Norman — leased access to their botnet for the purposes of earning fraudulent advertising revenue through click fraud activity and renting out their botnet to other cybercriminals.

As part of this scheme, victim devices were used to transmit high volumes of requests to view web addresses associated with affiliate advertising content. Because the victim activity resembled legitimate views of these websites, the activity generated fraudulent profits through the sites hosting the advertising content, at the expense of online advertising companies.

Jha and his co-conspirators admitted receiving as part of the click fraud scheme approximately two hundred bitcoin, valued on January 29, 2017 at over $180,000.

Prosecutors say Norman personally earned over 30 bitcoin, valued on January 29, 2017 at approximately $27,000. The documents show that Norman helped Jha and White discover new, previously unknown vulnerabilities in IoT devices that could be used to beef up their Mirai botnet, which at its height grew to more than 300,000 hacked devices.

«

Click fraud by IoT. Things pretending to be people to click ads.
link to this extract

Is AlphaZero really a scientific breakthrough in AI? • Medium

Jose Camacho Collados is an AI/NLP research and international chess master:

»

We should scientifically scrutinize alleged breakthroughs carefully, especially in the period of AI hype we live now. It is actually responsibility of researchers in this area to accurately describe and advertise our achievements, and try not to contribute to the growing (often self-interested) misinformation and mystification of the field. In fact, this early December in NIPS, arguably the most prestigious AI conference, some researchers showed important concerns about the lack of rigour of this scientific community in recent years.

In this case, given the relevance of the claims, I hope these concerns will be clarified and solved in order to be able to accurately judge the actual scientific contribution of this feat, a judgement that it is not possible to make right now. Probably with a better experimental design as well as an effort on reproducibility the conclusions would be a bit weaker as originally claimed.

«

He has a number of questions about the AlphaZero/Stockfish matchup. Some seem a bit weak, or easily answered, but the question of reproducibility is important. Deepmind is making big claims, but this isn’t how you do real science.
link to this extract

It’s official: ADSL works over wet string • RevK’s rants

»

Broadband services are a wonderful innovation of our time, using multiple frequency bands (hence the name) to carry signals over wires (usually copper, sometimes aluminium). One of the key aspects of the technology is its ability to adapt to the length and characteristics of the line on which it is deployed.

We have seen faults on broadband circuits that manifest as the system adapting to much lower speeds, this is a key factor as a service can work, but unusually slowly, over very bad lines.

It has always been said that ADSL will work over a bit of wet string.

Well one of our techies (www.aa.net.uk) took it upon himself to try it today at the office, and well done.

He got some proper string, and made it wet…

«

Flipping biscuits, he got 3.5Mbps down. That’s more than I get at home.
link to this extract

Exclusive interview: Apple’s Phil Schiller on how the iPhone X ‘seemed impossible at the start’ • T3

Dan Grabham:

»

We say to Schiller that we’ve been surprised at how good Face ID is for Apple Pay. “Yes. That was on a long list of things we knew we had to deliver. The home button, at the beginning, really did one thing. Maybe two. It woke up your screen, and then it let you go to the home screen from any app. And then over the years, we’ve layered on many, many uses – the multitasking capabilities, evoking Siri, you being able to use it for Apple Pay, creating Touch ID for your fingerprint. So Face ID had a much harder job for its first version than the home button had for its first version.”

Apple notoriously doesn’t talk about products in advance (unless it’s the 2018 Mac Pro, when it did), but regardless we ask whether Face ID could appear in more Apple products beyond phones? “We try not to get ahead of ourselves,” says Schiller with the look of someone who may have been asked this question before. “While we have many plans throughout the year for many things, we also are realists in that we need to create something, and that we need to make it great, and that we need to study, and we need to learn… all the user cases all around the world from everybody in every situation, before we then imagine some of the other things we might do.”…

Why the pause [in delivering HomePod]?

“It’s really very simple. It’s a brand new product. It’s a lot of engineering to make it be the product we’ve described, and for it to be what we all hope it can be.

“And I’m actually really proud that we’re a company that will take the time to do something right. Our goal is always not to be ‘most’ but to be ‘best’, and we set high standards. We often exceed those, but not always. And we need to be self-honest if something’s not ready, and continue to work on it until it is.”

Schiller is also frank about AI-driven speakers being still very much a developing product category. “Nobody really knows how we all want to use these kinds of products.

“There might not be one product for everybody. And our [focus is] on having great sounding music wherever you place it in your room or your flat, or a great interaction with Siri for a music experience – we think that that’s a great [starting] point for a whole new kind of product in our lives.

“I think others have different perspectives on the things that they’re making, and we’re all going to learn together what we think.”

«

Also covers AirPods, Apple Pencil, and iPad Pro as a desktop/laptop replacement. I think what he’s saying about HomePod echoes the Apple Watch introduction – Apple had an idea for how that would be used which quite quickly coalesced around the fitness angle rather than apps. What’s HomePod’s one?
link to this extract

Apple to invest $390m in Finisar to ramp up chip production • Reuters

»

Apple Inc will give Finisar Corp $390m to increase production of chips that power high-profile iPhone X features including Face ID, Animojis and portrait-mode photos…

…The investment is Apple’s second from its $1bn advanced manufacturing fund that seeks to foster innovation and create jobs, Apple said. The first investment was a $200m infusion into Gorilla Glass maker Corning in May.

Finisar will use the money to transform a previously closed 700,000-square-foot plant in Sherman, Texas to make high volumes of laser diodes called vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, or VCSELs.

In the fourth quarter of 2017, Apple said it would buy 10 times more VCSELs than were previously made worldwide over a similar time period.

«

That’s a big ramp in VCSELs. Do they have any other uses?
link to this extract

I used to be a bitcoin bull — here’s why that changed • Ars Technica

Timothy B Lee:

»

Now we’re in the midst of another big bitcoin bull market, and I’m much more worried that the market is getting into unsustainable territory. At the beginning of the year, bitcoins were worth $1,000 apiece, and all bitcoins in circulation were worth around $15 billion—still quite small as global financial assets go. Today, each bitcoin is worth $17,000, and all bitcoins in circulation are worth a much more substantial $280 billion. That seems like a lot for a payment network that only processes about four transactions per second.

