After the EU ruling, Google is buying almost all the shopping ads on its site. Is that how it’s meant to work? Photo by Herry Lawford on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Written on an iPad Pro, as my Mac wouldn’t boot. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google rivals ask EU to toughen measures in antitrust case • WSJ

Natalia Drozdiak on how that “Google Shopping” compliance is going:

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New third-party data show that Google’s product ads appear in almost all of the product-ad spots it displays as part of the EU remedy. In a report published Monday, search analytics firm Searchmetrics said that only 2% of product-ad spots in Germany show competitors’ ads. In the U.K. the proportion is 0.4%. The researchers tested by recording product-ad results on Google for 2,500 popular keywords in each country.

The new system [introduced by Google, where it bids alongside other shopping sites for shopping ad slots on search results pages] is “nothing game-changing,” nor is it “meaningful enough to be considered a fair and even playing field,” says Harald Schiffauer, managing director of Nextag Inc.’s Guenstiger.de, a German site that bids actively in the Google system.

“It’s really hard to compete,” said Philipp Peitsch, managing director of Idealo, a price-comparison engine owned by Axel Springer SE. “I don’t think it’s a fair proposal.”

Google declined to comment on rivals’ individual allegations, but previously said that its remedy gives rivals the same opportunity as Google to show shopping ads to users.

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Google says it has set up the Shopping business as if it were a stand-alone, must-make-profit company. It would be great to see how that company is formed. Does it buy its own computers? Hire its own people? Rent its own offices? Or does it have a very cheap room inside Google staffed with Googlers?

I seem to recall that Foundem, which has done many piercing analyses of the proposals, forecast this outcome.
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Google is using 46 billion data points to predict the medical outcomes of hospital patients • Quartz

Dave Gershgorn:

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Some of Google’s top AI researchers are trying to predict your medical outcome as soon as you’re admitted to the hospital.

A new research paper, published Jan. 24 with 34 co-authors and not peer-reviewed, claims better accuracy than existing software at predicting outcomes like whether a patient will die in the hospital, be discharged and readmitted, and their final diagnosis. To conduct the study, Google obtained de-identified data of 216,221 adults, with more than 46 billion data points between them. The data span 11 combined years at two hospitals, University of California San Francisco Medical Center (from 2012-2016) and University of Chicago Medicine (2009-2016).

While the results have not been independently validated, Google claims vast improvements over traditional models used today for predicting medical outcomes. Its biggest claim is the ability to predict patient deaths 24-48 hours before current methods, which could allow time for doctors to administer life-saving procedures.

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You’d hope that the findings would be freely shared with the hospitals and medical profession. In a situation like this, how should the benefits be shared out? Everyone – Google, the patients, the doctors, the hospitals – contributed to the creation of the data, and thus the benefit. Is it right that only those who process it in a specific way get to monetise it?
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Things are getting ‘heated’ on Strava… • Battenhall

Joe Cant:

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It’s easy to look at the recent stories and call Strava the bad egg, but does publicly displaying data that’s readily available mean the app is to blame for stories like this week’s where soliders inadvertently exposed military bases?  

It’s easy to forget this data is useful and important to some of the greatest athletes, scientists and coaches in the world. It’s this tracking that also enables Strava’s beacon feature to keep track of people in vulnerable places at vulnerable times (or help find a lost phone).

Since the heatmap news broke, Strava’s CEO James Quaries has released a statement explaining that the company is taking the matter seriously, that it understands the responsibility related to the data shared (as well as outlining steps to respond), and how people can use the app’s privacy settings.

There have long been stories and concerns involving Strava users, in particular cyclists, having their bikes stolen due to thieves targeting their home (logged at the end and beginning of their activity), as well as reading equipment information or photos the user has stored on their phone. Of course, anyone who shares information about their whereabouts online could, in theory, allow thieves to know when to target people’s houses.

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Seems to me the thing where thieves could target your house is a clue this wasn’t well set up.
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The latest data privacy debacle • NY Times

Zeynep Tufekci:

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the Strava debacle underscores a crucial misconception at the heart of the system of privacy protection in the United States. The privacy of data cannot be managed person-by-person through a system of individualized informed consent.

Data privacy is not like a consumer good, where you click “I accept” and all is well. Data privacy is more like air quality or safe drinking water, a public good that cannot be effectively regulated by trusting in the wisdom of millions of individual choices. A more collective response is needed.

Part of the problem with the ideal of individualized informed consent is that it assumes companies have the ability to inform us about the risks we are consenting to. They don’t. Strava surely did not intend to reveal the GPS coordinates of a possible Central Intelligence Agency annex in Mogadishu, Somalia — but it may have done just that. Even if all technology companies meant well and acted in good faith, they would not be in a position to let you know what exactly you were signing up for.

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This is, as always, a smart take: you need data privacy to apply everywhere.
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US military reviewing its rules after fitness trackers exposed sensitive data • Washington Post

Dan Lamothe:

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The US military said Monday that it is reviewing its guidelines for the use of wireless devices at military facilities after revelations that popular fitness apps can be used to expose the locations and identities of individuals working in sensitive areas.

The review came after reports by The Washington Post and other outlets that a “heat map” had been posted online by the fitness-tracking company Strava showing where users jog, bike and exercise — and in the process inadvertently highlighting the locations of U.S. military facilities in some of the most dangerous spots in the world.

The concerns raised by the online map went beyond sensitive military sites, with evidence that Strava could help reveal the movements of international aid workers, intelligence operatives and millions of other people in many countries.

In the latest discoveries Monday, Internet sleuths found ways of using the publicly available Strava data to identify individual users of the tracking service by name, along with the jogging routes they use in war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

On one of the Strava sites, it is possible to click on a frequently used jogging route and see who runs the route and at what times.

One Strava user demonstrated how to use the map and Google to identify by name a US Army major and his running route at a base in Afghanistan.

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Suspect the guidelines will go from “sure, use the things” to “do not use the things under any circumstances”.
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‘Jackpotting’ hackers steal over $1m from atms across US, says Secret Service • Reuters

Dustin Volz:

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The heists, which involve hacking ATMs to rapidly shoot out torrents of cash, have been observed across the United States spanning from the Gulf Coast in the southern part of the country to the New England region in the northeast, Matthew O‘Neill, a special agent in the criminal investigations division, told Reuters in an interview.

The spate of attacks represented the first widespread jackpotting activity in the United States, O‘Neill said. Previous campaigns have been spotted in parts of Europe and Latin America in recent years.

“It was just a matter of time until it hit our shores,” O‘Neill said.

Diebold Nixdorf and NCR, two of the world’s largest ATM makers, warned last week that cyber criminals are targeting ATMs with tools needed to carry out jackpotting schemes.

The Diebold Nixdorf alert described steps that criminals had used to compromise ATMs. They include gaining physical access, replacing the hard drive and using an industrial endoscope to depress an internal button required to reset the device.

A confidential U.S. Secret Service alert seen by Reuters and sent to banks on Friday said machines running XP were more vulnerable and encouraged ATM operators to update to Windows 7 to protect against the attack, which appeared to be targeting ATMs typically located in pharmacies, big box retailers and drive-thrus.

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As I first read this story I wondered to myself whether Windows XP would turn up.
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Why Apple sells just 2.5% of India’s smartphones • CNBC

Manish Singh:

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iPhones have remained beyond the budget for most Indians. The least expensive iPhone X model, for instance, is priced at 92,430 rupees ($1,450) in India, while the least costly iPhone 8 unit ships at Rs 66,120 ($1,040). The devices are so much more expensive in India because the local government imposes a heavy charge on imported electronics items.

The iPhone-maker, for its part, is trying to circumvent the customs duty by manufacturing the iPhone SE model locally in India through a partnership with Taiwanese contract manufacturer Wistron. That’s made the iPhone SE the least costly iPhone model from the recent generations in the country.

But the company ought to do more, analysts told CNBC.

Samsung, and Chinese smartphone makers including Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo, many of which entered the Indian market in the last five years, are increasingly claiming dominance in the nation. Xiaomi and Samsung ship more handsets in India in under two months than Apple does in a year.

Samsung and the Chinese companies now control 80% of the smartphone market in India, while Apple settles for a meager 2.2%, Counterpoint and IDC said, citing data for the quarter that ended in September last year.

As of the quarter ending in December, Apple had 2.5% of India’s overall smartphone market, according to Counterpoint.

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This shows Apple’s problem in trying to bring “affordable luxury” to everyone; it aims at the US market initially, but India is just different in so many ways. As a global company, it’s going to find itself in places where its strategy doesn’t give it a huge share.
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Opinion: smartphone market challenges raise major questions • Techspot

Bob O’Donnell:

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As dynamic and exciting as the smartphone market has been for many years, it’s hard to imagine a time when it just won’t matter that much to most people. Kind of like how many people now feel about the PC market.

Don’t get me wrong, the smartphone market will still be very large and extremely important to some people for quite a while (just as the PC market still is for many—myself included). But the truth is, we’re rapidly approaching the era of smartphone market maturation, and quite possibly, the end of smartphone market growth.

Along with those changes are likely to come a shift in attention and focus away from smartphones, and towards other more “interesting” product categories—in the press, on people’s minds, and, most importantly, in critical industry technologies and developments.

The signs of this impending change are all around. In fact, you could argue that this is already starting to occur. While total 2017 worldwide smartphone shipment data may end up showing a modest increase over 2016 (final numbers have yet to be released), the fact that China—the world’s largest smartphone market—showed a 4% decline in Q4 2017 is a very telling and concerning indication of where the market is headed.

Essentially, what that data point tells us is that even in rapidly-growing markets, we’ve started to hit saturation. In other words, pretty much everyone who wants a smartphone now has one.

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Africa hasn’t really taken part in this explosion in smartphone use, but the hot growth is over. O’Donnell suggests that talk of cuts in iPhone X production just emphasise this – but the smarter view of those “cuts” is that Apple was surprised by the number of iPhone X handsets it was able to make and ship in the just-gone quarter, and so can dial back against its larger expectations (which were built on anticipated low supply).

But saturation is here. I’m a little surprised that news sites still review smartphones. When did they stop for PCs? We’re at the same place now.
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After building new African Union headquarters, China spies on Addis Ababa facility • Morocco News

Amira El Masaiti:

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In Addis Ababa, ministers and heads of states meet twice a year to discuss major continental issues. While strict security measures give the impression that that building is closely monitored and secured, an unseen security threat was present from 2012 until 2017. The threat was from none other than those who built the headquarters: the Chinese. An investigation conducted by “Le Monde Afrique” exposed Chinese espionage efforts.

According to the report, for five years, between midnight and 2 a.m., computer servers were reaching a peak in data transfer activity. A computer scientist noticed the oddity of the situation. The organization’s technical staff later discovered that the AU servers were all connected to servers located in Shanghai.

Every night, the secrets of the AU were being stored more than 8,000 km away by what was thought to be a diplomatic ally of Africa.

The $200m glass tower complex was gifted to the African Union in 2012. The computer systems were fully equipped by the Chinese, allowing them to open an undocumented portal that gives Chinese administrators access to the AU’s computing system. This “backdoor” is an intentional fault put into code to allow hackers and intelligence agencies to gain illicit access to information.

“Following this discovery, we have taken some steps to strengthen our cybersecurity,” a AU official told Le Monde.

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Something something Greeks bearing gifts.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Apologies: the superscript on the post about Graham’s Number in yesterday’s post didn’t come through. (But if you clicked through to the link, it was there.)

Traffic jams are a longstanding feature of London’s streets – but Uber and the like won’t solve it, because it’s about geometry. Photo by Leonard Bentley 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 8 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Our next update on our 2018 focus to make sure Facebook isn’t just fun • Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg:

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We’re making a series of updates to show more high quality, trusted news. Last week we made an update to show more news from sources that are broadly trusted across our community. Today our next update is to promote news from local sources.

People consistently tell us they want to see more local news on Facebook. Local news helps us understand the issues that matter in our communities and affect our lives. Research suggests that reading local news is directly correlated with civic engagement. People who know what’s happening around them are more likely to get involved and help make a difference.

When I traveled around the country last year, one theme people kept telling me is how much we all have in common if we can get past some of the most divisive national issues. Many people told me they thought that if we could turn down the temperature on the more divisive issues and instead focus on concrete local issues, then we’d all make more progress together.

Starting today, we’re going to show more stories from news sources in your local town or city.

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Um, Mark? You and Google have sucked up all the money for ads for local news. They’ve been shedding reporters at an amazing rate. People might want to see local stuff (though they’re probably lying to you) but there isn’t going to be much chance to see it if nobody writes it.
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The UK government’s own Brexit analysis says the UK will be worse off in every scenario outside the EU • Buzzfeed

Alberto Nardelli has a big scoop:

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The government’s new analysis of the impact of Brexit says the UK would be worse off outside the European Union under every scenario modelled, BuzzFeed News can reveal.

The assessment, which is titled “EU Exit Analysis – Cross Whitehall Briefing” and dated January 2018, looked at three of the most plausible Brexit scenarios based on existing EU arrangements.

Under a comprehensive free trade agreement with the EU, UK growth would be 5% lower over the next 15 years compared to current forecasts, according to the analysis.

The “no deal” scenario, which would see the UK revert to World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, would reduce growth by 8% over that period. The softest Brexit option of continued single-market access through membership of the European Economic Area would, in the longer term, still lower growth by 2%.

These calculations do not take into account any short-term hits to the economy from Brexit, such as the cost of adjusting the economy to new customs arrangements.

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The government didn’t deny this:

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A government spokesperson told BuzzFeed News: “We have already set out that the government is undertaking a wide range of ongoing analysis in support of our EU exit negotiations and preparations.

“We have been clear that we are not prepared to provide a running commentary on any aspect of this ongoing internal work and that ministers have a duty not to publish anything that could risk exposing our negotiation position.”

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A conversation about how public transport really works • FT Alphaville

Jarrett Walker spoke to Izabella Kaminska of the FT’s Alphaville; he blogs at HumanTransit.org, where he continues the campaign to inform the world about the physical constraints of urban geometry:

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transport is fundamentally a physical, spatial problem. It is not fundamentally a communications problem or to the extent that it was a communications problem, we’ve gone most of the way, I think, in taking that friction out of the system. And what Uber is discovering, I think, what a lot of these tech firms are discovering is that taking that friction out of the system did not transform the fundamental reality of space and the math of labour and so on, which have really been the facts that have determined what’s possible in passenger transport and will continue to determine those things.

No, of course, the driverless car people will say, no, cars will fit closer together and they’ll be smaller and so we’ll fit more of them over the bridge but that’s a linear solution to an exponential problem. The other dimension of this problem that you must keep in mind is the problem of what we, in the business, call induced demand. And induced demand is the very simply idea that when you make something easier, people are more likely to do it and this is why, for example, when you widen a motorway, the traffic gets worse or it fills up to the same level of congestion that you had before…

…I don’t want to deny the fact that being in the city, being on public transport, having the richness of interacting with a great diversity of people is not always fun; it means you get to interact with some crazy people and some difficult people but more importantly, it is simply the deal that life in a city is. There is no other way for everyone to live in a city. There is a way for elites to live in a city without having to interact with people; you can come and go in limousines; you can come and go to your penthouse by helicopter.

And this is where we get to the problem of elite projection, which is the danger of very fortunate people, whose taste and experience is, therefore, extremely unusual, using their own tastes to determine how a city should be designed; that’s a fundamental problem but, I think, I want to acknowledge the fact that life in the city has its own difficulties, that you don’t always want to deal with the company of strangers. But even more fundamentally, that is simply the deal you signed onto when you decided to live in a city, rather than in a suburb where you can drive your car everywhere and only see people you intend to see.

There’s a tremendous risk and when you think about this idea, this fantasy that at some point, Uber will scale to the point that they can bring their prices down to the point that everyone can afford them.

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The whole interview is terrific (and not behind the usual FT paywall). Highly recommended.
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Internet giants try to soften antitrust rules in credit card case • Bloomberg

Joshua Brustein:

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A trade group representing Amazon.com Inc., Facebook Inc., Google, and Uber Technologies Inc. has taken sides in a Supreme Court battle over credit card fees because the internet giants want to shape the future of antitrust rules in their favor.

The top U.S. court is set to hear oral arguments on the lawsuit—Ohio vs. American Express—next month. The dispute started in 2010, when states and the federal government sued American Express Co. for forbidding merchants from steering customers to credit cards that charge lower fees.

The government said this discouraged competition and led to artificially high card fees. American Express argued its business was a two-sided marketplace that must balance the desires of merchants against the need to attract cardholders. The extra fees American Express charged went in part to offer airline miles and other perks to shoppers, the company argued. What looked like bullying merchants was actually just enthusiastic competition against Mastercard Inc. and Visa Inc. for users. 
 
