Asus stopped online retailers lowering prices in Europe from 2011-2014: now it’s been fined €63m. Photo by Rodrigo Bastos 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.

OK, so this is the last instalment for a couple of weeks. See you in August!

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

A global guide to state-sponsored trolling • Bloomberg

»

In Venezuela, prospective trolls sign up for Twitter and Instagram accounts at government-sanctioned kiosks in town squares and are rewarded for their participation with access to scarce food coupons, according to Venezuelan researcher Marianne Diaz of the group @DerechosDigitales. A self-described former troll in India says he was given a half-dozen Facebook accounts and eight cell phones after he joined a 300-person team that worked to intimidate opponents of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. And in Ecuador, contracting documents detail government payments to a public relations company that set up and ran a troll farm used to harass political opponents.

Many of those findings are contained in a report released this week by a global group of researchers that uncovered evidence of state-sponsored trolling in seven countries, and Bloomberg reporters documented additional examples in several others. The report is by the Institute for the Future, a non-partisan, foresight research and public policy group based in Palo Alto, California.

“These campaigns can take on the scale and speed of the modern internet,” the report said. “States are using the same tools they once perceived as a threat to deploy information technology as a means for power consolidation and social control, fueling disinformation operations and disseminating government propaganda at a greater scale than ever before.”

Almost two years in the making, the report grew out of an earlier project commissioned by Google but never published. Researchers for the company’s Jigsaw division, its technology incubator, documented vicious harassment campaigns that were intended to appear spontaneous but in fact had links to various governments. These campaigns often operate “under a high degree of centralized coordination and deploy bots and centrally-managed social media accounts designed to overwhelm victims and drown out their dissent,” according to an unpublished copy of the Google report obtained through an outside researcher.

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Social media considered… harmful?
link to this extract

UK university domains spoofed in massive fraud campaign targeting suppliers • HOTforSecurity

Graham Cluley:

»

As Action Fraud explains, the criminals are using the bogus email addresses to commit distribution fraud.

Distribution fraud is where criminals make an order to a supplying company (often overseas) via email, posing as a well-known organisation. The ploy is often convincing because they will use an email address that looks similar to the genuine organisation and steal their branding.

Action Fraud says that in the current case, fraudsters are registering domains that are similar to genuine university domains such as xxxxacu-uk.org, xxxxuk-ac.org and xxxacu.co.uk.

Placing orders for a large quantity of expensive products (such as food, pharmaceuticals, or IT equipment), the fraudsters will avoid payment in advance by using faked purchase orders, bank transfer confirmation documentation, or by giving the organisation’s real address for invoicing.

However, the criminals ask for the delivery to be made to an address that does not belong to the spoofed organisation, or in some cases will contact the delivery driver en route to give them a new delivery address.

«

And why now? Because universities aren’t in term time, and so there’s less oversight of what’s going on.
link to this extract

14 million Americans are drinking carcinogen-polluted tap water • Fast Company

Melissa Locker:

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The drinking water of some 14 million Americans is contaminated with a cancer-causing industrial solvent called Trichloroethylene, or TCE, according to a new EWG analysis of tests from public utilities nationwide. EWG’s Tap Water Database, which aggregates test results from utilities nationwide, shows that in about half of the systems it monitors, average annual levels of TCE were above what some health authorities say is safe for infants and developing fetuses.

More than 400 of the government’s Superfund sites have TCE contamination that can spread into groundwater and threaten drinking water supplies. Drinking TCE-contaminated water has been linked to birth defects, hormone disruption, increased risk of cancer, and more. The EPA’s legal limit for TCE in drinking water is 5 parts per billion. That limit was set back in 1987, and researchers believe TCE could be harmful at much lower levels.

TCE pollution is not new. In fact, in 1995, it was made famous thanks to Jonathan Harr’s nonfiction best-seller A Civil Action, which not only won the National Book Award, but also got John Travolta to star in the film version of it. That book (and film) followed a 1980s case of TCE pollution in Massachusetts that may have caused leukemia in children exposed to the toxic chemical in their drinking supply. Even with the case, and Travolta’s star power, TCE pollution hasn’t been a sexy hot-button issue for years. That could—and should—all change.

«

Wonderful!
link to this extract

WhatsApp balks at India’s demand to break encryption • VentureBeat

Manish Singh:

»

As WhatsApp scrambles to figure out technology solutions to address some of the problems its service has inadvertently caused in developing markets, India’s government has proposed one of its own: bring traceability to the platform so false information can be traced to its source. But WhatsApp indicated to VentureBeat over the weekend that complying with that request would undermine the service’s core value of protecting user privacy.

“We remain deeply committed to people’s privacy and security, which is why we will continue to maintain end-to-end encryption for all of our users,” the company said.

The request for traceability, which came from India’s Ministry of Electronics & IT last week, was more than a suggestion. The Ministry said Facebook-owned WhatsApp would face legal actions if it failed to deliver.

“There is a need for bringing in traceability and accountability when a provocative/inflammatory message is detected and a request is made by law enforcement agencies,” the government said Friday. “When rumours and fake news get propagated by mischief mongers, the medium used for such propagation cannot evade responsibility and accountability. If they remain mute spectators they are liable to be treated as abettors and thereafter face consequent legal action,” it added.

India is WhatsApp’s largest market, with more than 250 million users.

«

Nice try, India. It’s the same swerve that Pakistan tried to pull on BlackBerry (that’s in 2015; it tried the same in 2011) but it doesn’t wash nowadays when E2E encryption is utterly commonplace.

Fake news is a problem – no doubt – but it’s a problem about humans, not the machines they use.
link to this extract

Supervisors move to ban workplace cafeterias • The San Francisco Examiner

Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez:

»

New city tech workers dreaming of dining in workplace cafeterias may soon face a harsh reality — going outside.

Two city legislators on Tuesday are expected to announce legislation banning on-site workplace cafeterias in an effort to promote and support local restaurants.

The measure, proposed by Supervisor Ahsha Safai and co-sponsored by Supervisor Aaron Peskin, would adjust zoning laws to ban workplace cafeterias moving forward, but would not be retroactive.

Peskin said the measure, similar to one was inspired by tech companies like Twitter and Airbnb, which are widely known to have access to dining in their own buildings, depriving nearby restaurants of the dollars usually spent by nearby workers. The measure has the support of Gwyneth Borden, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association and other local merchants.

Under the legislation which is expected to be introduced Tuesday, “you can’t have an industrial kitchen in your office building,” Peskin said.

Peskin said the legislation sought to avoid the “Amazon effect that impacts retail and restaurants across the county,” he said. “This is forward thinking legislation.”

San Francisco is not the first city to implement such a measure. Mountain View, home to Google’s headquarters, has prohibited the company from fully subsidizing employee meals at new office locations, in an effort to encourage employees to engage with the community and local businesses, the San Francisco Chronicle has reported.

Peskn said the measure was purposefully made not retroactive “so it’s not goring anybody’s ox.”

«

This probably isn’t going to end well.
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Apple seemingly unable to recover data from 2018 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar when logic board fails • Mac Rumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

Last week, iFixit completed a teardown of the 2018 MacBook Pro, discovering that Apple has removed the data recovery connector from the logic board on both 13-inch and 15-inch models with the Touch Bar, suggesting that the Customer Data Migration Tool can no longer be connected.

MacRumors contacted multiple reliable sources at Apple Authorized Service Providers to learn more, and based on the information we obtained, it does appear that the tool is incompatible with 2018 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar models.

Multiple sources claim that data cannot be recovered if the logic board has failed on a 2018 MacBook Pro. If the notebook is still functioning, data can be transferred to another Mac by booting the system in Target Disk Mode, and using Migration Assistant, which is the standard process that relies on Thunderbolt 3 ports.

The data recovery port was likely removed because 2018 MacBook Pro models feature Apple’s custom T2 chip, which provides hardware encryption for the SSD storage, like the iMac Pro, our sources said.

Apple’s internal 2018 MacBook Pro Service Readiness Guide, obtained by MacRumors, advises technicians to encourage customers to back up to Time Machine frequently, and we highly recommend following this advice, as it now appears to be the only way to preserve your data in the rare event your MacBook Pro fails.

«

A few years ago this would have seemed disastrous. Now, you assume that everyone keeps stuff in the cloud – or if it’s too big for that, backs it up locally to a gargantuan cheap drive. I don’t think this is a dramatic failing; as Rossignol hints, it’s probably more in the way of a security element.

In other MacBook Pro news: Apple says it found a “missing digital key in the firmware” which was making the new MBPs run less effectively under heavy load. (As mentioned previously.) There’s a software update which fixes it. So there you go.

link to this extract

European Commission Antitrust fines four consumer electronics manufacturers for fixing online resale prices • EC

»

Asus, Denon & Marantz, Philips and Pioneer engaged in so called “fixed or minimum resale price maintenance (RPM)” by restricting the ability of their online retailers to set their own retail prices for widely used consumer electronics products such as kitchen appliances, notebooks and hi-fi products.

The four manufacturers intervened particularly with online retailers, who offered their products at low prices. If those retailers did not follow the prices requested by manufacturers, they faced threats or sanctions such as blocking of supplies. Many, including the biggest online retailers, use pricing algorithms which automatically adapt retail prices to those of competitors. In this way, the pricing restrictions imposed on low pricing online retailers typically had a broader impact on overall online prices for the respective consumer electronics products.

Moreover, the use of sophisticated monitoring tools allowed the manufacturers to effectively track resale price setting in the distribution network and to intervene swiftly in case of price decreases.

The price interventions limited effective price competition between retailers and led to higher prices with an immediate effect on consumers.

In particular, Asus, headquartered in Taiwan, monitored the resale price of retailers for certain computer hardware and electronics products such as notebooks and displays. The conduct of Asus related to two Member States (Germany and France) and took place between 2011 and 2014. Asus intervened with retailers selling those products below the resale prices recommended by Asus and requested price increases.

«

Total fines: €111m, the biggest (€63m) going against Asus. I wonder if the US FTC has seen similar activity? Also: seven years to reach this stage from the start of the activity. Is that good?
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Yup, the Galaxy Note 9 will be really expensive • BGR

Chris Smith:

»

It was only the other day that we showed you a Galaxy Note 9 leak from Europe that said the phone might cost €1,029 (128GB) and €1,279 (512GB), making the new Samsung flagship the most expensive handset in Samsung’s history. That’s $1,204 and $1,497 at current rates, although you shouldn’t expect a direct conversion for the US price of the handset.

A second report from the region indicates the price leak is accurate, providing an even higher entry price for the handset.

Yesterday’s report from Italian site Tutto Android said these leaked prices might increase by the time the phone is released next month. German blog WinFuture, an accurate source in the past, offers a similar pricing structure.

The site says the Galaxy Note 9 will be available in 128GB and 512GB storage options, which is certainly an improvement over previous models. The cheaper model will sell for €1,050 ($1,229), while the 512GB version will cost €1,250 ($1,463).

«

At this point, though carefully dripped-out leaks, pretty much everything is known about the Galaxy Note 9 – the price, shape, colours of the device – apart from what colour the pen will be. Even so, it feels like this will test the willingness of its customers to pay for that top-end feel.
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Boobs, muscles & fairy wings: everything i know about how humans design their avatar selves • Hunter Walk

»

It was a combination of early career anxiety and actual startup struggles which combined to make my years working on Second Life personally stressful. I remember my parents visiting our office and casting a sideways glance at the bottles of Mylanta and hard alcohol sitting side by side on my desk, like the cartoon angel and devil characters sitting on the shoulders of an 80s movie character wrestling with his conscience. With some hindsight perspective though, the tremendous benefits of the experience became clear – I had the opportunity to work on a thoughtful, innovative product with an amazing technical team and together we produced what is ultimately an ongoing, profitable company (even if it failed to achieve its full potential).

Besides the meta-learnings about how startups function, there were a [NeesonVoice] very particular set of skills [/NeesonVoice] that I took away from my years at Linden Lab. The other day a young entrepreneur – she was in diapers when we started Second Life – asked me about avatars and specifically the design decisions we made about how people could represent themselves in our virtual world. It was so much fun reminiscing about what we observed that I wanted to document some stuff here.

«

The point about how teens choose to appear is particularly interesting.
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Xiaomi expansion into South Korea heaping pressure on Samsung • Digitimes

Colley Hwang:

»

China-based Xiaomi launched its latest smartphones including the flagship Hongmi Note 5, in Seoul, South Korea, priced KRW200,000-300,000 (US$190-285), in cooperation with local telecom carriers SK Telecom and Korea Telecom. Their competitive pricing of less than US$300, far below Korea-based vendors’ smartphone ASP of over US$500 in 2017, has quickly caught much attention in the Korea market.

Xiaomi’s operating profits have always been below 5%, but the slim-profit strategy is also the China-based smartphone vendor’s strongest weapon in its foray into new territories. Xiaomi has already outraced Samsung Electronics in India’s smartphone market and is now looking to challenge the Korea giant on its home turf.

Currently, Samsung is the largest smartphone vendor in South Korea with a 55% share, followed by Apple at 28.3% and LG Electronics at 15.7%. The three handset vendors together already account for 99% of the market, leaving almost no room for any other players.

To nudge its way through the barriers, Xiaomi has introduced Hongmi Note 5, featuring a 5.99-inch screen, 12-megapixel back-end and 5-megapixel front-end cameras, and artificial intelligence (AI) support, priced at KRW299,000; it has been a star in Xiaomi’s winning lineup for the race in India. Although Xiaomi has not revealed the number of its smartphone pre-orders from South Korea, sources from local channels have reported positive feedbacks from consumers.

«

Which demonstrates that substitution – cheaper as-good hardware for another – is a continual risk for Android handset makers, even in their own back yard. That Apple has such a huge share – comparable with the UK (as is the size of the South Korean smartphone market) – is remarkable, though.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Fibre broadband for all! At some future date. We hope. Photo by Ruth 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.

PLEASE NOTE that this week will have a shorter posting schedule: you’ve had Monday, there’s Tuesday (this one), and Wednesday. After that I’m on a fortnight’s break.

A selection of 11 links for you. for your comfort and safety, we have disabled caps lock. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The story behind Google’s secret offer to settle EU’s Android probe • Bloomberg

Aoife White and Stephanie Bodoni:

»

Vestager indicated in the interview that any settlement offer should have been made in 2016, after the company received the EU’s statement of objections, which detailed the antitrust problems with Android. The EU said the company might breach competition rules by unfairly pushing search and browser apps onto Android phones.

That might have been the narrow window to settle the case, but Google’s legal team were spinning dozens of plates in 2016. They had deadlines to respond to the Android charges, the shopping probe was still a major priority and there were new complaints filed to the EU by News Corp. and other rivals.

After the rebuff, the EU stepped up its probe, sending a formal “letter of facts” in November 2017, adding new evidence, two people said. There was little substantive contact between the two sides until Google representatives talked with EU officials in April during a so-called state of play meeting about the case, which was well on the way to the record fine.

«

Pretty thin gruel, this story; it’s clear that Google misread the timings and overestimated its chances of winning.

However the EC’s solution is no good. It should have obliged Google to offer Google Play separately. But even then, it’s far too late.
link to this extract

Full-fibre broadband pledge for new homes • BBC News

»

Under [the new UK national telecoms strategy] targets, all of the UK will have full-fibre broadband coverage by 2033, replacing the copper wire network that currently delivers the service.

It proposes legislation to encourage more private infrastructure investment.

Earlier this month, research was published indicating that the UK has slipped from 31st to 35th place in the global broadband league tables, behind 25 other European countries.

The data was collected by M-Lab, a partnership between Google Open Source Research and Princeton University’s PlantLab, and the results compiled by UK broadband comparison site Cable.

Government statistics suggest only 4% of UK premises have a full-fibre link – compared to 79% in Spain and 95% in Portugal…

…Andrew Ferguson, editor of the Think Broadband site, said the strategy turned visions of full-fibre coverage into “slightly firmer targets”. However, he added, there was one “very important caveat” to the strategy which might slow the take up of full-fibre in the UK. In nations such as Spain, he said, full-fibre was the first decent broadband people were offered which meant people enthusiastically signed up.

“Getting the UK to upgrade to full-fibre if they are getting decent speeds from a VDSL2 or cable broadband connection may be harder,” he said, adding that how the packages were priced would be a factor in adoption.

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I’ll believe it when I see it.
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Lattis Ellipse Smart Bike Lock review: equal parts smart and frustrating • CNET

Patrick Holland:

»

In everyday use, the lock worked… okay. But there were many times I struggled with it. For example when we filmed the video accompanying this review, I tried to lock my bike to a thicker post and ended up dropping my phone and cracking the screen. This scenario happened frequently: Holding the two pieces of lock and my phone, while tapping the screen to force the Ellipse closed.

The Ellipse app does provide a “handsfree” alternative called auto lock and auto unlock. To use, I close the Ellipse around my bike and the rack, walk away, and the app automatically triggers it to lock. The same thing happens in reverse to unlock it: I just have to walk towards the lock.

This is a good idea, but it doesn’t work consistently. Sometimes it took an unnerving amount of time for the lock to trigger. Also, this doesn’t quite solve the problem when I had to physically hold the Ellipse closed to lock it. I wish the Ellipse was integrated with the Apple Watch or Wear OS device to free up my hands.

There were also instances when my phone’s Bluetooth connection was off, and I had to wait for it to connect to the Ellipse and then unlock it. For those moments, I opted to use the lock’s built-in touch keypad. But even then, the keypad was annoying, too. It feels like touch technology from 10 years ago. I was only able to enter my passcode successfully when I used a deliberately slow touch.

«

The “smart” bit is that it can tell if there’s a theft (or attempt), or if it thinks you’ve had a crash. The stupid bit is described in the extract above: it’s too hard to lock.
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YouTube TV shows tough economics of skinny bundles • The Information

Jessica Toonkel and Tom Dotan:

»

As hundreds of thousands of people continue to drop cable and satellite TV every quarter, some are signing up for cheaper streaming versions introduced in the past few years. Google’s YouTube TV has so far amassed close to 800,000 subscribers while Hulu with Live TV is near a million, The Information has learned (see chart below). Including Dish’s Sling TV and AT&T’s DirecTV Now, the total number of people using these services is close to six million—75% higher than last October. But it’s still a fraction of the estimated 92 million people who still pay for satellite and cable.

But these streaming services have yet to figure out how to make money. In fact, the more people they sign up, the more money they lose. That’s because the services are paying more for programming than what they’re charging consumers. YouTube TV, for instance, is estimated to be paying $49 per subscriber a month—$9 more than it charges—for most of its channels, according to people familiar with the situation.