Meanwhile, there are growing signs that ordinary, unsophisticated investors may be getting in over their heads. Anecdotal reports suggest that people with no real technical or financial expertise are getting interested in cryptocurrency, and some people are even borrowing money to invest in bitcoin. The market is starting to feel like the final month of the dotcom boom, when people started getting tech stock tips from their taxi drivers.

I don’t necessarily think the market is over-valued, and it might still go up further. But I’m pretty sure investors won’t enjoy the kind of outsized gains that earlier investors have enjoyed. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see the market crash in the coming months…

…The big question is what will people use bitcoin for, and how big will the resulting markets be?

A big challenge, however, is that the network is becoming increasingly congested. Right now, the network is struggling to process more than about four transactions per second, and intense demand for network capacity has pushed the average transaction fee above $20. There are various proposals to relieve this congestion, from increasing the size of Bitcoin blocks to developing new technologies to allow many transactions to occur outside of Bitcoin’s blockchain.

Nevertheless, capacity limits are likely to limit the Bitcoin network’s growth for years to come.

«

I get the slight feeling that this is the response to an editor’s call of “find me someone who used to be a bull on bitcoin and is now bearish!”, but overall it’s solid.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Grand Theft Auto got its big push via manufactured outrage. Photo by Smade Media on Flickr.

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.

A selection of 10 links for you. Contains no Star Wars spoilers. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Meet the man trying to catch Google search at its worst • The Outline

Jon Christian:

»

There is one group working on a concept for a system that would establish a record of search engine results. The idea is similar to the Internet Archive, which downloads periodic copies of websites, but more complicated since search engines display different results depending on the time as well as the location and history of the user. The solution for tracking such a complicated system is described in a prospectus for the Sunlight Society, founded by a group of 20 researchers under the banner of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT), a nonprofit in Vista, California that conducts research in psychology and tech.

The concept is similar to Nielsen Media Research’s longstanding system that collects information about audience size and demographics of television viewers through meters installed in households around the country. But instead of monitoring TV habits of real people, the system would monitor their internet use. This would require a worldwide network of paid collaborators who would provide the Sunlight Society with access to their search results.

“This is about new methods of influence that have never existed before, and that are affecting the decisions of billions of people every day without their knowledge, and without leaving a paper trail,” said Robert Epstein, a 64-year-old researcher, book author, and former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today.

«

Ambitious scheme. But important.
link to this extract

iMac Pro available to order december 14, starting at $4,999 • Mac Rumors

»

iMac Pro is a powerful, top-of-the-line workstation designed for professional users with demanding workflows, such as advanced video and graphics editing, virtual reality content creation, and real-time 3D rendering.

“iMac Pro is a huge step forward and there’s never been anything like it,” said John Ternus, Apple’s VP of Hardware Engineering.

The all-in-one desktop computer has a 27-inch Retina 5K display within a sleek space gray enclosure. Apple also includes a space gray Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad, Magic Mouse 2, and Magic Trackpad 2 in the box.

Apple said the iMac Pro is the fastest and most powerful Mac ever, at least until the modular Mac Pro is released.

The machine can be configured with up to an 18-core Intel Xeon processor, up to 4TB of SSD storage, up to 128GB of ECC RAM, and an AMD Radeon Pro Vega 64 graphics processor with 16GB of HBM2 memory.

«

That’s quite hefty. The thinking is that Apple was going to let this be its top-end “Pro” model but that the outcry about the lack of modularity got it to go back and revamp the cylindrical Mac Pro, which will be completely renewed in 2018.
link to this extract

Facebook to stop booking ad sales through Irish HQ • FT

Hannah Kuchler and Madison Marriage:

»

The world’s largest social network said next year it will move towards a local selling structure. Advertisements sold will be booked as revenue in the 25 countries across the world rather than at its international headquarters in Ireland.

The move could mean the company faces higher taxes as it books revenue in countries such as France, Germany and Italy. But depending on how it accounts for its expenses in each jurisdiction, it may not pay much more tax overall. Revenue from its self-serve platform, where millions of small advertisers buy inventory, will continue to be booked in Ireland.

Dave Wehner, chief financial officer, said the move will require “significant resources” to implement and will only be finished at the end of the first half of 2019.

“We believe that moving to a local selling structure will provide more transparency to governments and policymakers around the world who have called for greater visibility over the revenue associated with locally-supported sales in their countries,” he said.

«

Or is it to do with the new General Data Protection Requirements coming in to Europe next year? Then again given when it will finish, perhaps not.

link to this extract

AI-assisted fake porn is here and we’re all fscked • Motherboard

Samantha Cole:

»

There’s a video of Gal Gadot having sex with her stepbrother on the internet. But it’s not really Gadot’s body, and it’s barely her own face. It’s an approximation, face-swapped to look like she’s performing in an existing incest-themed porn video.

The video was created with a machine learning algorithm, using easily accessible materials and open-source code that anyone with a working knowledge of deep learning algorithms could put together.

It’s not going to fool anyone who looks closely. Sometimes the face doesn’t track correctly and there’s an uncanny valley effect at play, but at a glance it seems believable. It’s especially striking considering that it’s allegedly the work of one person—a Redditor who goes by the name ‘deepfakes’—not a big special effects studio that can digitally recreate a young Princess Leia in Rogue One using CGI. Instead, deepfakes uses open-source machine learning tools like TensorFlow, which Google makes freely available to researchers, graduate students, and anyone with an interest in machine learning.

Like the Adobe tool that can make people say anything, and the Face2Face algorithm that can swap a recorded video with real-time face tracking, this new type of fake porn shows that we’re on the verge of living in a world where it’s trivially easy to fabricate believable videos of people doing and saying things they never did. Even having sex.

«

“Not going to fool anyone who looks closely”. You think people watching that sort of stuff are going to look closely?
link to this extract

Want proof that patience pays off? Ask the founders of this 17-year-old $525m email empire • Inc.com

Maria Aspan:

»

MailChimp, which grew out of a discarded web business, is profitable, still entirely owned by its co-founders, and growing by more than $120m every year; [co-founder and CEO Ben] Chestnut estimates that in 2017 it will post $525m in revenue.

That’s despite the fact that some undisclosed percentage of his customers never pay MailChimp a cent. In fact, MailChimp started succeeding when it stopped charging everybody – when it deliberately tied its fortunes to the small businesses that make up its core customers. It’s kept growing at a torrid pace for years – this, while many more prominent tech companies are losing money, customers, CEOs, and credibility. MailChimp has never taken a dollar from venture capitalists or other outside investors. And long before entrepreneurship was cool, it made itself crucial to the ecosystem of new and emerging businesses. For all those reasons, in 2017, MailChimp is Inc.’s Company of the Year.