The dispute has no direct connection to Silicon Valley. But it could heavily influence any future antitrust action against tech firms, many of which run two-sided digital marketplaces. In a friend-of-the-court brief filed this week, the Computer and Communications Industry Association said a ruling against American Express would threaten innovation by hampering marketplaces that have to please multiple groups with differing priorities. 

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Because the big platforms now are about two-sided markets – chokepoints, in simpler language – they’d want something that reassures them.
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Trump team idea to nationalize 5G network to counter China is rejected • Reuters

David Shepardson:

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The option of a nationalized 5G network was being discussed by Trump’s national security team, an administration official said on Sunday.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said on Monday that discussions were at “the very earliest stages” to ensure a “secure network,” and “absolutely no decisions” have been made.

The government has blocked a string of Chinese acquisitions over national security concerns and the 5G network concept is aimed at addressing what officials see as China’s threat to U.S. cyber security and economic security.

But the option was rejected by several of those who would have a say.

“Any federal effort to construct a nationalized 5G network would be a costly and counterproductive distraction from the policies we need to help the United States win the 5G future,” Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai, a Republican appointed by Trump, said in a statement on Monday.

CTIA, the trade group that represents AT&T Inc (T.N), Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N), Apple Inc (AAPL.O), Sprint Corp (S.N) and others, said in a statement on Monday that the “government should pursue the free market policies that enabled the U.S. wireless industry to win the race to 4G.”

Carriers have already spent billions of dollars acquiring spectrum and beginning to develop and test 5G networks, which are expected to be at least 100 times faster than current 4G networks and cut latency to less than one thousandth of a second from one one hundredth of a second in 4G, the FCC said.

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That’s going to be inconvenient for those who thought Pai is Trump’s poodle. In reality he’s pretty fiercely free-marketeer, with all that implies.
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From 1,000,000 to Graham’s Number • Wait But Why

We join Tim Urban just after he has introduced readers to the idea of a million. Now he’s going to take you into outer space:

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When we went from 1 to 1,000,000, we didn’t need powers—we could just use a short string of digits to represent the numbers we were talking about. If we wanted to multiply a number by 10, we just added a zero.

But as you advance past a million, zeros start to become plentiful and you need a different notation. That’s why we use powers. When people talk about exponential growth, they’re referring to the craziness that can happen when you start using powers. For example:

If you multiply 9,845,625,675,438 by 8,372,745,993,275, the result is still smaller than 829.

As we get bigger and bigger today, we’ll stick with powers of 10, because when you start talking about really big numbers, what becomes relevant is the number of digits, not the digits themselves—i.e. every 70-digit number is somewhere between 1069 and 1070, which is really all you need to know. So for at least the first part of this post, the powers of 10 can serve nicely as orders-of-magnitude “checkpoints”.

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The maths isn’t particularly hard, but it is mindblowing. Here’s how the post ends:

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Weirdly, thinking about Graham’s number has actually made me feel a little bit calmer about death, because it’s a reminder that I don’t actually want to live forever—I do want to die at some point, because remaining conscious for eternity is even scarier. Yes, death comes way, way too quickly, but the thought “I do want to die at some point” is a very novel concept to me and actually makes me more relaxed than usual about our mortality.

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I’d never come across Graham’s Number before, but having read the article I see what Urban means. Use maths to embrace your mortality!
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What I wish the iPad would gain from the Mac • MacStories

Ryan Christoffel has a list, most of which seem a bit “ehh” to me (multiple instances of an app, more diverse hardware – when there are three different sizes of iPad Pro? – persistent background app privileges [for when the device is plugged into power], more pro first-party apps) and then finally: multi-user support:

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This one’s a no-brainer. Not only is it a feature that traditional computers have had for ages, but it also fits with the way many iPads are used today. Despite their lack of proper multi-user support, iPads are often shared devices in a household. If that isn’t reason enough, how about this: multi-user support already exists on the iPad, but it’s exclusive to education customers. Just bring it to everyone, Apple.

The only potential wrench in this idea is that Face ID will likely arrive on iPad in the near future, and, assuming the technology replaces Touch ID altogether, Face ID’s current limitation to one saved face, and issues distinguishing between family members, would make multi-user support challenging. Apple could always resort to using only passcodes for user login on Face ID-equipped iPads, while letting older iPads with Touch ID use fingerprint authentication, but that seems unlikely – it would behoove Apple to make sure the best multi-user experience is found on the newest, most advanced devices.

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Multi-user support would be great (for parents especially) – but we’re now at seven years after the iPad’s introduction. Apple has had plenty of time to introduce this. It isn’t going to.
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Strava privacy concerns: Here is how to safely use the app • Quartz

Rosie Spinks:

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Last summer, I noticed that male strangers were liking my workouts on the app, despite the fact that I’d enabled what’s called Enhanced Privacy. Because I tend to run the same few routes close to my house regularly—and because, as an urban female who also works on the internet, I am used to all manner of privacy invasion—I grew both concerned and curious. I reached out to Strava and wrote a story for Quartz on the implications of the app’s confusing privacy settings.

While my piece did not focus on Strava’s Heatmap feature hitting the headlines now, it was based on the same concerns. In essence: If you use the app in the default way it’s designed to be used—a social network meets a fitness tracker—you could unknowingly be broadcasting an alarming amount of habitual, location-specific information. That fact, one can assume, is how so many users ended up broadcasting their location from military bases or sensitive locations without realizing it.
This morning, when I created a brand new account with a different email than the account I normally use, I was automatically opted into Heatmaps (see blue tick box below), rather than being asked to consent first. This was via the browser and was not an option in the app, but more this later.

On July 28 last year—one day after I interviewed Strava communications lead Andrew Vontz for my story, and four days before my piece on Quartz was published, on August 1—Strava published this blog post clarifying how to use their privacy policy. Since then, it appears they have also updated the language in the app explaining their privacy settings (Quartz has reached out to find out when they did this and will update the post accordingly). While this may be a positive step, the onus is still very much on you, the user, to make sure you know how your location-based activity is being used.

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For “woman finding her trails being liked by male strangers” substitute “soldier in hostile territory finding his trails being like by unknown sources”. Equally worrying.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

“Yeah, opsec is really important. That’s what it says on my Fitbit when it uploads to the cloud.” Photo by the US Army 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. It’s all done by magic, which sometimes doesn’t work. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The follower factory • The New York Times

Nicholas Confessore, Gabriel J.X. Dance, Richard Harris and Mark Hansen with an amazing, in-depth piece about the people who buy fake followers and one of the (many) companies, Devumi, that sells them:

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Over two years, the Democratic public relations consultant and CNN contributor Hilary Rosen bought more than a half-million fake followers from Devumi. Ms. Rosen previously spent more than a decade as head of the Recording Industry Association of America. In an interview, she described the purchases as “an experiment I did several years ago to see how it worked.” She made more than a dozen purchases of followers from 2015 to 2017, according to company records.

Other buyers said they had faced pressure from employers to generate social media followers. Marcus Holmlund, a young freelance writer, was at first thrilled when Wilhelmina, the international modeling agency, hired him to manage its social media efforts. But when Wilhelmina’s Twitter following didn’t grow fast enough, Mr. Holmlund said, a supervisor told him to buy followers or find another job. In 2015, despite misgivings, he began making monthly Devumi purchases out of his own pocket.

“I felt stuck with the threat of being fired, or worse, never working in fashion again,” said Mr. Holmlund, who left in late 2015. “Since then, I tell anyone and everyone who ever asks that it’s a total scam — it won’t boost their engagement.” (A Wilhelmina spokeswoman declined to comment.)

Several Devumi customers acknowledged that they bought bots because their careers had come to depend, in part, on the appearance of social media influence. “No one will take you seriously if you don’t have a noteworthy presence,” said Jason Schenker, an economist who specializes in economic forecasting and has purchased at least 260,000 followers.

Not surprisingly, Devumi has sold millions of followers and retweets to entertainers on the lower and middle rungs of Hollywood, such as the actor Ryan Hurst, a star of the television series “Sons of Anarchy.” In 2016 and 2017, he bought a total of 750,000 followers, about three-quarters of his current count. It cost less than $4,000, according to company records. Mr. Hurst did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

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It’s worth viewing this in a desktop browser to get the full effect, which is amazing. (Devumi denied it sold fake followers. Uh-huh.) There’s a great deal of “did not respond to requests for comment”. And it prompted Paul Hollywood to delete his account, it seems. Martha Lane Fox, a Twitter board member, is also caught in the net. And one Breitbart bureau chief’s followers are almost all bots, each priced about 2 cents each.

Makes it clear that Twitter really doesn’t have a handle on what’s going on. But it would also be hard as hell.
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No, OnePlus is still not sending your clipboard data to China • Android Police

Ryan Whitwam:

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The apparent misunderstanding comes down to a file in the OxygenOS beta called badwords.txt. You can get a rundown of what it contains in this tweet. In the resulting Reddit thread, most everyone was happy to hop on the bandwagon and blame OnePlus.

This time, the company is wasting no time issuing a clear explanation of the situation. Here’s the official statement.

»

There’s been a false claim that the Clipboard app has been sending user data to a server. The code is entirely inactive in the open beta for OxygenOS , our global operating system. No user data is being sent to any server without consent in OxygenOS.

In the open beta for HydrogenOS, our operating system for the China market, the identified folder exists in order to filter out what data to not upload. Local data in this folder is skipped over and not sent to any server.

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The allegation is that OP uses this file to identify data to upload to a Chinese server. According to OnePlus, badwords.txt is actually a blacklist file—it tells the OS not to monitor matching data for its smart clipboard service. You’re probably not familiar with that feature because it’s only used in China as part of HydrogenOS. It was originally developed as a way to get around blocking of competitor links in Chinese messaging services like WeChat, and there’s no reason to do that in the US. So, the code is inactive in OxygenOS.

So, it sounds like OnePlus’ only mistake here was including files from HydrogenOS in the OxygenOS beta. The code is inactive, but it’s bound to confuse people. Everyone is watching OP closely right now and ready to believe the worst, but the company didn’t do anything shady with your clipboard data. It’s also important to remember this is beta software.

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Map showing where today’s countries would be located on Pangea • Open Culture

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The map’s creator is Massimo Pietrobon, someone who playfully describes himself as “a famous explorer and cartographer of Atlantis,” and who has taken on other experiments with maps in the past. When someone claimed that the scale of certain countries wasn’t exactly right, Massimo was quick to confess on his blog, “Yes, it’s just a trial, it can be better.” But it’s a creative start.

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I don’t think the US would like those neighbouring countries. Then again, flights to Europe would be cheap.
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U.S. soldiers are revealing sensitive and dangerous information by jogging • The Washington Post

Liz Sly:

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An interactive map posted on the Internet that shows the whereabouts of people who use fitness devices such as Fitbit also reveals highly sensitive information about the location and activities of soldiers at U.S. military bases, in what appears to be a major security oversight.

The Global Heat Map, published by the GPS tracking company Strava, uses satellite information to map the location and movements of subscribers to the company’s fitness service over a two-year period, by illuminating areas of activity. 

Strava says it has 27 million users around the world, including people who own widely available fitness devices such as Fitbit, Jawbone and Vitofit, as well as people who directly subscribe to its mobile app. The map is not live — rather, it shows a pattern of accumulated activity between 2015 and September 2017.

Most parts of the United States and Europe, where millions of people use some type of fitness tracker, show up on the map as a blaze of light, because there is so much activity. 

In war zones and deserts in such countries as Iraq and Syria, the heat map becomes almost entirely dark — except for scattered pinpricks of activity. Zooming in on those areas brings into focus the locations and outlines of known U.S. military bases, as well as of other unknown and potentially sensitive sites — presumably because American soldiers and other personnel are using fitness trackers as they move around.

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So many people are going to be in such trouble. But once your opsec is breached, it’s gone.
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Your sloppy bitcoin drug deals will haunt you for years • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

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Researchers at Qatar University and the country’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University earlier this week published findings that show just how easy it may be to dredge up evidence of years-old bitcoin transactions when spenders didn’t carefully launder their payments. In well over 100 cases, they could connect someone’s bitcoin payment on a dark web site to that person’s public account. In more than 20 instances, they say, they could easily link those public accounts to transactions specifically on the Silk Road, finding even some purchasers’ specific names and locations.

“The retroactive operational security of bitcoin is low,” says Qatar University researcher Husam Al Jawaheri. “When things are recorded in the blockchain, you can go back in history and reveal this information, to break the anonymity of users.”

Bitcoin’s privacy paradox has long been understood by its savvier users: Because the cryptocurrency isn’t controlled by any bank or government, it can be very difficult to link anyone’s real-world identity with their bitcoin stash. But the public ledger of bitcoin transactions known as the blockchain also serves as a record of every bitcoin transaction from one address to another. Find out someone’s address, and discovering who they’re sending money to or receiving it from becomes trivial, unless the spender takes pains to route those transactions through intermediary addresses, or laundering services that obscure the payment’s origin and destination.

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Is this the society we really want? • NewCo Shift

John Battelle:

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Do we really want to buy our food at automated, faceless Amazon stores? Do we really want to cleanse all human contact from what is now one of our most human and most social activities — the gathering of our sustenance? When did society collectively decide that we no longer value the produce guy, the butcher, or the cashier who knows our kids and asks how our mother in law is faring?

My first take on Amazon Go is this: F*cking A, do we really want eggplants and cuts of meat reduced to parameterized choices spit onto algorithmized shelves? Ick. I like the human confidence I get when a butcher considers a particular rib eye, then explains the best way to cook that one cut of meat. Sure, technology could probably deliver me a defensibly “better” steak, perhaps even one tailored to my preferences as expressed through reams of data collected through means I’ll probably never understand.

But come on.

Sometimes you just want to look a guy in the eye and sense, at that moment, that THIS rib eye is perfect for ME, because I trust that butcher across the counter. We don’t need meat informed by data and butchered by bloodless algorithms. We want our steak with a side of humanity. We lose that, we lose our own narrative.

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It is the trend in cities – but Battelle is right: human interaction is essential. Else you’re in some vaguely dystopian Black Mirror episode.
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Now even YouTube serves ads with CPU-draining cryptocurrency miners • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

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On Friday, researchers with antivirus provider Trend Micro said the ads helped drive a more than three-fold spike in Web miner detections. They said the attackers behind the ads were abusing Google’s DoubleClick ad platform to display them to YouTube visitors in select countries, including Japan, France, Taiwan, Italy, and Spain.

The ads contain JavaScript that mines the digital coin known as Monero. In nine out of 10 cases, the ads will use publicly available JavaScript provided by Coinhive, a cryptocurrency-mining service that’s controversial because it allows subscribers to profit by surreptitiously using other people’s computers. The remaining 10% of the time, the YouTube ads use private mining JavaScript that saves the attackers the 30% cut Coinhive takes. Both scripts are programmed to consume 80% of a visitor’s CPU, leaving just barely enough resources for it to function.

“YouTube was likely targeted because users are typically on the site for an extended period of time,” independent security researcher Troy Mursch told Ars. “This is a prime target for cryptojacking malware, because the longer the users are mining for cryptocurrency the more money is made.” Mursch said a campaign from September that used the Showtime website to deliver cryptocurrency-mining ads is another example of attackers targeting a video site.

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Using self-organizing maps to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem •

Diego Vicente:

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To evaluate the implementation, we will use some instances provided by the aforementioned National Traveling Salesman Problem library. These instances are inspired in real countries and also include the optimal route for most of them, which is a key part of our evaluation. The evaluation strategy consists in running several instances of the problem and study some metrics:

• Execution time invested by the technique to find a solution.
• Quality of the solution, measured in function of the optimal route: a route that we say is “10% longer that the optimal route” is exactly 1.1 times the length of the optimal one.

The parameters used in the evaluation are the ones found by parametrization of the technique, by using the ones provided in previous works 2 as a starting point. These parameters are:

• A population size of 8 times the cities in the problem.
• An initial learning rate of 0.8, with a discount rate of 0.99997.
• An initial neighbourhood of the number of cities, decayed by 0.9997.

These parameters were applied to the following instances:

Qatar, containing 194 cities with an optimal tour of 9352.
• Uruguay, containing 734 cities with an optimal tour of 79114.
• Finland, containing 10639 cities with an optimal tour of 520527.
• Italy, containing 16862 cities with an optimal tour of 557315.

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It gets pretty close to the ideal – within 10% on a couple. (Worse on others.) The GIF above is for Uruguay, where it hit 7.5% of the ideal.
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Why open matters • Sonos Blog

It’s possible this is authored by Patrick Spence, CEO of Sonos:

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With Sonos, we promise you’ll never hit a dead end. That’s because our smart speaker system is designed to tap into just about any piece of sonic culture you can imagine. Since our early days, we’ve been agnostic about the sources of music and audio you can hear on Sonos, preferring to stay open-minded and let you make the choices. If it’s not available on big tech music subscription services, try Spotify, TuneIn or some of the other music services on Sonos.