That highlights the challenge for these streaming cable services and the broader entertainment industry. The streaming services were meant to provide a cheaper alternative to traditional cable, keeping the lucrative cable channel business alive for companies like Disney, 21st Century Fox and Time Warner. But they haven’t changed the fundamental cost structure of cable. Entertainment companies charge the new services as much—or in some cases, more—than what they charge satellite and cable services to carry their TV networks. Entertainment companies couldn’t offer discounts to the new services even if they wanted to: contractual provisions ensure that big cable operators like Comcast always get the lowest rate on programming.

“The fundamentals of the pay TV business are still broken,” said one person who’s arranged these deals. “You just had deeper-pocketed people wanting to play in this business for a number of different reasons.”

«

This slightly misses the point. Once people abandon cable for a skinny bundle, they’re very unlikely to go back. That gives the skinny players a loyal subscriber, and thus the chance to carefully boil the frog – raise prices or push upsells. Outcome: longer-term profit. And they have huge numbers of unconverted potential users.
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Britain proposes tougher foreign investment rules to protect national security • Reuters

Andrew MacAskill and Ben Martin:

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The decision to tighten the screening of foreign investment rules marks a further shift in policy for the world’s fifth-largest economy which has traditionally been one of the most open markets to global mergers and acquisitions.

Britain is pressing ahead with the changes in parallel with similar efforts in other western economies such as Germany and Australia amid growing levels of Chinese investment.

Under the new rules, the government will broaden its power to investigate deals regardless of the size of the companies’ revenue or market share and have the right to scrutinize any transaction in any sector of the economy.

The government will also have the power to intervene when a company wants to acquire an asset such as a particular piece of technology or intellectual property rather just when they are seeking to buy or take control of a firm.

At present the government can only intervene if a deal creates a group with 25% of the market or with turnover of over £70m ($91.72m). That has already been reduced to £1m for companies that make technology with military or dual-use applications.

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy expects the changes will mean the government will investigate around 50 deals on national security grounds each year, up from one this year so far and one last year.

«

In years gone by this would have been a standard move for a left-wing Labour government, and there would have been eye rolling from right-wing Tories about how you can’t interfere in the free market and that foreign investment is important. (It’s how most of the water and electricity companies are now foreign-owned.)

Now? Everyone’s worried about China and the shutters come down.
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Infowarzel 7/23 • Campaign Monitor

Charlie Warzel of Buzzfeed has a newsletter, and one of his topics in the latest is about Elon Musk’s crazy ranting style on Twitter, and what or how the news media should cover it:

»

How can the media best cover newsworthy figures who’re extremely thin-skinned and extremely online? Public opinion about Elon’s tweets seems to have largely mirrored the reaction in 2015 to Trump’s use of Twitter: first it’s novel (he’s so accessible!), then a mix of shock and outrage, calls for him to knock it off, and then the contrarian opinion that he should tweet more, because it shows the world what a total boob he is.
Personally, I’m not sure what the press ought to do, though it feels increasingly like the current practice (person tweets → tweets are aggregated into news stories → large freakout/backlash → backlash is aggregated into more news stories) is reactive and counterproductive. In the end, despite all the bluster and punditry, the winner in all of this seems to be the Musks and Trumps of the worlds. Their original grievances/musings are repeated endlessly; they’ve commandeered the news cycle.
I touched on a lot of this last week, but increasingly it feels like the press (self very much included) lack a blueprint for dealing with people like Musk or Trump. In a tweet this week the brilliant Zeynep Tufekci described the situation this way: “It’s like we’re supposed to fight oxygen but our only tools are matches.”

«

Tufekci is a genius. Totally stealing that one. There’s also a Linda Smith comment I saw recently, playing on a Margaret Thatcher comment (about blocking Irish Republican Army spokesmen from speaking on British TV to “deny them the oxygen of publicity”): “I don’t know about the oxygen of publicity. I wish we didn’t give him the oxygen of oxygen.”
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Sonos aims to raise up to $264m in IPO • Financial Times

Tim Bradshaw and Nicole Bullock:

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Initial pricing details released in an updated filing on Monday, as the company kicked off its roadshow in New York, suggest Sonos itself could raise up to $105.6m, while selling stockholders will receive up to $158.3m in proceeds. KKR, the company’s largest shareholder, is selling only a small portion of its holding. 

Sonos said it expected to sell shares at $17-$19, although that price could change as it makes its pitch to Wall Street investors in the coming days, ahead of a likely market debut in August. On a fully diluted basis, at the midpoint of the current pricing range, that would leave Sonos’s valuation above $2bn but below the $2.5bn-$3bn range it was said to have been targeting as it readied for and IPO earlier this year.

When it published its full prospectus earlier this month, Sonos revealed it had 18% revenue growth in the six months to March, up from 10% in the financial year ending in September 2017. 

Alongside Netgear’s planned spin-off of its internet-connected security camera business Arlo, Sonos will be a test of investors’ appetite for consumer electronics businesses. Previous US flotations, such as Fitbit and GoPro, have performed poorly, although Roku, the TV streaming technology company, has fared better in recent months. 

«

August is an interesting time to IPO. Market quiet (in theory). More to the point, none of the big companies will have announced results – or new hardware. That’s the way to get the shares moving.
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Google: security keys neutralized employee phishing • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs on Google’s requirement for its 85,000 staff:

»

“We have had no reported or confirmed account takeovers since implementing security keys at Google,” the spokesperson said. “Users might be asked to authenticate using their security key for many different apps/reasons. It all depends on the sensitivity of the app and the risk of the user at that point in time.”

The basic idea behind two-factor authentication (2FA) is that even if thieves manage to phish or steal your password, they still cannot log in to your account unless they also hack or possess that second factor.

The most common forms of 2FA require the user to supplement a password with a one-time code sent to their mobile device via text message or an app. Indeed, prior to 2017 Google employees also relied on one-time codes generated by a mobile app — Google Authenticator.

In contrast, a Security Key implements a form of multi-factor authentication known as Universal 2nd Factor (U2F), which allows the user to complete the login process simply by inserting the USB device and pressing a button on the device. The key works without the need for any special software drivers.

Once a device is enrolled for a specific Web site that supports Security Keys, the user no longer needs to enter their password at that site (unless they try to access the same account from a different device, in which case it will ask the user to insert their key).

U2F is an emerging open source authentication standard, and as such only a handful of high-profile sites currently support it, including Dropbox, Facebook, Github (and of course Google’s various services). Most major password managers also now support U2F, including Dashlane, Keepass and LastPass. Duo Security [full disclosure: an advertiser on this site] also can be set up to work with U2F.

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link to this extract

Passionate sports fans are more likely to endorse right-wing policies • Pacific Standard

Tom Jacobs:

»

The 1,051 participants completed an online survey in November of 2016. They were asked whether they considered themselves a fan of, or closely followed, “professional or collegiate football, basketball, baseball, or another sport.” For each sport they followed, they indicated how often they watched or listened to games, and whether they engaged in six fan-related behaviors, including wearing team clothing.

They also answered questions about their political attitudes, including their endorsement of traditional gender roles, support for the military, and which factors they considered most important to a person’s “ability to improve themselves financially and get ahead in life.” Strong beliefs in the importance of “ambition, hard work, and good money-management skills” reflected an individualistic mindset.

Altogether, the study found that 81% of men and 65% of women followed at least one sports team. “Football was the most popular sport, with 56% identifying as fans, followed by baseball (38%) and basketball (26%),” the researchers report.

“Basketball fans are more likely than those who do not follow sports to lean Democratic,” they write. Otherwise, spectator sports attract people from across the political spectrum pretty much equally.

However, ideological differences emerged when the researchers compared casual fans with real enthusiasts. “Fan intensity is significantly associated with the belief that economic success is due to individual effort,” they report. It was also strongly associated with support for the armed forces.

«

I wonder if Trump’s advisors had knowledge of this sort of information when they picked their fight with (black) NFL players who take a knee during the US national anthem; his tweets couched it as disrespectful to the military. Their protest is nothing to do with that; it’s about police violence towards black citizens. The lie shouted loudest persisted, though.
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Facebook to publish data on Irish abortion referendum ads • The Guardian

Emma Graham-Harrison:

»

Facebook is to publish comprehensive data on political advertising during Ireland’s abortion referendum campaign, giving an unprecedented insight into targeting of voters on social media, and setting a powerful precedent for election transparency.

The US company has told Irish politicians it will provide anonymised details of the amount spent on targeting Irish voters on its platform between 1 March and 25 May, and the number of referendum-linked ads that had been purchased.

It will also provide details of proposed advertisements, and proposed spending, that it had rejected after bringing in a ban on foreign organisations paying for online campaigns inside Ireland.

The Irish Green party leader, Eamon Ryan, who has been pushing for greater transparency and new legislation to regulate online political campaigning, welcomed the social media firm’s decision. He said he hoped it would set a new benchmark for democracy in the internet era.

“Providing data about online spending in the recent Irish abortion referendum sets an important precedent, which should apply now in every future vote,” Ryan said.

«

Not perfect, but a big improvement. Facebook is already making it harder for people outside a country to buy ads in another one (based on location) – I know someone who tested this. The next question is tracing the “dark money” that flows to “think tanks” that are often just fronts for foreign money.
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2016: beware of Uber vomit scam, passenger says • SF Gate

Mike Moffitt:

»

A New York City ride-share passenger was sickened to discover that Uber charged her $200 in addition to the fare in order to clean up vomit that she supposedly spewed over the car.

But Meredith Mandel told Gothamist that when she and her companions reached their destination in Williamsburg shortly before 1:30 a.m., they left the Uber vehicle without even a belch, much less puddles of puke.

When she saw the PayPal charge — $19 plus the $200 cleaning fee — for the two-mile trip, she naturally was outraged.

«

Naturally. Just proving that this scam, highlighted here yesterday, isn’t new at all. Though it has reversed the positions of power. In the old days, if you hurled in the taxi, it was tough for them to extract your money. Now it’s easy; the harder thing is proving you didn’t. (Thanks Papanic for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Is Google Translate being trained on Bible content – and getting a bit religious nutty as a result? Photo by George Redgrave 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.

PLEASE NOTE that this week will have a shorter posting schedule: Monday (this one), Tuesday, and Wednesday. After that I’m on a fortnight’s break.

A selection of 14 links for you. Re-up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

‘I felt colossally naive’: the backlash against the birth control app • The Guardian

Olivia Sudjic tried an app called “Natural Cycles”:

»

One paid-for post I saw featured a still life of a puppy, a pair of on-trend headphones, a self-help book and a thermometer, with a 250-word caption starting with “5 things I need in the morning. Cuddles from Bee [the dog], tea, music, positive quotes and the first thing I do when I wake up – my Natural Cycles thermometer.” But I found that taking your temperature regularly is not so easy. The number of times I leapt out of bed bleary-eyed and needing to pee, then realised I hadn’t first taken my temperature, meant I started waking up in the middle of the night to pre-emptively urinate, panicked about missing my measuring window in the morning. On the pill, it didn’t matter if I’d just woken up, was lying down or standing up when I took it. With Natural Cycles, the slightest motion seemed to count. It was comedic until it became tragic; I got pregnant when the predictions of fertile and infertile changed back and forth in one day, turning from green to red, after I had unprotected sex.

I now know that the ideal Cycler is a narrow, rather old-fashioned category of person. She’s in a stable relationship with a stable lifestyle. (Shift-workers, world-travellers, the sickly, the stressed, insomniacs and sluts be advised.) She’s about 29, and rarely experiences fevers or hangovers. She is savvy about fertility and committed to the effort required to track hers. I could add that her phone is never lost or broken and she’s never late to work. She wakes up at the same time every day, with a charged phone and a thermometer within reach.

«

Tech is no match for the female reproductive system.
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Roku is in the ad business, not the hardware business, says CEO • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

CEO Anthony Wood was frank and open about his company’s evolving business strategy in an interview on this week’s Vergecast. “We don’t really make money… we certainly don’t make enough money to support our engineering organization and our operations and the cost of money to run the Roku service,” he said. “That’s not paid for by the hardware. That’s paid for by our ad and content business.”

If you’ve got a Roku TV or streaming gadget, you’ve no doubt seen advertising for shows and apps plastered on the home screen. That’s some prime real estate. The shortcut buttons on the remote control — you know, with one or two that you’ll never use — are also paid placement. “It’s kind of an exchange of value. We help content distributors find customers, sign up customers, and promote their content, and we get paid for that.”

But it goes much deeper. Roku is learning fast as it hulks up its advertising operation, and now partially controls the ad infrastructure for some apps on its platform. So if you’re using an app like Crackle, some of the ads you’ll see are sold by Roku itself. Business Insider recently reported that “in some cases, Roku insists on selling 30% of a publisher’s ad inventory for an app if they want to be distributed on Roku devices.”

Netflix, Hulu, and other major streaming services are big enough that they don’t let Roku directly sell ads for their apps, but many smaller players do.

«

Roku went public earlier this year, so it needs a message that it’s got a reliable income stream. Certainly the hardware isn’t priced for profit.
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A four-day workweek? A test run shows a surprising result • The New York Times

Charlotte Graham-McLay:

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A New Zealand firm that let its employees work four days a week while being paid for five says the experiment was so successful that it hoped to make the change permanent.

The firm, Perpetual Guardian, which manages trusts, wills and estates, found the change actually boosted productivity among its 240 employees, who said they spent more time with their families, exercising, cooking, and working in their gardens.

The firm ran the experiment — which reduced the workweek to 32 hours from 40 — in March and April this year, and asked two researchers to study the effects on staff.

Jarrod Haar, a human resources professor at Auckland University of Technology, said employees reported a 24% improvement in work-life balance, and came back to work energized after their days off.

“Supervisors said staff were more creative, their attendance was better, they were on time, and they didn’t leave early or take long breaks,” Mr. Haar said. “Their actual job performance didn’t change when doing it over four days instead of five.”

Similar experiments in other countries have tested the concept of reducing work hours as a way of improving individual productivity. In Sweden, a trial in the city of Gothenburg mandated a six-hour day, and officials found employees completed the same amount of work or even more. But when France mandated a 35-hour workweek in 2000, businesses complained of reduced competitiveness and increased hiring costs.

«

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Video raises concerns about excessive thermal throttling on 2018 MacBook Pro w/ Intel Core i9 • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

YouTuber Dave Lee, a respected and popular reviewer, shared his hands-on with the 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro this evening, showcasing the top-of-the line model with the 2.9GHz 6-core 8th-generation Intel Core i9 processor. Apple offers the processor exclusively with the 15-inch model in the form of a $300 upgrade.

In his video, Lee explains that after a “few seconds” of high-intensity work, such as editing in Adobe Premiere, throttling begins to kick-in and limits the clock speed. In Lee’s testing, the average clock speed while under load for the MacBook Pro is around 2.2GHz.

Lee compares the 15-inch MacBook Pro’s performance to that of a 2018 Aero 15X, which uses an Intel i7 processor with a base clock of 2.2GHz. That machine is able to secure an average clock speed of 3.1GHz thanks to Turbo Boost.

This i9 in the MacBook can’t even maintain the base clock speed. Forget about Turbo Boost, it can’t even maintain the 2.9GHz base clock speed, which is absurd. This CPU is an unlocked, overclock-able chip, but all of that CPU potential is wasted inside this chassis, and the thermal solution inside this chassis.

Somewhat humorously, Lee ran a render time test using Adobe Premiere (which is rather poorly optimized for macOS) with the MacBook Pro in his freezer in an attempt to cool the machine as it rendered. In doing this, the render time dropped from nearly 40 minutes to 27 minutes.

«

Apple Insider reckons it knows why:

»

Apple’s 2016 MacBook Pro chassis was designed more than two years ago. We got the first glimpse of it in a photograph in May of 2016.

At the time, Intel was promising smaller and smaller dies, with lower and lower TDP to go with it. The company didn’t make its own die-shrink projections. Even the processor in the MacBook Pro currently is well over 18 months late, according to Intel’s ever-shifting timetables.

Odds are, Apple was counting on this when it developed the enclosure.

Apple is hardly the only vendor dealing with i9 thermal conditions, and like we said, Premiere performs far better with Nvidia GPU silicon than AMD Radeon gear which explains most of the Dell ripping through the test. However, while related, this isn’t really the meat of the matter given that Lee put the MacBook Pro in the freezer and got better completion speeds out of it.

Video producer Lee suggested that the entire MacBook Pro cooling solution, an Apple-designed heatsink and fan module, is insufficient for the beefy (and hot) i9 Intel silicon as it stands.

«

One has to observe that Apple keeps designing itself into a thermal corner.
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Why Is Google Translate spitting out sinister religious prophecies? • Motherboard

Jon Christian:

»

On Twitter, people have blamed the strange translations on ghosts and demons. Users on a subreddit called TranslateGate have speculated that some of the strange outputs might be drawn from text gathered from emails or private messages.

“Google Translate learns from examples of translations on the web and does not use ‘private messages’ to carry out translations, nor would the system even have access to that content,” said Justin Burr, a Google spokesperson, in an email. “This is simply a function of inputting nonsense into the system, to which nonsense is generated.”

When Motherboard provided Google with an example of the eerie messages, its translation disappeared from Google Translate.

There are several possible explanations for the strange outputs. It’s possible that the sinister messages are the result of disgruntled Google employees, for instance, or that mischievous users are abusing the “Suggest an edit” button, which accepts suggestions for better translations of a given text.

Andrew Rush, an assistant professor at Harvard who studies natural language processing and computer translation, said that internal quality filters would probably catch that type of manipulation, however. It’s more likely, Rush said, that the strange translations are related to a change Google Translate made several years ago, when it started using a technique known as “neural machine translation.”

In neural machine translation, the system is trained with large numbers of texts in one language and corresponding translations in another, to create a model for moving between the two. But when it’s fed nonsense inputs, Rush said, the system can “hallucinate” bizarre outputs—not unlike the way Google’s DeepDream identifies and accentuates patterns in images.

«

Another theory: Google did some training using the Bible, as translated into different languages. Notice that bit where the weird translation disappears when notified to Google PR. This is either (a) preventing others confirming it or (b) improving the system when notified by users. Pick your preference.

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Farewell, Google Maps • In der Apotheke

Bartłomiej Owczarek and Tomasz Nawrocki run a startup which helps people find medicines at p[hysical pharmacies; they’ve previously used Google Maps, but suddenly found the prices rising dramatically:

»

After a conference call with Google Maps customer service (who, contrary to the email, offered no discounts or credits whatsoever) we realised that price increases are huge:

• Current free usage limit of 750k requests monthly turns into ca. 28k requests (almost 30 times less)

• Current $0.5 for commercial usage becomes $7 (14 times more), $5.60 with high volume

Importantly, prices are the same from US to the Africa, despite the fact that revenue generation is vastly different in most developed countries compared to the others. We know it well from comparing Polish market to Germany, as we expand there. 

Comparison of Google Maps monthly bill before and after price hike

If we maintained current monthly usage of both maps and Places (ie. location search), the cost of Google Maps would be multiple times higher than the total cost of all other infrastructure.