Still: Email? In an era of Instagram stories and Snapchat filters and Facebook ads, Inc.’s 2017 Company of the Year is focused on email?

It is. And for a good reason. “It’s not the shiny new thing, but more the steady thing that actually works,” says Neeru Paharia, who was on the founding team of Creative Commons, which developed standards for internet publication, and is now an assistant professor of marketing at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. Maybe that’s why small businesses still allocate about 10% of their marketing budgets to direct marketing, including email, according to Forrester, which estimates that US business spent $2.8bn on email marketing in 2017.

«

Given that pretty much every single website you land on demands you SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER, maybe that’s not surprising. By the way, if you’re reading this on the web page, have you signed up for the daily email?
link to this extract

Bitcoin arbitrage and tax math • Bloomberg

Matt Levine:

»

We talked yesterday about the launch of bitcoin futures at Cboe Global Markets Inc., and about the fact that a January bitcoin future was going for about $1,000 more than a bitcoin today. “When regular trading hours start today,” I said, “you might expect more professionals to come in and arbitrage away some of the price differences,” but nah: As of 8:15 this morning, the futures were still more than $1,000 above the spot price. You could borrow $16,889, buy one bitcoin, sell a future for $18,000 on Cboe, wait a month, sell the bitcoin and deliver the cash to settle the future. The extra $1,111 – minus your cost of borrowing – would be risk-free profit. Everyone finds it a little odd…

«

But he thinks the reason is probably just inefficient markets:

»

There’s a big gap between the futures and the spot because the market is not yet working right. Perhaps there are not enough arbitrageurs in the futures market: The contract is brand new, not all brokers are offering access to it, and those who do offer access often don’t allow short selling. (You need to short the futures to do the arbitrage.) “Right now the big boys haven’t come in yet,” says one trader. Eventually that will settle down and the spread will narrow.

«

Once again we expect people to lose their shirts and more on bitcoin. But that saying about “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”? Applies in spades to bitcoin.

The rest of Levine’s column is worth reading too. (Thanks Walt for the link.)
link to this extract

People are taking out mortgages to buy bitcoin, says Joseph Borg • CNBC

Michelle Fox:

»

Bitcoin is in the “mania” phase, with some people even borrowing money to get in on the action, securities regulator Joseph Borg told CNBC on Monday.

“We’ve seen mortgages being taken out to buy bitcoin. … People do credit cards, equity lines,” said Borg, president of the North American Securities Administrators Association, a voluntary organization devoted to investor protection. Borg is also director of the Alabama Securities Commission.

“This is not something a guy who’s making $100,000 a year, who’s got a mortgage and two kids in college ought to be invested in.”

«

As someone pointed out on Twitter, isn’t it the banks’ responsibility not to lend money foolishly (since the money they lend actually belongs to other people, not the banks), rather than the responsibility of people not to ask for money foolishly?
link to this extract

GTA: “Max Clifford made it all happen” • GamesIndustry.biz

Rachel Weber:

»

David Jones and Mike Dailly, the creators of the original Grand Theft Auto, have revealed just how pivotal PR guru Max Clifford was to the game’s success.

“Max Clifford made it all happen,” Dailly told The Sunday Times.

“He designed all the outcry, which pretty much guaranteed MPs would get involved… He’d do anything to keep the profile high.”

The game was developed by DMA Design and published by BMG Interactive, who hired the controversial media manager. According to Jones, his provocative plan included planted stories and knowing which politicians and papers could provide the game with free press fuelled by outrage.

“He told us how he would play it, who he would target, what those people targeted would say.” Jones adds, “every word he said came true”.

«

Outrage and attention: the two key drivers. The world is full of Cliffords now. Yes, in both senses. (He was imprisoned for sexual assault, and died in prison last weekend.)
link to this extract

Fingerprints of Russian disinformation: from AIDS to fake news • The New York Times

Linda Qiu:

»

Called Operation Infektion by the East German foreign intelligence service, the 1980s disinformation campaign seeded a conspiracy theory that the virus that causes AIDS was the product of biological weapons experiments conducted by the United States. At the time, the disease disproportionately afflicted gay men, and the Reagan administration’s slow response had escalated into suspicions in the gay community that the United States government was responsible for its origins.

“The K.G.B. picked up on that, and added a new twist with a specific location: Fort Detrick, Md.,” where military scientists conducted biological weapons experiments in the 1950s and 1960s, said Douglas Selvage, the project director at the Office of the Federal Commissioner for Stasi Records in Berlin.

The K.G.B. campaign began with an anonymous letter in Patriot, a small newspaper published in New Delhi that was later revealed to have received Soviet funding. It ran in July 1983, under the headline “AIDS May Invade India: Mystery Disease Caused by U.S. Experiments” and pinned the origin of the disease to Fort Detrick.

The choice of Patriot was deliberate, said Thomas Boghardt, a military and intelligence historian who traced how the campaign unfolded. “It had no explicit links to the Soviets and was an English-language newspaper easily accessible to a global audience.

“The Soviets intuitively understood how the human psyche works,” Dr. Boghardt said. He said the playbook was simple but effective: Identify internal strife, point to inconsistencies and ambiguities in the news, fill them with meaning and “repeat, repeat, repeat.”

«

link to this extract

That viral story about Alabama drivers license offices is from 2015, and it’s missing one key point • The Washington Post

Christopher Ingraham:

»

late last year, the state [of Alabama] agreed to expand license office hours in a number of rural, predominantly black counties in response to a federal Department of Transportation investigation.

According to the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, there are driver’s license offices in every Alabama county except for one: Lauderdale County, which is 87% white and is served primarily by an office immediately across the Tennessee River in Colbert County.

Many of the offices in smaller counties are open only during limited hours each month. In Cherokee County (pop. 25,897, 93% white), for instance, the office is open only the first Tuesday of each month. The office in Chambers County (pop. 34,018, 57% white) is open only on the second Thursday.

But the primary determinant in a license office’s hours of operation appears to be population, rather than race.