And if your current itch is too obscure for any of our more than 80 streaming partners to scratch, you can always hook up your turntable or stereo directly to Sonos using a Connect. Whether it’s music, movies, podcasts, or any other sliver of sonic culture, you can use Sonos to pipe it through any room in your home in clear, superior quality.

This spirit of openness is as crucial to us and our products as it is to the free flow of creativity and culture in general. Just like the open, neutral architecture of the Web helps fuel a new creative, musical renaissance, the same principles will help Sonos and its customers explore the true depth of the sonic internet for years to come.

It’s not just about having dozens of music streaming options, either. We’re busy extending the Sonos platform to other partners and integrations as well.

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Sonos has stuck to this philosophy since its inception – it’s all about making it possible for any service to stream through its devices. But of course, the reason for pointing this out now is because of Apple’s HomePod, which is about to go on sale and takes Sonos on at the “audio quality” end of its capabilities.

Very reminiscent also of Google’s “open systems win” memo from 2009, when it was about to launch Android:

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“At Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses.”

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Dell considers return to stock market • FT

Richard Waters and James Fontanella-Khan:

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Michael Dell is considering a return to the stock market, a little over four years after he took his PC company private in a highly contentious $25bn buyout, followed by the $67bn purchase of storage company EMC in the tech industry’s biggest deal.

The company’s board is set to consider the idea of an initial public offering for Dell Technologies, now one of the world’s largest IT companies, along with other potential transactions, according to two people familiar with the company’s deliberations.

According to one of the people, if Dell opts to go public it is likely to pursue a direct listing or a full merger with VMware, the publicly traded data centre technology company that it already controls.

News of the deliberations pushed shares of VMware up by nearly 9% on Friday, lifting its value to $60bn. However, a separate class of “tracking” shares that Dell issued and which are theoretically tied to VMware’s performance slumped by nearly 5%.

The divergence in price appeared to reflect a belief that even if Dell bought out VMware’s ordinary shares, the tracker would continue to trade — and that Dell might even issue more of those shares to help pay for the deal.

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Basically, needs some money to help pay down the debt. Michael Dell probably doesn’t want to come back to the market except for that requirement.
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You can now watch Nicolas Cage play James Bond • The Outline

Jon Christian:

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It was only a matter of time. Users on Deepfakes, a subreddit where people use deep learning technology to face swap celebrities’ likenesses onto footage of porn performers, are turning their skills to a new purpose: inserting the much-memed actor Nicolas Cage into roles he never played.

Back in December, Motherboard discovered a Reddit user who was using a neural network to swap the faces of celebrities including Gal Godot and Taylor Swift onto the bodies of porn performers. Just weeks later, another Redditor used the same algorithm to create a user-friendly program called FakeApp which streamlines the process, letting users plug in a database of images to create new videos without much technical know-how about deep learning technologies. In the wake of FakeApp, Motherboard reported, the phenomenon exploded — the Deepfakes subreddit, for instance, now has more than 30,000 followers.

And now, in what seems to be the natural progression of things on the internet, the subreddit is turnings attention to Cage, an actor known for leading roles in “Raising Arizona,” “Lord of War” and “Face/Off.” In spite of — or perhaps because of — Cage’s uneven critical reception, he’s also become a timeless internet meme. Internet humorists have long remixed his strange performance in the 2006 remake of “The Wicker Man,” photoshopped him into surreal situations, and, most of all, plastered his face onto other people.

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THIS HAS GONE TO FAR. WE NEED LAWS NOW.
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The dirty war over diversity inside Google • Wired

Nitasha Tiku:

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In interviews with WIRED, 15 current Google employees accuse coworkers of inciting outsiders to harass rank-and-file employees who are minority advocates, including queer and transgender employees. Since August, screenshots from Google’s internal discussion forums, including personal information, have been displayed on sites including Breitbart and Vox Popoli, a blog run by alt-right author Theodore Beale, who goes by the name Vox Day. Other screenshots were included in a 161-page lawsuit that Damore filed in January, alleging that Google discriminates against whites, males, and conservatives.

What followed, the employees say, was a wave of harassment. On forums like 4chan, members linked advocates’ names with their social-media accounts. At least three employees had their phone numbers, addresses, and deadnames (a transgender person’s name prior to transitioning) exposed. Google site reliability engineer Liz Fong-Jones, a trans woman, says she was the target of harassment, including violent threats and degrading slurs based on gender identity, race, and sexual orientation. More than a dozen pages of personal information about another employee were posted to Kiwi Farms, which New York has called “the web’s biggest community of stalkers.”

Meanwhile, inside Google, the diversity advocates say some employees have “weaponized human resources,” by goading them into inflammatory statements, which are then captured and reported to HR for violating Google’s mores around civility or for offending white men.

Engineer Colin McMillen says the tactics have unnerved diversity advocates and chilled internal discussion. “Now it’s like basically anything you say about yourself may end up getting leaked to score political points in a lawsuit,” he says. “I have to be very careful about choosing my words because of the low-grade threat of doxing. But let’s face it, I’m not visibly queer or trans or non-white and a lot of these people are keying off their own white supremacy.”

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Alt-right folk are in general stupid, but they’re good at playing the angles to others’ disbenefit.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: if you’re signed up for the daily email, you won’t have received it on Friday. This turns out to be because my appalling home broadband lost a crucial bit during the upload on Thursday night, and so the RSS feed (used to generate the email) was empty. So no email. I hope this is now fixed; you might have received two emails. I’m sorry about that too, but that’s how machines are.

The NotPetya ransomware came from Russia and had truly dramatic effects on the Maersk shipping business. Photo by portalgda 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 9 links for you. Quickly, Friday! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

YouTube tries to think of the children • Bloomberg

Mark Bergen and Lucas Shaw:

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Months of outrage had followed reports that YouTube had let terrorist leaders continue to post recruiting videos and aired the juvenile blunders of young stars PewDiePie (who cracked anti-Semitic jokes) and Logan Paul (who filmed the corpse of an apparent suicide). The bigger problem for advertisers: bewildering, sometimes grotesque videos appearing on YouTube’s dedicated channel for children. Think young kids being force-fed or a knockoff of a popular cartoon pig being tortured in a dentist’s chair.

Google’s solution was to safeguard a tiny slice of YouTube, one sanitized for marketers, with every video vetted by human moderators. The rest of the familiar YouTube free-for-all would have far fewer channels running ads. Advertisers would have less reason to worry that their pitches might run ahead of Nazi humor or child exploitation. “The human review is fantastic,” says Jon Anselmo, chief digital officer with ad giant Omnicom Media Group. “The devil will be in the details.”

YouTube has pledged to hire 10,000 people to root out inappropriate clips and train computers to do the same, and it will beef up the rating system for advertisers paying for its Google Preferred premium package. A second tier of YouTube creators will still be allowed to run ads and get a piece of that revenue, but newbies will have to prove themselves. Other details remain elusive. YouTube said in a statement that it aims to “curb bad actors, stabilize creator revenue, and provide greater assurances to advertisers.”

The creation of this walled garden marks a big change for YouTube, which has always presented itself as a playground where any video creator can become popular enough to make a living.

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Interesting. Back in 2014 I criticised YouTube for its lack of age striation; it seems that now there’s actual money (or the absence of it) involved, YouTube is properly interested. Could still do better, though.
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The Hawaii missile alert culprit: poorly chosen file names Medium

Jared Spool:

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Saturday morning, January 13, 2018 at 8:09am Hawaii time, a staff member of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency’s (HIEMA) State Warning Point office was going through their routine shift change checklist. They went through the same checklist every time they started their shift. It was routine. It wasn’t interesting.

At one point, they opened up their IPAWS alert software, retrieved a list of saved “templates” and picked one from a list of 9. What they picked was named PACOM (CDW) — STATE ONLY.

Only, this wasn’t the template file they meant to open. The template they meant to open was named DRILL — PACOM (CDW) — STATE ONLY. Other than the word DRILL in the file name, the two files were nearly identical. I say nearly, because there was one other difference: The drill version sent a message only to test devices, while the non-drill version sent the exact same message to every mobile phone in Hawaii.

The message was ominous. BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

…Sending a message to millions of phones about an incoming ballistic missile should, one would think, have a confirmation message. It did. But so did the test message. It also required the user type in a special password to ensure they intended to send the message to every recipient, but so did the test message.

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But then in the event of a real missile alert it would be all “who knows the password? WHO KNOWS THE DAMN PASSWORD??” Wouldn’t it?
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LG’s Q4 profits jump 84%, still misses expectations (Update: Full 2017 earnings report) • AndroidAuthority

Matt Adams:

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LG has released a full breakdown of its 2017 financial results including figures for Q4. As expected, LG’s mobile division posted operating losses for an eleventh straight quarter. The total loss came in at 213.2bn won ($192m), which is slightly higher than analyst estimates, but also far lower than losses in Q3 2017. LG cited strong sales of the LG V30, other premium phones, and “business structure” changes for the improvement.

While LG’s mobile division continues to struggle, the wider company is booming. Not only did LG acheive a record full-year revenue of 61.4trn won ($55.4bn), its profits soared to 2.47trn won ($2.24bn) – a massive 85% increase compared to 2016.

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In the broader scheme of things, the losses on phones make little difference to LG; closing the division would be expensive and there might be some synergies with other divisions. It has now reached the stage where it’s, well, comfortably numb about the ongoing deficits.
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How anti-globalisation switched from a left to a right-wing issue – and where it will go next • The Conversation

Rory Horner, Daniel Haberly, Seth Schindler and Yuko Aoyama (from the universities of Manchester, Sussex, Sheffield and Clark):

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Significant proportions of the US and other countries in the Global North have experienced limited, if any, income gains in the most recent era of globalisation. Leading global inequality expert Branko Milanovic has explored changes in real incomes between 1988 and 2008 to show who particularly lost out on relative gains in income. He found two groups lost most: the global upper middle class – those between the 75th and 90th percentiles on the global income distribution, of whom 86% were from advanced economies – and the poorest 5% of the world population.

A different picture emerges in the Global South. People living in Asia accounted for the vast majority of those who experienced relative income gains from 1988 to 2008. In comparison with the 1990s, the Global South now earns a much larger share of world GDP, has more middle-income countries, more middle-class people, less dependency on foreign aid, considerably greater life expectancy, and lower child and maternal mortality.

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Samsung refutes report of Xiaomi overtake, says still top Indian manufacturer ‘by a distance’ • SamMobile

“Adnan F”:

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A spokesperson for Samsung has said that “As per the German research firm GfK, which tracks sales to end consumers, in the last (November) quarter, Samsung had a 45% value market share and 40% volume market share.”

This is an important distinction that the company is making here. It’s not going by reports of units shipped by market research firms and instead relying on numbers that indicate just how many handsets were actually sold to the end user. A unit can be shipped and stay on retailers’ shelves for months but that still doesn’t count as a sale for the company.

“Samsung is a full range player and leads the smartphone business across every segment of the India market in 2017. More importantly, Samsung is India’s ‘Most Trusted’ brand. We owe our undisputed leadership to the love and trust of millions of our consumers in India,” the spokesperson added.

Samsung India’s global vice president Asim Warsi also pointed out this distinction in a recent interview. “German research firm GfK reports final consumption which is the most important measure of market share,” adding that while shipment numbers are important, they don’t tell the final market share.

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So the suggestion is that Xiaomi is “stuffing the channel” – pushing handsets in which just sit on shelves waiting to be sold. Also, strictly, Samsung *rebutted* the reports; it isn’t a refutation to say there are different ways to measure this stuff. Clearly its pride is wounded though.
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Soros forecasts end for Facebook and Google • FT

Peter Wells and Katie Martin:

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More than just the survival of open society, Mr Soros said that “the survival of our entire civilisation is at stake”, and pointed to the rise of leaders such as Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un as having much to do with this, particularly for their brinkmanship around a possible nuclear war.

Having got that off his chest, Mr Soros turned his ire toward giant, monopolistic IT platforms, saying the likes of Google and Facebook had become “obstacles to innovation” whose quest to increase their share of users’ attention was inducing people to give up their autonomy. At the quickening pace Facebook had added its first and then second billion users, it would run out of people to convert within three years, he said.

That could all lead to a more alarming prospect, Mr Soros warned, in the form of alliances between authoritarian states and these giant, data-rich IT monopolies that would combine systems of corporate surveillance, in their infancy, with an already developed system of state-sponsored surveillance.

“The owners of the platform giants consider themselves the masters of the universe, but in fact they are slaves to preserving their dominant position. It is only a matter of time before the global dominance of the US IT monopolies is broken. Davos is a good place to announce that their days are numbered. Regulation and taxation will be their undoing and EU Competition Commissioner Vestager will be their nemesis.”

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Maersk reinstalled 45,000 PCs and 4,000 servers to recover from NotPetya attack • Bleeping Computer

Catalin Cimpanu:

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These new details came to light yesterday, while Jim Hagemann Snabe, Chairman of [shipping company] A.P. Møller-Maersk, participated in a panel on securing the future of cyberspace at the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland.

The incident Snabe was referencing is the NotPetya ransomware outbreak that hit companies around the world.

“I’ll never forget, It was the 27 of June when I was woken up at 4 o’clock in the morning. A call came from the office that we had suffered a cyberattack,” Snabe said.

“The impact of that is that we basically found that we had to reinstall an entire infrastructure,” Snabe continued. “We had to install 4,000 new servers, 45,000 new PCs, 2,500 applications.”

“And that was done in a heroic effort over ten days. Normally —I come from the IT industry— I would say it’s gonna take six months. It took ten days,” Snabe added, referring to his previous position as SAP’s CEO.

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The CIA has concluded that Russia was behind NotPetya. Maersk did OK – it handled 80% of normal volume manually.
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“This is serious”: Facebook begins its downward spiral • Vanity Fair

Nick Bilton:

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There’s another theory floating around as to why Facebook cares so much about the way it’s impacting the world, and it’s one that I happen to agree with. When Zuckerberg looks into his big-data crystal ball, he can see a troublesome trend occurring. A few years ago, for example, there wasn’t a single person I knew who didn’t have Facebook on their smartphone. These days, it’s the opposite. This is largely anecdotal, but almost everyone I know has deleted at least one social app from their devices. And Facebook is almost always the first to go. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other sneaky privacy-piercing applications are being removed by people who simply feel icky about what these platforms are doing to them, and to society.

Some people are terrified that these services are listening in to their private conversations. (The company’s anti-privacy tentacles go so far as to track the dust on your phone to see who you might be spending time with.) Others are sick of getting into an argument with a long-lost cousin, or that guy from high school who still works in the same coffee shop, over something that Trump said, or a “news” article that is full of more bias and false facts. And then there’s the main reason I think people are abandoning these platforms: Facebook knows us better than we know ourselves, with its algorithms that can predict if we’re going to cheat on our spouse, start looking for a new job, or buy a new water bottle on Amazon in a few weeks. It knows how to send us the exact right number of pop-ups to get our endorphins going, or not show us how many Likes we really have to set off our insecurities. As a society, we feel like we’re at war with a computer algorithm, and the only winning move is not to play.

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It’s true; I deleted the Facebook app from my phone literally years ago. (If I go there on mobile, it’s via the website.) Instagram annoys the hell out of me because of its algorithmic feed; I’d like to see what people have posted just now, not what an algorithm thinks I’d like. I realised the other day that if Twitter moved to an algorithmic feed I’d feel like giving it up.

Bilton thinks there’s even a vague possibility Facebook could be extinct – or split from Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp – in five years.
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Apple HomePod: tell Me where You come from, I will tell You who You are • Tech.pinions

Carolina Milanesi:

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It will be interesting to see how Apple deals with the shared music experience with HomePod. Will we be able to train Siri to recognize different voices and therefore set up different profiles? Or will HomePod be linked to one phone and one profile but everybody could ask Siri anything music related? What about HomeKit? Will I be the lady of the house or will the whole family be able to turn the lights on and off?

Building a relationship with a personal assistant takes time and trust but should be more straightforward to set up from a technology perspective. When shared, the complexity that an assistant will have to deal with grows. No one has done that elegantly thus far other than for very top level actions, so Apple is not alone in having to figure this out. That is, of course, if Apple is interested in a communal Siri. Historically, Apple has been more focused on personal experiences than shared ones, mostly because those experiences were starting from a personal device.