«

They are going with MapBox and MapTiler – but also swapped in some code so that they can quickly swap between providers.
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Vomit fraud could make your Uber trip really expensive • Miami Herald

Catalina Ruiz Parra:

»

The next time you use Uber, check your bill. The trip could turn out to be expensive — not just for the distance but for a type of fraud that is on the rise.

It’s called “vomit fraud,” a scam repeatedly denounced in social networks yet still taking place around the world.

And Miami, of course, is a common spot.

What is it? Passengers request Uber cars, which deliver them to their destination. So far so good.

But soon the passenger receives a note from Uber reporting an “adjustment” in the bill and an extra charge that can range from $80 to $150, depending on the driver’s degree of crookedness.

If you think that’s frustrating, you’re right. But the worst is still to come.

The passenger, unaware of what’s happening, tries to contact Uber. The only way to do that is through the “help” button on the company’s app or internet page.

The first reply usually goes something like this: “I understand that it can be disconcerting to receive adjustments to the tariff after your trip ended … In this case, your driver notified us that during your trip there was an incident in the vehicle and therefore a cleanup fee of $150 was added.”

The message is accompanied by photos of the alleged incident — vomit in the vehicle. The Uber driver had sent the images to the company, which considered them sufficient evidence to add the cleanup charge to the bill.

«

I’d imagine the drivers just have a stock or multiple pictures that they send. (Does Uber check the EXIF data for the photo?) Or perhaps they throw some vegetable soup over it? Either way, Uber is caught in the middle – and regulators say it’s not up to them.
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Evolutionary algorithm outperforms deep-learning machines at video games • MIT Technology Review

»

Many genomes [of evolving code, where “good” code is reused] ended up playing entirely new gaming strategies, often complex ones. But they sometimes found simple ones that humans had overlooked.

For example, when playing Kung Fu Master, the evolutionary algorithm discovered that the most valuable attack was a crouch-punch. Crouching is safer because it dodges half the bullets aimed at the player and also attacks anything nearby. The algorithm’s strategy was to repeatedly use this maneuver with no other actions. In hindsight, using the crouch-punch exclusively makes sense.

That surprised the human players involved in the study. “Employing this strategy by hand achieved a better score than playing the game normally, and the author now uses crouching punches exclusively when attacking in this game,” say Wilson and co.

Overall, the evolved code played many of the games well, even outperforming humans in games such as Kung Fu Master. Just as significantly, the evolved code is just as good as many deep-learning approaches and outperforms them in games like Asteroids, Defender, and Kung Fu Master.

It also produces a result more quickly. “While the programs are relatively small, many controllers are competitive with state-of-the-art methods for the Atari benchmark set and require less training time,” say Wilson and co.

The evolved code has another advantage. Because it is small, it is easy to see how it works. By contrast, a well-known problem with deep-learning techniques is that it is sometimes impossible to know why they have made particular decisions, and this can have practical and legal ramifications.

«

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24% of Tesla Model 3 orders have been canceled, analyst says • CNN

Jordan Valinsky:

»

Cancellations for Model 3 orders have picked up in recent weeks. Refunds now outpace deposits for Tesla’s new mass-market electric car, according to Needham & Co. analyst Rajvindra Gill. Tesla disputes that.

In an analyst note delivered to clients Thursday, Gill cited extended wait times for the car, the expiration of a $7,500 tax credit, and the fact that Tesla has not yet made the $35,000 base model of the car available for purchase yet.

About one in every four Model 3 orders is canceled, Gill said, double the rate from a year ago. Customers have to put down a refundable $1,000 deposit to reserve a Model 3, then pay another $2,500 to choose their specific version. They pay the rest when the car is delivered.

The wait time for a Model 3 is about 4 months to a year, and base model customers could wait until 2020, Gill said.

A Tesla spokesperson denied that Model 3 cancellations exceed new orders. The spokesperson also said the wait times that Gill cites are outdated. Tesla’s website currently lists wait times from 1 month to 9 months.

«

There are signs of stress at Tesla, and none of them being leavened.
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WhatsApp to limit message forwarding after rumor-led violence in India • WSJ

Krishna Pokharel:

»

Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp messaging service is making it harder for users world-wide to forward content, after the spread of rumors on the app led to mob violence and the killing of more than 20 people in India.

False messages about roaming child-kidnapping gangs spread through WhatsApp—one of the most widely used apps in India with over 200 million monthly active users—have triggered a spate of lynching as panicked groups attack strangers they find suspicious, Indian authorities have said.

WhatsApp’s announcement Thursday came a day after Facebook under a new policy said it would begin removing misinformation that could spark violence. The initiative will start in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, which have also struggled with violence fueled by false reports spread on social media.

The Indian government earlier this month asked WhatsApp to take immediate action to stop the misuse of its platform, saying rumors circulated on the messaging service had led to deadly attacks.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company said in a blog post that it is putting restrictions on the number of groups to which a message can be forwarded.

«

The things Facebook touch turn to crap, don’t they?
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Risky Thailand cave rescue relied on talent, luck—and on sticking to the rules • Ars Technica

Chris Peterman is a professional diver with 16 years’ experience, and understands the dangers of cave diving; he nearly died once, as he recounts, and so can explain the challenges that the Thai football team faced:

»

Cave diving has five rules. These sum up the hard-won wisdom of the cave-diving community, as conducted through the analysis of cave-diving accidents and fatalities. Though the exact wording of each will differ from instructor to instructor, the rules are:

• Be well-trained and do not dive beyond your certification level
• Never use more than one third of your breathing gas to enter the cave—reserve one third for exiting and one third for emergencies
• Maintain a physical guideline back to the cave entrance at all times
• Never dive below the appropriate depth for your breathing gas mixture
• Carry at least three lights per person—one main and two back-ups

Since these rules were introduced in the late 1970s (first as only three rules, later expanding to five), fatalities per number of dives have dropped among the cave-diving community. Today, the largest segment of fatalities in underwater caves comes not from certified cave divers but from divers not specifically trained by a professional cave instructor to be in that environment.

The first of these rules is therefore simple, and one that I broke badly: never dive beyond your certification level.

«

Rock climbing has similarly made itself safer and safer though the accretion of experience and technology, though it doesn’t have rules in quite the same way.
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The best thing about Samsung’s exciting new tablet might also be a fatal flaw • BGR

Chris Smith:

»

just like the iPhone X, the Galaxy Tab S4 will sacrifice the fingerprint sensor, a feature many people love on a smartphone or tablet.

Apple replaced Touch ID with Face ID, a secure 3D facial recognition system that’s a first for the industry. Samsung doesn’t have that luxury, however.

In lack of a 3D front-facing camera, Samsung will employ the Intelligent Scan feature that’s already available on the Galaxy S9.

In case you’re not familiar with that, that’s a mix between the iris scanner and facial recognition system that Samsung has had for years. SamMobile discovered a video from the official Galaxy Tab S4 firmware that plays when you’re configuring Intelligent Scan on the tablet.

«

It’s not as secure as Face ID, which means you’d want to go with a passcode/password, which is a retrograde step. I’m already interested to see what the second generation of Apple’s Face ID is like; the first is pretty good, but there was a huge difference between the first generation of Touch ID and the second.
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Registry of Open Data on Amazon Web Services

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This registry exists to help people discover and share datasets that are available via AWS resources. Learn more about sharing data on AWS.

See all usage examples for datasets listed in this registry.

«

This is pretty amazing. Landsat pictures (zoom in on your house!), IRS 990 filings, satellite data labelled for machine learning, 5bn web pages from web crawling, a global database (from broadcast, print and online news) from every country identifying key events, OpenStreetMap, bourse data from the German stock market, Hubble telescope data… it’s such a colossal reservoir of data waiting to be made use of. Sure, many others have got there first, but what could come from cross-matching Landsat data with OSM with bourse data with key events? And then applying machine learning to that?
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Congress to leave Trump’s deal with China’s ZTE untouched • Bloomberg

Jenny Leonard and Erik Wasson:

»

Negotiators from the Senate and House of Representatives late Thursday agreed to abandon efforts to reinstate harsher sanctions against the Chinese telecommunications-equipment maker as part of the defense policy bill, the people said. Both chambers are expected to vote on the National Defense Authorization Act next week.

Draft language advanced in the House earlier this year focused on a procurement ban for ZTE products, whereas the Senate approved language that would reinstate the sales ban for US companies to sell to ZTE. The White House strongly opposed any efforts by Congress to block its deal for ZTE to resume business.

The Trump administration in April announced a seven-year ban on US exports to ZTE after it said the company violated sanctions agreements by selling American technology to Iran and North Korea. The move forced ZTE to announce it was shutting down.

Trump reversed course in May, saying he was reconsidering penalties on ZTE as a personal favor to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Later that month, his administration announced it would allow the company to stay in business after paying a new fine, changing its management and providing “high-level security guarantees.”

Following through on the promise, the Commerce Department last week lifted a ban on American firms selling products to ZTE after the company paid the final tranche of a $1.4bn penalty by placing $400m in escrow at a US bank. Congresspeople from both parties had blasted the Trump administration for helping ZTE.

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This is the sort of revival to make Lazarus whistle in admiration.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

An event like Trump-Putin in Helsinki overwhelms Google News’s algorithm. Photo by Garret Keogh 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. Well, how many technology sections did you need? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Exclusive: Britain says Huawei ‘shortcomings’ expose new telecom networks risks • Reuters

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Technical and supply-chain issues with equipment made by Chinese firm Huawei have exposed Britain’s telecom networks to new security risks, a government report said on Thursday.

The assessment, made in a report signed off by Britain’s GCHQ spy agency, will intensify the espionage debate around Huawei Technologies, which has come under increasing fire in the United States and Australia over concerns it could facilitate Chinese government spying.

The report was released after sources told Reuters that senior British security officials say they can now give only limited assurances that Huawei’s UK operations pose no threat to national security, downgrading their previous position.

“Identification of shortcomings in Huawei’s engineering processes have exposed new risks in the UK telecommunication networks and long-term challenges in mitigation and management,” officials said in the report.

Huawei, the world’s biggest producer of telecoms equipment, said that it welcomed the thrust of the report by the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre (HCSEC) oversight board, which it said showed supervision by British authorities was working well.

“The report concludes that HCSEC’s operational independence is both robust and effective. The Oversight Board has identified some areas for improvement in our engineering processes,” a Huawei spokesman said.

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The report concluded that it wasn’t certain that Huawei’s manufacturing would prevent espionage by Chinese operatives inserting things into products as they were made (rather as the NSA did with Cisco routers). That’s not good, given that BT’s entire telecoms backbone relies on Huawei.
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The EU fining Google over Android is too little, too late, say experts • The Guardian

Samuel Gibbs:

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[The EC’s demands are] a similar strategy to that employed by the EC in 2004, when it forced Microsoft to release a version of Windows without Windows Media Player and later offer a browser choice screen, which allowed users to select a web browser other than Internet Explorer.

But as with the Media Player-free version of Windows, Windows XP N, for which there was no demand, consumers are unlikely to buy a version of Android without Google’s services.

“The EU’s stance is arguably six to eight years too late,” said [Geoff] Blaber [of CCS Insight]. “Android has already helped establish Google apps and services as essentials for consumers in the western world.

“While the separation of apps from the operating system may help foster competition over the longer term, manufacturers will continue to need to offer Google services to be competitive and address consumer demand.”

Richard Windsor from research company Radio Free Mobile said that because users in the EU are so accustomed to using Google services and have come to prefer them “separating Google Play from the rest of Google’s Digital Life services would have very little impact as users would simply download and install them from the store”.

The EC also ordered Google to stop paying smartphone manufacturers and mobile network operators through revenue sharing for exclusively including Google Search on their phones. Finally, Google is also ordered to stop blocking manufacturers from using so-called forked or modified versions of Android, such as Amazon’s Fire OS, if they want to use Google services on their other devices.

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Android was 40% of sales share (the first indicator of market dominance) in 2Q 2011, according to IDC. It had 40% of the installed base of smartphones by 2012. Even allowing then for the possibility that Windows Phone might have blown the bloody doors off, the EC is five years too late in this: market dominance was established long before Margrethe Vestager even pulled back her chair. Her predecessor, Almunia, was a failure. That’s evident now.

Nokia did try an Android-without-Google phone in 2014 – the Nokia X. It sank without trace. The game had finished by then.
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The spread of true and false news online • Science

»

There is worldwide concern over false news and the possibility that it can influence political, economic, and social well-being. To understand how false news spreads, Vosoughi et al. used a data set of rumor cascades on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. About 126,000 rumors were spread by ∼3 million people. False news reached more people than the truth; the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people. Falsehood also diffused faster than the truth. The degree of novelty and the emotional reactions of recipients may be responsible for the differences observed.

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This is only the abstract (I can’t get at the full text – help welcomed) but those are some dramatic numbers.
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On a big story like the Helsinki Trump/Putin summit, Google News’ algorithm isn’t up to the task • Nieman Journalism Lab

Rich Gordon:

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look what I found at the top of the “Full coverage” page for the Trump/Putin press conference:

All four of these items come, directly or indirectly, from Fox News. Even worse, none of them is a factual report about the press conference — and all are commentary from the conservative end of the political spectrum, more specifically Trump sympathizers:

• From Fox News directly: “Dr. Gorka on the left’s reaction to the Trump-Putin summit”;
• From Fox News Insider: “WATCH: Tucker Carlson Previews TUESDAY Interview With President Donald Trump”;
• From RealClearPolitics, a story about a Fox News interview: “Stephen F. Cohen: Do You Prefer Impeaching Trump, Or Avoiding Nuclear War With Russia”;
• From The Hill, a story about comments Tucker Carlson made on Fox News: “Tucker Carlson: Mexico has interfered in U.S. elections ‘more successfully’ than Russia.”

The fact that Google News thinks the four most important stories about the summit all come from or are based on Fox News is just stunning. Especially considering that the fallout from the press conference included criticism of Trump from conservative voices like Bob Corker, Lindsey Graham and John McCain.

Look, I understand that we have a polarized political environment and that publishing a partisan spin on the news is a reliable way for digital publishers to build an audience. One of the reasons I would go to Google News is to find different perspectives on an important story.

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It could be that this is skewed by what Gordon normally searches on (if he writes about right-wing outlets), but this only emphasises that Google isn’t doing what we assume it should be doing – providing access to information – and instead is pushing people towards reinforcement of what they think.

And if not, then something is seriously wrong. Though Google News has been broken, as a concept, almost from its inception.
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Undercover Facebook moderator was instructed not to remove fringe groups or hate speech • The Verge

Nick Statt:

»

An investigative journalist who went undercover as a Facebook moderator in the UK says the company lets pages from far-right fringe groups “exceed deletion threshold,” and that those pages are “subject to different treatment in the same category as pages belonging to governments and news organizations.” The accusation is a damning one, undermining Facebook’s claims that it is actively trying to cut down on fake news, propaganda, hate speech, and other harmful content that may have significant real-world impact.

The undercover journalist detailed his findings in a new documentary titled Inside Facebook: Secrets of the Social Network, that just aired on the UK’s Channel 4. The investigation outlines questionable practices on behalf of CPL Resources, a third-party content moderator firm based in Dublin, Ireland that Facebook has worked with since 2010.

Those questionable practices primarily involve a hands-off approach to flagged and reported content like graphic violence, hate speech, and racist and other bigoted rhetoric from far-right groups. The undercover reporter says he was also instructed to ignore users who looked as if they were under 13 years of age, which is the minimum age requirement to sign up for Facebook in accordance with the Child Online Protection Act, a 1998 privacy law passed in the US designed to protect young children from exploitation and harmful and violent content on the internet.

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It is truly surreal how awful far-right stuff is tolerated by American companies.
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Samsung plans to launch foldable-screen phone early next year • WSJ

Timothy Martin:

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Samsung Electronics Co. is planning to introduce a foldable-screen smartphone early next year, according to people familiar with the matter, as the world’s largest phone maker eyes a splashy device to help re-energize its slumping handset business.

The Samsung prototype, which bears the internal code name “Winner,” features a screen that measures about 7 inches diagonally, roughly the size of a smaller tablet, these people said.

The screen can be folded in half, like a wallet, these people said. When the phone is folded, its exterior shows a small display bar on one side and cameras on the other, they said.

A foldable-screen device has long been a hotly rumored industry pursuit, with several phone makers said to be developing models. Unlike a traditional flip phone, the device when opened would be almost all screen, giving consumers a large display akin to a tablet, with the portability of a phone that could fit in a consumer’s hand, pocket or purse.

Other manufacturers have launched smartphones that fold, but those devices used two screens connected at their phone frames.

The new Samsung design—using a foldable screen—could help rejuvenate a handset industry that has struggled to find new dazzling features to impress consumers.

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(Narrator’s voice: it didn’t rejuvenate the handset industry, because nobody cared that your phone could fold.)
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British broadband speed map • FT

Alan Smith, Nic Fildes, David Blood, Max Harlow, Caroline Nevitt and Ændrew Rininsland:

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The areas of the country with ultrafast internet have often taken a go-it-alone approach. Small telecoms operators such as B4RN (Broadband for the Rural North) in Lancashire and CityFibre in York have replaced old copper wires with their own fibre-optic networks that are independent of the traditional national network, controlled by Openreach, BT’s engineering arm.

And while the data show that speeds are generally faster in urban areas compared with rural ones, this is often the result of strong investment in the suburbs. One of the most striking features of the British internet reality is that connections are very poor in the centre of the main cities, including London, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham. In many of those cases, the speed is below the 10 MBit/s threshold set for the “universal service obligation” that the government is set to introduce as a minimum standard for broadband access over the coming years.

In Britain, the digital divide is often not between urban and rural areas: it is between the suburbs and the inner city.

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Terrific interactive where you input a postcode and get an idea of how you compare against somewhere else. (The introductory graphic comparing part of Knightsbridge, in expensive London, with rural Shropshire is an eye-opener.) However we’re no closer to truly fast, universal wired broadband because there hasn’t been competition, unlike the situation that was mandated in mobile (where there were two, then four, then five principal competitors).
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Be My Eyes: how can I help a blind person to see? • The Big Tech Question

Barry Collins:

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The headline on this story sounds like hyperbole or an advertising slogan. Trust me, it’s not. The simply brilliant Be My Eyes app genuinely lets you see on behalf of someone who is blind or visually impaired.

The app works by turning the visually impaired person’s smartphone into a live video camera. When they need help identifying something – whether it’s a caller at their door, a tin of food in their cupboard or a packet of painkillers – they put out a request for help. Within seconds, one of the app’s 1.5 million volunteers will answer the call and be their eyes, using live video to see what’s in front of the visually impaired person and tell them what it is.

It’s hard to think of a more ingenious use of a smartphone – which is one of the reasons why it picked up a BT Tech4Good Award at the ceremony at BT HQ in London yesterday.