«

My fault for not checking the date on the original post which I quoted in yesterday’s edition. Such an easy mistake, yet such an important one to take care about. My apologies. (Notable that some publications, such as The Guardian, will warn you when you’re reading an old story on their site. Of course, it was much harder to make this mistake with print.) (Thanks Fabian and Wendy for pointing out my error.)
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Time to take Iran’s state hackers seriously, experts say. Picture by Dalantech on Flickr.

Now with links which open in new windows/tabs! Really.

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.

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

The problem with Muzak • The Baffler

Liz Pelly:

»

Spotify loves “chill” playlists: they’re the purest distillation of its ambition to turn all music into emotional wallpaper. They’re also tied to what its algorithm manipulates best: mood and affect. Note how the generically designed, nearly stock photo images attached to these playlists rely on the selfsame clickbait-y tactics of content farms, which are famous for attacking a reader’s basest human moods and instincts. Only here the goal is to fit music snugly into an emotional regulation capsule optimized for maximum clicks: “chill.out.brain,” “Ambient Chill,” “Chill Covers.” “Piano in the Background” is one of the most aptly titled; “in the background” could be added to the majority of Spotify playlists.

As an industry insider once explained to me, digital strategists have identified “lean back listening” as an ever more popular Spotify-induced phenomenon. It turns out that playlists have spawned a new type of music listener, one who thinks less about the artist or album they are seeking out, and instead connects with emotions, moods and activities, where they just pick a playlist and let it roll: “Chillin’ On a Dirt Road,” “License to Chill,” “Cinematic Chill Out.” They’re all there.

These algorithmically designed playlists, in other words, have seized on an audience of distracted, perhaps overworked, or anxious listeners whose stress-filled clicks now generate anesthetized, algorithmically designed playlists. One independent label owner I spoke with has watched his records’ physical and digital sales decline week by week. He’s trying to play ball with the platform by pitching playlists, to varying effect. “The more vanilla the release, the better it works for Spotify. If it’s challenging music? Nah,” he says, telling me about all of the experimental, noise, and comparatively aggressive music on his label that goes unheard on the platform. “It leaves artists behind. If Spotify is just feeding easy music to everybody, where does the art form go? Is anybody going to be able to push boundaries and break through to a wide audience anymore?”

«

This approach is reminiscent of the “relaxing” videos that some people adore on YouTube – though those are like a sort of visual Muzak.
link to this extract

Why Apple just spent up to $400 million on song-identification app Shazam • CNBC

Lora Kolodny:

»

With its large user base comes a staggering amount of data, and data is the new oil. Shazam knows what people are listening to, where and when, and how those trends are shifting over time.

With this kind of attentional feedback, artists, labels and other businesses can learn where fans are listening in the real world, and make better decisions about where to promote their songs offline.

Shazam faces competition, including from SoundHound and China’s QQ Music. But Shazam has been granted over 200 patents around its audio recognition and other technology.

The app is best-known as a song identifier, but Shazam can also be used to scan movie posters or other images to “unlock” extras, like behind-the-scenes video clips or augmented reality content from a celebrity or brand.

Now all of that intellectual property in audio recognition and advertising becomes Apple’s.

«

Expected exit price of $400m, way below its supposed valuation of over $1bn in 2015. Competition with Spotify’s capabilities as being developed above.
link to this extract

Alabama sends message: We are too broke to care about right and wrong • AL.com

Note: this post is from September 2015.

John Archibald:

»

Take a look at the 10 Alabama counties with the highest percentage of non-white registered voters. That’s Macon, Greene, Sumter, Lowndes, Bullock, Perry, Wilcox, Dallas, Hale, and Montgomery, according to the Alabama Secretary of State’s office. Alabama, thanks to its budgetary insanity and inanity, just opted to close driver license bureaus in eight of them. All but Dallas and Montgomery will be closed.

Closed. In a state in which driver licenses or special photo IDs are a requirement for voting.

It’s not just a civil rights violation. It is not just a public relations nightmare. It is not just an invitation for worldwide scorn and an alarm bell to the Justice Department. It is an affront to the very notion of justice in a nation where one man one vote is as precious as oxygen. It is a slap in the face to all who believe the stuff we teach the kids about how all are created equal.

Every single county in which blacks make up more than 75% of registered voters will see their driver license office closed. Every one.

«

Discovering new ways to implement racism is one of the US’s growth industries. Oh, and there’s an election there today, Tuesday.
link to this extract

New bitcoin futures suggest breakneck price gains to slow • Reuters

Saqib Iqbal Ahmed, Jemima Kelly and Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss:

»

Chicago-based derivatives exchange Cboe Global Markets launched the futures late on Sunday, marking the first time investors could get exposure to the bitcoin market via a large, regulated exchange.

The one-month bitcoin contract opened at 6 p.m. local time (2300 GMT) on Sunday at $15,460. By midday on Monday in New York, it was trading at $17,780, roughly 10% above bitcoin’s spot price of $16,335 on the Bitstamp exchange.

But given bitcoin has almost tripled in value over the past month, and was up more than 10% on Monday alone, the futures pricing suggested investors see price increases moderating.

«

Or else that investors are going to lose their shirts on margin calls.
link to this extract

Ex-Gawker employees launch crowdfunding drive to buy website • WSJ

Jonathan Randles:

»

Former employees of Gawker.com’s defunct publisher are raising money through a new crowdfunding campaign in a bid to purchase the blog out of bankruptcy and relaunch the website.

The campaign was launched Monday on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter and seeks to raise at least $500,000. Gawker ceased publication in August 2016 after losing a lawsuit brought by Hulk Hogan.

“This is a testing of the waters,” said James Del, a former vice president of programming at Gawker Media LLC who is organizing the crowdfunding drive. Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers is also advising, while other former employees are providing input on the project.

«

Ambitious, but the world has missed Gawker. Maybe they’d choose more carefully in the future.
link to this extract

YouTubers made hundreds of thousands off of bizarre and disturbing child content • Buzzfeed

Charlie Warzel:

»

Before YouTube pulled the ads from “Ted”’s channel, it was making him tens of thousands of dollars a month.

The father of two, who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of retaliation from YouTube, left a job with a six-figure salary to make YouTube videos of his young kids. These videos feature his children being “scared” by clowns, and adults mock-wrestling and handling a diaper covered in fake poop. As such, they fall into the broad category of “family-friendly” content — that is, home videos featuring children in situations ranging from merely silly to potentially exploitative — which YouTube recently began cracking down on after public outcry and media attention.