If I am right and HomePod will be a music-first kind of device, I also start to wonder whether or not Apple believes in ambient computing. I certainly think, Apple believes in giving people options when it comes to how they interact with Siri, but they might not believe that smart home interactions and the value of an assistant can only be channeled through voice. This might explain why Siri’s skills and HomeKit’s support are not added at the same pace as we have seen with Amazon and Google.

We are still at the very beginning of this smart home, voice first and ambient computing roll out and I think it is hard to believe we know what consumers will eventually settle on. Right now, it is natural to think that because you can do more with a specific assistant that assistant is more advanced. Over time, however, we might not appreciate an assistant that is the Jack of all trades, and we might even be less trusting of an assistant that cracks a joke over one that is more focused and gets the job done.

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Lots of people are puzzling over how other people are going to see the HomePod, and how it’s going to function. Not that Google Home has that nailed down either. Amazon has a lot of this space – though how *big* is it? How much do we want to talk to the walls?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Stuff like this is clogging up the internet. Let Google’s engineers explain. Photo by Sunciti Sundaram’s Images and Messages on Flickr. (That’s kind of a clue.)

A selection of 11 links for you. Have whatever sort of morning you damn well like. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google engineer Steve Yege calls company ‘100% competitor-focused’

Jillian D’Onfro:

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A Google engineer who just left the company after nearly 13 years criticized it Wednesday for becoming “100% competitor-focused” and said the company “can no longer innovate.”

Steve Yegge, who joined Google from Amazon in 2005, wrote a blog post about his decision to quit the company, saying it has become too focused on competitors instead of customers. He said product launches such as its smart speaker, Home, its chat app Allo and its Android Instant Apps copy Amazon Echo, Facebook-owned WhatsApp and WeChat, respectively.

“Google has become 100% competitor-focused rather than customer focused,” he wrote. “They’ve made a weak attempt to pivot from this, with their new internal slogan ‘Focus on the user and all else will follow.’ But unfortunately it’s just lip service.”

He said employees don’t set aside enough time to regularly interact with customers, instead relying on competitor activity to guide decisions about what people want.

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Yegge wrote the blogpost in 2011 criticising Google Plus which went viral too.

Then again, the world is full of people who used to work at X company who think it’s all gone to pot. (For the Apple version, see Bob Burrough, who worked on the iPod, iPhone and iPad; he detests the post-Jobs Apple.)
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Everyone is making AI-generated fake porn now • Motherboard

Samantha Cole:

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In December, Motherboard discovered a redditor named ‘deepfakes’ quietly enjoying his hobby: Face-swapping celebrity faces onto porn performers’ bodies. He made several convincing porn videos of celebrities—including Gal Gadot, Maisie Williams, and Taylor Swift—using a machine learning algorithm, his home computer, publicly available videos, and some spare time.

Since we first wrote about deepfakes, the practice of producing AI-assisted fake porn has exploded. More people are creating fake celebrity porn using machine learning, and the results have become increasingly convincing. Another redditor even created an app specifically designed to allow users without a computer science background to create AI-assisted fake porn. All the tools one needs to make these videos are free, readily available, and accompanied with instructions that walk novices through the process.

These are developments we and the experts we spoke to warned about in our original article. They have arrived with terrifying speed.

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So there are now fakes of celebrities – female celebrities so far I think? – taking showers, etc. (Perhaps someone could do a Windowlicker-style video to stem this. And if you’re wondering whether attitudes like this are just for the youth crowd…
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Men Only: Inside the charity fundraiser where hostesses are put on show • FT

Madison Marriage:

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It is for men only. A black tie evening, Thursday’s event was attended by 360 figures from British business, politics and finance and the entertainment included 130 specially hired hostesses.

All of the women were told to wear skimpy black outfits with matching underwear and high heels. At an after-party many hostesses — some of them students earning extra cash — were groped, sexually harassed and propositioned.

The event has been a mainstay of London’s social calendar for 33 years, yet the activities have remained largely unreported — unusual, perhaps, for a fundraiser of its scale.

The questions raised about the event have been thrown into sharp relief by the current business climate, when bastions of sexual harassment and the institutionalised objectification of women are being torn down.

The Financial Times last week sent two people undercover to work as hostesses on the night. Reporters also gained access to the dining hall and surrounding bars.

Over the course of six hours, many of the hostesses were subjected to groping, lewd comments and repeated requests to join diners in bedrooms elsewhere in the Dorchester…

…It was unclear why men, seated at their tables with hostesses standing close by, felt the need to hold the hands of the women, but numerous hostesses discussed instances of it through the night. For some, this was a prelude to pulling the women into their laps. Meanwhile champagne, whisky and vodka were served.

On stage, entertainers came and went. It was soon after a troupe of burlesque dancers — dressed like furry-hatted Coldstream Guards, but with star-shaped stickers hiding nipples — that one 19-year-old hostess, recounted a conversation with a guest nearing his seventies: who had asked her, directly, whether she was a prostitute. She was not. “I’ve never done this before, and I’m never doing it again,” she said later. “It’s f***ing scary.”

«

Ms Marriage (such a wonderfully appropriate name) is usually the FT’s accounting and tax correspondent, but she got onto this story after a tipoff. It has been going for 33 years. The counterargument – “but it’s for charity!” – fails; notorious paedophile Jimmy Savile raised lots of money for charity too. And the President’s Club dinner apparently brought in £694k – but cost £673k to organise. A number of charities said they would return funds raised by the dinner.

On Wednesday evening UK time, the President’s Club said it would be closing after distributing its remaining funds.
link to this extract

Xiaomi beats Samsung to become top smartphone vendor in India • Canalys

»

India’s smartphone market has finally seen a change at the top, with Xiaomi now leading with shipments close to 8.2m units in Q4 2017. Despite annual growth of 17%, Samsung failed to maintain its lead, shipping just over 7.3m smartphones to take second place. The smartphone market in India grew by a modest 6% overall, in line with Canalys forecasts, following the seasonal dip as vendors and channel partners take stock after a busy Q3. Vivo, Oppo and Lenovo rounded out the top five, while total smartphone shipments were just shy of 30m units.

«

This seems like a worrying development for Samsung. Look how Xiaomi has grown there, too.
link to this extract

Global smartphone average sales price sees record year-on-year growth in 4Q17 • GfK Global

»

Global smartphone sales reached 397m units in the fourth quarter of 2017 (4Q17), a 1% increase year-on-year. Demand was primarily driven by Middle East and Africa, which experienced 8% growth, and Central & Eastern Europe, where demand grew 7%. Global smartphone average sales price (ASP) increased by 10% year-on-year to USD 363, its fastest quarterly growth rate to date. 

«

There’s a fascinating table to go with it, showing sales and sales value by region. Given a little time you could figure out a regional ASP, but the most important point is that ASPs are going up fast in China, by 17%.
link to this extract

The internet is filling up because Indians are sending millions of ‘good morning!’ texts • WSJ

Newley Purnell:

»

Millions of Indians are getting online for the first time—and they are filling up the internet. Many like nothing better than to begin the day by sending greetings from their phones. Starting before sunrise and reaching a crescendo before 8 a.m., internet newbies post millions of good-morning images to friends, family and strangers.

All that good cheer is driving a 10-fold increase in the number of Google searches for “Good Morning images” over the past five years. Pinterest, the San Francisco visual-search platform, added a new section to display images with quotes. It saw a ninefold increase over the past year in the number of people in India downloading such pictures.

Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp messaging service—which has 200 million monthly active users in India, making the country its biggest market—added a status message last year so users could say good morning to all of their contacts at once.

Desh Raj Sharma, 71 years old, recently started using a smartphone. At around 6 a.m. every day he searches for and sends good-morning images to more than 50 friends and family using WhatsApp…

…When Google researchers peeked into Indian consumers’ phones, they found thousands of “good morning” images gumming up their storage. One in three smartphone users in India run out of space daily, according to a survey by data-storage firm Western Digital Corp. , compared with one in 10 in the U.S.

Google’s solution: a new app called Files Go that highlights files for possible deletion—with a special feature to search out and delete all good-morning messages at once.

«

To be clear – the “peeking” was done by asking people in person to see what was on their phones. But I love the idea of the internet being filled up.

The obvious thing is to cater to the India market by offering phones with LOADS of storage.
link to this extract

Should we believe the hype about blockchains? • Spectator Coffee House

Jamie Bartlett:

»

I worry that a lot of organisations will rush toward blockchain solutions, and grow disillusioned two years later when they realise it wasn’t quite as easy as our dear thought-leaders made out. The current volume of investment, conferences, talks, meet-up groups, consultancies and Twitter experts far exceed what it’s actually achieved. Even bitcoin, the undisputed and highly-priced blockchain prince isn’t getting picked up all that quickly as an actual functioning currency. This sort of thing happened twice already in the field of AI research.

In the early 1970s, and then again in the late 1980s, periods of irrational excitement about the prospects for artificial intelligence led to companies founded, money invested, and promises made about how everything was about to change. When expectations for major advance were not met, there were dramatic cuts in research funding and corporate investment. These become known as the ‘AI winters’ – and set the whole field back several years. A blockchain winter would do the same, and the potential of this new technology would be lost to a sad collection of wild hype, windy promise, overpaid consultants and utopian dreams. 

«

link to this extract

Facebook to roll out new tools in response to EU privacy laws • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

»

Facebook will roll out a new set of tools aimed at making it easier for users to make informed choices about their privacy in response to sweeping new European privacy laws, according to the company’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg.

“We’re rolling out a new privacy centre globally that will put the core privacy settings for Facebook in one place and make it much easier for people to manage their data,” Sandberg said at a Facebook event in Brussels on Tuesday.

She said that the creation of a “privacy centre” was prompted by the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), an EU regulation that seeks to give Europeans more control over their information and how companies use it.

“Our apps have long been focused on giving people transparency and control and this gives us a very good foundation to meet all the requirements of the GDPR and to spur us on to continue investing in products and in educational tools to protect privacy,” Sandberg said.

«

OK, but will it apply outside the EU? Will it apply in the US?
link to this extract

6,000 gamers just risked $1M in a massive space fight • VICE News

David Gilbert:

»

More than 6,000 gamers logged on to play Eve Online Tuesday for a “million-dollar battle” in which gamers risked real-world money for the chance to gain virtual mastery within the in-game universe.

The interstellar-fighting game, which pitted spaceships worth an estimated $1 million on each side of the two main alliances, ended in victory for the Moneybadger Coalition, who defended their Keepstar space station, defeating for the Imperium alliance, also known as the Clusterfuck Corporation.

The previous sentence might not make much sense to you, so here’s some context.

Eve Online is not Mario Kart. It’s not a game you can pick up and play for an hour or two. It requires a huge amount of time to master. Icelandic developer CCP Games has built a loyal subscriber base that not only spend hundreds of hours playing the game but also spend a lot of money building their fleets.

«

Turns out that the cost was way less. By the way, if you’ve seen the “Callister” episode of Series 4 of Black Mirror, this will look totally familiar.
link to this extract

The ‘Frequent Flier’ program that grounded a hospital’s soaring costs • POLITICO Magazine

Arthur Allen:

»

Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation (or PCCI) was a joint effort with community partners such as homeless shelters and food pantries to build a network of what was hoped would eventually be hundreds of community-based social services around Dallas County, with Parkland Memorial at the center of it. A sophisticated software platform would enable the hospital to easily refer homeless people discharged from its emergency room to shelters and pantries, and to let social workers at those places see what their clients were doing: whether they were filling their prescriptions, or getting healthy food, or had a place to sleep, or money for the bus. It would be so much cheaper to meet those needs outside the medical system than to pay for the consequences inside it. Two years into the program, evidence is mounting that PCCI is working.

Callies cites the case of a man with hypertension and a stressful situation at home whose hospital bills dropped from $108,500 in December 2016 to zero by April as his health stabilized. Callies says on average hospital visits for some of the highest utilizers have been cut by two-thirds or more, saving an estimated $12 million.

“I had a ‘Wow!’ moment when I saw these charts,” says Callies.

Less than two years after its launch, the PCCI portal contains 150,000-plus names and had been accessed nearly a million times by 98 community groups, including some, like the local community college, that officials never anticipated would participate. And the list is growing.

«

That’s the nub of it, but there’s much more to how they implemented it. It’s well-known that a few people tend to generate huge costs; and that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
link to this extract

Here’s the first Animoji Karaoke with Apple’s newest characters • Fast Company

Harry McCracken:

»

With iOS 11.3–which Apple is seeding as a beta to developers today and expects to ship in final form this spring–the company is upping the Animoji ante with four additional characters: a bear, a lion, a skull, and a particularly fine dragon. Apple gave me early access to the newcomers, which are as uncannily polished and emotive as their predecessors. Naturally, I made them break out in song.

The more Animoji the merrier as far as I’m concerned, but if Apple is serious about giving these beasties their due, there’s an obvious next step: Rather than making Animoji available only in Messages, it should build them into its nifty Clips movie-making app. That could end the need to use iOS 11 screen recording to capture more than 10 seconds at a time, and would give Animoji impresarios the ability to create real extravaganzas entirely on the iPhone X.

«

Any bets this happens in iOS 12?
link to this extract

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If your name’s Mohamed, this might cost you more than if it’s John. Photo by David Farrell on Flickr.

A selection of 11 links for you. If only you’d waited. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Apple iPhone X sales near 30 million in Q4: Canalys • Fortune

Don Reisinger:

»

Apple hasn’t revealed how many iPhone X units it sold in the fourth quarter, but a new study from researcher Canalys has put a number on it.

The tech giant sold 29 million iPhone units in the fourth quarter, including 7 million in the U.S., Canalys said in a statement on Tuesday. That was enough to make the iPhone X the most popular iPhone Apple sold during the period, topping the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus…

…Canalys found in its analysis of the worldwide market that many customers traded in their older iPhones to defray the cost of the iPhone X.

Still, Canalys cautioned that the iPhone X might have performed “slightly below industry expectations” and early iPhone X shipments “were not the fastest ever for an iPhone.” The researcher didn’t say which Apple handset tallied the fastest sales.

Apple has been silent about iPhone X sales, despite widespread speculation over exactly how many units it has sold. The company will announce earnings next week for the fiscal period that includes the fourth quarter. It’s unknown whether it will break down iPhone sales by unit.

«

Guess what? Apple isn’t going to give a per-product breakdown. Never has. It would be painting a huge target on its financials for rivals. Not sure what these industry expectations were, but if the Canalys figure is right then that’s $29bn in revenues right there. Counterpoint Research reckons the iPhone X was the best-selling phone worldwide in November, and that Apple had five of the top 10 best-selling phones that month. Thus:

The surprising thing to me is how low Samsung’s representation seems to be. But it spreads it widely.
link to this extract

‘WHAT THE F*CK IS GOING ON?’ Linus Torvalds explodes at Intel spinning Spectre fix as a security feature • The Register

Thomas Claburn and Kat Hall:

»

Intel’s fix for Spectre variant 2 – the branch target injection design flaw affecting most of its processor chips – is not to fix it.

Rather than preventing abuse of processor branch prediction by disabling the capability and incurring a performance hit, Chipzilla’s future chips – at least for a few years until microarchitecture changes can be implemented – will ship vulnerable by default but will include a protection flag that can be set by software.

Intel explained its approach in its technical note about Spectre mitigation, titled Speculative Execution Side Channel Mitigations. Instead of treating Spectre as a bug, the chip maker is offering Spectre protection as a feature.

The decision to address the flaw with an opt-in flag rather than activating defenses by default has left Linux kernel steward Linus Torvalds apoplectic.

Known for incendiary tirades, Torvalds does not disappoint. In a message posted to the Linux kernel mailing list on Sunday, he wrote, “As it is, the patches are COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE.”

“All of this is pure garbage. Is Intel really planning on making this shit architectural?” he asked. “Has anybody talked to them and told them they are f*cking insane? Please, any Intel engineers here – talk to your managers.”

«

The full Torvalds rant is worth reading. Never one to hold back, ol’ Linus. (Thanks John Naughton for the link.)
link to this extract

Motorists fork out £1,000 more to insure their cars if their name is Mohammed • The Sun

Ben Leo:

»

Motorists are being stung for almost £1,000 more to insure cars if their name is Mohammed.

Top firms Admiral, Marks & Spencer, Bell, Elephant and Diamond all give far lower quotes when the driver has the English name John, a Sun investigation reveals.

The most shocking example we found was an Admiral quote via GoCompare. We put in identical details apart from the name. When it was “John Smith” wanting fully comprehensive insurance for a 2007 Ford Focus in Leicester the quote was £1,333. But for “Mohammed Ali” it was £2,252 — a huge £919 more.

One victim of the scandal — Mohammed Butt — raged: “It’s racism, pure and simple. They cannot say Mohammeds are worse drivers than Johns.”