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This is amazing, and as Barry says, such a good and somehow obvious – in retrospect – idea.
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How do movie genre tastes change with age? • Stephen Follows

»

The data for today’s piece came from Pearl and Dean’s public microsite, comScore, IMDb and the Office of National Statistics.  It focuses on films released between 2005 and 2015, inclusive.

Movies were permitted to have up to three genres, and I used IMDb’s genre classification system.  This explains why the overall choices of any age group add up to more than 100%.  For example, Alien Vs Predator is not only a bad action movie but also a bad horror movie and a bad sci-fi movie.

The Pearl and Dean exit poll data is designed to help cinema advertisers and it does not cover all movies, meaning that there will be a slight bias towards the bigger, advertiser-friendly movies.  That said, in this article I’m looking at the overall UK cinema population and the majority of those tickets are bought for the major movies (an average of 75% of the box office goes to the 50 highest grossing films each year). Therefore, if your focus is independent or art-house cinema then you may find that your audience skews older.

The chart comparing UK population and cinema receipts requires some nit-picky detail to ensure we all understand exactly what it’s showing.  The UK population data is from the Office of National Statistics in 2014 and shows what percentage of the UK population aged over six years old falls into each of the six categories.  I excluded everybody aged six and under because we don’t have cinema data for that age group and I wanted to compare like with like.  The cinema data is a calculation based on exit polls and the total box office income.

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Comedy and adventure decline, action and SF have a mid-age peak, drama and romance grow. Now go and finance a film.
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How one company defied the odds and is grossing almost $1 billion in revenue… in Nigeria • Medium

Efosa Ojomo:

»

In 1988 Nigeria was not a premier investment destination. Life expectancy for the country’s 91 million people was 46 years; gross domestic product (GDP) was about $23bn; GDP per capita was about $256; 78% of people lived on less than $2 per day; about 37% of people had access to sanitation while roughly 58% had access to improved water source; Nigeria had experienced six coups in its short 28 years of existence as a republic; it was also under military rule in 1988 so technically and literally, anything could happen. In fact, in 1993 Nigerians unhappily welcomed General Sani Abacha, one of the most corrupt and brutal dictators Nigeria would ever know, to rule the country. In short, if you were an investor, Nigeria was just not the place to go.

But the executives at Tolaram Group paid little to no attention to those statistics. In 1988, Tolaram began importing instant noodles into Nigeria. Since then the company has vertically integrated in-country and has grown their Indomie Noodle® instant noodle sales to a staggering $700m a year. A packet of noodles cost about 18 cents. They sell more than 4.5 billion packets of noodles per year. In 1988, Nigeria did not have an instant noodle market. How was Tolaram able to set up and sustain operations in one of the most difficult countries to do business? After assessing Tolaram’s strategy, I cannot help but highlight the following attributes and impacts of their business — business model targeting non-consumption, interdependence, patient capital, and job creation and tax revenue.

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Astonishing story – part of a series.
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Anatomy of a butterfly (keyboard)—teardown style • iFixit

Sam Lionheart digs deeper (and notes a MacRumors story which says the new design is to prevent debris problems:

»

what does this silicone barrier [on the keys] actually look like? Are the keys wrapped in individual cushions? Did Apple just hide one of those goofy keyboard covers in this device? Like an ogre onion, this keyboard is a series of layers, so let’s get to peeling. In order to get to the keyboard at all you need to gut the MacBook, peel off a large backing sticker, remove a whole brace of screws and bust through more than a dozen rivets. And you wonder why Apple is replacing entire top case assemblies—including batteries—when they only really need to replace the keyboard. Apple could have saved themselves a lot of money, grief, and a ton of negative press if they just made this thing easier for their own techs to work on. And even after the irreversible pin removal, we still need to cook the thing under a pile of iOpeners to loosen the adhesive holding it together.

Oh, and remove all 64 keycaps on the laptop.

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The complexity and irreversibility of this design is truly strange.
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Siri’s last remaining cofounder is out at Apple — The Information

Aaron Tilley and Kevin McLaughlin:

»

[Tom] Gruber is retiring and will be pursuing personal interests in photography and ocean conservation, said people. His departure comes as the Siri group is undergoing a major leadership change, with the announcement last week that John Giannandrea, the former Google artificial intelligence research and search chief who joined Apple in April, would take over the unit. Apple’s head of search, Vipul Ved Prakash, has also left the company.

Mr. Gruber was the last of three cofounders of Siri Inc., the digital assistant startup, which Apple bought in April 2010 for $200m. The two other cofounders, Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, departed from Apple several years ago, around the time Siri was first integrated as a feature into the iPhone by Apple in 2011. Messrs. Kittlaus and Cheyer later went on to found another digital assistant startup called Viv Labs, which was acquired by Samsung in 2016 for more than $200m.

Mr. Prakash was the CEO of Topsy, a search engine company Apple acquired for more than $200m in 2013. The search team sits within the Siri group.

«

Topsy used to be a terrific search engine for Twitter; I couldn’t point now to what its effects have been on Apple’s search efforts (which I assume are mainly in its app stores?).

Gruber is retiring – if that’s definitely what he’s doing – at the age of 59. Sounds reasonable. It’s all going to change with Giannandrea in charge.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If Netflix can keep a new US customer for a year, it’s in profit, analysts reckon. Photo by Mon Œil on Flickr.

Please note: I’m taking a day off tomorrow for fun personal reasons, so there won’t be a Thursday edition. Back on Friday.

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

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

It takes 11 months for Netflix to achieve payback on each new US subscriber • Videonet

John Moulding:

»

Netflix’s cost of adding new subscribers in the U.S. has rocketed in recent years, reaching $100 per net new subscriber, according to figures from Ampere Analysis, a leading research/analyst firm covering the entertainment sector. The cost of acquiring each new U.S. subscriber was stable at around $60 between 2013-2015, Ampere Analysis notes.

The company says 14% of Netflix’s expenditure is on marketing related costs today. Increased marketing spend, combined with falling subscriber growth on its home soil, mean it takes the SVOD giant 11 months to achieve payback on net new domestic customers.

Ampere Analysis believes that if international markets follow the same trajectory as the U.S., with increasing levels of marketing required to drive a steady rate of new customers, subscriber acquisition costs could rise to around one-fifth of Netflix’s total costs. Meanwhile, the analyst firm estimates that Netflix churn is running at 20% annually (you can see their methodology below).

“The lengthening payback period – coupled with ever-rising content costs – goes a long way to explaining Netflix’s recent testing of a new premium price tier,” Ampere Analysis declares. “That will help the streaming giant offset its rising cost base.”

Richard Broughton, Research Director at Ampere Analysis, says: “With declining domestic growth rates and spiralling acquisition costs, Netflix faces a very real set of challenges if it is to continue to command such a strong position. Our research shows that while Netflix can continue to enjoy relatively low acquisition costs for international subscribers and a buoyant market keen to embrace SVoD, it cannot afford to take its eye off the ball in the domestic market, even momentarily. Its ability to grow ARPU will be critically important to manage long-term growth – domestically and abroad.” 

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To me that sounds… OK? Outside the US, the cost is $40-$45. With its growing catalogue and excellent interface, it has the killer product as fast internet spreads. Its UI in particular is so well tuned – if you compare it with rivals, it’s streets ahead.
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Walmart plots rival to Netflix, Amazon Prime Video • The Information

Jessica Toonkel, Tom Dotan and Priya Anand:

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Walmart is considering launching a subscription streaming video service to compete with Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, people familiar with the situation told The Information. Such a move could be enormously costly for the retailer but would demonstrate its determination to compete on multiple fronts with Amazon in particular.

The Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer sees an opportunity to undercut Netflix and Amazon on price. Walmart is thinking of a service priced below $8 per month, according to one of the people. Netflix has been steadily raising the price of its service, which now costs between $8 and $14 a month, while Amazon charges $8.99 a month for its Prime Video service. Walmart is also considering an ad-supported free service…

…While Walmart already offers an online video on demand service called Vudu, that hasn’t become popular. Launch of a subscription service would be a major expansion in entertainment. In taking such a step, Walmart would join numerous tech and telecom companies that see TV shows as a way to attract customers. Apple is now financing production of shows for a new service, while Facebook has launched a video offering called Facebook Watch.

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This is a bad idea. Sure, it’s big, but it’s an elephant trying to dance. Vudu should be enough warning.
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Europe tries to shut the Google stable door • CCS Insight

Geoff Blaber is an analyst at CCS; the EC is expected to announce on Wednesday a fine and “action” on Google’s tying of Google apps to Android:

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The size and scale of the Android ecosystem, coupled with the business model interdependencies of Google, manufacturers, operators and app developers, mean the case is decidedly more complex than that of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer bundling. There’s a substantial risk that despite the commission’s best intentions, its action results in unintended consequences that ultimately penalize the consumer.

The strength of Google’s position has invited increased scrutiny by the European Commission. In the wake of the 2017 verdict on Google Shopping results, Android was a natural next target. With more than 2 billion active devices and stringent requirements for manufacturers about how Android is used when coupled with Google apps and services, it is unsurprising the commission has sought to take action.

Although an open-source operating system, Android was introduced as a vehicle for Google’s licensable apps and services and to extend Google’s business model as engagement shifted to mobile devices. In this context, Android has been incredibly successful.

And yet Europe’s stance is arguably six to eight years too late. The commission is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. A related problem is that there is no clear alternative to Android. Apple’s iOS is an alternative from a consumer perspective, but Google has definitively beaten any licensable alternatives. Had the commission’s determination been made even five years ago, it would have opened a door of opportunity for others such as Microsoft. Today most contenders are themselves built on an Android code base.

Although a move to separate apps from the operating system may help foster competition over the longer term, Android has served its purpose in cementing Google services in consumers’ minds. At least in the West, manufacturers will still have to offer Google services to be competitive and meet consumer demand.

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As he says: it’s years too late if it’s really to make a difference. I’ve never felt that the Android case is anywhere near as egregious as the Google Shopping case, where Google suppressed search results from other sites to favour its own.
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Greek court rules to extradite Alexander Vinnik, accused of laundering $4bn in bitcoin • Coin Telegraph

Helen Partz:

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A Greek court has ruled to extradite the alleged former operator of crypto exchange BTC-e, Alexander Vinnik, to France, local news outlet CNN Greece reported Friday, July 13.

The 39-year old Russian national Vinnik, also known colloquially as “Mr. Bitcoin,” was indicted by U.S. authorities on charges of fraud and money laundering last year, reportedly involving up to $4 billion in Bitcoin (BTC).

Vinnik’s Greek lawyer Ilias Spyrliadis confirmed to Russian news agency TASS that “the court has granted France’s request for Vinnik’s extradition.” Spyrliadis also revealed that he is planning to appeal against the court’s decision in the Greek Supreme Court.

According to CNN Greece, Vinnik himself challenged the decision of the Greek court on extradition to France, denying the allegations of French authorities, who issued a warrant, in which the alleged BTC-e owner was accused of “defraud[ing] over 100 people in six French cities between 2016 and 2018.” Vinnik responded that he was “transferring e-money through a platform,” considering it as “legitimate personal transactions.”

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Four billion? Billion??
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The conventional wisdom about not feeding trolls makes online abuse worse • The Verge

“Film Crit Hulk”:

»

Whether we’re talking about AOL, AIM, early 4chan, or the early days of Twitter, there has always been a myth about the time and place where things were more innocent, when trolling was all in good fun. But what everyone really remembers about these proverbial times isn’t their purity. It’s how they didn’t see the big deal back then. They remember how they felt a sense of permission, a belief that it was all okay. But that was only true for those who were like them, who thought exactly like they did. All the while, someone else was getting stepped on and bullied while others laughed. The story of the internet has always been the same story: disaffected young men thinking their boorish and cruel behavior was justified or permissible.

And it was always wrong.

The second great lie is that trolling is harmless…

…The third great lie is about what fixes it…

The premise of “don’t feed the trolls” implies that if you ignore a troll, they will inevitably get bored or say, “Oh, you didn’t nibble at my bait? Good play, sir!” and tip their cap and go on their way. Ask anyone who has dealt with persistent harassment online, especially women: this is not usually what happens. Instead, the harasser keeps pushing and pushing to get the reaction they want with even more tenacity and intensity. It’s the same pattern on display in the litany of abusers and stalkers, both online and off, who escalate to more dangerous and threatening behavior when they feel like they are being ignored. In many cases, ignoring a troll can carry just as dear a price as provocation.

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Terrific article. I feel as though in technology, the hardware business is in stasis generally. Now we’re trying to work out the social and software side.
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Is the oil industry repeating a critical error? • OilPrice.com

Kurt Cobb:

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The recent rebound in oil prices should spur some investment elsewhere, especially where genuine financial returns await. But the punishing price decline in oil from 2014 to 2016 and the slow recovery that followed has resulted in deep cuts in exploration and development throughout the industry (if not so much in the U.S. tight oil fields).

In response, the International Energy Agency has been waving its arms for some time that this dearth of investment will mean constrained supplies after 2020. In addition, Rystad Energy, an independent energy research firm, reported at the end of last year that 2017 saw a record low in oil discoveries. It noted that exploration expenditures had dropped 60% from 2014 to 2017. Without a substantial reversal of this trend, the firm expects supply deficits. (Translation: There won’t be enough oil to go around in the not-too-distant future.)

Meanwhile, writer Gail Tverberg has been pounding home her counterintuitive thesis that peak world oil production won’t be accompanied by high prices. Rather, it will be the result of prices too low for much of the remaining oil to be extracted profitably. In other words, in Tverberg’s opinion there isn’t an oil price that is both low enough to avoid economic stagnation (i.e., a price that consumers can readily afford) and yet high enough to incentivize oil companies to extract sufficient quantities of oil to prevent a decline in the overall rate of production worldwide.

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It’s been ages since I thought about Peak Oil (probably true for you too). But prices are creeping up again, up 50% in a year – though well short of their 2012-14 levels.
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App traps: how cheap smartphones siphon user data in developing countries • WSJ

Newley Purnell:

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For millions of people buying inexpensive smartphones in developing countries where privacy protections are usually low, the convenience of on-the-go internet access could come with a hidden cost: preloaded apps that harvest users’ data without their knowledge.

One such app, included on thousands of Chinese-made Singtech P10 smartphones sold in Myanmar and Cambodia, sends the owner’s location and unique-device details to a mobile-advertising firm in Taiwan called General Mobile Corp., or GMobi. The app also has appeared on smartphones sold in Brazil and those made by manufacturers based in China and India, security researchers said…

…Thi Thi Moe, a sales clerk in Mandalay, Myanmar, said she was unaware until being informed by The Wall Street Journal that GMobi was collecting data from her Singtech P10 phone. She said she had become annoyed in recent months at frequent advertisements on its screen for mobile games.

“I don’t want that kind of app on my phone,” said the 28-year-old, who added that she bought her phone last year for $77. “I’m not familiar with the technology, but it seems like it shouldn’t be taking my private information.”

…Upstream Systems, a London-based mobile commerce and security firm that identified the GMobi app’s activity and shared it with the Journal, said it bought four new devices that, once activated, began sending data to GMobi via its firmware-updating app. This included 15-digit International Mobile Equipment Identification, or IMEI, numbers, along with unique codes called MAC addresses that are assigned to each piece of hardware that connects to the web. The app also sends some location data to GMobi’s servers located in Singapore, Upstream said.

Upstream also said that in recent months it blocked GMobi’s app from making suspicious attempts to sign up users for paid services, such as mobile games. Had the app been successful, users would have been billed more than $7m in total across eight countries, Upstream said. GMobi’s Mr. Wu said the company wasn’t responsible for any malicious activity emanating from its app.

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Trump’s ‘missing DNC server’ is neither missing nor a server • Daily Beast

Kevin Poulsen:

»

It’s true that the FBI doesn’t have the DNC’s computer hardware. Agents didn’t sweep into DNC headquarters, load up all the equipment and leave Democrats standing stunned beside empty desks and dangling cables. There’s a reason for that, and it has nothing to do with a deep state conspiracy to frame Putin.

Trump and his allies are capitalizing on a basic misapprehension of how computer intrusion investigations work. Investigating a virtual crime isn’t a like investigating a murder. The Russians didn’t leave DNA evidence on the server racks and fingerprints on the keyboards. All the evidence of their comings and goings was on the computer hard drives, and in memory, and in the ephemeral network transmissions to and from the GRU’s command-and-control servers.

When cyber investigators respond to an incident, they capture that evidence in a process called “imaging.” They make an exact byte-for-byte copy of the hard drives. They do the same for the machine’s memory, capturing evidence that would otherwise be lost at the next reboot, and they monitor and store the traffic passing through the victim’s network. This has been standard procedure in computer  intrusion investigations for decades. The images, not the computer’s hardware, provide the evidence.

Both the DNC and the security firm Crowdstrike, hired to respond to the breach, have said repeatedly over the years that they gave the FBI a copy of all the DNC images back in 2016. The DNC reiterated that Monday in a statement to the Daily Beast.

“The FBI was given images of servers, forensic copies, as well as a host of other forensic information we collected from our systems,” said Adrienne Watson, the DNC’s deputy communications director. “We were in close contact and worked cooperatively with the FBI and were always responsive to their requests. Any suggestion that they were denied access to what they wanted for their investigation is completely incorrect.”

The FBI declined comment for this story, but in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee last year, then-director James Comey said that Crowdstrike “ultimately shared with us their forensics.”

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Most people don’t know what computer forensics involves (even though the process has been pretty much the same for about 30 years), nor how much information a computer collects (pretty much everything, apart from the specific keystrokes – and sometimes even those).
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US ban on China’s ZTE forces telecoms to rethink business: sources • Reuters

Eric Auchard:

»

[Russian and emerging markets carrier] Veon was especially hard hit, suffering launch delays at its Italian joint venture and in Ukraine, near network outages in Bangladesh, and lesser disruptions at its Pakistan operations, sources at the Amsterdam-based operator told Reuters. “Veon has decided to second source everything,” a person familiar with the strategy shift at Veon said of moves to reduce dependence on any one supplier of network gear.

“We don’t want the company to be in the same position we were in when the U.S. (ban on ZTE) came out: It caused massive problems in three or four of our markets,” the source said.

Perhaps the biggest setback was for Italian mobile operator Wind Tre, which had a €1bn ($1.17bn) contract with ZTE to upgrade radio equipment.

The ban forced ZTE to abandon more than half of the remainder of the contract, and Wind Tre will use gear from network supplier Ericsson instead, sources told Reuters.

The original deal had marked ZTE’s biggest breakthrough into the European market, which has been dominated by regional players such as Ericsson of Sweden and Nokia of Finland.

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It still feels as though Trump let ZTE off the hook too easily. What has China offered, exactly?
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The secret Facebook groups for people with shocking DNA test results • The Atlantic

Sarah Zhang:

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not all biological parents want to be found. In conversations and correspondence with more than two dozen people for this story, I heard of DNA tests that unearthed affairs, secret pregnancies, quietly buried incidents of rape and incest, and fertility doctors using their own sperm to inseminate patients. These secrets otherwise would have—or even did—go the grave. “It’s getting harder and harder to keep secrets in our society,” says CeCe Moore, a prominent genetic genealogist who consults for the television show ‘Finding Your Roots’. “If people haven’t come to that realization, they probably should.”

St. Clair told me she sees it as a generational shift. The generation whose 50-year-old secrets are now being unearthed could not have imagined a world of $99 mail-in DNA kits. But times are changing, and the culture with it. “This generation right now and maybe the next 15 years or so, there’s going to be a lot of shocking results coming out. I’d say in 20 years time it’s going to dissipate,” she predicted. By then, our expectations of privacy will have caught up with the new reality created by the rise of consumer DNA tests.

But until then, hundreds, maybe thousands, of people like St. Clair are left to piece together their family histories, containing the fallout of a DNA test however they can. The best help, many have found, is each other.

“It was better than therapy,” Dawn, 54, says of joining the DNA NPE Friends group. “I tried therapy. It didn’t work.” (The Atlantic agreed to identify by first name only the people who have not revealed their misattributed parentage to friends and family.) Therapists, friends—they all had trouble understanding why the revelation mattered so much. When Dawn told her close friends that her biological father had Italian heritage, they joked about making cannoli. “They don’t understand the gravity,” she says. She herself didn’t quite understand until it happened to her either. Dawn had spent her whole life suspecting her father was not her biological father, yet the revelation still left her unmoored. “The very foundation of who I thought I was was ripped out from under me,” she says. “Until that moment, I had no idea how much stock I had put in my family to identify to find who I was.”

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What had been a staple of reality TV morning shows becomes untelevised reality.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Romance on Kindle is a huge business – and pretty brutal. Photo by Classic Film on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Can colloids collude? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How a cabal of romance writers cashed in on Amazon Kindle Unlimited • The Verge

Sarah Jeong:

»

The fight over #Cockygate, as it was branded online, emerged from the strange universe of Amazon Kindle Unlimited, where authors collaborate and compete to game Amazon’s algorithm. Trademark trolling is just the beginning: There are private chat groups, ebook exploits, conspiracies to seed hyperspecific trends like “Navy SEALs” and “mountain men,” and even a controversial sweepstakes in which a popular self-published author offered his readers a chance to win diamonds from Tiffany’s if they reviewed his new book.

Much of what’s alleged is perfectly legal, and even technically within Amazon’s terms of service. But for authors and fans, the genre is also a community, and the idea that unethical marketing and algorithmic tricks are running rampant has embroiled their world in controversy. Some authors even believe that the financial incentives set up by Kindle Unlimited are reshaping the romance genre — possibly even making it more misogynistic.

A genre that mostly features shiny, shirtless men on its covers and sells ebooks for 99 cents a pop might seem unserious. But at stake are revenues sometimes amounting to a million dollars a year, with some authors easily netting six figures a month. The top authors can drop $50,000 on a single ad campaign that will keep them in the charts — and see a worthwhile return on that investment.

In other words, self-published romance is no joke.

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Jiminy. Great reporting.
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It takes just six minutes for a dog to die in a hot car • The Conversation

Jan Hoole and Daniel Allen:

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RSPCA Australia stresses it takes “Just six minutes” for a dog to die in a hot car.

Despite this, people continue to leave their dogs in cars. Between 2009 and 2018, the RSPCA had 64,443 reported incidents of animal and heat exposure in England and Wales. Around 90% of calls related to dogs in vehicles. This year the RSPCA emergency hotline received 1,123 reports of animals suffering heat exposure in just one week (June 25 to July 1 2018). That’s seven calls an hour.

Perhaps this happens because many owners don’t really understand what happens to a dog’s body in overheating and heatstroke. If a dog’s internal temperature goes above 41°C (105.8°F) it is at risk of heatstroke, which only 50% of dogs survive. Some breeds are more susceptible than others – large dogs, dogs with short faces such as bulldogs and boxers, and overweight or long-coated dogs are most at risk – but every dog has the potential to suffer from heatstroke. It doesn’t have to be boiling hot for this to happen either – when it’s 22°C, (71.6°F) outside, the inside of a car can easily reach 47°C within an hour(116.6°F).

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Either don’t take the dog in the car, or take it out with you.
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Airline pilot shortage: United States at a critical point • CNN Travel

Peter Gall:

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In the 1970s, when most of today’s airline pilots like myself were growing up, piloting for an airline was considered a prestigious career.

The job offered not only high salaries and nice schedules with many days off, but also a respected position in society. In the early 1990s, pilot salaries approached $300,000 in today’s dollars for some international pilots.

What’s more, during this time, the military had a steady and consistent demand for pilots. A young aspiring aviator could go into the military to receive all of his or her flight training. Once these pilots had fulfilled their military commitment, they were almost guaranteed a good job flying for a major airline.
Today, this is no longer the case. The career of the airline pilot has lost its luster.

This is due in part to deregulation. The 1978 Airline Deregulation Act kicked off the era of the low-cost carrier. As a result, airlines such as Pan-Am went out of business. Then, the 9/11 attacks left the airlines in poor financial condition.

Five of the six major legacy airlines in the United States declared bankruptcy: US Airways, Delta, Northwest, United and American Airlines. I clearly recall a day a couple weeks after 9/11, when one of my flights, from Washington DC to Orlando, Florida, boarded just one passenger.

From my own experience, I can attest to many pilots like myself who were forced to vacate their captain position and go back to first officer, resulting in their pay dropping from roughly $190,000 per year to $75,000 per year.

Meanwhile, the number of pilots supplied by the military has dwindled. Much of this is due to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles. In the 1980s, roughly two thirds of airline pilots were ex-military. Recently, that percentage has dropped to less than one-third. The Navy predicts a 10% pilot shortage in 2020, while the Air Force predicts its own 1,000-pilot shortage by 2022.

This means many young aspiring aviators now have to pay for their own flight training.

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End of an era? Or start of a worrying trend? Won’t supply and demand sort this out, or is the inherent delay between the two so large it will undermine it?
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Instapaper is going independent • Instapaper

»

Today, we’re announcing that Pinterest has entered into an agreement to transfer ownership of Instapaper to Instant Paper, Inc., a new company owned and operated by the same people who’ve been working on Instapaper since it was sold to betaworks by Marco Arment in 2013. The ownership transfer will occur after a 21 day waiting period designed to give our users fair notice about the change of control with respect to their personal information.

We want to emphasize that not much is changing for the Instapaper product outside the new ownership. The product will continue to be built and maintained by the same people who’ve been working on Instapaper for the past five years. We plan to continue offering a robust service that focuses on readers and the reading experience for the foreseeable future.

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I know the question you’ve got. No, it’s not yet available in Europe (GDPR). The comments on this post are stuffed with people demanding to know when it will be; Instapaper’s CEO doesn’t answer.
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This company outsources customer service back to the customer • Bloomberg

Olga Kharif:

»

Two years ago, when news broke that a 2012 hack of LinkedIn had compromised 117 million users’ passwords, instead of the 6.5 million previously reported, the site got a few extra questions. Almost overnight, customer service cases rose 1,300 percent. It would have taken 15 weeks, LinkedIn Inc. says, for staffers to address them all. Instead, the company resolved the caseload in about one-third the time by using Directly, software that connects distressed customers with other, more knowledgeable customers.

Using these amateur experts, LinkedIn paid about $2 a pop for answers to easy customer questions about what had happened or protective measures to take, says Andy Yasutake, who oversees LinkedIn’s customer service IT and operations. “It was worth it,” he says. When internal staffers do the same thing, it typically costs $6 to $7. (The staffers, though, get higher ratings from customers.) LinkedIn has since made Directly Software Inc.’s system a permanent feature for many paying customers. “We saw this as an alternative to outsourcing,” Yasutake says.

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Neat idea.
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Scientists now know exactly how lead got into Flint’s water • Smithsonian Magazine

Ben Panko:

»

Haizhou Liu, an environmental engineer at the University of California at Riverside who studies corrosion and water quality, praised the study’s “careful sampling,” and said it shows how crucial phosphates are to controlling corrosion in water systems. More importantly, he says, it portends the future America faces with outdated water systems in the 21st century. “In my opinion, the Flint story reveals the challenges to maintain our aging water infrastructure nationwide,” says Liu, who was not involved in this study.

While not a new revelation to experts, Edwards says this study exemplifies how lead from main service pipes can build up in the galvanized iron pipes used inside and outside of many American houses built before 1987, and leach from those pipes into the water even after the lead pipes are gone. Using samples taken by Walters in January 2015 and sections of the iron pipe that connected Walters’ house to the lead service pipe, Edwards was able to pinpoint the contamination patterns.

Curt Guyette, an investigative reporter with the Michigan branch of the ACLU who helped expose the lead crisis in Flint, profiled Walters in 2014 for a documentary on the city’s growing water problems. “There’s just a very severe lack of trust,” says Guyette about Flint residents’ current relationship with both their water supply and their government officials.

This suspicion isn’t limited to Flint. Guyette says that on his travels across the country, he’s encountered many Americans who now know and worry about lead in their own drinking water. “What this study does is only add to the evidence of how widespread the concern should be,” he says. Edwards is now working to study the efficacy of Flint’s citywide efforts to replace lead pipes, and says this study is just the first step in getting the full picture.

«

The article is a little confusing – it talks about lead in the houses coming from the rust in the non-lead galvanised iron pipes; only later do you realise that the rust trapped lead leaching from the (lead) service pipes, but then the rust leached out (due to phosphates).

But also: the externalities of underinvestment in infrastructure (in favour of low taxes) eventually come back to bite you.
link to this extract

An Apple accessories maker scrambles to keep up • The Information

Wayne Ma:

»

When his first $59 [MacBook Pro] docking station went on sale in 2010, Mr. Vroom received more than 20,000 pre-orders, selling out of its initial run of 2,000 stations in about three days. The demand overloaded both his payment processor and the company website.

Initially, Mr. Vroom wanted to manufacture his products in the U.S. because it would reduce shipping times and allow him to monitor the production line to fix problems. But he eventually decided to make them in China, where he found electronic toy manufacturers and other factories far more eager than their U.S. counterparts to take a chance on a small business like his. He said he still can’t find U.S. factories that can offer the same level of manufacturing quality and coordination with suppliers as in China.

“For us, manufacturing in China is not about cost, it’s about capabilities and a willingness to work with smaller companies,” Mr. Voom said.

In China, Mr. Vroom ran into the intellectual property issues that have bedeviled so many Western companies that manufacture products there. One of his factories adapted a Henge design into a new, generic product of its own. When Mr. Vroom raised the issue, factory managers initially didn’t understand why he was upset, explaining that Henge’s product was a different shape. Mr. Vroom went as far as to offer them alternative industrial designs.

“It took some convincing, but we finally got a commitment from their management that they would stay away from our designs, and we would continue [the partnership],” he said.

«

This is the point about China: it’s both the best and worst place to manufacture. Best for facilities and price; worst for IP theft.
link to this extract

How to be a better beggar for your health care • Medium

Darryl Ohrt:

»

this is exactly how plenty of cancer patients are funding their care.

It’s true. The health care situation in our country is so bad that people just like me have resorted to begging on the streets to fund their care. Only the streets are now on the internet.

A recent article in Cure, “A Virtual Safety Net” details how to craft a better crowdsourcing campaign to fund your cancer health care, making this all too obvious that our health care industry accepts this as the new norm.

Changing the word “beg” to “ask” and putting a pretty “donate” button on it shouldn’t make this an acceptable event in our society. And we can’t blame the patients. I’ve received care at cancer centers all over our country, and met people just like your uncle, your mom, and your brother who can no longer afford the care they need. They’ve exhausted their savings. Cashed out their retirement. Reverse mortgaged their home. All in an effort to stay alive. Put in this situation, who wouldn’t crowdsource for help?

«

A popular joke on Twitter: “It’s 2060. The US has universal healthcare, called GoFundMe.”
link to this extract

PlaneBae saga: woman breaks her silence, asks for anonymity • Business Insider

»

“I did not ask for and do not seek attention,” the woman, dubbed #PrettyPlaneGirl by social media, said in a statement provided to Business Insider by her lawyer, Wesley Mullen of New York City-based law firm Mullen PC, on Thursday. “#PlaneBae is not a romance — it is a digital-age cautionary tale about privacy, identity, ethics and consent.”

Business Insider has verified that she is the woman from the Twitter posts. We have not published her name out of respect for her desire for privacy. You can read her full statement at the end of this story.

In contrast, the woman’s #PlaneBae counterpart, a former pro soccer player named Euan Holden, embraced his newfound celebrity and even appeared on the “Today” show. After Blair’s Twitter posts went viral, the woman quickly went to ground, deleting her social-media accounts in an attempt to preserve her privacy.

Still, it didn’t stop some internet users from finding and circulating her personal information, she said.

“Strangers publicly discussed my private life based on patently false information,” she said. “I have been doxxed, shamed, insulted and harassed. Voyeurs have come looking for me online and in the real world.” “Doxxing” is internet slang for when a person’s private information is publicly released against his or her will.

«

I’m still amazed by the woman who tweeted the whole “saga” – more like a story in her mind. It’s like an episode from Dave Eggers’s The Circle.
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Apple says third-generation keyboards exclusive to 2018 MacBook Pro • Mac Rumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

some customers have been hoping that Apple will start swapping out second-generation keyboards with third-generation keyboards, as part of its service program, but MacRumors has learned that isn’t the plan.

When asked if Apple Stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers will be permitted to replace second-generation keyboards on 2016 and 2017 MacBook Pro models with the new third-generation keyboards, if necessary, Apple said, no, the third-generation keyboards are exclusive to the 2018 MacBook Pro.

Hopefully, in that case, it means that Apple has quietly tweaked the second-generation keyboard to be more reliable. It wouldn’t really make sense for Apple to replace keyboards with ones that are just as prone to break again, especially if the third-generation keyboards offer a fix.

One possibility is that the third-generation keyboards aren’t backwards compatible with 2016 and 2017 MacBook Pro models to begin with. The keyboard is actually one part of a larger component called the “top case,” which has a glued-in battery, and this part may have changed slightly in 2018 models.

«

I’d go for the “compatibility” explanation. And note how neatly this fits my explanation yesterday: when Apple said the quieter keyboards “aren’t a fix for that”, they literally meant not a fix for those machines which have the issue, rather than the broader “dust gets in my mechanism” problem.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Apple’s new keyboard covers up its vulnerable mechanism. Photo by tua ulamac on Flickr.

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A selection of 12 links for you. Like that! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Researchers find that filters don’t prevent porn • TechCrunch

John Biggs:

»

In a paper entitled Internet Filtering and Adolescent Exposure to Online Sexual Material, Oxford Internet Institute researchers Victoria Nash and Andrew Przybylski found that Internet filters rarely work to keep adolescents away from online porn.

“It’s important to consider the efficacy of Internet filtering,” said Dr, Nash. “Internet filtering tools are expensive to develop and maintain, and can easily ‘underblock’ due to the constant development of new ways of sharing content. Additionally, there are concerns about human rights violations – filtering can lead to ‘overblocking’, where young people are not able to access legitimate health and relationship information.”

This research follows the controversial news that the UK government was exploring a country-wide porn filter, a product that will most likely fail. The UK would join countries around the world who filter the public Internet for religious or political reasons.

«

In a response on Dave Farber’s Interesting-People list, L Jean Camp points out that

»

Culturally we have problems distinguishing “Sexual” from “women’s bodies”, which is, of course, related to why I have to walk past screaming haters to get cancer screening at Planned Parenthood.

Please read the Comstock Laws in the US, or the Saudi constraints on information about women’s bodies.

Computers cannot define the difference between consensual activities, health information, and assault because culturally people cannot either. If porn consisted of healthy consensual activities no one would care.

A computer cannot implement inconsistent irrational arbitrary filters, surprise.

Imagine that, boys, going back to get your second cancer screening and passing spittle-flecked women howling about the inherent sexual and sacred nature of your colon. That would be insane, and it is reality for many women.

Our culture is crazy, deadly, hateful about women and sex. Computers cannot do that particular kind of crazy.

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link to this extract

Why didn’t America become part of the modern world? • Eudaimonia

Umair Haque argues that while Europe realised, after the Second World War, that poverty is a bad thing and so set about social equity schemes, the US didn’t – “America was building drinking fountains for ‘colored people'” – and insisted that poverty is a teacher:

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So what was the inevitable result of a nation which didn’t learn history’s greatest lesson, which thought poverty was good for people? Unsurprisingly, it was….poverty. The old kind: 40 million Americans live in poverty, while 50 million Mexicans do. Surprised. And a new kind, too. The middle class imploded, and Americans began living lives right perched right at the edge of destruction. Less then $500 in emergency savings, having to choose between healthcare and educating their kids, a without retirement, stability, security, or safety of any kind. America never joined the modern world in understanding that poverty leads societies to ruin — and so it quickly became the rich world’s first poor country.

What happened next? Well, exactly what history suggested would. That imploding middle class, living lives of immense precarity, sought safety in the arms of religion, superstition, and myths, at first. And then in the arms of extremism. And finally, in the arms of a demagogue, leading a nationalist, proto-fascist movement. It was exactly what happened in the 1930s — and it still is.
So. What has anyone learned? Funnily, sadly, as far as I can see, not much. America never joined the modern world — that is why its people live such uniquely wretched lives, paying thousands for ambulance rides, which even people in Lahore or Lagos don’t. But the consequences weren’t just poverty. They were what poverty produces — nationalism, authoritarianism, fascism, social collapse and implosion, as people, enraged, lost trust in society to be able to protect and shelter them. But no one has learned that lesson. Not America’s intellectuals, certainly. Not its politicians, leaders, thinkers. Not its people, either, unfortunately.

So here America is. Modernity’s first failed state. The rich nation which never cared to join the modern world, too busy believing that poverty would lead to virtue, not ruin. Now life is a perpetual, crushing, bruising battle, in which the stakes are life or death — and so people take out their bitter despair and rage by putting infants on trial.

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link to this extract

I used an Android Go phone for a month, and it was terrible • Android Police

Ryne Hager tried the low-end Android option, at $100:

»

Who are these phones for?

This question consumed me in the lead-up to my time with the Alcatel 1X, and long before the review process started, I knew there wouldn’t be time to fully answer it. So, against my own better judgment and the repeated pleas of my coworkers here at Android Police, I decided before I started that I would exclusively use the Alcatel 1X as my only personal phone for an entire month. Of course, covering software updates and apps might require that I occasionally grab a work phone to pull screens or fact check, but when I was off duty, on vacation, or out on the town, it would be the Alcatel 1X in my pocket—with no backup.

Android Go and a mere 1 GB of RAM would be responsible for my entire mobile-centric life for a whole month. I expected the worst from the experience, and I wasn’t entirely disappointed.

I didn’t suffer any major catastrophes in the period I spent using it exclusively, but it was my only phone on two personal trips, and its shortcomings repeatedly drove me to apoplexy. It was explicitly incompatible with Android Auto, which meant more extensive planning and care had to go into my beer run to Burlington (a ~4-hour drive from Boston). The full version of Maps required for step-by-step directions eats quite a lot of the little free RAM left on a 1 GB device, and I was also concerned Spotify might be pushed out of memory mid-drive—as it once did while I had the app open on the subway. Thankfully, both were able to stay running the entire time.

It was a functional phone, but it wasn’t good, and in a lot of ways it felt like stepping back in time to 2008-2010: That era when smartphones were only just starting to proliferate.

«

Spotify? The full version of Google Maps? Isn’t this expecting a lot? I’d expect if you go from a flagship (of any of the past two years) to a $100 phone you’d find it hard. That doesn’t make it worthless.
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Digital ads are starting to feel psychic • The Outline

Oscar Schwartz:

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Earlier this year, my friend Max gave me a knife from Japan as a gift. That evening, as I was lying in bed looking at Instagram, I scrolled passed an ad of what looked like exactly the same knife. I did a double take, got out of bed, retrieved the knife from the kitchen and compared it to the one my screen—it was a perfect match, a Masomoto KS. I hadn’t Googled the knife, taken a picture of it, or event sent a text about it. The only interaction I had about the knife was face to face with Max when he gave it to me. This felt like more than a coincidence — it felt like I was being listened to.

Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne, two Brooklyn-based artists whose work explores the intersections of technology and society, have been hearing a lot of stories like mine. In June, they launched a website called New Organs, which collects first-hand accounts of these seemingly paranoiac moments. The website is comprised of a submission form that asks you to choose from a selection of experiences, like “my phone is eavesdropping on me” to “I see ads for things I dream about.” You’re then invited to write a few sentences outlining your experience and why you think it happened to you.

«

Spooky, but even (sceptical) I can offer an explanation. Max is a friend of Oscar. They almost surely are connected with other on Facebook, or Instagram, or both. Max found the knife by searching, and chose to buy it. Instagram’s system knows only that Max bought the knife, not that it was a gift. If Max likes the knife, perhaps Oscar likes the knife? Cue: advert. (Schwartz reaches this conclusion later on.)

Even though it’s explicable, though, it’s still creepy.
link to this extract

73-year-old Frank Sinatra was originally offered the leading role in Die Hard • Today I Found Out

Emily Upton:

»

how did Frank come to be considered for the role? It all started with an author named Roderick Thorp. You might not know it, but the Die Hard movie was based on a book called Nothing Lasts Forever by Thorp, which was published in 1979. The LA Times reviewed the book, saying it was “A ferocious, bloody, raging book so single-mindedly brilliant in concept and execution that it should be read at a single sitting.” This book is really what made Thorp a big name, but he was on the publishing scene much earlier.

It turns out that Nothing Lasts Forever is actually a sequel to a book called The Detective, published in 1966 which was made into a movie of the same name in 1968. The movie starred—you guessed it—Frank Sinatra as the main character, Detective Joe Leland. The book was extremely popular, remaining on bestseller lists for a while and making a name for Thorp; the movie also did well in the box office. It was described as “gritty” for its time, dealing with issues like homosexuality, but it was decidedly less action-packed than the Die Hard movies we know today.

Die Hard itself wasn’t picked up by producers until 1988, nearly 10 years after the book it was based on was published. Because the movie was technically a sequel, they were contractually obligated to offer Frank Sinatra the leading role. He was 73 years old at the time and gracefully turned the offer down.

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PHEW. (Following on from last week. Thanks Richard Gaywood for the link. Bonus Die Hard fun: the video in this tweet.)
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What Elon Musk should learn from the Thailand cave rescue • The New York Times

Zeynep Tufekci:

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Mr. Musk’s desire to help was commendable. But when the head of the rescue operation, Narongsak Osottanakorn, declared that Mr. Musk’s contraption was impractical for the task at hand — a task that had been completed, at that point, by some of the world’s top cave divers — Mr. Musk responded with irritation. He insisted on Twitter that leaders of the operation had in fact welcomed his assistance and that Mr. Narongsak was not the “subject matter expert.” He also expressed frustration that he was being criticized while trying to help.

Instead of venting, Mr. Musk — indeed, Silicon Valley as a whole — can perhaps see the Thai operation as a lesson. This was a most improbable rescue against the longest odds. Safely navigating 12 kids and one adult, many of whom were not swimmers, through a dangerous cave relied on a model of innovation that Silicon Valley can and should learn from.

The Silicon Valley model for doing things is a mix of can-do optimism, a faith that expertise in one domain can be transferred seamlessly to another and a preference for rapid, flashy, high-profile action. But what got the kids and their coach out of the cave was a different model: a slower, more methodical, more narrowly specialized approach to problems, one that has turned many risky enterprises into safe endeavors — commercial airline travel, for example, or rock climbing, both of which have extensive protocols and safety procedures that have taken years to develop.

This “safety culture” model is neither stilted nor uncreative. On the contrary, deep expertise, lengthy training and the ability to learn from experience (and to incorporate the lessons of those experiences into future practices) is a valuable form of ingenuity.

This approach is what allowed the airline captain Chesley Sullenberger to safely land a commercial airplane on the Hudson River in 2009 after its engines were disabled. Captain Sullenberger’s skill and composure were, of course, a credit to him personally. But they also rested on decades of training and learning in an industry that had been government-regulated and self-regulated to such a degree that hurling through the atmosphere in giant metal cans at 35,000 feet is now one of the safest ways to travel.

«

Musk has since vented even more. When I remarked on Twitter that Musk’s submarine seemed to me “the perfect Silicon Valley metaphor/example” (the wrong solution for the problem), I got lots of people insisting it was just right IF it had kept raining. Which was also wrong.
link to this extract

Elon Musk pledges to fix Flint water in homes with contamination • ABC News

Roey Hadar:

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Musk previously offered to provide solar electricity options to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and volunteered to send his own equipment and staff to assist in the rescue of 12 boys and their soccer coach from a cave in Thailand.

But the efforts to persuade Musk to help Flint stem from a source that’s more directly connected to the Flint community.

Mari Copeny, a 10-year-old local activist known as “Little Miss Flint,” tweeted she has been working with Musk’s team for over a week on coming up with a solution for Flint that he could fund.

Musk worked with Copeny earlier this month, donating at least 500 bikes meant for children in the Flint area as a way of helping a community event she had organized.

Musk’s tweets come as Flint residents still grapple with the continued after-effects of the crisis. Local residents have sued local government authorities, contractors and companies tasked with maintaining the city’s water supply seeking damages. The residents’ class-action lawsuit had a hearing in federal court earlier this week.

«

This is good – no two ways about it – but the key problem is with the infrastructure, with lead deposits from supply pipes embedded in rust in household pipes and then gradually deposited into peoples’ water (due to a change in the supply, and thus its chemistry). You’d need to replace all the pipes. Simply: you cannot avoid public spending forever.
link to this extract

Surface Go is Microsoft’s big bet on a tiny-computer future • WIRED

Lauren Goode:

»

A lot about the new Surface has been “tuned”—not just the guts of the Go, but its software, too. “We tuned Office, we then tuned the Intel part, we tuned Windows, we made sure that, in portrait, it came to life,” Panay says. “We brought the Cortana [team] in to better design the Cortana box—we went after the details on what we think our customers need at 10 inches.”

There’s usually a tradeoff when you’re buying a computer this small. You get portability at the expense of space for apps and browser windows. The Surface Go has a built-in scaler that optimizes apps for a 10-inch screen, and Microsoft says that it’s working with third-parties to make sure certain apps run great. There’s only so much control, though, you have over software that’s not your own. I was reminded of this when I had a few minutes to use the Surface Go, went to download the Amazon Kindle app in the Windows Store, and couldn’t find it there…

…So who is this tiny Surface Go actually made for? It depends on who you ask at Microsoft, but the short answer seems to be: anybody and everybody.

[Natalia] Urbanowicz, the product marketing manager, says Go is about “reaching more audiences, and embracing the word ‘and’: I can be a mother, and an entrepreneurial badass; I can be a student, and a social justice warrior.” Kyriacou, when describing the Go’s cameras, says to “think about the front line worker in the field—a construction worker, architect, they can capture what they need to or even scan a document.” You can also dock the Go, Kyriacou points out, using the Surface Connect port, which makes it ideal for business travelers. Groene talks about reading, about drawing, about running software applications like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Almost everyone talks about watching Hulu and Netflix on it.

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I don’t think they know who it’s for. Note too how Microsoft is struggling, like any OEM, to get third-party apps onto its store.
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Russia Indictment 2.0: what to make of Mueller’s hacking indictment • Lawfare

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The timing of the indictment given the upcoming Helsinki summit is a powerful show of strength by federal law enforcement. Let’s presume that Mueller did not time this indictment to precede the summit by way of embarrassing Trump on the international stage. It is enough to note that he also did not hold off on the indictment for a few days by way of sparing Trump embarrassment—and that Rosenstein did not force him to. Indeed, Rosenstein said at his press conference that it is “important for the president to know what information was uncovered because he has to make very important decisions for the country” and therefore “he needs to know what evidence there is of foreign election interference.” But of course Rosenstein and Mueller did not just let Trump know. They also let the world know, which has the effect—intended or not—of boxing in the president as he meets with an adversary national leader.

Put less delicately: Rosenstein has informed the president, and the world, before Trump talks to Putin one-on-one that his own Justice Department is prepared to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, in public, using admissible evidence, that the president of the Russian Federation has been lying to Trump about Russian non-involvement in the 2016 election hacking.

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The byline has eight names, which is nearly as many as were indicted – 12 GRU hackers who used the alias “Guccifer 2.0” to contact Trump-linked people such as Roger Stone. (Stone admits he is “probably” the person who responded to the hackers. Make that “definitely”.)
link to this extract

Plastic straws aren’t the problem • Bloomberg

Adam Minter:

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The anti-straw movement took off in 2015, after a video of a sea turtle with a straw stuck in its nose went viral. Campaigns soon followed, with activists often citing studies of the growing ocean plastics problem. Intense media interest in the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch – a floating, France-sized gyre of oceanic plastic – only heightened the concern.

But this well-intentioned campaign assumes that single-use plastics, such as straws and coffee stirrers, have much to do with ocean pollution. And that assumption is based on some highly dubious data. Activists and news media often claim that Americans use 500 million plastic straws per day, for example, which sounds awful. But the source of this figure turns out to be a survey conducted by a nine-year-old. Similarly, two Australian scientists estimate that there are up to 8.3 billion plastic straws scattered on global coastlines. Yet even if all those straws were suddenly washed into the sea, they’d account for about .03% of the 8 million metric tons of plastics estimated to enter the oceans in a given year.

In other words, skipping a plastic straw in your next Bahama Mama may feel conscientious, but it won’t make a dent in the garbage patch. So what will?

A recent survey by scientists affiliated with Ocean Cleanup, a group developing technologies to reduce ocean plastic, offers one answer. Using surface samples and aerial surveys, the group determined that at least 46% of the plastic in the garbage patch by weight comes from a single product: fishing nets. Other fishing gear makes up a good chunk of the rest.

«

OK, but .03% of 8m is 2,400 tonnes, which is a lot of plastic. As the article also makes clear, there are market mechanisms to identify abandoned nets, but they’re poorly implemented. That can be fixed too. Everyone wins, including the sea creatures.
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The great Apple keyboard cover-up • iFixit

Sam Lionheart:

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Here’s an inflammatory take for you: Apple’s new quieter keyboard is actually a silent scheme to fix their keyboard reliability issues. We’re in the middle of tearing down the newest MacBook Pro, but we’re too excited to hold this particular bit of news back: Apple has cocooned their butterfly switches in a thin, silicone barrier.

The 2018 MacBook Pro features a thin rubberized layer under its keycaps, covering the second-generation butterfly mechanism.

This flexible enclosure is quite obviously an ingress-proofing measure to cover up the mechanism from the daily onslaught of microscopic dust. Not—to our eyes—a silencing measure. In fact, Apple has a patent for this exact tech designed to “prevent and/or alleviate contaminant ingress.”

Here’s the really good part: I can tell you it’s there, but I can’t definitively prove it’s a reliability fix. After all, Apple told The Verge that “this new third-generation keyboard wasn’t designed to solve those [dust] issues.”

«

Two points on this:
• if it fixes the dust problem AND makes the keyboard quieter, then it’s absolutely what everyone wants. I look forward to someone doing noise-level tests. (Honestly – that’s the only way to know on the noise. And I’m sure someone will.) The dust reliability, we’ll find out.
• “wasn’t designed to solve those dust issues” can be read as “wasn’t designed to solve THOSE” (points at older models already affected) “dust issues.” In other words, this new fix won’t fix the old already-broken ones. It’s a lawyer’s get-out, but might be the slippery way around having to do a recall on all the past, affected, models.

Only question now is whether the new keyboard can be retrofitted into old models. But a lot of people – myself included – will be looking on this as a very positive sign.
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Worldwide PC shipments grew for first time in six years during 2Q 2018 • Gartner

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“PC shipment growth in the second quarter of 2018 was driven by demand in the business market, which was offset by declining shipments in the consumer segment,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. “In the consumer space, the fundamental market structure, due to changes on PC user behavior, still remains, and continues to impact market growth. Consumers are using their smartphones for even more daily tasks, such as checking social media, calendaring, banking and shopping, which is reducing the need for a consumer PC.

“In the business segment, PC momentum will weaken in two years when the replacement peak for Windows 10 passes. PC vendors should look for ways to maintain growth in the business market as the Windows 10 upgrade cycle tails off.”

With the completion of Lenovo’s joint venture with Fujitsu, three out of four PCs were shipped by the top five PC vendors in the second quarter of 2018. With the inclusion of Fujitsu’s PC shipments due to the joint venture (a formation of Joint Venture with Fujitsu), Lenovo was in a virtual tie with HP Inc. for the top spot in the second quarter of 2018 based on global PC shipments. All of the top five PC vendors experienced an increase in worldwide PC shipments in the quarter.

…In the US PC market, the industry returned to growth after six consecutive quarters of shipment declines. In the second quarter of 2018, US PC shipments totaled 14.5 million units, a 1.7% increase from the same period last year. HP Inc. continued to be the market leader in the US, but Dell closed the gap, as Dell’s US PC shipments increased 7.2%.

“In the US, business PC demand was particularly strong among the public sector as the second quarter is typically PC buying season among government and education buyers,” Ms. Kitagawa said. “Desk-based PC growth was attributed to continued high usage of desk-based PCs in the US public sectors. Mobile PCs grew in the US, but strong Chromebook demand in the education market adversely affected PC growth. Overall, Chromebooks grew 8% in the US, but Chromebooks are not included in the PC market statistics.”

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OK, it’s time to ask: if Chromebook shipments can be high enough to “affect” PC growth, why the hell aren’t they included in the stats, and perhaps broken out?
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

It was 30 years ago today. OK, yesterday. Photo by John Koetsier on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. “These guys are mostly European judging by their clothing labels and…[long pause] cigarettes.” I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The African Union headquarters hack and Australia’s 5G network • The Strategist

Danielle Cave:

»

In January 2018, France’s Le Monde newspaper published an investigation, based on multiple sources, which found that from January 2012 to January 2017 servers based inside the AU’s headquarters in Addis Ababa were transferring data between 12 midnight and 2  am—every single night—to unknown servers more than 8,000 kilometres away hosted in Shanghai. Following the discovery of what media referred to as ‘data theft’, it was also reported that microphones hidden in desks and walls were detected and removed during a sweep for bugs.

The Chinese government refuted Le Monde’s reporting. Chinese state media outlet CGTN (formerly CCTV) reported that China’s foreign ministry spokesperson called the Le Monde investigation ‘utterly groundless and ridiculous’. China’s ambassador to the AU said it was ‘ridiculous and preposterous’. The BBC also quoted the ambassador as saying that the investigation ‘is not good for the image of the newspaper itself’.

Other media outlets, including the Financial Times, confirmed the data theft in reports published after the Le Monde investigation. It’s also been reported on by think tanks and private consultancies from around the world.

One AU official told the Financial Times that there were ‘many issues with the building that are still being resolved with the Chinese. It’s not just cybersecurity’.

The Le Monde report also said that since the discovery of the data theft, ‘the AU has acquired its own servers and declined China’s offer to configure them’. Other media reports confirmed that servers and equipment were replaced and that following the incident ‘other enhanced security features have also been installed’…

…What seems to have been entirely missed in the media coverage at the time was the name of the company that served as the key ICT provider inside the AU’s headquarters.

It was Huawei.

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On Twitter, Cave says that Huawei “must answer some tough questions in relation to this incident… Huawei never discovered what appears to be one of the longest-running thefts of confidential government data that we know about.”
link to this extract

Lawmakers target Chinese security companies over spy fears • The Hill

Katie Bo Williams and Morgan Chalfant:

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Congress is weighing a ban on federal agencies using video surveillance equipment from two large Chinese companies, the latest sign of concerns about foreign espionage among lawmakers.

It’s part of a broader trend. Across the government, the U.S. is moving away from foreign state-owned tech companies to prevent cyber spying.

But one of the companies named in the proposed ban is pushing back. Hikvision argues that the legislation — written into the House version of the annual defense authorization bill — is a knee-jerk response to an anti-Chinese “Red Scare.”

“To my knowledge, and to my understanding, I’ve got a gut feeling that if we are not a Chinese company, this wouldn’t be an issue at all,” said Jeffrey He, president of Hikvision’s independent U.S. subsidiary, in an interview with The Hill.

“It’s very difficult to prove ourselves not guilty of providing back doors to Chinese government or any source.”

Indeed, unlike firms like ZTE or the Russian-owned Kaspersky, it’s a much more open question whether Hikvision products are pinging home to China.

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Rob Graham of Errata Security had a thread on this, concluding with the tweet: “BTW, when masscanning the Internet, Hikvision cameras are one of the more popular devices I find exposed to the Internet – because of the difficulty of getting video streams through firewalls, they are left exposed by default.”
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City street orientations around the world • Geoff Boeing

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By popular request, this is a quick follow-up to this post comparing the orientation of streets in 25 US cities using Python and OSMnx. Here are 25 more cities around the world:

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Compare them to the American cities, also shown in the post. “Regular” barely begins to describe it. OSMnx is an interesting package, building on OpenStreetMap.
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Several people are typing: the good, the bad, and the mansplaining of WikiTribune • Nieman Journalism Lab

Laura Hazard Owen:

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“I realized that I built Nupedia again — too top-down, too restrained, not trusting enough,” [Jimmy] Wales told me in a Slack DM last month. (Nupedia was the predecessor of Wikipedia, but it required a seven-step, editor-driven approval process for any updates to any of its content; in its three years of operations, only 25 fully approved articles were actually published.) “I should have known better, but hey, at least this time it only took me a year to realize it — last time it took two.”

“When community members read a complete story, signed by a journalist, they don’t feel comfortable to change or improve it,” Orit Kopel, cofounder of WikiTribune and CEO of the Jimmy Wales Foundation, told me in an email. “Unless they identified a typo or a meaningful error, they were pretty much deterred from touching it. With the new design, we wanted to deliberately project an incomplete work, raw material and initial stories which invite the readers to expand, improve, and lead them…We’re just in early days of the new design, but it seems to communicate our vision better and increase participation already.”

What does it look like when the community takes control? I’ve spent the past few weeks immersed in WikiTribune’s article sidebars and its public Slack, trying to get a better sense of how it runs. Doing so, I’ve seen both the promise and the pitfalls of WikiTribune’s model. On the one hand, it’s admirably transparent: If you’ve always wanted to peek inside a news organization’s Slack channel (sorry to reach peak Nieman Lab niche), here’s a chance, sort of. On the other hand, it’s as annoying as any public Slack — dominated by the same men (its 150-ish users are about 90% male), rife with nitpicking, aggravatingly earnest discussion.

Here are a few things I noticed when I poked around.

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The question I don’t quite understand is: why WikiTribune, when Wikipedia exists and can be updated just as quickly? Why not just start a Wikipedia article and focus on that? There are a zillion news sites out there, of varying quality; why add another, whose quality can’t be as good as the best?
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Medical AI safety: we have a problem • Luke Oakden-Rayner

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There are also systems where the line gets a bit blurry. An FDA approved system to detect atrial fibrillation in ECG halter monitors from Cardiologs highlights possible areas of concern to doctors, but the final judgement is on them. The concern here is that if this system is mostly accurate, are doctors really going to spend time painstakingly looking through hours of ECG traces? The experience from mammography is that computer advisers might even worsen patient outcomes, as unexpected as that may be. Here is a pertinent quote from Kohli and Jha, reflecting on decades of follow-up studies for systems that appeared to perform well in multi-reader testing:

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Not only did CAD increase the recalls without improving cancer detection, but, in some cases, even decreased sensitivity by missing some cancers, particularly non-calcified lesions. CAD could lull the novice reader into a false sense of security. Thus, CAD had both lower sensitivity and lower specificity, a non-redeeming quality for an imaging test.

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These sort of systems can clearly have unintended and unexpected consequences, but the differences in outcomes are often small enough that they take years to become apparent. This doesn’t mean we ignore these risks, just that the risk of disaster is fairly low.

Now we come to the tipping point.

A few months ago the FDA approved a new AI system by IDx, and it makes independent medical decisions. This system can operate in a family doctor’s office, analysing the photographs of patients’ retinas, and deciding whether that patient needs a referral to an ophthalmologist.

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This is where “move fast and break things” isn’t the right approach, he points out.
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Refusal of new passports for children raises DNA testing fears • Financial Times

Robert Wright:

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The Home Office has refused to renew the British passports of at least two children in recent weeks without proof of paternity that lawyers say can be provided only through a DNA test.

In both cases, the mothers of the children were not UK citizens, but their children had already been issued British passports on account of their British fathers.

The cases suggest the Home Office is taking a particularly hard line where the right to reside in the UK of a mother depends on the UK citizenship of their child.

The revelations came after the Home Office ordered an urgent review last week into why its immigration officers have been demanding DNA tests even though guidelines state they should not be compulsory.

Letters from HM Passport Office, a department of the Home Office, were sent to the two women on June 11 and July 2.

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Note that this is *renewal*, not instantiation, of the passport. Seems like the “hostile environment” towards immigrants hasn’t changed after all.
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Die Hard at 30: how it remains the quintessential American action movie • The Guardian

Scott Tobias:

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There are dozens of other examples of small, deftly planted details that will pay off later on. The first terrorist McClane kills has feet “smaller than [his] sister’s”, so he can’t take his shoes; he also happens to be the brother of Karl (Alexander Godunov), the vicious right-hand to the mastermind, Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), which raises the stakes for their inevitable mano a mano. And that famous shot of Hans falling to his death from an upper floor after McClane unclasps the watch from his wife’s wrist? That Rolex is accounted for, too, in the early going, when it’s revealed to have been a reward for Holly’s excellent performance for the company. The watch is a painful symbol of their separation, because she left New York to pursue her career ambition and he didn’t follow. Unclasping the watch means more than merely saving her from peril.

There’s not a wasted moment in Die Hard, not a moment when the audience feels confused about who’s who or what’s going on or where the characters are in relation to each other. It seems like simplest, most banal part of a making a movie, but it must be the hardest, because the vast majority of actioners, even good ones, don’t succeed in doing it. Stuart and De Souza’s script is a perfectly worked-out puzzle of a thousand tiny pieces: Die Hard has at least five major villains, unfolds over multiple planes of action, and fully works out Gruber’s elaborate scheme to steal $640m in negotiable bearer bonds (he’s no mere common thief, he’s an exceptional thief) and McClane’s improvised efforts to stop it. “I always enjoyed to make models when I was a boy,” says Gruber at one point, in the meticulously jumbled English of a native German. “The exactness, the attention to every conceivable detail.” This is the screenwriters showing a little swagger.

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Yippie-ki-yay, indeed. Yes, this Christmas-set film really was released on July 12 1988.
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Hunting the con queen of Hollywood • Hollywood Reporter

Scott Johnson, with a fascinating piece about someone who impersonates high-level Hollywood studio execs over the phone and has fooled a stack of people in the business:

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The imposter works by using a combination of deceit, charm and intimidation to manipulate her marks. The victims travel to Indonesia on a promise of work and, once there, are asked to hand over relatively modest amounts of money at a time, up to $3,000 in some cases, to help cover expenses for things like car travel, translation, tour guides and fixers. A designated Indonesian “moneyman” arrives on a moped to collect the funds. Needless to say, the promised reimbursements never arrive. Over time, these small sums add up. All told, hundreds of thousands of dollars have been collectively stolen this way. “Even if they’re bringing in $300,000 a year, that’s a huge amount of money in Indonesia,” says Kotsianas, who believes the same group is behind all of the cases.

At the center of the organization is the impersonator — a woman whose sophisti cated research, skill with accents and deft psychological and emotional manipulation have earned her the begrudging respect of her victims and trackers. K2 investigators believe the woman is the “talent” of an operation that, while relatively small, may have legs on at least three continents, including the U.S., Asia and Europe. The victims come from all over — the U.K., Europe and the U.S. primarily — and represent a wide swath of creative industries: hairstylists, stuntmen, military advisers, photographers and cinematographers.

The Hollywood Reporter has obtained two separate audio recordings of the woman’s voice, which has never been publicly disclosed. Both of the tapes date from an earlier incarnation of the scam, when the imposter was targeting makeup artists in the U.K. at the end of 2015 and early 2016. In one, she speaks in a distinct American twang, a flat, almost nasal intonation, berating her interlocutor (in this case, a victim’s agent) about a missed flight. “To be very blunt with you, when I travel internationally, I use this number,” she says, exasperated. “This number can be reached, it was registered 10 years ago. OK?”

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There’s audio as well, if you want to hear how she sounds.
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2017 emissions • International Energy Authority

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Global energy-related CO2 emissions grew by 1.4% in 2017, reaching a historic high of 32.5 gigatonnes, a resumption of growth after three years of global emissions remaining flat.

The increase in CO2 emissions, however, was not universal. While most major economies saw a rise, some others experienced declines, including the United States, United Kingdom, Mexico and Japan. The biggest decline came from the United States, mainly because of higher deployment of renewables.

Global energy-related CO2 rose by 1.4% in 2017, an increase of 460 million tonnes (Mt), and reached a historic high of 32.5 gigatonnes (Gt). Last year’s growth came after three years of flat emissions and contrasts with the sharp reduction needed to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change.

The increase in carbon emissions, equivalent to the emissions of 170 million additional cars, was the result of robust global economic growth of 3.7%, lower fossil-fuel prices and weaker energy efficiency efforts. These three factors contributed to pushing up global energy demand by 2.1% in 2017…

…The biggest decline came from the United States, where emissions dropped by 0.5%, or 25 Mt, to 4,810 Mt of CO2, marking the third consecutive year of decline. While coal-to-gas switching played a major role in reducing emissions in previous years, last year the drop was the result of higher renewables-based electricity generation and a decline in electricity demand. The share of renewables in electricity generation reached a record level of 17%, while the share of nuclear power held steady at 20%.

In the United Kingdom, emissions dropped by 3.8%, or 15 Mt, to 350 Mt of CO2, their lowest level on record back to 1960. A continued shift away from coal towards gas and renewables led to a 19% drop in coal demand. In Mexico, emissions dropped by 4%, driven by a decline in oil and coal use, efficiency gains in the power system, strong growth in renewables-based electricity generation and a slight increase in overall gas use. In Japan, emissions fell by 0.5% as increased electricity generation from renewables and nuclear generation displaced generation from fossil-fuels, especially oil.

Overall, Asian economies accounted for two-thirds of the global increase in carbon emissions. China’s economy grew nearly 7% last year but emissions increased by just 1.7% (or 150 Mt) thanks to continued renewables deployment and faster coal-to-gas switching. China’s carbon dioxide emissions in 2017 reached 9.1 Gt, almost 1% higher than their 2014 level. While China’s coal demand peaked in 2013, energy-related emissions have nonetheless increased because of rising oil and gas demand.

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Still going in the wrong direction – this is extra CO2 added to the atmosphere – but the slowdown is welcome. Would love to see renewables v output. (Thanks Pete Kleinschmidt for the link.)
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BBC news: now on https • Medium

James Donohue on the surprisingly complex task of getting the BBC News site onto SSL/TLS:

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As a public service, we have to ensure that BBC News is available to the widest possible audience, regardless of device, browser or use of assistive technology. We champion the ideal of graceful degradation of service as far as possible. But in a climate of anxiety around fake news, it’s vital that users are able to determine that articles have not been tampered with and that their browsing history is private to them. HTTPS achieves both of these as it makes it far more difficult for ISPs to track which articles and videos you’re looking at or selectively suppress individual pieces of content. We’ve seen cases outside the UK with some of our World Service sites where foreign governments have tried to do this.

Our plan for migrating the News website was relatively straightforward, built on extensive groundwork already done to move World Service sites (such as BBC Hindi) to HTTPS. Until recently, anyone accessing BBC News over HTTPS was redirected (‘downgraded’) to HTTP. This changed in March when we enabled access via both protocols and began an iterative process of chasing down a multitude of bugs, while we worked on updating links, feeds and metadata to reflect the new address. Colleagues in BBC bureaux around the world helped us detect access issues in different geographical areas early (we discovered, for example, that in India a government-mandated network block initially made the site totally inaccessible).

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The fact of a government blocking https makes one suspicious that it’s monitoring what people read.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Why did Bozoma Saint John leave Uber? A recent departure may be a clue. Photo by Fortune 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. It lost its ticket at the bus station, and is now going to the Continent. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How fracking companies use Facebook surveillance to ban protest • Motherboard

Nafeez Ahmed:

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Revelations about how Facebook data has been used to target individuals for political ends continue to emerge. But after the Cambridge Analytica scandal of earlier this year, the story has taken an unexpected twist: Facebook is being used by oil and gas companies to clamp-down on protest.

Three companies are currently seeking injunctions against protesters: British chemical giant INEOS, which has the largest number of shale gas drilling licenses in the UK; and small UK outfits UK Oil and Gas (UKOG), and Europa Oil and Gas.

Among the thousands of pages of documents submitted to British courts by these companies are hundreds of Facebook and Twitter posts from anti-fracking protesters and campaign groups, uncovered by Motherboard in partnership with investigative journalists at DeSmog UK. They show how fracking companies are using social media surveillance carried out by a private firm to strengthen their cases in court by discrediting activists using personal information to justify banning their protests.

The material was submitted to support the companies’ case that campaigners intended to illegally disrupt their activities or trespass on their land. The companies all stress they do not seek to restrict lawful forms of protest, but argue that activists should not be allowed to unduly disrupt their lawful business activity.

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Magic Leap is shipping its first headset this summer • The Verge

Adi Robertson:

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Magic Leap’s first “spatial computing” mixed reality headset, the Magic Leap One Creator Edition, is shipping this summer. The company announced the news in a live stream today, narrowing down a previous statement that it would ship this year. It’s following up on an announcement from this morning, when AT&T revealed that it would be the exclusive US carrier partner for Magic Leap. However, Magic Leap still hasn’t confirmed an exact date or a price, although the company has previously said it would cost at least as much as a high-end smartphone.

Magic Leap has been slowly pulling back the veil on its headset. On its stream today, it revealed a few specifications on the headset, like the fact that it will use an Nvidia Tegra X2 processor. The stream also showed an an actual experience: a tech demo known as Dodge, where users have to dodge or block shots from a rock-throwing golem.

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Ah, so not quite the world-changing experience that people have been building it up as. In other news, Magic Leap has had two billion dollars of venture capital.
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Uber executive Hornsey resigns in email to staff following discrimination probe • Reuters

Salvador Rodriguez:

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The allegations raise questions about chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi’s efforts to change the toxic culture of the firm after he took over in August last year from former CEO Travis Kalanick following a series of scandals.

Khosrowshahi praised [“chief people officer” Liane] Hornsey in an email to employees, which was seen by Reuters, as “incredibly talented, creative, and hard-working.” He gave no reason for her departure.

Hornsey acknowledged in a separate email to her team at Uber, also seen by Reuters, that her exit “comes a little out of the blue for some of you, but I have been thinking about this for a while.”

She also gave no reason for her resignation and has not responded to requests for comment about the investigation.

The allegations against her and Uber’s human resources department more broadly were made by an anonymous group that claims to be Uber employees of color, members of the group told Reuters.

They alleged Hornsey had used discriminatory language and made derogatory comments about Uber Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion Bernard Coleman, and had denigrated and threatened former Uber executive Bozoma Saint John, who left the company in June.

“This person ultimately was the reason behind (Saint John’s) departure from Uber,” the anonymous employees said in an email, referring to Hornsey.

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I’d been thinking that St John’s departure seemed remarkably soon after she had joined; she’s a woman who seemed to be on an upward path.
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Solar just hit a record low price in the US • Earther

Brian Kahn:

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The project in question is the Eagle Shadow Mountain Solar Farm, which will begin operating in 2021. The farm will have a generating capacity of 300 megawatts, enough to power about 210,000 American homes. But it’s the price part that’s eye-popping. It will operate at a flat rate of $23.76 per megawatt-hour over the course of a 25-year power purchasing agreement (the term for a contract between an electricity generator and utility who buys it). On the surface, that price may not mean a lot to you if you’re not an energy nerd, but it’s a huge deal.

“On their face, they’re less than a third the price of building a new coal or natural gas power plant,” Ramez Naam, an energy expert and lecturer at Singularity University, told Earther in an email. “In fact, building these plants is cheaper than just operating an existing coal or natural gas plant.”

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Even without federal subsidies, it’s cheaper than coal or gas plants. Nowadays the only problem is energy storage.
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Why is the BBC downplaying the Facebook Brexit scandal? • The Guardian

Jonathan Freedland:

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It’s now understood that Vote Leave may have broken electoral law, by violating campaign spending limits. It’s also known that Leave.EU misled MPs about its true connections with Russia: the group’s founder Arron Banks told a parliamentary inquiry he had had “two or three” meetings with the Russian ambassador to London – having long insisted his sole contact with the official was one “boozy lunch” – and on Sunday my Observer colleague, Carole Cadwalladr, revealed that Leave.EU in fact met Russian embassy officials as many as 11 times ahead of and just after the Brexit vote.

Now the BBC has not ignored any of this; indeed, it went first with a leak of the Electoral Commission’s draft findings about Vote Leave spending. But it has not given the story the kind of full-spectrum coverage that it does so well: leading every bulletin, dominating its discussion programmes and interviews, putting it top of the national agenda. It is careful to clock it, to ensure it’s covered, but it hasn’t given it the weight that only the BBC can generate.

This is not a rare occurrence. The phone hacking revelations of 2011 followed a similar pattern: the Guardian had plugged away for years, mainly ignored, until suddenly the story exploded. Windrush was similar: months of reports by the Guardian’s Amelia Gentleman, until a critical mass was reached and the BBC became fully engaged.

Why has that moment not yet come for this affair? Some will say that the story is too arcane, full of obscure stuff about algorithms and data that news editors fear will leave the average viewer and listener cold. That belief may indeed play a part, along with the lazy assumption in some newsrooms that this is a story to be filed under “tech” rather than “politics”, a niche concern rather than one central to our democratic life.

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Here’s the Guardian’s story on the £0.5m fine for Facebook – the largest that the UK Information Commissioner’s Office could enforce on a pre-GDPR offence. Were it to happen now, it could levy a £1.2bn fine.
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Does having the best camera phone matter? • The Wirecutter

Ben Keough:

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Whenever flashy new smartphones debut, manufacturers inevitably claim they’ve produced the best camera phone ever. Sharper! Faster! More accurate colors! Smoother bokeh! Tech sites compare the cameras endlessly, and benchmarks like DxOMark’s mobile reviews attempt to rank them in a controlled lab setting. It’s enough to give any smartphone owner an inferiority complex, but all the experts we interviewed (including one who helped design DxOMark’s test) agree that stressing over which flagship phone has the most impressive camera is a waste of time, because they’re all impressive.

Unless your phone is several years old, we don’t recommend upgrading just to get a better camera. But if you need to upgrade anyway, we think you should go with what’s familiar—switching platforms for the promise of a slightly better camera is not worth the hassle. And unless you’re actually printing your photos, most of the differences between phone cameras get ironed out in the process of sharing photos through messages or social media, which shrink and compress images to save data.

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Perhaps that’s part of why the Galaxy S9 isn’t selling well: it’s essentially just a better camera, and Samsung isn’t selling a story for those whose phones are two or three years old.
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Kuo lists expected Apple products for autumn • 9to5Mac

Zac Hall:

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Here’s a roundup of what Kuo predicts Apple will ship this fall:

• Per previous reports, three new iPhones includes an updated 5.8″ OLED model and a new 6.5″ OLED model, plus a new 6.1″ LCD model
• Updated iPad Pro models with Face ID and no Home button with an updated 12.9″ version and a seemingly new 11″ version
• Several Mac updates including chip upgrades for the MacBook, MacBook Pro, an iMac with “significant display-performance upgrades”, and finally the Mac mini
• A new low-price notebook that Kuo now believes may not be called MacBook Air
Apple Watch updates with larger displays as previously reported, Kuo now specifies 1.57″ and 1.78″ screens with enhanced heart rate detection
• Mass production for both AirPower and updated AirPods

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This is simply incredible. An updated Mac mini??
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What does the continued exodus of Apple Watch apps mean for smartwatches? • 777 Labs

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many folks want full phone capabilities in their smartwatch, much like folks wanted full desktop capabilities in smartphones, back in the day. The way we use smartphones today, dominated by snacking, ubiquitous info, and real-time connections to social networks took a long time to coalesce, and is quite different from how we use desktop computers (though tablets are starting to blur these distinctions and provide an interesting continuum of digital experiences).

We’re at an early stage with smartwatches and folks need to stop thinking of how they use smartphones and try to shove the smartphone experience into their watch. Designers need to take a fresh look at how a wrist-top haptic and interactive surface can provide value to users. You can get an idea by observing the phone-watch connection between Apple-branded apps on the iPhone and on the Apple Watch (though the flow can be a bit fragmented or sometimes stupidly asymmetrical). And I’ve mentioned the Nike experience, before.

While I don’t think all apps benefit from a Watch app, I do think that some brands that have left in the exodus could benefit. The challenge is to think differently, rather than just port the phone experience to the watch.

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Airbnb benefits local economies. But mainly in white neighborhoods, study finds • Washington Post

Tracy Jan:

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Airbnb frequently touts its economic impact in “diverse” neighborhoods, saying guests spend money locally and boost businesses in areas where tourism is not already prevalent.

But a new Purdue University study found that white neighborhoods – not their black or Latino counterparts – are the ones most likely to benefit from an influx of Airbnb guests.

The study found that users of the home sharing platform generally eat in the neighborhood restaurants near where they are staying. However the spillover effect does not hold true when 50% or more of a neighborhood’s residents are black or Hispanic.

“Airbnb has made repeated claims that it helps the local economy in black neighborhoods, especially in New York City,” said Mohammad Rahman, a professor at Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management who specializes in the digital economy and big data. “We do not find any evidence of that economic spillover effect in restaurant employment.”

Rahman and his team focused their initial research on the impact of Airbnb on restaurant employment growth in New York City, the most visited, and the most active Airbnb city, in the United States.

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Global warning: Nick Harkaway on Gnomon • Waterstones

Nick Harkaway’s novel Gnomon began in 2014 as a rumination on a surveillance society, but realityt is starting to outpace its author:

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there’s an outer ring of surveillance which has also emerged over the last few years, and which can do similar tricks: the ring of data. We leave a trail through the world, of Internet history and store cards and credit cards and Oyster cards. Your supermarket knows you’re worried about staying healthy because you buy vitamins; they know you’re trying to get pregnant because you’ve changed your purchase; that you’ve succeeded; that it’s a boy; that it’s a girl; that it’s twins. Or they know to a reasonable percentage of certainty, and their model of you changes with those assumptions so that you get offered different things. So that they can persuade you to buy things. So that they can, to some degree, control your choices.

So that you can be “ground honest” [the purpose of the panopticon] – or in this case, ground into buying a more expensive brand of formula milk. Or trainers. Or birth control. Whatever it is that you want, they know you want it – sometimes before you do.

The inner and outer layers of surveillance – the brain and the cloud – give away intimate secrets. They allow the state and the commercial sector to know things which, if someone were simply watching you with a long lens, you would consider grossly inappropriate and probably criminal.

And these things are in their infancy. They have barely begun to take hold. A decade ago we swam in a sea of chaotic data and our minds were opaque. The day after tomorrow we’ll be, effectively, in a transparent glass tank, and our minds will legible. Employers – already keen to watch workers in the workplace both physically and digitally – will begin to ask you to sit for direct assessments. Are you loyal, enthused, considering a move? Are you thinking of joining a union? Starting one? Are you a troublemaker? Are your values in line with the company’s? 

Before you say “that will never happen,” stop and understand that to a great extent it already does in many industries, just without the new technology to make it more straightforward.

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She cut her weekly trash down so much it fits in an unbelievably small jar • Washington Post

Victoria Adams Fogg:

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[Tippi] Thole and her son, Eames, are newly minted members of the Zero Waste movement, a worldwide group that aims to eliminate as much waste as possible. Zero Wasters avoid plastics and disposable products, bring their own containers when shopping, make things that most of us buy packaged and buy clothing and furniture only when necessary and only secondhand.

When Thole, a 41-year-old freelance graphic designer who lives near Montreal, examined her trash, she discovered that most of it was food packaging. Now she buys her edibles at farmers markets and bulk-food stores, and she belongs to a farm cooperative — all places that provide unpackaged food.

Cutting way back on trash doesn’t require time, she says, but you do have to be prepared. Thole has a shopping kit that includes cloth bags and glass jars to collect dried food, liquids, meats and cheeses. She uses a wine tote to keep the jars upright and prevent them from banging against each other. She keeps everything in a wicker basket, stored in the back of her car.

“By shopping for package-free food,” Thole says, “we’re able to eliminate this category of waste entirely. You can buy just about anything in bulk…

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Jemima Kiss, with whom I used to work at The Guardian, is trying to live #Plasticfree (ie, don’t buy plastic-packaged goods), which I guess is a step towards Zero Waste. It looks difficult, but only because plastic wrapping has become pervasive – even when unnecessary.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Take your seats: what happens when the semi-private becomes the very public? Photo by Matthew Hurst on Flickr.

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

Former Apple employee charged with theft of trade secrets related to autonomous car project • Mac Rumors

Juli Clover:

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Xiaolang Zhang was hired at Apple in December of 2015 to work on Project Titan, developing software and hardware for use in autonomous vehicles. Zhang specifically worked on Apple’s Compute Team, designing and testing circuit boards to analyze sensor data.

He was provided with “broad access to secure and confidential internal databases” due to his position, which contained trade secrets and intellectual property for the autonomous driving project that he ultimately ended up stealing.

In April 2018, Zhang took family leave from Apple following the birth of his child, and during that time, he visited China. Shortly after, he told his supervisor at Apple he was leaving the company and moving to China to work for XMotors, a Chinese startup that also focuses on autonomous vehicle technology.

Zhang’s supervisor felt that he had “been evasive” during the meeting, which led Apple’s New Product Security Team to begin an investigation, looking into Zhang’s historical network activity and analyzing his Apple devices, which were seized when he resigned.

Apple found that just prior to Zhang’s departure, his network activity had “increased exponentially” compared to the prior two years he had worked at Apple. He accessed content that included prototypes and prototype requirements, which the court documents specify as power requirements, low voltage requirements, battery system, and drivetrain suspension mounts.

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Arrested at the airport as he was about to leave for China. Neil Cybart has dug into the court filing, which shows there are 5,000 Apple employees who know about “Project Titan” (the self-driving vehicle project) and 2,700 who have access to the Project Titan database. Here’s the full court filing.

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iPhone crashing bug likely caused by code added to appease Chinese gov’t • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

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The iOS 11.4.1 update Apple released Monday was most notable for making it harder for law enforcement to access locked iPhones. On Tuesday, security researcher Patrick Wardle illuminated another fix. He said his fix addressed code Apple added likely to appease the Chinese government; this is the code that caused crashes on certain iDevices when users typed the word Taiwan or received messages containing a Taiwanese flag emoji.

“Though its impact was limited to a denial of service (NULL-pointer dereference), it made for an interesting case study of analyzing iOS code,” Wardle, a former hacker for the National Security Agency, wrote in a blog post. “And if Apple hadn’t tried to appease the Chinese government in the first place, there would be no bug!”

Wardle, who is now a macOS and iOS security expert at Digital Security, said he was perplexed when a friend first reported her fully patched, non-jailbroken device crashed every time she typed Taiwan or received a message with a Taiwanese flag. He had no trouble reproducing the remotely triggerable bug, which crashed any iOS application that processed remote messages, including iMessage, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. Wardle did, however, find that only devices with certain region-specific configurations were affected.

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Exclusive: Apple to deploy 1Password to all 123,000 employees, acquisition talks underway • BGR

Jonathan Geller:

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According to our source, after many months of planning, Apple plans to deploy 1Password internally to all 123,000 employees. This includes not just employees in Cupertino, but extends all the way to retail, too. Furthermore, the company is said to have carved out a deal that includes family plans, giving up to 5 family members of each employee a free license for 1Password. With more and more emphasis on security in general, and especially at Apple, there are a number of reasons this deal makes sense. We’re told that 100 Apple employees will start using 1Password through this initiative starting this week, with the full 123,000+ users expected to be activated within the next one to two months.

Apple had very specific requirements for this deal, code-named B2, all around, as you would expect. Some of these include a maximum 4-hour response time (SLA) through customer support for Apple employees, translations of all 1Password support pages into all major international languages, and plenty more. In fact, since AgileBits wasn’t even prepared for this kind of influx of users, the company turned to a third-party call management service that will help to provide phone support in order to fulfill the contractual requirements of the deal.

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Quite a scoop for Geller (usual caveats apply). If Apple is buying Agilebits, it will mean a really strong password solution. Wonder what it will mean for Troy Hunt’s HaveIBeenPwned site, which has a partnership (API) connection with 1Password.
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We are all public figures now • Ella Dawson

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I don’t think there is any such thing as a “private person” anymore. The vast majority of us constantly groom our internet presence, choosing the right filter on Instagram for our brunch and taking polls of our friends about our next Facebook profile picture. We don’t think about this as a public act when we have only 400 connections on LinkedIn or 3,000 followers on Tumblr. No one imagines the Daily Mail write-up or the Jezebel headline. We actively create our public selves, every day, one social media post at a time. Little kids dream of becoming famous YouTubers the same way I wanted to be a published author when I was twelve.

But there are also those of us who don’t choose this. We keep our accounts locked, our Instagram profile set to “friends only.” Maybe we learned a lesson when a post took off and left the safe haven of our community, picked apart in a horrifying display of context collapse. Maybe we are hiding from something: a stalker, an abusive ex, our family members who don’t know our true queer identity. To some of us, privacy is as vital as oxygen. Without it we are exposed—butterflies with our wings pinned to the corkboard, our patterns scrutinized under a magnifying glass. For what? For entertainment? For someone else’s mid-workday escapism? For a starring role in someone else’s bastardized rom com?

A woman boarded a plane in New York and stepped off that plane in Dallas. She chatted with a stranger, showed him some family photos, brushed his elbow with her own. She wore a baseball cap over her face and followed him back on Instagram. At no point did she agree to participate in the story Rosey Blair was telling. After the fact, when the hunt began and the woman took no part in encouraging it the way Holden did, Blair tweeted a video in which she drawled, “We don’t have the gal’s permish yet, not yet y’all, but I’m sure you guys are sneaky, you guys might…”

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Stop live-tweeting strangers flirting • The Atlantic

Taylor Lorenz:

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Everyone loves a rom-com, though, especially one they can follow along live on Twitter. But real life isn’t like the movies, and while the public has an endless thirst for fairy-tale romances, the type of love-at-first-sight-sweep-you-off-your-feet romance perpetuated by most rom-coms is unrealistic, false, and destructive to forming healthy relationships. Real life romance and heartbreak can rarely be captured in 140 (or 280) characters.

The real-life people involved in these threads also never agreed to star in an epic love story. Projecting this myth onto unsuspecting couples, the way that Blair and Hardaway did, is cruel and unfair, especially because, even though they could overhear the conversation, as a third party they can’t fully understand what was actually occurring between Holden and Helen.

What sounds like romantic banter to an eavesdropper could be a nightmare for one or both of the people involved. Blair repeatedly implies in her thread that Helen is flirting with Holden, but was she? Who is to say this woman wasn’t simply politely entertaining the man next to her for fear of being rude? Or perhaps she has a partner at home. She should be allowed to casually flirt or make a new friend without people on the internet suggesting that she had sex with a stranger in a plane bathroom.

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Put that way, it’s a horrendous invasion of privacy – or what should be a limited expectation of some privacy.
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YouTube to crack down on fake news, backing ‘authoritative’ sources • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

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YouTube is investing $25m (£18.8m) in journalism on its platform, focusing on helping news organisations produce online videos and changing its site to better support trusted news providers.

As well as the investment, which will be partly used to fund a working group to spearhead news product features, the company is changing how its site works to “make authoritative sources readily accessible”.

The service, owned by Google, will heavily promote videos from vetted news sources on the site’s Top News and Breaking News sections “to make it easier to find quality news”, and create new features – initially only in the US – to help distribute local news.

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This isn’t going to make any difference as long as its recommendation algorithm is built around maximising the time people spend on the site: it will still send people to extreme junk.
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Apple combines machine learning and Siri teams under Giannandrea • TechCrunch

Matthew Panzarino:

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Apple is creating a new AI/ML team that brings together its Core ML and Siri teams under one leader in John Giannandrea.

Apple confirmed this morning that the combined Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning team, which houses Siri, will be led by the recent hire, who came to Apple this year after an eight-year stint at Google, where he led the Machine Intelligence, Research and Search teams. Before that he founded Metaweb Technologies and Tellme.

The internal structures of the Siri and Core ML teams will remain the same, but they will now answer to Giannandrea. Apple’s internal structure means that the teams will likely remain integrated across the org as they’re wedded to various projects, including developer tools, mapping, Core OS and more. ML is everywhere, basically.

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The real surprise is more that this wasn’t done sooner, but maybe they needed him to find his way around.
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Microsoft’s $399 Surface Go aims to stand out from iPads or Chromebooks • The Verge

Tom Warren:

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Microsoft’s new Surface Go is finally official after months of rumors and leaks. It’s an inexpensive 10-inch tablet designed to be a smaller and less powerful version of the Surface Pro. While the exterior of the Surface Go makes it look like a baby Surface Pro, Microsoft has changed a lot inside. The base model is priced at $399, but it only ships with 4GB of RAM, 64GB of slower eMMC storage, and a less powerful Intel Pentium Gold processor. Prices quickly jump to over $600 after adding the all important Type Cover, more RAM, a faster SSD, and other Surface add-ons. With these specs and price points in mind, who exactly is the Surface Go for?

Microsoft isn’t targeting its Surface Go at any particular customer from what I can tell. It’s not an iPad killer, it’s not going directly after Chromebooks, and it’s not really challenging $400 Windows laptops…

…It’s natural to compare the Surface Go to Apple’s iPad, but the two are not like-for-like competitors. Apple’s base model iPad is priced at $329. If you only want a pure tablet, the Surface Go won’t offer the best experience as it doesn’t have the 1.3 million apps that are designed and optimized for the iPad. Let’s face it: if you’re going to buy just a tablet, the iPad is the only one worth buying right now.

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OK, that’s one way of “standing out from” iPads and Chromebooks. It’s a good enough product for the price, but who, truly, is it for? Sadly, there’s no outside comment (from, say, analysts who watch the marketplace) so you’ll just have to guess.
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The unstoppable TI-84 Plus: how an outdated calculator still holds a monopoly on classrooms • The Washington Post

Matt McFarland:

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In the ruthlessly competitive world of technology, where companies rush the latest gadget to market and slash prices to stay competitive, the TI-84 Plus is an anomaly.

Texas Instruments released the graphing calculator in 2004, and continues to sell it today. The base model still has 480 kilobytes of ROM and 24 kilobytes of RAM. Its black-and-white screen remains 96×64 pixels. For 10 years its MSRP has been $150, but depending on the retailer, today it generally sells for between $90 and $120. The only changes have come in software updates.

Amazon calls the TI-84 Plus a No. 1 best-seller. Texas Instruments says that this year the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition has become its best-selling calculator, and that the TI-84 is its most popular family of calculators. The TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition is slightly more expensive than the base model, has a color screen, rechargeable battery and significantly more memory.

Even with a 320×240 pixel screen, 128 kilobytes RAM and 4 megabytes ROM, overall the TI-84 line of calculators appears unnecessarily expensive given the components. Apple — which is notorious for high margins on its products — sells an iPod touch for $199 that comes with 16 gigabytes of memory and a four-inch screen with a resolution of 1136-by-640 pixels. That’s a dramatically better piece of hardware with a less significant gap in price.

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Wonderful. And yes, it’s still in use in English schools too.
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Facebook Dating will fail! • Medium

Amit Shafrir:

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Facebook is a media company whose main business model is generating revenue via ads. The best way to monetize a successful dating service is via direct payment from users. Subscriptions, one-off payments, etc.

Monetization is simply not in Facebook’s DNA. It never has been, and they have no experience in it.
Successfully monetizing a dating service is mostly about understanding human psychology. Knowing WHAT to offer to WHOM and at WHAT time. There is an art and a science to successful monetization.

My sense is that Facebook is not treating this opportunity with the gravitas that its potential merits. It is limiting itself to a small subset of its vast userbase of over 2 billion, and to a subset of potential functionality.

It is not clear why Facebook is not seeing this for the opportunity it is. Here’s a small back of the envelope calculation: If Facebook gets just 10% of its user base, that is, 200 million users to use this service, and if it is able to extract an ARPU of $2/month (doable in my opinion) — that would generate $4.8bn of incremental revenues. Given that Facebook would not have to incur any costs of acquisition, it’s likely that a clear majority of this revenue would be translated into EBITDA-say 80%=$3.84bn. With a current multiple of 29, that adds $111bn to its market cap of $571bn, an increase of 20%!

Unless something radically changes, I predict that Facebook’s efforts on the dating front will fail, and that is saddening. Done right, FBDate could be the ultimate dating service out there.

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He’s right, it could be huge; but the disconnect between the business models is, as he says, big.
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Digital Tulips? Returns to investors in ICOs • SSRN

Hugo Benedetti and Leonard Kostovetsky at Boston College’s School of Management:

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We created a dataset on 4,003 executed and planned ICOs, which raised a total of $12bn in capital, nearly all since January 2017. We find evidence of significant ICO underpricing, with average returns of 179% from the ICO price to the first day’s opening market price, over a holding period that averages just 16 days. Even after imputing returns of -100% to ICOs that don’t list their tokens within 60 days and adjusting for the returns of the asset class, the representative ICO investor earns 82%. After trading begins, tokens continue to appreciate in price, generating average buy-and-hold abnormal returns of 48% in the first 30 trading days. We also study the determinants of ICO underpricing and relate cryptocurrency prices to Twitter followers and activity. While our results could be an indication of bubbles, they are also consistent with high compensation for risk for investing in unproven pre-revenue platforms through unregulated offerings.

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It’s a short paper, and finds 56% of ICOs are dead as a doornail just 120 days after they start. So where has the $6bn that people put into those ones gone, exactly? Logically, it must be in the hands of those who saw the average 82% returns; and the zero (or -100%) returns must be in the hands of a much bigger group.

Even so, 82%? That’s crazy. There is a get-rich-quick element to cryptocurrencies, pretty much equally matched by a get-poor-quick one. (Read the full paper.)
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