According to screenshots from the YouTuber’s account reviewed by BuzzFeed News, in the past two months, Ted made more than $100,000 on his videos — after YouTube’s 45% cut. Emails obtained by BuzzFeed News also show that twelve videos from the channel — videos that included “suspenseful” scenarios — were manually deemed “suitable for all advertisers” in November. (At least three videos were deemed unsuitable, at least one video was deleted, and another age-restricted.)

And then, suddenly, YouTube pulled advertising on the channel — with what Ted described as “no communication, notification, [or] reason … and no way to appeal or request review” — as part of its effort to remove and/or demonetize (remove ads from) hundreds of thousands of questionable and exploitative kids’ videos on the platform.

«

After YouTube’s cut. Of 45%. Both amazing facts.
link to this extract

iPhone X: the rise of gestures • Nielsen Norman Group

Raluca Budiu:

»

The lack of a Home button does incur usability costs, as we’ve hinted above. First, existing iPhone users will have to unlearn all the habits they’ve formed on previous devices. Second, they will have to remember more gestures and their corresponding outcomes. They will make mistakes in the very beginning, but after enough experience, they will eventually become as proficient as they were with their old devices. Last but not least, designers have to worry about this new form factor and about how their app will look on this device.
However, the question is not so much whether there are any costs, but whether the costs of this design are outweighed by the benefits. In this case, there is one potentially huge usability benefit: more screen space. Screen real estate is very expensive on mobile, so every additional millimeter has a positive impact on the user experience. That extra space might mean less scrolling and higher chances of actually seeing relevant content. (Also: how often do users use the Home button? Very often. But less often than reading content in an app or on the web. )
Right now, the extra space may not seem that generous — if you compare the visible area on an iPhone 8 Plus and on an iPhone X, you can see at best one extra line of text. Yet using a gesture instead of a visible button has the potential to open up more user-experience improvements in the designs to come — from Apple and from others.

The NNgroup.com webpage as seen on an iPhone X (left) and on an iPhone 8 Plus (right)

Apple is in a unique position to push this kind of gesture-based innovation and could even go beyond that to create a standard vocabulary of gestures that can be used by other apps or phone manufacturers, because the Apple brand  is so strong that people will put up with the hurdles of learning a new system and unlearning what they know for the sake of using its products.

«

link to this extract

Solved: Are you aware? Comcast is injecting 400+ lines of … • Comcast Xfinity Help and Support Forums

Angry User:

»

just learned of this dispicable Comcast practice today and I am livid.  Comcast began injecting 400+ lines of JavaScript code in to pages I requested on the internet so that when the browser renders the web page, the JavaScript generates a pop up trying to up-sell me a new modem.  When you call the number in the popup, they’re quick to tell you that you need a new modem, which in my case is not true.  I later verified with level-2 support that my modem is pefectly fine and I don’t need to upgrade.  As deceptive as that is however, my major complaint is that Comcast is intercepting web pages and then altering them by filling them with hundreds of lines of code.  Even worse is that I’ve had to speak to 7 different supervisors from all areas of Comcast and they have either never heard of the process, or those who were aware of the practice don’t know how to turn it off.  

«

Jonathan Livingood, Comcast staff member:

»

This is our web notification system, documented in RFC 6108 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6108, which has been in place for many years now. It presents an overlay service message on non-TLS-based HTTP sessions. If you click the X box or otherwise acknowledge the notice it should immediately go away. If that is not the case let me know and we’ll have a look at what may be happening.

[re the modem]: We are not trying to sell you a new one. If you own your modem we’re informing you that it is either end of life (EOL) or that you are about to get a speed upgrade that the modem will be unable to deliver.

«

Comcast can’t win: customers will be annoyed with it for injecting code and putting in popups, or for not telling them about new modems and giving them speed upgrades.
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This country’s hacking efforts have become too big to ignore • Cyberscoop

Chris Bing:

»

Multiple cyber-espionage groups attributed to Iran became increasingly active over the last 12 months, as at least four entities with ties to the regime have broken into a wide array of organizations, according to private sector cybersecurity experts and three former U.S. intelligence officials with knowledge of regional activity.

“For the first time in my career, I’m not convinced we’re responding more to Russia or China,” FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia said in a report published by the company on Thursday. “It feels to me that the majority of the actors we’re responding to right now are hosted in Iran, and they are state-sponsored.”

This surge in digital espionage — which has predominantly come in the form of spearphishing emails, strategic web compromises and breached social media accounts distributing malware — saw Iranian groups attempt to covertly gather business secrets and sensitive personal communications, according to Eyal Sela, head of threat intelligence with cybersecurity company ClearSky Security.

The targeted organizations range in location, with some strictly based in the U.S., some U.S.-based with locations in the Middle East and others solely located in Europe. Among the hardest hit were U.S. companies with a presence in the Middle East.

«

Nukes and cyber-attacks: the two proficiencies that modern nations want.
link to this extract

US Treasury admits tax plan won’t pay for itself – Axios

Dan Primack:

»

The US Treasury Department today released a one-page analysis of the GOP’s proposed tax reform plan.

Bottom line: The report acknowledges that the tax plan will not pay for itself via increased economic growth, despite Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin having regularly made such a claim. Instead, getting into the black would require both the tax plan and “a combination of regulatory reform, infrastructure development, and welfare reform.”

Moreover, the analysis uses the White House’s previous economic growth estimates (made before the tax plan was written) and works its way backwards into the math, rather than analyzing how the actual tax plan would affect economic growth.

The backstory: Mnuchin spent months talking about a detailed Treasury analysis of the GOP tax plans, but the NY Times reported in late November that no such analysis actually existed.

«

It sounds as though Mnuchin and the UK’s David Davis could have an entertaining conversation about non-existent analyses.

I do think Mnuchin should be played in the film – surely there’s going to be a film – by Rick Moranis.
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Why do asteroids explode high in the atmosphere? • Bad Astronomy

Phil Plait:

»

Computer models of how asteroids break up in the atmosphere show that the main mass must have been far weaker overall than the pieces found, by a factor of a hundred or so!

How can this be? New research indicates that the answer is, once again, air. Up until now we haven’t been treating it correctly in the physics.