We got 60 quotes via GoCompare, plus others using rival comparison sites. The sites do not calculate figures themselves but simply show results from insurers. Admiral and its sister companies Diamond, Bell and Elephant always quoted more if the driver was called Mohammed.

The difference was often hundreds of pounds. The story was similar when we went to the firm direct. Quotes we sought ranged across ten cities.

«

My only thought of the way that this might just – just – make sense is if Asian names were associated with the many “fake whiplash crash” claims that stung insurers so badly in the past. Those were reckoned to add about £100 to every household’s car insurance. (Thanks Richard for the link. First time we’ve had The Sun here.)
link to this extract

Five obvious questions about Apple’s HomePod speaker – The Verge

Dieter Bohn wonders if HomePod (available for pre-order this Friday, on sale February 9) is like iPod, which was initially dismissed for not being or looking like existing devices in that specific space:

»

I’m not eager put myself out on a limb and say that the HomePod is or is not going to replicate the iPod’s success. But I can’t stop from feeling like the smart speaker market is further along in its evolution now than the MP3 player market was when the iPod was announced. I also can’t stop thinking that consumers are smarter and more demanding about gadgets now than they were then.

Here is a simple list of the things that are troubling about the HomePod vis-à-vis its competition, Alexa and Google Assistant speakers:

• Price. The HomePod is $349. You can buy into either the Alexa or Google ecosystem for 50 bucks (often for way less).
• Diversity of products. There is one HomePod, and it costs 350 bucks. There are dozens of different speakers that support Alexa; Amazon itself offers at least four current models. There are soon to be dozens of Google Assistant speakers; Google itself offers three models. Both of those ecosystems will have speakers with full displays (if that’s what you want).
• Software compatibility. Alexa and Google have a significant lead with their intelligent assistants compared to Siri. That’s a strange circumstance, given that Apple was first to market with Siri and sells millions of devices with Siri on them. But both Amazon and Google have been building out compatible voice-only capabilities with third parties to work with their speakers, while Apple has taken a slower, more deliberate approach. Apple’s description of Siri on the HomePod is a “musicologist” and only mentions its broader capabilities as a side note.
• Software compatibility, part 2. The HomePod only works with Apple Music. Alexa and Google not only work with Spotify, Pandora, and TuneIn (and more!), but they’ll even let you set a competing music service as the default playback option. Also, Apple Music has no free option: to make a HomePod work, you’ll have to pay a monthly subscription fee.
• Features incomplete. The HomePod is launching without key features for a home speaker. AirPlay 2 is apparently necessary for multiroom audio and even stereo pairing of two speakers, and it won’t be on the HomePod at launch. It’s “coming this year in a free software update.” (Also can we take another moment to ask what the heck is up with AirPlay 2? It still feels very mysterious.) Meanwhile, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Sonos are all offering these features.

«

All good points; I think that the “price” question will be answered by the audio quality. For diversity, it’s easy to build down from the top of the market; harder to build upwards. The software compatibility and features remain to be seen. I think that – like the Apple Watch – it will be a deep hit, beloved by those who really like it. It’s not the next iPhone, but then what is?
link to this extract

Privacy, simplified • Spread Privacy

Gabriel Weinberg (CEO of DuckDuckGo):

»

Today we’re taking a major step to simplify online privacy with the launch of fully revamped versions of our browser extension and mobile app, now with built-in tracker network blocking, smarter encryption, and, of course, private search – all designed to operate seamlessly together while you search and browse the web. Our updated app and extension are now available across all major platforms – Firefox, Safari, Chrome, iOS, and Android – so that you can easily get all the privacy essentials you need on any device with just one download.

The DuckDuckGo browser extension and mobile app will also now show you a Privacy Grade rating (A-F) when you visit a website. This rating lets you see at a glance how protected you are, dig into the details to see who we caught trying to track you, and learn how we enhanced the underlying website’s privacy measures. The Privacy Grade is scored automatically based on the prevalence of hidden tracker networks, encryption availability, and website privacy practices.

«

Currently doing 22m direct searches per day. Tiny compared to Google, but personally I like it.
link to this extract

Economist Barry Eichengreen on the dollar losing its status as a dominant reserve currency and the future of bitcoin • Quartz

Eshe Nelson:

»

Using new evidence on central bank reserves from the 1910s to early 1970s, with particularly focus on the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s, Eichengreen and his co-authors find that reserve currencies can and do coexist. For example, in the period between the wars, it seems the British pound and the US dollar shared reserve currency status more or less equally, depending on the year. Before the First World War, even though sterling was the most important currency, the French franc and German mark were internationally significant, too.

“From this vantage point, it is the second half of the 20th century that is the anomaly, when an absence of alternatives allowed the dollar to come closer to monopolizing this international currency role,” they write.

This implies that the dollar’s days as the dominant reserve currency will end “sooner rather than later.” The book suggests we’re heading for a return to the time when currencies coexisted on more equal footing in international markets. In the future, the dollar will be forced to share prominence with the yuan and the euro, in particular. The speed of the shift might depend on the actions of Donald Trump, Eichengreen says.

«

There’s an interview with Eichengreen in the article. I’ll point out that the US ceasing to be the world’s reserve currency is the opening pivot of Lionel Shriver’s “The Mandibles” – about a future US. (Don’t say “bitcoin!”)
link to this extract

Ending Bitcoin support • Stripe

»

At Stripe, we’ve long been excited about the possibilities of cryptocurrencies and the experimentation and innovation that’s come with them. In 2014, we became the first major payments company to support Bitcoin payments.

Our hope was that Bitcoin could become a universal, decentralized substrate for online transactions and help our customers enable buyers in places that had less credit card penetration or use cases where credit card fees were prohibitive.

Over the past year or two, as block size limits have been reached, Bitcoin has evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange. Given the overall success that the Bitcoin community has achieved, it’s hard to quibble with the decisions that have been made along the way. (And we’re certainly happy to see any novel, ambitious project do so well.)

This has led to Bitcoin becoming less useful for payments, however. Transaction confirmation times have risen substantially; this, in turn, has led to an increase in the failure rate of transactions denominated in fiat currencies. (By the time the transaction is confirmed, fluctuations in Bitcoin price mean that it’s for the “wrong” amount.) Furthermore, fees have risen a great deal. For a regular Bitcoin transaction, a fee of tens of U.S. dollars is common, making Bitcoin transactions about as expensive as bank wires… of the businesses that are accepting Bitcoin on Stripe, we’ve seen their revenues from Bitcoin decline substantially. Empirically, there are fewer and fewer use cases for which accepting or paying with Bitcoin makes sense.

«

Bitcoin! So much winning!
link to this extract

Bitcoin broker Coinbase booked $1bn in revenue last year • Recode

Theodore Schleifer:

»

Coinbase, the bitcoin trading broker that has exploded in popularity as cryptocurrencies surge and nose dive, has encountered an unusual problem for a Silicon Valley startup: Too many investors are trying to get in.

The six-year-old company crossed $1bn in revenue last year, Recode has learned from industry sources, a tremendous rise fueled by layman interest in both bitcoin and competing virtual currencies that users can buy and sell through the app…

…Bitcoin is altogether only worth about $175bn in market value as of today’s trading price of about $10,500 — a 50% drop from just a month ago. And so Coinbase’s $1bn in revenue suggests it has become the most-used broker for bitcoin transactions.

Coinbase makes money not on bitcoin’s price but on the volume of trades — charging both the buyer and seller usually a fee between 0.25% and 1% of the total transaction size through the site. The company serves as both an exchange and a broker of deals, though it does not serve as a market maker that holds bitcoin.

«

If accurate, that’s really remarkable. Suggests a lot of trading has gone on – but is that people exiting and reentering, or new people coming in?
link to this extract

Trump slaps steep tariffs on foreign washing machines and solar products • NY Times

Ana Swanson and Brad Plumer:

»

Whirlpool Inc. appealed to the White House for help in curbing washing machine imports from its Korean competitors, while two solar companies, Suniva Inc. and SolarWorld Americas, said imports of cheap solar cells and modules were similarly putting their companies at risk.

While the tariffs [of up to 30%] were welcomed by the companies that sought them, economists warned the levies could drive up prices for consumers and hurt some American businesses. The solar industry has been split over the tariffs; companies that develop large-scale solar farms, as well as purchasers of solar power such as retailers and tech companies, opposed the tariffs over concerns that they would cost them more money and make solar power less competitive with other energy sources, at least in the short term.

Abigail Ross Hopper, the president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, which opposed the measures, said the decision “will create a crisis in a part of our economy that has been thriving, which will ultimately cost tens of thousands of hard-working, blue-collar Americans their jobs.”

«

The solar association estimates that 84,000 jobs will go – about 34% of the 260,000 Americans who worked in solar in 2017 (more than coal and oil combined): 6,300 in Texas (Ted Cruz’s state), 4,700 in North Carolina, 7,000 in South Carolina.

That’s going to play through this year, with elections to come in November. Also, there’s no chance the US will challenge China in making solar panels; that’s a race it would have had to enter with commitment 20 years ago.

So the price will put off homeowners buying solar panels for their homes, installers are out of work. Tariffs only help if you have a dominant product or a less developed economy, where you need the time to develop your own specialisation. The US is long past that point on solar.
link to this extract

Wall Street, not American solar, stands to gain from Trump tariffs • Bloomberg

Brian Eckhouse:

»

The biggest winners of President Donald Trump’s decision to slap tariffs on imported solar equipment may not be American manufacturers but a group of investment houses around the globe.

The firms – from Centerbridge Partners LP to JPMorgan Chase & Co. – all are creditors to the two struggling solar companies that brought the trade complaint. The value of their investments, mostly in the form of distressed bonds, is likely to get a boost as the new tariffs help American manufacturers. While much of the US solar industry has blasted the tariffs, warning of massive job losses, these investors show at least some on Wall Street stand to gain.

Centerbridge, a New York firm that manages $14 billion in credit and distressed assets, is among the biggest creditors to solar manufacturer SolarWorld AG, a German company that owns SolarWorld Americas. Centerbridge controls about a third of the parent company’s senior secured notes, according to people familiar with the matter. SolarWorld AG filed for bankruptcy in May. 

SolarWorld Americas, which has a plant in Hillsboro, Oregon, was a leader of the tariff campaign. 

«

Another point: the US power infrastructure needs renewal, and having individuals install solar panels takes a lot of load off the generating capacity and grid – think of the times when the weather is hot and air conditioners are on. Generate power locally, or pipe it in from across the grid? If you pipe it in, you need the infrastructure and you need the power plants.
link to this extract

This Hearst ranch has raised cattle since 1865. Now it also powers Apple’s headquarters • CNBC

Anita Balakrishnan:

»

150 years after George Hearst bought the ranch, it took on a new, ultra-modern function: A 2,900-acre solar farm, which until now has been contracted by Apple to run the company’s Cupertino headquarters.

It wasn’t easy to get the job, Hearst said in a statement, as it was “a huge, unbelievable construction project,” but the long summer stretches of 115-degree heat helped seal the deal…

…Apple CEO Tim Cook said in 2015 that the company would contribute $850m to build the solar farm, which also aims to provide enough energy for 60,000 homes.

“We know in Apple that climate change is real. The time for talk is passed,” he said at that time, according to Reuters. “The time for action is now.”

The project is still expanding, with the second phase of the 2.5m solar panels being installed this year, to provide energy offset for California customers. According to Hearst, “cowboys of Jack Ranch have been outnumbered by construction workers as the 280-megawatt solar project heads into its final month.”

«

280MW? That’s colossal. Though one suspects it also needs plenty of batteries to store excess, if Apple is really being powered directly from it. (I suspect it’s more that it feeds into the grid, and extracts that much or less.)
link to this extract

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CRISPR/Cas9 in neurons. Is what’s happening in China like this? Photo by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) 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 8 links for you. Tolerable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Rupert Murdoch: Facebook, Google should pay for trusted news • CNBC

John Shinal:

»

Rupert Murdoch said on Monday that Facebook and Google have made “scurrilous” news sources popular, and that the U.S. tech giants should pay publishers if they want “trusted” content.

“Facebook and Google have popularized scurrilous news sources through algorithms that are profitable for these platforms but inherently unreliable,” the News Corp. chairman said in a statement.

“If Facebook wants to recognize ‘trusted’ publishers then it should pay those publishers a carriage fee similar to the model adopted by cable companies,” Murdoch said.

The statement comes after Facebook said Friday it would survey its users about what news sources they trust, and tweak its ranking software to help promote more the credible ones.

In his own Facebook post last week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “I’ve asked our product teams to make sure we prioritize news that is trustworthy, informative, and local. And we’re starting next week with trusted sources.”

«

He keeps trying to find ways to make this happen, and they keep failing.
link to this extract

China, unhampered by rules, races ahead in gene-editing trials • WSJ

Preetika Rana, Amy Dockser Marcus and Wenxin Fan:

»

In a hospital west of Shanghai, Wu Shixiu since March has been trying to treat cancer patients using a promising new gene-editing tool.

U.S. scientists helped devise the tool, known as Crispr-Cas9, which has captured global attention since a 2012 report said it can be used to edit DNA. Doctors haven’t been allowed to use it in human trials in America. That isn’t the case for Dr. Wu and others in China.

In a quirk of the globalized technology arena, Dr. Wu can forge ahead with the tool because he faces few regulatory hurdles to testing it on humans. His hospital’s review board took just an afternoon to sign off on his trial. He didn’t need national regulators’ approval and has few reporting requirements.

Dr. Wu’s team at Hangzhou Cancer Hospital has been drawing blood from esophageal-cancer patients, shipping it by high-speed rail to a lab that modifies disease-fighting cells using Crispr-Cas9 by deleting a gene that interferes with the immune system’s ability to fight cancer. His team then infuses the cells back into the patients, hoping the reprogrammed DNA will destroy the disease.

In contrast, what’s expected to be the first human Crispr trial outside China has yet to begin. The University of Pennsylvania has spent nearly two years addressing federal and other requirements, including numerous safety checks designed to minimize risks to patients. While Penn hasn’t received final federal clearance to proceed, “we hope to get clearance soon,” a Penn spokeswoman said…

…There is little doubt China was first out of the block testing Crispr on humans. Nine trials in China are listed in a U.S. National Library of Medicine database. The Wall Street Journal found at least two other hospital trials, including one beginning in 2015—a year earlier than previously reported. Journal reporting found at least 86 Chinese patients have had their genes edited.

The trials align with China’s industrial policy. As part of its drive to place China on the global stage in a multitude of industries, Beijing in a 2016 five-year plan highlighted gene editing. Many of the Crispr trials emerged after that call-to-arms.

«

Expected. Also: please don’t let this be the opening scene of a zombie apocalypse.
link to this extract

More than 10% of $3.7bn raised in ICOs has been stolen: Ernst & Young

Anna Irrera:

»

More than 10% of funds raised through “initial coin offerings” are lost or stolen in hacker attacks, according to new research by Ernst & Young that delves into the risks of investing in cryptocurrency projects online.

The professional services firm analyzed more than 372 ICOs, in which new digital currencies are distributed to buyers, and found that roughly $400m of the total $3.7bn funds raised to date had been stolen, according to research published on Monday.

Phishing was the most widely used hacking technique for ICOs, with hackers stealing up to $1.5m in ICO proceeds per month, according to the report.

The research also noted that the volume of ICOs has been slowing since late 2017. Less than 25% of ICOs reached their target in November, compared with 90% in June.

The study comes amid a cryptocurrency investing craze, with young companies raising hundreds of millions of dollars online to fund their projects, with often little more than a handful of employees and a business plan outlined in a so-called “white paper”.

«

Going to keep pointing this stuff out until the inevitable happens.
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Who’s using 2FA? Sweet FA. Less than 10% of Gmail users enable two-factor authentication • The Register

Iain Thomson:

»

It has been nearly seven years since Google introduced two-factor authentication for Gmail accounts, but virtually no one is using it.

In a presentation at Usenix’s Enigma 2018 security conference in California, Google software engineer Grzegorz Milka today revealed that, right now, less than 10% of active Google accounts use two-step authentication to lock down their services. He also said only about 12% of Americans have a password manager to protect their accounts, according to a 2016 Pew study.

We polled El Reg readers on Twitter just before we published this piece, asking: “What percentage, rounded to nearest integer, of Gmail users do you think use two-factor authentication?” Out of 838 followers who responded within the hour, 82% correctly selected less than 10%. The rest picked more than 10%.

The Register asked Milka why Google didn’t just make two-factor mandatory across all accounts, and the response was telling. “The answer is usability,” he replied. “It’s about how many people would we drive out if we force them to use additional security.”

Please, if you haven’t already done so, just enable two-step authentication. This means when you or someone else tries to log into your account, they need not only your password but authorization from another device, such as your phone. So, simply stealing your password isn’t enough – they need your unlocked phone, or similar, to to get in.

«

I consider it a mark of achievement that I got all my family onto 2FA. And recall that it was the lack of 2FA on John Podesta’s personal email account which led to it being hacked to such disastrous effect.

Meanwhile inside Google…
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BeyondCorp: how Google ditched VPNs for remote employee access • The New Stack

»

Today, none of Google’s employee-facing applications are on a virtual private network. They all have public IP addresses.

The company feels this approach, which it has dubbed BeyondCorp, is the “new cloud model,” for doing cloud security, asserted Neal Mueller, head of infrastructure product marketing at Google, who gave a presentation on this approach at the O’Reilly Security conference, held recently in New York.

This model can be fall under a number of rubrics in the security community, including “zero-trust” or “perimeter-less” security. It is the opposite of the traditional approach of security, which Mueller described as “the castle” approach, in which a strong firewall is used to set off an internal network that can only be accessed by way of a virtual private network (VPN).

The problem with the “castle” approach is that once the perimeter is breached, the entire internal network, and all the associated applications, are at risk. “Do not trust your network. It is probably already owned,” added Max Saltonstall, a Google program manager for corporate engineering, who also participated in the presentation. Phishing, man-in-the-middle, SQL Injection attacks all find fertile ground on VPNs.

Plus, a VPN was cumbersome to use, and slowed performance, especially for overseas workers. And it is no walk in the park for admins either.

«

Fascinating how Google is inverting this whole idea, and letting anyone – who is correctly authorised – access it. And it must be enormously confident to give a presentation like this (more slides in the full article) where hackers will target its systems.
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A powered-on ‘Xbox Watch’ emerges, shows off fitness focus • Windows Central

Jez Corden:

»

Images of the so-called “Xbox Watch” have surfaced before, but this is the first time we’ve been able to see the device powered on (no chargers seem to exist for this thing.)

The pictures come via Hikari Calyx on Twitter, showing off an extremely early version of the Xbox Watch in a powered-on state. At this stage, the device only sported four apps, “Workout,” “GPS,” “Settings,” and a USB debugger for developers.

This device preceded the Microsoft Band, and might have been a response to how well Nintendo was able to position console gaming as a fitness option, back during the Wii Fit craze. We believe that the technology developed for the “Xbox Watch” eventually got rolled into the Microsoft Band, which, of course, also got cancelled.

«

Wise to cancel it. This wasn’t going to be a winner, and the writing was already on the wall of Microsoft’s mobile ecosystem.
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Why ads keep redirecting you to scammy sites and what we’re doing about it • Vox

Winston Hearn, who – like you probably did at some point recently – found himself diverted to a scammy site when he’d clicked on what seemed like a safe page:

»

another engineer and I became curious about what exactly was happening to cause the redirect and annoy all users served the malicious ad. We dug in and were extremely surprised that the frigging thing could not be more simple. When the ad landed on the page there were about three lines of code. That code creates a link just like you click to go to any page on the web then waits seven seconds before triggering a click on the link which causes the browser to redirect you. That’s it. Why seven seconds? Most likely to avoid security tools that actively scan sites to try and detect ads like this, although that is just speculation on my part.

Let me be extremely clear: we hate these malicious ads with the fire of a thousand suns and are working actively to keep them off of our sites. We use automated services that regularly scan our sites trying to find malicious ads. We work with ad-selling partners to try to ensure the ads that are sold and served on our sites are high quality. And Vox Media’s AdOps team is constantly monitoring social media, email and Slack for reports of anything that seems questionable (not just malicious).

Despite all this, malicious ads like this pop up every few months. After this recent round, we started investigating what else we can do to prevent these ads from harming your experience on our sites. The ideal solution would be for ads to be delivered to our sites in a safe way that prevent things like this. Google allows advertisers to treat these safer options as opt-in, which means nothing currently prevents scammers from sneaking in ads that cause App Store or gift card redirects.

«

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10 typography trends to look for in 2018 • Elegant Resources

B.J. Keeton:

»

The internet changes so quickly and so often that web designers can barely keep up. What works for clients and converts well one month might completely falter the next. So we have to keep up with trends, specifically with typography because it is so foundational to every single project we work on.

2018 is pretty exciting, honestly, because there are some trends that we’re seeing that may just shake up what we’ve taken for granted over the past few years.

Let’s take a look at what this year has in store for us!

«

Your guide to all the things you’re going to be squinting at this year saying “Why can’t it just be in clean type dammit.”
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

It’s taken three years, but LG has finally realised what makes it lose money in smartphones. Photo by Janitors 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 13 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Saying goodbye to Civil Comments • Medium

Aja Bogdanoff:

»

Civil Comments used a clever peer-review submission process to mimic face-to-face social interactions, requiring commenters to rate the civility of three randomly-selected comments before their own was, in turn, rated by others. Commenters were willing to pitch in and do the extra work because they were motivated to get their own comments published, and so every single comment came in with human moderation data attached. The more comments submitted, the more “moderators” there were, so it scaled beautifully at times when, say, an article went viral…

…even though the product succeeded beyond our expectations, product alone does not a strong business make. As much as everyone might like to see higher-quality, less-toxic comments on their favorite news sites, the reality is that the number of sites willing and able to pay for comments software of any quality is not large, or growing. Civil the company finds itself in a catch-22: unable to land the largest enterprise customers we need to survive because we aren’t a big enough team, and unable to build a larger team because we don’t have the largest enterprise customers. I believed, really believed, that we could build a solid business by solving problems as we did; I understand now why that wasn’t the case. I’m very glad to know our friends at the Coral Project will be continuing the fight for better comments.

And so we find ourselves at the end of our run with Civil.

«

The emphasis came from all the people who’ve read the article and picked that out. It’s totally true. Comments, as a genre, are in a dire situation.
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LG to shift strategy on money-losing smartphone • Korea Herald

Shin Ji-hye:

»

“We will unveil new smartphones when it is needed. But we will not launch it just because other rivals do,” said LG Electronics Vice Chairman Cho Sung-jin on Wednesday during a press conference at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. He was responding to a question on when the firm would launch its new flagship smartphone LG G7.

“We plan to retain existing models longer by, for instance, unveiling more variant models of the G series or V series,” Cho said. 

As for why the strategy on smartphones will be changed, the chief said, “We found it is important to retain a good platform for a long (time) and concerns rise over the supply of lithium materials.” 

Although he did not mention the smartphone unit’s financial losses, the announcement appears to reflect the firm’s scale-down of its phone business amid slow growth in the global smartphone market in contrast to the firm’s flourishing appliances and other sectors.

LG’s mobile communications unit is estimated to report a financial loss for the 11th straight quarter in the October-December period last year. 

The mobile unit was not able to make a turnaround last year, as the bulk of its earnings came from budget phones, not flagship models although its smartphone business reduced losses by more than 40% last year compared to the previous year, reaching around 700 billion won ($650 million) in losses.

Analyst Park Won-jae of Mirae Asset Daewoo Securities predicted LG’s smartphone business would once again fail to make a turnaround this year, although it would further reduce its losses to 184.7 billion won ($170m) this year.

«

As I pointed out last week, LG loses money on the top-end “flagship”. Every year it launches one; every year its losses peak that quarter. Shifting towards the budget end is a good idea.
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News Feed FYI: helping ensure news on Facebook is from trusted sources • Facebook Newsroom

Adam Mosseri, head of News Feed:

»

Starting next week, we will begin tests in the first area: to prioritize news from publications that the community rates as trustworthy.

How? We surveyed a diverse and representative sample of people using Facebook across the US to gauge their familiarity with, and trust in, various different sources of news. This data will help to inform ranking in News Feed.

We’ll start with the US and plan to roll this out internationally in the future.

When we rank and make improvements to News Feed, we rely on a set of core values. These values — which we’ve been using for years — guide our thinking and help us keep the central experience of News Feed intact as it evolves. One of our News Feed values is that the stories in your feed should be informative.

For informative sources, we will continue to improve on the work we first announced in August 2016, where we began asking people to rank the informativeness of updates in their feed on a scale of one to five.

We’re evaluating ways to expand this work to more areas this year.

«

Can’t see how this ends well. Everyone is biased in their own way, and the US’s level of partisanship is beyond wild. Everyone has pointed out that this idea of “trust” is bound to go wrong. The only question is how long it will take to get another course correction.

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Update on Twitter’s review of the 2016 U.S. election • Twitter public policy blog

»

As previously announced, we identified and suspended a number of accounts that were potentially connected to a propaganda effort by a Russian government-linked organization known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA).

Consistent with our commitment to transparency, we are emailing notifications to 677,775 people in the United States who followed one of these accounts or retweeted or liked a Tweet from these accounts during the election period. Because we have already suspended these accounts, the relevant content on Twitter is no longer publicly available.

Examples of IRA Content

Most user engagement was with a very small number of IRA-associated accounts… [a number of examples are provided…]…

…As part of our ongoing review, we have identified both more IRA and automated Russia-based accounts. The results of this supplemental analysis are consistent with the results of our previous work: automated election-related content associated with Russian signals represented a very small fraction of the overall activity on Twitter in the ten-week period preceding the 2016 election.

We have identified an additional 1,062 accounts associated with the IRA. We have suspended all of these accounts for Terms of Service violations, primarily spam, and all but a few accounts, which were restored to legitimate users, remain suspended.

«

The question is not really whether these bots had an effect – they must have done – but whether it was significant. Removing the content makes that more difficult to find out and evaluate independently.
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OnePlus hack exposed credit cards of up to 40,000 people • CNET

David Katzmaier:

»

If you bought a OnePlus phone such as the OnePlus 5T between November and January, you’d best check your credit card statement.

The phone maker on Friday confirmed in a statement that its website, oneplus.net, was hacked, potentially exposing the detailed credit card information of up to 40,000 customers. 

The company sent an email to customers saying that card numbers, expiration dates and security codes “may have been compromised.”

A malicious script on the company’s pages was inserted, harvesting the information from web browsers. The company says it has been removed, but customers who entered information into the site between mid-November 2017 and Jan. 11, 2018 could be at risk.

«

“A malicious script was inserted”? So that’s quite a hack – first into the company web server, and then capturing all those details. This needs quite a lot of explaining by OnePlus.
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Customise My Data – public beta • ONS Digital

Andrew Dudfield:

»

Allowing you to find data more easily is the sort of fundamental statement that may just sound too generic to mean anything, but it has specific context here. We know, from looking at analytics and user research, that you are all downloading large numbers of excel files from the Office for National Statistics’s (ONS) site. In part, this seems to be because a lot of people are not quickly finding the things they want. So, part of the aim of this project is adding more contextual data to our existing web pages. This might include the dimensions used, the geographic areas covered and so on. The aim being that it becomes easier to understand what is in a dataset before downloading it. We are also working hard to improve the in site search functionality at this stage as well. More on that soon.

Allowing our users to customise data is another key aim. Here we have spent considerable amounts of our time developing a range of (hopefully) simple design patterns to offer a consistent view on our inconsistent data and allow users to take away just the information they need.

Allowing users to browse by geography continues to be a key focus and, whilst you might be able to see hints of this now, you will see an awful lot more of this as the project continues to develop.

«

Neat. (Via Sophie Warnes.)
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Renewable power generation costs in 2017

International Renewable Energy Agency:

»

Renewable energy has emerged as an increasingly competitive way to meet new power generation needs. This comprehensive cost report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) highlights the latest trends for each of the main renewable power technologies, based on the latest cost and auction price data from projects around the world.

Download the Executive Summary.

Broadly, the study finds:
• Renewable power generation costs continue to fall and are already very competitive to meet needs for new capacity.
• Competitive procurement – including auctions – accounts for a small fraction of global renewable energy deployment. Yet these mechanisms are very rapidly driving down costs in new markets.
• Global competition is helping to spread the best project development practices, reducing technology and project risk and making renewables more cost-competitive than ever before.
• In developed countries, solar power has become cheaper than new nuclear power.

«

Those aren’t all the bullet points. And of course the point about nuclear is that it can provide a baseline supply, which solar can’t.
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Snap lays off two dozen employees • The Information

Tom Dotan:

»

Snap laid off around two dozen people in recent days, mostly in its content team, according to people close to the company. The staff cuts, which also affected people in several other departments, are the latest sign of how Snap is being cost-conscious amid struggles with slow user and revenue growth.

Snap’s content team, which reports to head of content Nick Bell, is consolidating its operations at the company’s Venice, Calif., headquarters. Members of the team were previously based in New York as well as Venice.

The team oversees the production of videos from media companies as well as snaps submitted by users. It has been ramping up the amount of original shows that run on Snap’s Discover section, including with a planned foray into scripted shows.

«

Getting the feeling that content, especially video, isn’t a big thing for social media companies.
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British 15-year-old gained access to intelligence operations in Afghanistan and Iran by pretending to be head of CIA, court hears • Daily Telegraph

Hayley Dixon:

»

A 15-year-old gained access to plans for intelligence operations in Afghanistan and Iran by pretending to be the head of the CIA to gain access to his computers, a court has heard. 

From the bedroom of the Leicestershire home he shared with his mother, Kane Gamble used “social engineering” – where a person builds up a picture of information and uses it manipulate others into handing over more – to access the personal and work accounts of some of America’s most powerful spy chiefs .

The teenager persuaded call handlers at an internet giant that he was John Brennan, the then director of the CIA, to gain access to his computers and an FBI helpdesk that he was Mark Giuliano, then the agency’s Deputy Director, to re-gain access to an intelligence database.

He also targeted the US Secretary of Homeland Security and Barack Obama’s Director of National Intelligence from his semi-detached council house in Coalville. 

Gamble taunted his victims online, released personal information, bombarded them with calls and messages, downloaded pornography onto their computers and took control of their iPads and TV screens, a court heard.

Mr Justice Haddon-Cave noted: “He got these people in his control and played with them in order to make their lives difficult.

John Lloyd-Jones QC, prosecuting, said that Gamble founded Crackas With Attitude (CWA) in 2015, telling a journalist: “It all started by me getting more and more annoyed about how corrupt and cold blooded the US Government are so I decided to do something about it.”

«

Impressive. Give him a job. (Thanks multiple readers who sent this.)
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Die With Me

»

The chat app you can only use when you have less than 5% battery.

Die together in a chatroom on your way to offline peace.

«

A clever idea: finding a niche in what seems like the utterly known territory of the smartphone. What about “The 1%” where it only works on 99%.. OK, something else? 4G connection? 3G? Edge?
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The BitConnect Ponzi scheme has finally collapsed as exit scam becomes evident • NewsBTC

JP Buntinx:

»

Thousands of people bought into this scam and some of them may have even made money. Most users, however, probably never got their money out of this program whatsoever. That is only normal, as over 95% of all trades were conducted on the native BCC exchange. When a currency’s developers also run the main exchange, you know things are not always going to end well.

To put this into perspective, the BitConnect price has dropped by a lot. Over the past week, it went from nearly $400 all the way to $27. Such a steep decline seems to confirm the developers finally completed their grand exit scam. It is also possible they used the ‘stolen” Bitcoins to crash the current market. Whether or not that latter part is a conspiracy theory or the sheer reality, remains to be seen. It is evident the BCC exchange had access to a lot of BTC, though. Either way, it seems this Ponzi Scheme is gone for good, which can only be considered to be a good thing.

Furthermore, it seems the project’s subReddit is no longer accessible. Rather than leaving it open to the public, it is now completely private. No one who isn’t “approved” can’t access this subreddit or see what is being posted there. A very worrisome turn of events for the people still waiting to get their money out. They were warned dozens of times about this Ponzi Scheme, though. Anyone who lost money due to BitConnect only has themselves to blame. It is a harsh reality, but that’s what people get for falling for snake oil practices.

«

Thousands of people. Blaming the victim seems a little extreme here, but bitcoin (and associated) has been the venue for Ponzi schemes almost from the inception; here’s a piece I did back in 2013 about a similar scheme.
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New botnet infects cryptocurrency mining computers, replaces wallet address • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

Satori—the malware family that wrangles routers, security cameras, and other Internet-connected devices into potent botnets—is crashing the cryptocurrency party with a new variant that surreptitiously infects computers dedicated to the mining of digital coins.

A version of Satori that appeared on January 8 exploits one or more weaknesses in the Claymore Miner, researchers from China-based Netlab 360 said in a report published Wednesday. After gaining control of the coin-mining software, the malware replaces the wallet address the computer owner uses to collect newly minted currency with an address controlled by the attacker. From then on, the attacker receives all coins generated, and owners are none the wiser unless they take time to manually inspect their software configuration.