What was thought to happen was that the rock slams into the atmosphere and the pressure in front of it screams up. This huge force is so great it flattens the asteroid in a process literally called pancaking. The stress breaks the rock up into smaller pieces. Each piece now has more surface area, and therefore more area to slam into air and glow. They each pancake, and the process repeats, giving you a rapid cascade into disintegration and energy release. kaBOOM.

But it turns out that the computer code being used didn’t really treat how the air gets into the rock, literally finding its way at high speed and pressure into cracks and voids inside the rock. That’s where the new research comes in. Using a more sophisticated code (developed at Los Alamos National Lab to simulate air flow at high velocities), they were able to add in the asteroid material permeability to see how it changes the impact physics.

What they found is that increasing the permeability increases the amount of pancaking, which increases the efficiency of breaking up the rock.

«

Just in case you’re asked by a national leader to help decide what to do about a giant asteroid heading for the earth.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Longer tweets are more popular – by some metrics – than short ones, new data suggests. Photo by Corine Bliek on Flickr.

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.

A selection of 15 links for you. Things just kept coming. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

German intelligence unmasks alleged covert Chinese social media profiles • Reuters

Thomas Escritt:

»

Germany’s intelligence service has published the details of social network profiles which it says are fronts faked by Chinese intelligence to gather personal information about German officials and politicians.

The BfV domestic intelligence service took the unusual step of naming individual profiles it says are fake and fake organizations to warn public officials about the risk of leaking valuable personal information via social media.

“Chinese intelligence services are active on networks like LinkedIn and have been trying for a while to extract information and find intelligence sources in this way,” including seeking data on users’ habits, hobbies and political interests, they said.

Nine months of research had found that more than 10,000 German citizens had been contacted on the LinkedIn professional networking site by fake profiles disguised as headhunters, consultants, think-tankers or scholars, the BfV said.

«

link to this extract

Huawei P11 might also have a notch • GSMArena

“Yordan”:

»

Huawei is preparing to launch its next flagship the P11 in February and first leaked firmware files suggest a surprise is on the way. According to XDA Developers, the Chinese manufacturer is going to introduce the phone with a notch on the front screen, similar to what we’ve seen in the iPhone X, Essential PH-1, and Sharp Aquos S2.

The overlay image comes from a reference in a configuration file that defines the “RoundCornerDisplay”. Multiple files are associated with this definition, all of them appearing to assist in avoiding drawing over parts of the screen to accommodate the unique display.

Another file has the word “notch” in its name “ro.config.hw_notch_size” with the value set to “258,84,411,27”. It might represent left, top, right and bottom offsets in moving screen content.

«

I think the aim of this is just to make the screen look like the iPhone X because it’s so striking, and in China – Huawei’s biggest market – it’s a status thing. See also: Huawei offering Force Touch (but then not following through).
link to this extract

Twitter users like long tweets more than short ones • Buzzfeed

Alex Kantrowitz:

»

Given the deluge of complaints about Twitter’s 280-character limit when it debuted this fall, you’d think people would be ignoring the new, lengthier tweets.

But that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Early data shows tweets above 140 characters are being liked and retweeted at a rate approximately double that of their shorter counterparts. BuzzFeed News obtained the data from SocialFlow, a publishing tool used by approximately 300 major publishers including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

SocialFlow reviewed tens of thousands of tweets published between Wednesday 29 November and Wednesday 6 December, analyzing clicks, retweets, and likes. It determined that tweets above 140 characters are being retweeted 26.52 times on average compared with 13.71 times for tweets of 140 characters and below. The company also found that longer tweets are being liked — again on average — 50.28 times compared with 29.96 times for shorter tweets. Clicks per tweet for the time period analyzed were about even.

«

I’d have liked to see a comparison from before there were 280-character tweets, though Twitter claims to have done something like that itself. I’m not sure if I engage any more than I did before.
link to this extract

The point of Patreon isn’t how many people earn a full-time living • Boing Boing

Cory Doctorow responds to last week’s article about how many/few people make anything like a living via Patreon:

»

Art is an irrational market; artists make art without regard to the laws of supply and demand. There are — and always have been — more people who’d like to make a living in the arts than the arts will sustain. That means that artists produce material without any rational expectation of any meaningful return on their investments, and this puts them at great risk from the distributors (retailers, platforms) and financiers (publishers/studios/labels, ad networks, etc) who have historically been key to connecting them to their audiences.

What’s more, there’s returns on scale in both financing and distributing, which is why (for example), we’ve ended up with five publishers, one major online bookseller, and one major brick-and-mortal bookseller. This anti-competitive concentration in both sectors has the effect of eroding the share of income from successful work that goes to the creator, moving an ever-larger slice to the other parts of the art industry. In 1999, first novels were selling to science fiction publishers for about $7,000 (about $10,200 in 2017 dollars). Today, first novels are selling for…about $7,000. And yet, if anything, more writers are producing first novels than in 1999…

…The right way to look at a 2% success rate in delivering a full-time living to creators on Patreon is to first compare that number to the percentage of people who, for example, send a demo to a record label and then get to quit their jobs to be full-time musicians (that’s a lot less than 2%). The right way to look at the remaining 98% of Patreon artists who earn some money from the service is to compare how much money they get, compared to how much money they’d get if they had to rely on more indirect (and less artist-friendly) sources like ad brokers and traditional retail channels.

On both of these metrics, Patreon is performing beautifully. On these metrics, Patreon is a fucking godsend to artists.

«

link to this extract

Cluster of UK companies reports highly improbable gender pay gap • FT

Billy Ehrenberg-Shannon, Aleksandra Wisniewska and Sarah Gordon:

»

The gap between wages paid to men and women has become a hot political and corporate issue. Seeking to hold employers accountable, the UK government this year began requiring companies and public sector bodies with more than 250 employees to publicly report their median and mean gap. Roughly 9,000 companies must submit their numbers by April 1 but as of Thursday only 311 had done so.

Experts on pay said that it was highly anomalous for companies of that size to have median and mean pay gaps that were identical because the two statistics measure different things. The mean gap measures the difference between the average male and female salary while the median gap is calculated using the midpoint salary for each gender.

Of the 16 companies that said they had no pay gap, eight also said that they employed exactly the same number of men and women in the four pay grades that must be reported.