Records show that the attacker-controlled wallet has already cashed out slightly more than 1 Etherium coin. The coin was valued at as much as $1,300 when the transaction was made. At the time this post was being prepared, the records also showed that the attacker had a current balance of slightly more than 1 Etherium coin and was actively mining more, with a calculation power of about 2,100 million hashes per second. That’s roughly equivalent to the output of 85 computers each running a Radeon Rx 480 graphics card or 1,135 computers running a GeForce GTX 560M…

«

Sneaky, and terrifically clever. Satori is a variant of Mirai, the IoT botnet which its author(s) open-sourced in a desperate – and unsuccessful – attempt to be able to deny their authorship.
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The policy hack • Terence Eden

He’s at it again:

»

I’ve found a delightfully exploitable social hack which I presented at UK GovCamp.

It applies to any uncooperative bureaucracy.

Here’s how it works. You ask someone to do something and they reply with “I’m sorry sir, that’s against our policy.”

You should say “I’m sorry to hear that. Please can you send me a copy of the policy?”

Turns out, most times, there is no policy!

Shocking, I know. So much of modern life rests on the whim of whichever call-centre worker you happen to get. If they can’t be bothered to do something, they can hide behind a non-existent policy.

«

There are, as he accepts, occasional exceptions, but it’s quite a way to throw grease in the gears.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The end of this kind of thing? The dotJS conference in 2017. Photo by dotJS conferences 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. This, too, must pass. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

TV, retail, advertising and cascading collapses • Benedict Evans

»

As ecommerce keeps growing, at some point we will start to see certain retailers disappear – it’s common to say there are strong parallels with newspapers, in that they have a fixed cost base, falling revenue, and the wrong assets & skills. When internet reading or internet buying was 5%, it felt as though it might be additive to newspapers or retails – at 10 or 20%, as it is now, it becomes an existential problem. That is, at a certain point they stop being able to cut costs at the margin and start closing stores, or radically changing format etc. So, rhetorically (or apocalyptically) speaking, when Sears and Macy’s go bust, how many malls do they take with them, and how many other retailers that might have been doing fine on their own will go or lose a lot of their footprint because of that? And, where were those retailers advertising? What was their TV budget? How much of this is self-reinforcing – the more you buy online, the more you buy online? Conversely, did Aeropostale’s customer base go online to buy all the same kinds of clothes when the stores went bust, or buy different cloths, or buy different things? That is, do email failures caused (partly) by ecommerce cause further ecommerce adoption and further failures?

…There’s a famous Jeff Bezos quote that “your margin is my opportunity” – right now Amazon is building a billion dollar ad business in its own search results, but I suspect he also looks at the $500bn that’s spent every year on advertising and the further $500bn that’s spent on marketing and sees money that should be going to lower prices and same-day or 1-hour delivery. P&G spent 11% of revenue on advertising last year and plenty more on marketing. What will that look like in 10 years, where will it be spending it and how will people be buying?

«

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If this link is texted to you over iMessage, it’ll freeze your iPhone • Buzzfeed

Nicole Nguyen:

»

When someone texts you a link to a website through Messages in iOS, the app generates a preview of the link. Apple’s software guidelines allow developers to insert a few characters into their website’s HTML to customize the image and title of that link preview in Messages.

Instead of a few characters, Masri inputted hundreds of thousands of characters into his webpage’s metadata, much more than the iOS operating system expected, which is why, Masri suspects, the Messages app crashes. He then hosted the bug’s code on GitHub, which made it available for other people to use.

The chaiOS GitHub page has been taken down and Masri’s account was suspended. But that doesn’t mean iOS users are safe.

“My GitHub is publicly accessible, so anyone can copy [the code]. I’m pretty sure someone else has posted it, but I’m not going to rehost it,” Masri said. Github initially suspended Masri’s account, then restored it a few hours later. The chaiOS repository appeared to have been removed from Masri’s account page.

The malicious code has likely been reuploaded elsewhere, and there may be other bad links exploiting the chaiOS vulnerability circulating around. Masri said he published the bug to alert Apple: “My intention is not to do bad things. My main purpose was to reach out to Apple and say, ‘Hey, you’ve been ignoring my bug reports.’ I always report the bug before releasing something.”

«

Masri tweeted “here’s the link… do not use it for bad stuff.” Yeah, that’ll work. (I wonder if people are texting him the link.)

Apple says it’s working on a fix, probably for next week. Might be an annoying weekend for some. (But at least we have an idea of why these “crashing text” things happen.)
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Six Chinese ships covertly aided North Korea. The US was watching • WSJ

Michael Gordon and Chun Han Wong:

»

Satellite photographs and other intelligence gathered by U.S. officials provide what they say is detailed evidence of at least six Chinese-owned or -operated cargo ships violating United Nations sanctions against North Korea.

The U.S. compiled the information from Asian waters as part of the Trump administration’s strategy to pressure North Korea into giving up its nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.

The effort identified the ships by name and tracked their movements. The ships either entered ports in North Korea and transported what U.S. officials concluded was illicit cargo to Russia and Vietnam or made ship-to-ship transfers at sea.

According to the U.S., which presented the information to a U.N. sanctions committee, the ships also made extensive maneuvers designed to disguise their violations of the U.N. sanctions. In August, the Security Council banned North Korean exports of coal, iron ore, lead and seafood, which have generated an estimated $1bn a year in hard currency for North Korea.

«

$1bn might not sound much, but it’s a significant proportion of North Korea’s GDP. Problem, though: how do you censure China effectively?
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Silicon Valley would be wise to follow China’s lead • FT

Michael Moritz, famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist:

»

In California, the blogosphere has been full of chatter about the inequity of life. Some of this, especially for women, is true and for certain individuals their day of reckoning has been long overdue. But many of the soul-sapping discussions seem like unwarranted distractions. In recent months, there have been complaints about the political sensibilities of speakers invited to address a corporate audience; debates over the appropriate length of paternity leave or work-life balances; and grumbling about the need for a space for musical jam sessions. These seem like the concerns of a society that is becoming unhinged.

These topics are absent in China’s technology companies, where the pace of work is furious. Here, top managers show up for work at about 8am and frequently don’t leave until 10pm. Most of them will do this six days a week — and there are plenty of examples of people who do this for seven. Engineers have slightly different habits: they will appear about 10am and leave at midnight. Beyond the week-long breaks for Chinese new year and the October national holiday, most will just steal an additional handful of vacation days. Some technology companies also provide a rental subsidy to employees who choose to live close to corporate HQ.

In California, this sort of pace might be common for the first couple of years of a company, but then it will slow. In China, by contrast, it is quite usual for the management of 10 and 15-year-old companies to have working dinners followed by two or three meetings. If a Chinese company schedules tasks for the weekend, nobody complains about missing a Little League game or skipping a basketball outing with friends.

«

Damn Silicon Valley slackers. How dare they consider other things than making someone else rich? Or try to treat all people as deserving attention? Sure, China doesn’t have free elections, freedom of speech and its air and soil have colossal pollution, but they’re making other people rich!
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EFF and Lookout uncover new malware espionage campaign infecting thousands around the world • Electronic Frontier Foundation

»

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and mobile security company Lookout have uncovered a new malware espionage campaign infecting thousands of people in more than 20 countries. Hundreds of gigabytes of data has been stolen, primarily through mobile devices compromised by fake secure messaging clients.

The trojanized apps, including Signal and WhatsApp, function like the legitimate apps and send and receive messages normally. However, the fake apps also allow the attackers to take photos, retrieve location information, capture audio, and more.

The threat, called Dark Caracal by EFF and Lookout researchers, may be a nation-state actor and appears to employ shared infrastructure which has been linked to other nation-state actors.

«

Fear not, though: it works through phishing links which then direct people to third-party app stores. (None hit iOS, for this reason.) Stick to the legit stuff, you’re OK.

Still amazing that people do this, ten years after mobile app stores arrived.
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The end of the conference era • Marco.org

Marco Arment, picking up Chris Adamson’s observation that there’s a contraction in the number of iOS and related conferences:

»

It’s getting increasingly difficult for organizers to sell tickets, in part because it’s hard to get big-name speakers without the budget to pay them much (which would significantly drive up ticket costs, which exacerbates other problems), but also because conferences now have much bigger competition in connecting people to their colleagues or audiences.

There’s no single factor that has made it so difficult, but the explosion of podcasts and YouTube over the last few years must have contributed significantly. Podcasts are a vastly more time-efficient way for people to communicate ideas than writing conference talks, and people who prefer crafting their message as a produced piece or with multimedia can do the same thing (and more) on YouTube. Both are much easier and more versatile for people to consume than conference talks, and they can reach and benefit far more people.

Ten years ago, you had to go to conferences to hear most prominent people in our industry speak in their own voice, or to get more content than an occasional blog post. Today, anyone who could headline a conference probably has a podcast or YouTube channel with hours of their thoughts and ideas available to anyone, anywhere in the world, anytime, for free.

But all of that media can’t really replace the socializing, networking, and simply fun that happened as part of (or sometimes despite) the conference formula.

«

Wonder whether anyone tracks Windows and/or Android developer conferences, and how numbers of those have changed?
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‘Time well spent’ is shaping up to be tech’s next big debate • The Verge

Casey Newton:

»

Today, one of [ex-Googler Tristan] Harris’ collaborators returned the volley. In a pair of closely argued essays on Medium, Joe Edelman — who says he coined the term “time well spent” with Harris five years ago — lays out a suggested path forward for Facebook.

”It’s possible (but very tricky) to design software so as to address the users’ sense of meaning,” Edelman wrote in the first essay. “But it requires profound changes to how software gets made! These changes make others your company has gone through (such as the adoption of machine learning, the transition from web to mobile) look easy.”

Less than a month into the new year, “time well spent” promises to become the “fake news” of 2018: a term overused into oblivion by partisans of every stripe. To Zuckerberg, “time well spent” means independent research showing that people value the time they spend on Facebook, and feel better about themselves afterward. To Harris, it represents a shift away from measuring comments and shares to emphasizing companies’ positive contributions to users’ lives. There’s overlap, but there are also some fundamental differences. In 2018, the battle will play out.

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link to this extract

Too much music: a failed experiment in dedicated listening • NPR

James JAckson Toth, aged 39, felt he’d lost his critical faculty through having too much music to choose from, and tried an experiment for 2017: listen only to one album per week. He gave up within three days:

»

The notion that there is something to be gained by choosing this type of scarcity, by actively inviting a kind of regression, suddenly seems, to this Western mind, pretty stupid. It dawns on me that I’ve made this choice not for reasons of spiritual asceticism or worldly good, but nostalgia, the last refuge of the middle-aged sad-sack. I begin feeling like a Civil War reenactor, or the man at the Renaissance Faire who scolds you for wearing a watch; a pedant, an anachronism. The very embodiment of everything about a 40-year old that baffles a 20-year old.

Perhaps I’m being too hard on myself. When asked in a 2009 interview with the Wall Street Journal whether he thought the epic novel was still relevant to modern readers, author Cormac McCarthy surprised me by conceding the following: “The indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you’re going to write something like The Brothers Karamazov or Moby-Dick, go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don’t care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.”

He may be right. As long as we try to maintain the Sisyphean task of trying to experience everything, our brains, unable to adapt and forever lagging behind exponential technological progress, will continue to struggle. “Computing power is still doubling every 18 months,” notes cryptographer and technology writer Bruce Schneier, “while our species’ brain size has remained constant.”

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There are lots of insightful gems in this – don’t miss the bit about your favourite 10 albums.
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Carillion’s failure: the many questions that need answers • Forbes

Frances Coppola on the abrupt collapse of a listed company which was the largest provider of services to the UK central and local government:

»

Valuing Carillion’s assets – or even identifying them – is something of a black art. Carillion Group’s balance sheet is highly opaque. It has made extensive use of off-balance sheet “special purpose companies” (SPCs) to manage its many joint ventures and special projects. Many of these are thought to be highly indebted, but the debt does not appear on Carillion Group’s balance sheet. What does appear is a whopping intangible asset called “goodwill,” which according to the notes to the 2016 accounts is derived from the projected net cash flows of Carillion Group’s subsidiaries. At the end of 2016, this “goodwill” made up one third of Carillion Group’s total assets.

The problem is that goodwill valued on net cash flow is entirely ephemeral. If the cash flow dries up, goodwill evaporates. And that is what happened to Carillion. The June 2017 interim report shows that cash income was substantially lower than expected. This forced the company to reduce its cash flow projections and impair its goodwill asset.

But it continued to increase its borrowing. Short-term debt, in particular, rose enormously: the FT reports that by the time of its collapse, Carillion Group’s revolving credit was a whopping £790m, more than half of the total amount owed to banks.

«

“Goodwill” is a dangerous financial drug that to a large extent exists only to make balance sheets, well, balance. As it’s an intangible asset, you quickly discover that it’s not something to rely on. Just for comparison, Apple’s goodwill at November 1 2017 was $5.7bn – that’s 1.5% of its total assets; Google’s was $16.7bn, or 8.8% of its total assets.

For more reading on goodwill-to-asset ratios, this 1997 paper talks about the then companies in the US with the largest GTA ratios. Top at the time? Worldcom. It later went spectacularly bust. At a guess, it was the rise in goodwill which tipped hedge fund companies off to Carillion’s increasingly dire position.
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The end of the Awl and the vanishing of freedom and fun from the internet • The New Yorker

Jia Tolentino used to work at The Awl, which was set up in 2009 (and where she worked, later) but which is now closing:

»

now, in 2018, the economics of online publishing are running everyone off the map. I sometimes think, with some regretful wonder and gratitude, about an Awl chat-room conversation that took place in 2013. Some annoying mini-scandal had transpired on the Internet, and everyone else who worked for the little network—they all had years of experience on me—was typing out lively scenarios of what they would do if our online infrastructure magically burned down. Sitting in my little blue house in Ann Arbor, I kept quiet for a while, and then typed something like, “Aww guys, no, the Internet is great.” I meant it, though the sentiment now feels as distant as preschool. Reading the Awl and the Hairpin, and then working with the people that ran them, had actually convinced me that the Internet was silly, fun, generative, and honest. They all knew otherwise, but they staved off the inevitable for a good long while.

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“How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
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Please don’t kill the blogs • Seth’s Blog

Seth Godin:

»

I’m aware that you don’t charge the people who use GMail for the privilege. In fact, we’re the product, not the customer. Your goal is to keep people within the Google ecosystem and to get the writers and marketers who use email as a permission asset to instead shift to paying money (to Google) to inform and reach their audience.

So you invented the ‘promotions’ folder.

It seems like a great idea. That spam-like promo mail, all that stuff I don’t want to read now (and probably ever) will end up there. Discounts on shoes. The latest urgent note from someone I don’t even remember buying from. The last time I checked, you’ve moved more than 100,000 messages to my promotions folder. Without asking.

Alas, you’ve now become a choke point. You take the posts from this blog and dump them into my promo folder–and the promo folder of more than a hundred thousand people who never asked you to hide it.

Emails from my favorite charities end up in my promo folder. The Domino Project blog goes there as well. Emails from Medium, from courses I’ve signed up for, from services I confirmed just a day earlier. Items sent with full permission, emails that by most definitions aren’t “promotions.”

Here’s a simple way to visualize it: Imagine that your mailman takes all the magazines you subscribe to, mixes them in with the junk mail you never asked for, and dumps all of it in a second mailbox, one that you don’t see on your way into the house every day. And when you subscribe to new magazines, they instantly get mixed in as well.

It’s simple: blogs aren’t promotions. Blogs subscribed to shouldn’t be messed with. The flow of information by email is an extraordinary opportunity, and when a choke point messes with that to make a profit, things break.

The irony of having a middleman steal permission is not lost on me. That’s what you’re doing. You’re not serving your customers because you’re stealing the permission that they’ve given to providers they care about it. And when publishers switch to SMS or Facebook Messenger, that hardly helps your cause.

«

I don’t use Google’s Inbox for pretty much this reason – I have stuck with the classic old version. But I use the web interface as rarely as possible; you can get IMAP (also free!) on your computer or phone, and then you can triage as you like.

But Google doesn’t really care about blogs; if it did it wouldn’t have killed Reader.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

It’s not a bowling ball, it’s a trackball. But you can be forgiven for the confusion. Photo by Iwan Gabovitch 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. . I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Trackball history: Canada’s earliest gift to computing • Tedium

Ernie Smith:

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DATAR represented perhaps one of the most ambitious projects of the budding Canadian computer industry at the time, a sophisticated machine that allowed ships to transfer radar and sonar data with one another…

…DATAR, considering both what it was and how early it was in computer history, was a very complex piece of work, having to integrate a number of cutting-edge technologies into a single machine. According to Georgi Dalakov’s History of Computers website, the resulting prototype used 30,000 vacuum tubes, and with its drum memory system, it could store 500 objects.