“While it is certainly possible for organisations with 250 or more employees to have no gender pay gap, common sense dictates that it is entirely implausible that they would have no gap on both the median and mean measure, while having exactly equal numbers of men and women in each of the four pay quartiles,” said Jonathan Portes, professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London.

«

So having demanded them, will the government actually take any action and look into these extremely unlikely figures?
link to this extract

Please invest responsibly — an important message from the Coinbase team • Coinbase

Brian Armstrong is co-founder and CEO of Coinbase:

»

Despite the sizable and ongoing increases in our technical infrastructure and engineering staff, we wanted to remind customers that access to Coinbase services may become degraded or unavailable during times of significant volatility or volume. This could result in the inability to buy or sell for periods of time. Despite ongoing increases in our support capacity, our customer support response times may be delayed, especially for requests that do not involve immediate risks to customer account security. You can read more in our Coinbase User Agreement.

We also wanted to remind customers of some of the risks associated with trading digital currency. Digital currencies are volatile and the prices can go up and down. Due to the rapidly changing price of digital currencies, some customers may not have sell limits that are sufficient relative to the value of total digital currency they are storing on Coinbase.

«

TL;DR: don’t play in the futures market if you can’t handle a margin call when things go south. Even shorter version: you could lose it all.
link to this extract

Andy Rubin has returned to his company weeks after he took leave amid allegations of inappropriate behavior • Recode

Theodore Schleifer:

»

Rubin as of Friday ended the personal leave that he took in November after dealing with personal issues, according to two people familiar with his activities. His leave was reportedly only shared with employees on November 27, though a company representative said at the time that he began his leave earlier that month.

The CEO of Essential last month took leave as The Information was about to report that an “internal investigation determined that he had carried on an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate,” when he served as a top executive at Google.

Rubin has denied any wrongdoing and stressed that the relationship was consensual.

The decision to return to Essential will likely calm jitters about the future of the phone company, which has raised $330m to develop its highly anticipated product. Rubin, the creator of the Android operating system, is a dominant figure in the phone industry.

Even while on leave from Essential, Rubin was still able to show up to work at the same physical workplace. That’s because he did not take a similar leave from Playground Global, the venture capital firm he founded, which shares the same office space as Essential.

«

What sort of nonsense is this? Essential PR person claims he’s on leave of absence where he’s not actually absent just as questions are asked in media? Uh-huh.
link to this extract

Android to iPhone, part two: What I’ve liked about switching to the iPhone X • Android Police

David Ruddock has been trying out the iPhone X for a month or so, having never used iOS before. Here’s his bit on notifications:

»

I will get this out of the way: notifications on iOS are terrible. Actually bad. Just not good. I will cover that in my next post.

But! iOS does do one thing right with them, at least for me: it cuts down on information overload. Just looking at my Android phone’s notification bar practically compels me to clear it out. I don’t really like that feeling – it’s a distraction and keeps me from focusing on whatever I’m actually trying to do with my phone in a given moment, constantly sending me back and forth between apps and clearing out the bar.

iOS requires you to authorize an app to send notifications on its first run after install. What I’ve noticed is that, oftentimes, I really don’t need many apps to send me notifications… ever. I don’t need to hear from the Kindle app, the Amazon app, Google Maps, Dropbox, the New York Times, YouTube, or Yelp. The list goes on, but you get the idea: I get fewer notifications on iOS than I do on Android because iOS has forced me to think about which apps I actually want to get them from.

Not only that, the lack of notification icons in the status bar area means that unless you pull down the notification tray, you just don’t see your notifications all that often. You might catch a glimpse of them when you go to unlock the phone, but as soon as your swipe up, they’re gone.

I don’t find I’m any less effective at responding to emails or messages on iOS than I am on Android. I do find I am significantly less mentally burdened with the task of managing my notifications. It’s going to make me take a long, hard look at how I manage my notifications on Android when I switch back.

«

There’s plenty more to digest in this post. His next one, later this week, will be about the things he hasn’t liked with iOS, and he says it’s going to be longer.
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Android Oreo review: performance and stability • BirchTree

Matt Birchler, continuing his series comparing his experience using Oreo on a Pixel 2 with his experiences on an iPhone; though he’s usually an iOS user, he’s also very familiar with Android:

»

In day to day use, Android on the Pixel 2 does not feel much slower than the iPhone 8. Apps launch quickly on the Pixel, sometimes even faster than they do on the iPhone. Part of this is due to the shorter animations on Android, but other times it is just that the Pixel is just as fast or faster than the iPhone. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to say this before, but apps actually tend to launch a tiny bit quicker on Android than they do on iOS.

Once you get into apps, the experience changes a bit. While iOS takes milliseconds longer on average to load apps, once you’re in apps everything seems to go in iOS’s favor. First is general performance things like scrolling, which holds steady at what appears to be 60fps much more often than Android. Scrolling through lists or websites is where this is more noticeable, as Android has a slightly harsher feeling to moving around pages. It’s not bad by any means, and may be a preference thing, but i just feel more like I’m directly manipulating content on iOS than I do on Android.

Adding to this feeling of direct manipulation is the touch response on the Pixel 2 is noticeably slower than it is on the iPhone. There’s a slight delay in my finger moving and the screen updating behind it on iOS, but on Android the delay is much more pronounced. This lends to the overall feeling I sometimes get that I’m imputing commands to the phone rather than directly moving around the content on screen.

Finally, I have had some inconsistency when tapping a notification on my lock screen to go straight to that app. Usually it’s fine, but there have been dozens of times where the phone locks up for about 5 seconds between entering my fingerprint to unlock and the app actually coming up.

«

He’s also not complimentary about Android stability, or third-party apps. The latter is a situation that seems to be unchanging over time.
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Amazon, Google and Apple top the biggest tech disappointments of 2017 • CNBC

Todd Haselton with his list of things that he wasn’t happy about. Those mentioned are Amazon, Google, LG, Fitbit, Apple and Essential.

However there’s one key difference between the Apple product, and the products from the others. See if you can guess what it is before you click through.
link to this extract

YouTube to launch new music subscription service in March • Bloomberg

Lucas Shaw:

»

The new service could help appease record-industry executives who have pushed for more revenue from YouTube. Warner Music Group, one of the world’s three major record labels, has already signed on, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private talks. YouTube is also in talks with the two others, Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group, and Merlin, a consortium of independent labels, the people said.

Paid services from Spotify and Apple Music have spurred a recovery in the music business, which is growing again after almost two decades of decline. Yet major record labels say the growth would be even more significant if not for YouTube, which they criticize for not compensating them enough, considering how much people use the site to listen to tunes. Music is one of the most popular genres of video on YouTube, which attracts more than a billion users a month.

YouTube hasn’t had the same success as Apple or Spotify in convincing people to sign up for its paid music services, though it’s not for lack of trying. Google introduced audio-only streaming service Google Play Music in 2011. YouTube Music Key came along in 2014, giving subscribers ad-free music videos. That morphed into YouTube Red in 2016, letting users watch any video without advertising.

The new service, internally referred to as Remix, would include Spotify-like on-demand streaming and would incorporate elements from YouTube, such as video clips, the people said. YouTube has reached out to artists to seek their help in promoting the new service, one of the people said.

«

I was going to say – isn’t this what Google Play Music is already meant to be? Though I’ve never seen a single statistic for the number of signed-up users for that.

However, if this gets going it will be the final nail for Pandora, which looks ropey anyway. And what about Soundcloud and Deezer?

link to this extract

The Bulgarian government is sitting on $3bn in bitcoin • CoinDesk

Nikhilesh De:

»

A crackdown on organized crime by Bulgarian law enforcement in May resulted in the seizure of more than 200,000 bitcoins – an amount worth more than $3bn at today’s prices.

According to a press release dated May 19 from the Southeast European Law Enforcement Center (SELEC), a regional organization comprised of 12 member states including Bulgaria, a total of 213,519 bitcoins were seized that month. Twenty-three Bulgarian nationals were arrested during the operation, and officials said at the time that the arrests and subsequent asset seizures followed an investigation into an alleged customs fraud scam.

As of press time, the amount seized is worth approximately $3.3bn, at a price of roughly $15,524, according to CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price Index (BPI).

«

The seizure was because some hackers tried to evade $6m in customs fee on some imports. At the time, the bitcoins were worth $500m – still nothing to sneeze at.
link to this extract

Bitcoin is hot, but good luck using it • Bloomberg Gadfly

Stephen Gandel:

»

The idea, though, that bitcoin is being rapidly adopted, or even just gradually, is a myth. In 2013, a number of retailers and companies, large and small, started accepting bitcoin. Four years later, shoppers can’t use it at any large physical retailer. What’s more, not only have Walmart and The Gap not adopted bitcoin, many of the places that said they would no longer do.

A long list of merchants that take bitcoin has circulated the Internet for the past few years, published most recently on 99bitcoins.com. But the list is mostly bogus. Many of the businesses on the list no longer take bitcoin or never did. There is a bitcoin payment button for online electronics retailer Newegg.com, but when I tried to use it for a Nintendo Switch, it didn’t work. Even Bloomberg is on the list, but my colleagues in billing say you can’t pay your terminal fee in bitcoin. Nor can you get a subscription to BusinessWeek or any of Bloomberg’s other publications or services…

…a number of sites that track bitcoin, like Blockchain.info, show that use is up. On average, the daily value of bitcoin transactions has risen just more than 400% this year compared with the first 11 months of last year, according to Blockchain.info. But given the fact the number of places accepting it is falling, that seems hard to believe. The number is supposed to track just the volume of bitcoins used to buy actual goods or services. Even bitcoin believer Burniske thinks the figure has likely been inflated by all the people who have rushed into bitcoin as an investment. Worse, the cost to complete those transactions is rising even faster, with fees charged up nearly 2,200% this year, although it’s still minuscule on an absolute level, a fee of just 0.05% of the average transaction this year. 

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The simple thing people miss about cryptocurrencies • The Information

Jessica Lessin:

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Given the technical nature of these tokens, it shifts power to engineers not bankers. And it treats money as a product that can be improved and optimized for different purposes.  

Thinking of currency as product is a big leap for most traditional investors to make. Of course, you can invest without making that leap. You can make or lose money by buying the tokens just because you think they will go up or down without understanding anything about them. It’s also true that most tokens issued today are flawed products, with limited utility that aren’t worth trying to understand let alone betting on over the long-term.

But discussing cryptocurrencies based on how much bitcoin has appreciated this month (or year) misses the big picture. Technology is changing every industry and it is impossible for me to believe it won’t change our financial system. That’s particularly true because our current system—while stable—is imperfect.

Cryptocurrencies can be more secure and more efficient to exchange. They can be inflation-proof and are easier to settle and easier to interoperate. Those advantages, more than the relentless rise in bitcoin’s price, is what drives the true bitcoin believers. They believe bitcoin could be a superior financial product…

…Consumers may not even notice the impact of the technology. Most of the benefits of cryptocurrencies will play out of the back end of the financial system. You may still transact with your credit card. Everything that happens once you swipe may be different.

While certainly a disruptive idea, evolving our current financial system to take advantage of cryptocurrencies is not a crazy one. When you use a dollar or a euro, you are deciding to trust the U.S. or the EU. When you buy bitcoin or ethereum, you are choosing to trust the community of people who maintain the software and the system that keeps track of the transactions (the ledger).

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This is a much more reasonable take on bitcoin and the interest in it.
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Later iPhone X release hurts Apple share • Kantar Worldpanel

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In the three months ending October 2017, iOS share fell in key markets, making clear the impact of the flagship iPhone X not being available to buy in the month of October. And, as Windows continued to drop in share, Android was able to gain 4.3 percentage points in the big five European markets, 8.2% in the USA, and 7.5% in Japan. Urban China remained a bright spot for Apple, with its share edging up 0.5% in the latest three months to reach 17.4%…

…Urban China, a market once overrun with new challengers, is maturing, with the top five players all posting strong growth and the long tail of challenger brands falling away rapidly. In the three months ending in October 2017, the top five brands – Huawei, Xiaomi, Apple, Vivo, and Oppo – made up 91% of sales, compared to 79% a year earlier.

“Chinese brands like Meizu, LeTV, Coolpad, ZTE, and Lenovo were once on the same trajectory as the like of Xiaomi, but any momentum they once had has abruptly stopped, with many struggling to get past a 1% share,” Sunnebo said. “Samsung’s performance in China continues to deteriorate, with its share now down to just 2.2% of that market.”

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The crunch in China is quite a thing, unnoticed (mostly) in the west. (Neil Cybart of Above Avalon picked up on it, though.)
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