An early prototype of the first trackball. Note the stripes on the ball. (via the Engineering Technology and History Wiki)

That machine included a radar screen, and that screen just happened to be controlled by a 5-pin bowling ball. Invented by Tom Cranston and Fred Longstaff and relying an air-bearings system formulated by Taylor, the system worked like this: An operator, using a terminal, would scan over an area using the trackball to target the correct area on the radar screen, and they would hit a trigger to store the information on the screen, and that information would get transferred to other ships.

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This is an amazing read.
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Stanford’s AI predicts death for better end-of-life care • IEEE Spectrum

Jeremy Hsu:

»

Using artificial intelligence to predict when patients may die sounds like an episode from the dystopian science fiction TV series “Black Mirror.” But Stanford University researchers see this use of AI as a benign opportunity to help prompt physicians and patients to have necessary end-of-life conversations earlier.

Many physicians often provide overly rosy estimates about when their patients will die and delay having the difficult conversations about end-of-life options. That understandable human tendency can lead to patients receiving unwanted, expensive and aggressive treatments in a hospital at their time of death instead of being allowed to die more peacefully in relative comfort. The alternative being tested by a Stanford University team would use AI to help physicians screen for newly-admitted patients who could benefit from talking about palliative care choices.

Past studies have shown that about 80% of Americans would prefer to spend their last days at home if possible. In reality, up to 60% of Americans end up dying in an acute care hospital while receiving aggressive medical treatments, according to research cited by the Stanford group’s paper “Improving Palliative Care with Deep Learning” published on the arXiv preprint server.

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I guess it was inevitable. But the reality is that most doctors don’t want aggressive medical treatments at EOL. Ask the professionals what they want, and try offering that to patients. It doesn’t really take AI.
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Beyond the bitcoin bubble • The New York Times

Steven B Johnson:

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The only blockchain project that has crossed over into mainstream recognition so far is Bitcoin, which is in the middle of a speculative bubble that makes the 1990s internet I.P.O. frenzy look like a neighborhood garage sale. And herein lies the cognitive dissonance that confronts anyone trying to make sense of the blockchain: the potential power of this would-be revolution is being actively undercut by the crowd it is attracting, a veritable goon squad of charlatans, false prophets and mercenaries. Not for the first time, technologists pursuing a vision of an open and decentralized network have found themselves surrounded by a wave of opportunists looking to make an overnight fortune. The question is whether, after the bubble has burst, the very real promise of the blockchain can endure.

To some students of modern technological history, the internet’s fall from grace follows an inevitable historical script. As Tim Wu argued in his 2010 book, “The Master Switch,” all the major information technologies of the 20th century adhered to a similar developmental pattern, starting out as the playthings of hobbyists and researchers motivated by curiosity and community, and ending up in the hands of multinational corporations fixated on maximizing shareholder value. Wu calls this pattern the Cycle, and on the surface at least, the internet has followed the Cycle with convincing fidelity. The internet began as a hodgepodge of government-funded academic research projects and side-hustle hobbies. But 20 years after the web first crested into the popular imagination, it has produced in Google, Facebook and Amazon — and indirectly, Apple — what may well be the most powerful and valuable corporations in the history of capitalism.

Blockchain advocates don’t accept the inevitability of the Cycle. The roots of the internet were in fact more radically open and decentralized than previous information technologies, they argue, and had we managed to stay true to those roots, it could have remained that way. The online world would not be dominated by a handful of information-age titans; our news platforms would be less vulnerable to manipulation and fraud; identity theft would be far less common; advertising dollars would be distributed across a wider range of media properties…

…For all their brilliance, the inventors of the open protocols that shaped the internet failed to include some key elements that would later prove critical to the future of online culture. Perhaps most important, they did not create a secure open standard that established human identity on the network. Units of information could be defined — pages, links, messages — but people did not have their own protocol: no way to define and share your real name, your location, your interests or (perhaps most crucial) your relationships to other people online.

«

He calls the latter “a major oversight”, but you can’t really blame Tim Berners-Lee and the rest for not imagining everything and catering to it. Build incrementally. It’s a long read, and I don’t think I buy his argument about cryptotokens being a potential replacement for bonds.

Notable too that he overlooks the source of so much of the funding and drive for the useful stuff: GPS and the internet came from the government, Linux from a state-funded university graduate.
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The Secret History of World War III, by J.G. Ballard • Presidential Writings

Ballard imagined an America fascinated by the medical detail of its president’s health, even while real events are happening everywhere:

»

“…here’s an update on our report of two minutes ago. Good news on the President’s CAT scan. There are no abnormal variations in the size or shape of the President’s ventricles. Light rain is forecast for the DC area tonight, and the 8th Air Cavalry have exchanged fire with Soviet border patrols north of Kabul. We’ll be back after the break with a report on the significance of that left temporal lobe spike..”

“For God’s sake, there’s no significance.” I took the remote control unit from Susan’s clenched hand and began to hunt the channels. “What about the Russian Baltic Fleet? The Kremlin is putting counter-pressure on Nato’s northern flank. The US has to respond…”

By luck, I caught a leading network newscaster concluding a bulletin. He beamed confidently at the audience, his glamorous copresenter smiling in anticipation. “As of 5:05 Eastern Standard Time we can report that Mr Reagan’s inter-cranial pressure is satisfactory. All motor and cognitive functions are normal for a man of the President’s age. Repeat, motor and cognitive functions are normal. Now, here’s a newsflash that’s just reached us. At 2:35 local time President Reagan completed a satisfactory bowel motion.” The newscaster turned to his copresenter. “Barbara, I believe you have similar good news on Nancy?”

“Thank you, Dan,” she cut in smoothly. “Yes, just one hour later, at 3:35 local time, Nancy completed her very own bowel motion, her second for the day, so it’s all happening in the First Family.” She glanced at a slip of paper pushed across her desk. “The traffic in Pennsylvania Avenue is seizing up again, while F-16s of the 6th Fleet have shot down seven MiG 29s over the Bering Strait. The President’s blood pressure is 100 over 60. The EGG records a slight left-hand tremor…”

“A tremor of the left hand…” Susan repeated, clenching her fists. “Surely that’s serious?”

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Tell me this is fiction and I’ll say, give it 20 years or so. He’d already got the cat-and-laser-pointer nature of US TV news – and its audience.
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Coercion – a problem larger than authentication • Medium

“The Grugq”:

»

It seems appropriate to address the flawed understanding of security threats prompted by the FaceID authentication mechanism when it was announced. Particularly frustrating was the deep confusion around how coercion works at different levels, and why the sinister threat of “authoritarian regimes” is a poor threat model to apply to authentication mechanism security. It is popular to ask “how will this technology enable abuse by authoritarian regimes,” but the people asking that question, the technologies they choose to fret about, and the fantasy logic they use constructing threat models, need the cold water of reality…

…Technology that empowers dissidents, and dissident groups, is almost always just going to be Facebook (and Twitter, and WhatsApp or whatever the dominant is messenger for their region [see: Metcalfe’s Law]). Security for dissidents comes from being in the public eye, protecting them against secret reprisals.

When the secret police move against dissident groups, the individuals are going to face coercion that is state level. They will vanish while traveling alone. They will kill themselves while in police custody “in order to embarrass the police.” They will throw themselves off tall buildings “rather than face arrest” — no autopsy possible, their bodies cremated within 24hrs as they always wanted. They will commit suicide by shooting themselves in the back of the head, twice – just to be sure. If they survive secret police reprisals long enough, they will go to jail for decades.

The usual goal for a dissident who is captured is to remain silent for 24–48hrs, long enough to enable their comrades to escape. If there is some law governing their detention it may be “endure torture for 7 days, or jail for 30 years.”

At no point in time will dissidents think “if only my mobile phone was protected by an authentication mechanism that could not be tricked by physically forcing me to cooperate against my will.” In many cases, the coercion will be like a parent telling a child to go to their room. The weaker party will simply cooperate.

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This is why, he points out, a lot of the noise about privacy in these systems is misplaced. The only information you can’t give up is what you don’t know. And even that can be forced out of you.
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Warning: new undetectable DNS hijacking malware targeting Apple macOS users • The Hacker News

Mohit Kumar:

»

A security researcher has revealed details of a new piece of undetectable malware targeting Apple’s Mac computers—reportedly first macOS malware of 2018.

Dubbed OSX/MaMi, an unsigned Mach-O 64-bit executable, the malware is somewhat similar to DNSChanger malware that infected millions of computers across the world in 2012.

DNSChanger malware typically changes DNS server settings on infected computers, allowing attackers to route internet traffic through malicious servers and intercept sensitive information.
First appeared on the Malwarebytes forum, a user posted a query regarding unknown malware that infected his friend’s computer that silently changed DNS settings on infected macOS to 82.163.143.135 and 82.163.142.137 addresses.

After looking at the post, ex-NSA hacker Patrick Wardle analysed the malware and found that it is indeed a ‘DNS Hijacker,’ which also invokes security tools to install a new root certificate in an attempt to intercept encrypted communications as well.

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So check your DNS settings. (Preferences, Network, Advanced, DNS). Also not detected at that point by any of 59 popular antivirus programs.
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Turning soybeans into diesel fuel is costing us billions • NPR

Dan Charles:

»

“This is an easy one, economically. Biodiesel is very expensive, relative to petroleum diesel,” says Scott Irwin, an economist at the University of Illinois, who follows biofuel markets closely. He calculates that the extra cost for biodiesel comes to about $1.80 per gallon right now, meaning that the biofuel law is costing Americans about $5.4bn a year.

Irwin explains that use of biodiesel is driven by three different parts of the Renewable Fuel Standard. The law includes a quota for biodiesel use, but in addition to that, biodiesel also is used in order to meet the law’s demand for “advanced biofuels.” Finally, there’s an overall quota for biofuels of all sorts, and companies are using biodiesel to meet that quota as well because they’ve run into limits on their ability to blend ethanol into gasoline.

Defenders of biodiesel insist that it’s a much cleaner fuel than regular diesel, because it doesn’t come from the ground, but from soybean plants that capture carbon dioxide from the air as they grow. In fact, by the EPA’s calculations, replacing petroleum-based fuel with biodiesel will cut greenhouse emissions at least in half.

A growing number of environmentalists, however, say that this calculation is dead wrong. They say that if more soybeans are needed to make fuel in addition to food, it inevitably means that people somewhere on Earth will have to plow up grasslands or cut down forests in order to grow that additional supply — and clearing such land releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

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If you add in the externalities of climate change to the cost of petroleum diesel.. does that make a difference?
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Twitter hits back again at claims that its employees monitor direct messages • TechCrunch

Catherine Shu:

»

Twitter is pushing back against claims made by conservative activist group Project Veritas that its employees monitor private user data, including direct messages. In a statement to media outlets, it said “We do not proactively review DMs. Period. A limited number of employees have access to such information, for legitimate work purposes, and we enforce strict access protocols for those employees.”

Earlier this week, Project Veritas, which produces undercover sting operations that purportedly expose liberal biases at media companies and other organizations, posted footage that appeared to show Twitter engineers claiming that teams of employees look at users’ private data. One engineer seemed to say that Twitter can hand over President Donald Trump’s data, including deleted tweets and direct messages, to the Department of Justice.

Twitter already issued a statement after the video posted saying it “only responds to valid legal requests, and does not share any user information with law enforcement without such a request.”

The company also said the Twitter employees shown in the video “were speaking in a personal capacity and do not represent or speak for Twitter” and added that “we deplore the deceptive and underhanded tactics by which this footage was obtained and selectively edited to fit a pre-determined narrative. Twitter is committed to enforcing our rules without bias and empowering every voice on our platform, in accordance with the Twitter Rules.”

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Project Veritas has a track record of not being great at accuracy, and of very selective editing. “Speaking in a personal capacity” is hardly a rebuttal, though.
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Echo Spot: ‘smart clock’ launched as Amazon seeks to lock rivals out of home • The Guardian

Samuel Gibbs:

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Amazon is launching its small clock-like Echo Spot in the UK, as it continues to cement its market dominance.

The Echo Spot is small sphere with a 2.5in circular screen, camera and clock face that’s capable of showing the time as well as other at-a-glance information, similar to the larger Echo Show that launched earlier in the year.

“The Spot is to the Show what the Dot is to the original Echo,” said Rich Suplee, head of Alexa for Amazon in Europe. “So this is a smaller, stylish and more affordable version of an Echo with a screen.”

Amazon found great success with its Echo Dot, which was a smaller, cheaper alternative to the full-size Echo speaker – effectively an Echo with a less powerful speaker.

The Echo Spot similarly has most of the features of its more expensive sibling, the £200 Echo Show, condensed into a smaller, cheaper package. The Echo Spot, however, does not share the Dot’s impulse-buy pricing of £50, instead costing £120 each or £200 for two, available for pre-order today and shipping on 24 January…

…The Echo Spot has a camera for video calling to other Echo devices or the Alexa app on smartphones, can play video, music and other smart speaker-associated features. It uses a new four-mic array to hear users, which is a condensed version of the seven or eight-mic arrays used in other Echo devices. It has a reasonable speaker built into it, but also has 3.5mm analogue audio output and Bluetooth for connecting to existing systems.

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Clever. Getting into all the niches and nooks.
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Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can’t afford to ignore it • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

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The more electricity you burn, and the faster your computer, the higher your chance of winning the competition. The prize? 12.5 bitcoin – still worth over $100,000 – plus all the transaction fees paid in the past 10 minutes, which according analysts’ estimates is another $2,500 or so.

This is a winner-takes-all game, where the prize is guaranteed to be paid to one, and only one, miner every 10 minutes. Burning more electricity increases your chances of winning, but correspondingly decreases everyone else’s – and so they have a motivation to burn more electricity in turn.

The economic outcome of all of this is laid bare in a Credit Suisse briefing note published on Tuesday: the network as a whole will reinvest almost all the bitcoin paid out as mining rewards back into its electricity consumption. (Credit Suisse’s ballpark figure assumes that 80% of the expenses of bitcoin miners are spent on electricity).

At current prices for electricity and bitcoin, the bank calculates a maximum profitable power draw of bitcoin at around 100TWh – two-and-a-half times higher than its current rate. Any higher and the miner will lose money.

But it gets worse. If bitcoin were to become the global currency its supporters hope it will, its price would increase. And if its price increases, so too does the amount of electricity miners can afford to burn.

Credit Suisse estimate that a bitcoin price of $50,000 – five times its level as I write – would increase the electricity consumption tenfold. And at a bitcoin price of $1.1m, it would be profitable to use almost all the electricity currently generated in the world for mining.

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Lenovo to stay largest AIO PC vendor in 2018 • Digitimes

Aaron Lee and Steve Shen:

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Lenovo is expected to remain the largest all-in-one (AIO) PC vendor worldwide in 2018 with shipments to reach 3-3.2 million units, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.

Enterprise models will replace consumer products as the driving force of Lenovo’s AIO PC sales in 2018, accounting for 60% of total shipments, while the consumer models will make up the remaining 40%, said the sources.

While the overall AIO PC market is expected to grow slowly in 2018, the gaming AIO PC segment is likely to expand at a faster pace in the year, with the market leader Micro-Star International (MSI) to continue to ramp up its market share, according to Digitimes Research. MSI saw its gaming AIO PCs grow 35.7% on year in 2017.

However, the high-end segment could be a new battlefield in the AIO PC segment as Apple has launched its iMac Pro, which is believed to directly take on Microsoft’s Surface Studio, said the sources.

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If the iMac (inc Pro) really sells fewer than 3m units in a year out of Apple’s 19.2m (in 2017), given that the old, old, old Mac Pro sells pretty much nothing – surely? – that’s 15% desktop, 85% laptop.
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Why smart devices will get more expensive • The Information

Aaron Tilley:

»

Qualcomm is talking with a fridge maker about adding a downward-facing camera to understand if a kid or an adult is standing in front of the appliance, according to Raj Talluri, a senior vice president at Qualcomm.

But these higher end chips and other more complex hardware could add several hundred dollars to the cost of devices. And the big question is whether consumers will want to pay extra for these more advanced features and capabilities. As it is, devices with virtual assistants have yet to prove themselves as must-have products. The vast majority of people still only use their Echo, for instance, to check the weather or to play music, according to market research firm Argus Insights. It could be hard to persuade consumers to pay even more for a function they don’t need.

“Unless it’s a piece of hardware that’s earth shattering that no one can get from anyone else, it will be hard to convince consumers to buy it,” said Rene Haas, president of the chip licensing product group at Arm. He said companies behind the virtual assistants like Google and Amazon will have to make money off services.

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Services tend not to make that much money, unless you’re Google offering people ads to click. Hardware makes money, if you do it right. Not sure that people are really going to want cameras monitoring them by the fridge.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified