What if metal detectors could work by using Wi-Fi? Photo by Evgeniy Isaev on Flickr.

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

Facebook’s failure in Myanmar is the work of a blundering toddler • The Guardian

Olivia Solon:

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When Facebook invited journalists for a phone briefing on Tuesday evening to talk about its progress in tackling hate speech in Myanmar, it seemed like a proactive, well-intentioned move from a company that is typically fighting PR fires on several fronts.

But the publication of a bombshell Reuters investigation on Wednesday morning suggested otherwise: the press briefing was an ass-covering exercise.

This is the latest in a series of strategic mishaps as the social network blunders its way through the world like a giant, uncoordinated toddler that repeatedly soils its diaper and then wonders where the stench is coming from. It enters markets with wide-eyed innocence and a mission to “build [and monetise] communities”, but ends up tripping over democracies and landing in a pile of ethnic cleansing. Oopsie!

Human rights groups and researchers have been warning Facebook that its platform was being used to spread misinformation and promote hatred of Muslims, particularly the Rohingya, since 2013. As its user base exploded to 18 million, so too did hate speech, but the company was slow to react and earlier this year found its platform accused by a UN investigator of fuelling anti-Muslim violence.

The Australian journalist and researcher Aela Callan warned Facebook about the spread of anti-Rohingya posts on the platform in November 2013. She met with the company’s most senior communications and policy executive, Elliott Schrage. He referred her to staff at Internet.org, the company’s effort to connect the developing world, and a couple of Facebook employees who dealt with civil society groups. “He didn’t connect me to anyone inside Facebook who could deal with the actual problem,” she told Reuters.

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But was there anyone there who could deal with the actual problem? The most effective way would have been to turn it off.
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ARM says its next processors will outperform Intel laptop chips • Engadget

Jon Fingas:

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While ARM already believes that its recently unveiled Cortex-A76 is competitive with Intel’s 2.6GHz Core i5-7300U, it expects its 2019 “Deimos” and 2020 “Hercules” designs to clearly outperform that CPU. You would get “laptop-class” speed from a more efficient mobile chip, according to the company.

Of course, it’s worth taking ARM’s braggadocio with a grain of salt. The figures don’t include Intel’s comparable 8th-generation Core chips that pack twice as many cores and could easily shrink the performance gap. This is also based on one synthetic, integer-oriented benchmark (SPEC CINT2006), not a broader suite of tests that would measure floating point math and other performance traits. ARM is putting its best foot forward rather than offering definitive proof.

Even so, it’s telling that ARM might be in the ballpark.

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The argument is strong apart from the bit where it suggests PC OEMs would switch to ARM from Intel. I just don’t think it would happen. Fine, Windows could manage it. Could third-party apps? Nope. Only Apple might be able to strongarm enough developers to do that, or run an emulator able to do it.
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How Snap is becoming Twitter • The Information

Tom Dotan:

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A few years ago, when Snap was a fast-growing, hot commodity venerated by venture capitalists, some would occasionally ask whether it would end up like Twitter—a niche platform with dedicated users but without the broad scale of, say, Facebook.

It’s now becoming clear the answer is yes.

As the chart above shows, Snap’s user growth has slowed sharply since the third quarter of last year to around 9 to 10% year on year from as high as 65% just two years ago. The slower growth rate puts Snap right in line with Twitter’s recent trends. Twitter, of course, is another once-hot company that started four years before Snap and whose user growth slowed sharply starting around 2014.

Of course, all companies’ growth rate slows eventually, once they reach a certain size. But Snap didn’t even reach 200 million daily active users—it finished the June quarter with 188 million. Twitter doesn’t reveal how many daily active users it has (although it does disclose its quarterly DAU growth rate). A person with knowledge of Twitter’s finances say it has far fewer DAUs than Snap. In comparison, Facebook has 1.4 billion DAUs and is still growing that number at more than 10% year over year.

The question raised by Snap’s user growth slowdown is to what extent Snap’s ad revenue growth will also echo Twitter’s. The older company’s advertising revenue surged for a couple of years after user growth weakened, before slowing sharply in 2016—and falling in 2017. (It picked up in the first half of this year, however, rising 22%.)

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Does everything have to be as big as Facebook, though? Can’t they just be quietly successful with hundreds of millions of users?
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Google employees protest secret work on censored search engine for China • The New York Times

Kate Conger and Daisuke Wakabayashi:

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Hundreds of Google employees, upset at the company’s decision to secretly build a censored version of its search engine for China, have signed a letter demanding more transparency to understand the ethical consequences of their work.

In the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times, employees wrote that the project and Google’s apparent willingness to abide by China’s censorship requirements “raise urgent moral and ethical issues.” They added, “Currently we do not have the information required to make ethically-informed decisions about our work, our projects, and our employment.”

The letter is circulating on Google’s internal communication systems and is signed by about 1,000 employees, according to two people familiar with the document, who were not authorized to speak publicly.

The protest presents another obstacle for Google’s potential return to China eight years after the company publicly withdrew from the country in protest of censorship and government hacking. China has the world’s largest internet audience but has frustrated American tech giants with content restrictions or outright blockages of services including Facebook and Instagram.

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Google China censorship project named after co-founder Sergey Brin’s luxury yacht? • Ryan Gallagher

Gallagher, who writes at The Intercept, with some “cutting-room details” from his other stories on Google’s China project; it turns out that Sergey Brin has a 240ft, $80m yacht named “Dragonfly” – the same as the China project:

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After Google pulled its search engine out of China in 2010, Brin said of the Chinese government: “In some aspects of their policy, particularly with respect to censorship, with respect to surveillance of dissidents, I see the same earmarks of totalitarianism, and I find that personally quite troubling.”

It’s clear Brin was at the time genuinely uncomfortable with the censorship – he didn’t just say what he did for public relations reasons. I have heard this from several people inside the company who spent years working with him. He took a principled stand and had arguments with colleagues over the issue.

In recent years, Brin has taken a more hands-off role at Google. Since 2015, CEO Sundar Pichai has taken the helm, and he has steered the company’s policy on China. But Brin still serves on Google’s board of directors, and would surely have been briefed on the search engine plans, given their importance for Google both politically and strategically. So did Brin change his mind about the censorship? Was he simply outvoted by his colleagues on the issue?

More to the point at hand, why was the Chinese censorship project given the same name as Brin’s yacht? Is it possible somebody inside Google is trying to troll Brin, knowing that he has in the past spoken out against the Chinese government censorship? Or was Brin himself involved in giving the project this name, indicating that he has changed his views?

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I’d suspect it’s a form of trolling; that it’s people trying to annoy Brin, for whatever reason.
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A group of engineers say they’ve created a way to detect bombs and guns using basic Wi-Fi • Gizmodo

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The researchers’ system uses channel state information (CSI) from run-of-the-mill Wi-Fi. It can first identify whether there are dangerous objects in baggage without having to physically rifle through it. It then determines what the material is and what the risk level is. The researchers tested the detection system using 15 different objects across three categories—metal, liquid, and non-dangerous—as well as with six bags and boxes across three categories—backpack or handbag, cardboard box, and a thick plastic bag.

The findings were pretty impressive. According to the researchers, their system is 99% accurate when it comes to identifying dangerous and non-dangerous objects. It is 97% accurate when determining whether the dangerous object is metal or liquid, the study says. When it comes to detecting suspicious objects in various bags, the system was over 95% accurate.

The researchers state in the paper that their detection system only needs a wifi device with two to three antennas, and can run on existing networks. “In large public areas, it’s hard to set up expensive screening infrastructure like what’s in airports,” Chen said. “Manpower is always needed to check bags, and we wanted to develop a complementary method to try to reduce manpower.”

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Reading the paper, it seems a bit optimistic: fine for static things, but once you get to an airport where everyone’s moving around, how will you be sure what you’re monitoring? It would likely need people to walk through a specific space to be assessed. Rather like a doorway..?
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From laboratory in far west, China’s surveillance state spreads quietly • Reuters

Cate Cadell:

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Filip Liu, a 31-year-old software developer from Beijing, was traveling in the far western Chinese region of Xinjiang when he was pulled to one side by police as he got off a bus.

The officers took Liu’s iPhone, hooked it up to a handheld device that looked like a laptop and told him they were “checking his phone for illegal information”.

Liu’s experience in Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital, is not uncommon in a region that has been wracked by separatist violence and a crackdown by security forces.

But such surveillance technologies, tested out in the laboratory of Xinjiang, are now quietly spreading across China.

Government procurement documents collected by Reuters and rare insights from officials show the technology Liu encountered in Xinjiang is encroaching into cities like Shanghai and Beijing.

Police stations in almost every province have sought to buy the data-extraction devices for smartphones since the beginning of 2016, coinciding with a sharp rise in spending on internal security and a crackdown on dissent, the data show.

The documents provide a rare glimpse into the numbers behind China’s push to arm security forces with high-tech monitoring tools as the government clamps down on dissent…

…These sorts of scanners are used in countries like the United States but they remain contentious and security forces need to go through a lengthy legal process to be able to forcibly break into a suspect’s phone.

In China, while a number of firms say they have the ability to crack many phones, police are generally able to get users to hand over their passwords, experts say.

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It’s very intrusive, but of course there’s no way for people to protest effectively. It’s claimed that it can break into iPhones – which of course you can if you get the passcode.
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The truth sometimes hurts • Scientific American Blog Network

Kate Marvel on the problem of being a scientist who tries to communicate with the public:

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every time I talk about the uncertainties inherent in climate projections, I feel attacked from all sides of the climate mitigation debate. I admit that in the current landscape, any expression of uncertainty is immediately weaponized by those who want to delay climate action.

Still, I’m a scientist, and I love to think about things I don’t understand. Being honest means acknowledging we don’t know everything. It also means being open about the problems of science itself, from a broken incentive system to the pervasive racial and sexual harassment that drives out brilliant minds. I struggle with how to talk about these things in a world where merchants of doubt will find a way to convert my science into their product.

I suspect this piece will be shared by some of those bad-faith actors. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to construct an un-twistable argument. SCIENTIST SUPPRESSES INCONVENIENT RESULTS, they’ll say. CENSORSHIP! GROUPTHINK! This is, of course, the opposite of what I want to do. All I can ask is that if people insist on spreading false rumors about me, they also note that I have an evil twin, used to be an astronaut, and once killed a man in a bar fight. 

All I know is this: science communication is hard. There are no institutional rewards for doing it. Almost no one gets promoted for talking to the public. But we rely on scientists to choose to talk about their work, and to deal with the sometimes-overwhelming consequences of speaking in public. No other industry does this.  McDonalds does not force their cooks to engage in Hamburger Communication; they hire highly paid PR professionals instead.

So I want to approach this with something the stereotypical scientist is not known for: humility. Please don’t just tell us to be honest, help us to understand how to be transparent in an opaque world. 

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Twitter company email addresses why it’s #BreakingMyTwitter • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez has really had it with Twitter:

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The company’s email also says it hopes to eventually learn “why people hire 3rd party clients over our own apps.”

Its own apps?

Oh, you mean like TweetDeck, the app Twitter acquired then shut down on Android, iPhone and Windows? The one it generally acted like it forgot it owned? Or maybe you mean Twitter for Mac (previously Tweetie, before its acquisition), the app it shut down this year, telling Mac users to just use the web instead? Or maybe you mean the nearly full slate of TV apps that Twitter decided no longer needed to exist?

And Twitter wonders why users don’t want to use its own clients?

Perhaps, users want a consistent experience – one that doesn’t involve a million inconsequential product changes like turning stars to hearts or changing the character counter to a circle. Maybe they appreciate the fact that the third parties seem to understand what Twitter is better than Twitter itself does: Twitter has always been about a real-time stream of information. It’s not meant to be another Facebook-style algorithmic News Feed. The third-party clients respect that. Twitter does not.

Yesterday, the makers of Twitterific spoke to the API changes, noting that its app would no longer be able to stream tweets, send native push notifications, or be able to update its Today view, and that new tweets and DMs will be delayed.

It recommended users download Twitter’s official mobile app for notifications going forward.

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This is stupid. Twitter wants to know why people don’t use its app? Because, as everyone keeps saying, they prefer the experience over a web browser – which is not an app experience. It can never ever be. Web apps aren’t apps. Twitter needs to open up its API and figure it out. Show us ads, whatever. The phrase “user-hostile” is appropriate here. Convenient for Twitter; bad for us.
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SEO is back. Thank God • NYMag

Brian Feldman on how Facebook’s shift away from the News Feed for pushing content (“social-optimised” content) means we’re back to the good old days of SEO (search engine optimisation of links):

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The problem with social-optimized content is that its overt, eerie familiarity drapes a kind of lowest-common-denominator cynicism across the internet. Social media tends to favor positive sentiment over negative, and exaggeration over subtlety. When a writer claims to be “scrEAMING” at the newest Marvel trailer in the headline, are they saying that because they really are, or because they want the reader to think that they are so that the reader will share on Facebook? It’s not a crime to write an enthusiastic headline, but when every headline you see is yelling at you in one way or another — and making outsized claims about the emotional state of its author or readers — it becomes difficult to trust the claimed sentiments of writers. At the very least, it’s extremely annoying.

SEO content, on the other hand, dispenses with the emotional in favor of the mechanical. It can be stilted and awkward — but it’s more honest and transparent. When a writer pads their article for the trailer of the newest Marvel movie with search keywords — data like the cast and crew and opening date — they’re optimizing for the Google robots. But they’re also providing genuinely useful information. Social content was about manipulating people into clicking, sharing, and posting. SEO is about manipulating robots into treating your content as the best example of sought-after information.

SEO is far from a perfect assignment editor for the web. Scammers and charlatans have been trying to abuse it for years, and it can create spectacles as ghoulish and cynical as social-optimized posts when news happens. A particularly gross instance happened in the hours after news of Anthony Bourdain’s suicide broke, when Newsweek pumped out individual Google-optimized posts about each of his family members and former partners. Tasteless? Absolutely. But it is also fulfilling a direct reader request with dispassionate information instead of hyperbole. The mechanics of SEO are clear, far more than the mechanics of human emotions.

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Study shows kids can be swayed by peer pressure from robots • BGR

Andy Meek:

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Robots are coming to take our jobs — and trick our gullible children.

The conventional wisdom has long been afraid of the first half of that sentence, and now a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics speaks to the second half. The study paired a group of kids with cute, humanoid robots who constantly gave an incorrect answer to a simple test, which the led the kids to quite often — well, follow the robots’ incorrect lead.

According to an abstract of the study, “People are known to change their behavior and decisions to conform to others, even for obviously incorrect facts. Because of recent developments in artificial intelligence and robotics, robots are increasingly found in human environments, and there, they form a novel social presence. It is as yet unclear whether and to what extent these social robots are able to exert pressure similar to human peers.”

The testers, however, used a group of children ages 7 to 9 and found that they generally conform to the robots in the study. “This raises opportunities as well as concerns for the use of social robots with young and vulnerable cross-sections of society; although conforming can be beneficial, the potential for misuse and the potential impact of erroneous performance cannot be ignored.”

To be sure, you can argue about how much value to ascribe to this, since kids of a certain age will to a degree go along with anyone who’s older than them. Maybe that same thought holds true when it comes to kids and our robot overlords.

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People are the same when computers suggest things too. They’ll go along with an answer from a calculator when they’ve entered bad information in a way they might not on paper.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: The game ‘Fortnite’ was wrongly spelt ‘Fortnight’ yesterday.

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.

Free Twitter’s API, more like: changes on Thursday will crimp third-party apps. Photo by Howard Lake on Flickr.

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

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says in an interview he’s rethinking the core of how Twitter works • The Washington Post

Tony Romm and Elizabeth Dwoskin:

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Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey said he is rethinking core parts of the social media platform so it doesn’t enable the spread of hate speech, harassment and false news, including conspiracy theories shared by prominent users like Alex Jones and Infowars.

In an interview with The Washington Post on Wednesday, Dorsey said he was experimenting with features that would promote alternative viewpoints in Twitter’s timeline to address misinformation and reduce “echo chambers.” He also expressed openness to labeling bots — automated accounts that sometimes pose as human users — and redesigning key elements of the social network, including the “like” button and the way Twitter displays users’ follower counts.

“The most important thing that we can do is we look at the incentives that we’re building into our product,” Dorsey said. “Because they do express a point of view of what we want people to do — and I don’t think they are correct anymore.”

Dorsey’s openness to broad changes shows how Silicon Valley leaders are increasingly reexamining the most fundamental aspects of the technologies that have made these companies so powerful and profitable…

…Twitter’s new policies are being tested at the highest level — including by President Trump, whose tweets are a direct challenge. On Tuesday, Trump called former aide Omarosa Manigault Newman, who recently published a tell-all about her time at the White House, a “dog.” He also attacked Harley-Davidson on Sunday for moving jobs overseas — a move that precipitated a 2% drop in the company’s stock price.

Dorsey stuck to his long-held view that an exception generally would be granted to Trump because his comments are newsworthy and give users crucial insights as to how “global leaders think and treat the people around them.”

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The acid test would be if Trump’s tweets got some sort of downrating for being untrue, but that won’t happen. Again, Mark Zuckerberg’s comment that Twitter is “the clown car that drove into a gold mine” remains true.
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Tweetbot removes timeline streaming, activity and stats tab, and push notifications for some features ahead of Twitter changes • Mac Rumors

Juli Clover:

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Ahead of upcoming Twitter changes set to be implemented tomorrow [Thursday], Tapbots has released an updated version of its Tweetbot app for iOS devices, removing several features that have been present in the app for years.

Timeline streaming over Wi-Fi has been disabled, which means Twitter timelines will refresh every one to two minutes instead of as new tweets come in. We’ve been using the Tweetbot for iOS app in a beta capacity with these changes implemented, and while it’s not a huge change, the delay is noticeable.

Push notifications for Mentions and Direct Messages are also delayed by a few minutes, and push notifications for likes, retweets, follows, and quotes have been disabled. Tapbots says it is, however, investigating re-adding some of these push notification options in the future.

The Activity and Stats tabs have been removed from the app, and because the Apple Watch app was heavily dependent on Activity data, it too has been eliminated.

Tapbots says that it is sorry that the changes had to be made, but Twitter has decided to eliminate certain features provided to third-party apps without offering alternatives.

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This is utterly crap on Twitter’s part. The product grew because of third-party apps and now it’s killing them. Stupid, like so many of its decisions down the years.
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Twitter suspends Alex Jones and Infowars for seven days • The New York Times

Cecilia Kang and Kate Conger:

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Twitter on Tuesday suspended the account of the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones for a week after he tweeted a link to a video calling for supporters to get their “battle rifles” ready against media and others, in a violation of the company’s rules against inciting violence.

The social media company followed up on Wednesday by also suspending the account for Infowars, the media website founded by Mr. Jones, for posting the same video.

The twin actions effectively prevent Mr. Jones and Infowars from tweeting or retweeting from their Twitter accounts for seven days, though they will be able to browse the service.

The moves were Twitter’s harshest against Mr. Jones and Infowars after other tech companies took steps last week to ban them from their platforms. The removals began when Apple announced it would purge videos and other content by Mr. Jones and Infowars because of hate speech, followed by Facebook, YouTube and then Spotify. Twitter was the sole holdout among the major tech companies in not taking down content from Infowars and Mr. Jones, who has called the Sandy Hook shooting a hoax conducted by crisis actors.

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Clever move by Twitter. In effect, it was waiting for Jones to make the slightest wrong move, and he fell straight into the trap. The week’s suspension isn’t quite congruent for the Jones account and the Infowars account (by a few hours, the latter is in jail longer). It’s going to be harder and harder for him not to all into Twitter jail repeatedly, and eventually get banned. And so Twitter wins, without having to go to war.
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Italy bridge was known to be in trouble long before collapse • The New York Times

Gaia Pianigiani, Elisabetta Povoledo and Richard Pérez-Peña:

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As deaths from the bridge failure in Genoa rose on Wednesday to 39, it became clear that while the collapse was catastrophic, it was not exactly a surprise.

Years before part of the structure dissolved in a lethal cascade of concrete and steel, it required constant repair work, and experts in Parliament, industry and academia raised alarms that it was deteriorating and possibly dangerous.

Those warnings fueled an intense round of finger-pointing on Wednesday among political parties and the private company that operated the bridge, none offering an answer to a set of crucial questions that will not be answered quickly: Should everyone involved have anticipated a disaster of this scale? How were so many omens ignored? And how much of Italy’s aging, often neglected infrastructure is also at risk of failure?

“It was not destiny,” said Genoa’s chief prosecutor, Francesco Cozzi, who announced that he would conduct a criminal investigation into the failure of the Morandi Bridge.

When the bridge fell shortly before noon on Tuesday, Genoa lost a major artery that crosses the Polcevera River and connects the eastern and western parts of the city. The route is traveled by tens of thousands of commuters daily, and by many of the passengers and much of the freight passing through the city’s busy port, and its loss raises fears of economic damage that could take years to repair.

Italy has suffered a series of bridge collapses in recent years — though none nearly as serious as Genoa’s — and many other spans are showing serious wear.

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And yet the doltish deputy PM blamed the European Union, complaining about money remitted to its funds. EU money probably helped fund some of the infrastructure that’s now being neglected. There’s a good companion piece about bridges at The Conversation.
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In conversation: Penn Jillette • Vulture

David Marchese with a fantastic interview with the conjuror/juggler/magician, who has a fascinating sweep of insights:

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Q: You’ve talked in the past about how the antidote to bad ideas is more ideas. But doesn’t the way things are shaking out online suggest that actually what we need are better ideas and not just more of them?

PJ: I believe in the marketplace of ideas but you’re right, we now have algorithms that push people crazy. YouTube is set up to push you crazy. If I search for vegan recipes, I’ll end up with 9/11 truthers. But it’s like the first time people saw movies, and the train on the screen was coming toward themThe 1895 film The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station is a 50-second silent film showing a train pulling into a Paris station, and is an early document of cinematic technique: forced perspective, long shots, close-ups. There’s a myth about the film that in its premiere, audiences were terrified by the train coming at them, and ran from their seats. …

Q: And everyone jumped out of the way.

PJ: That’s right. They were screaming and yelling, but then it only took a millisecond for people to realize what was going on from that point forward. So even with all this bad stuff happening, yes, I still think people are overwhelmingly good, ideas are overwhelmingly good, and if you have Nazis being able to reach 10 million people, those same 10 million people will also be reached by Martin Luther King.

Q: Why do you think that? Isn’t the marketplace of ideas as it now exists online intentionally designed to send people further down a given rabbit hole rather than towards contrary ideas?

PJ: Yes, algorithms are weighted in favor of that, but that’s not the problem. If you’re worried about craziness in the next ten years, I don’t have any hope for you. Fifty years? No problem. It’s like when we first saw advertisements: they worked entirely. But now I can show you a TV ad and you don’t even reach for the phone. The words didn’t change, but you learned to tell that it was bullshit. We’re going to see that happening with the internet. People will learn to separate the good from the bad. But that whole idea that everybody else is going crazy on the internet sickens me. I can tell when something is garbage. You can tell. Who are all these mysterious people that can’t?

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Stay too for the bit where he discusses his experience on US Celebrity Apprentice with Donald Trump, and why he won’t talk about what he heard. (He does, in passing, dispel any doubts about whether a tape of Trump using the n-word exists.)
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How 3D printing exposes the fallacy of federal gun laws • Wired

Antonio Garcia Martinez knows more about guns than you (probably) do, and is looking at the implications of 3D printed guns – where the importance isn’t the 3D printed nature:

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You may have seen the weapon in 2010’s Academy Award for Best Picture winner, The Hurt Locker, where it’s used by US soldiers to eliminate Iraqi snipers from an astonishing distance. It fires a projectile the size of your thumb, and can kill a man from over a mile away. In spirit, the weapon is illegal in California. In actual fact, it’s legal with the right modifications that only slightly impact functionality. Gun regulation fails.

Why does this odd status quo exist?

Our current gun laws are a necessary compromise among pro- and anti-gun extremes, plus a large middle that wants some gun control but not an outright ban. The NRA zealot is placated by Democratic rhetoric around banning only “weapons of war” paired with the technical knowledge that they can tolerably dodge most Blue State gun laws via the modular technology described above. The pro-gun-control Blue Staters are placated because politicians are “doing something,” and thanks mostly to ignorance about how modern guns work, think their gun laws are actually stopping the distribution of firearms when they increasingly resemble security theater.

Defense Distributed’s ultimate goal is to kick the final, weak leg out from under this tenuous political agreement, and force a reckoning with the state of firearms technology. When the last-mile problem of untraceable, unregistered guns has finally been “solved,” even politicians can’t maintain the charade of effective gun control.

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Turns out that defining a “gun” isn’t a trivial task, and it’s now under pressure due to 3D printing fans Defense Distributed.
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Fortnite Android beta roundup: disappointing, frustrating, Samsung-only • ExtremeTech

Joel Hruska has the roundup:

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Samsung and Epic announced that the game would be distributed via an APK and would initially only be available on certain Samsung models. While this is only a beta launch, keeping the device profile restricted so narrowly should have made it simpler for Epic to deliver an early game version with robust performance and graphics. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened here.

According to Ars Technica’s Sam Machkovech, limiting itself to just Samsung devices “hasn’t made the game run smoothly in the slightest.” Android Central declares “I’ve been playing it almost non-stop from the moment it was made available in the Samsung Galaxy App Store, and this is my early review of the game having played it on a Samsung Galaxy S8” before noting: “Fortnite is fun, but not on Android.” Android Police states that the game is currently limited to those owning a Galaxy S7, S8, S9, Note 8, Note 9, Tab S3, or Tab S4, and that despite this restriction, the game’s frame rate simply cannot hold a steady 30fps, even on a device as new as the Galaxy Note 8+.

Resolution isn’t native — it looks to be barely 480p — and texture quality isn’t great, either. The Android Police author claims his device is stuck on Epic, but I’m not sure that’s true. Rather, it’s true that his device claims to be stuck on “Epic” quality, but it’s not clear that level of image quality is actually being applied. According to Ars, low quality (which is what this looks like): “drops the resolution to somewhere around 480p, removes all traces of anti-aliasing, drops texture resolution, simplifies all in-game geometry, and removes all shadows.”

Meanwhile, certain decisions the game makes have drawn scorn from almost everyone. By default, the game has aim assist enabled and recommends using Auto Shoot, which means you’ll basically be letting Bixby play the game for you. That might be for the best, however, since the game apparently isn’t all that much fun in the first place, thanks to the constant performance drops.

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Sounds like there’s a problem for Android, rather than Samsung. Also recommended, if you need to educate someone about Fortnight: this BBC Radio 4 programme about it, which aired on Wednesday.
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Ding, ding, seconds out: It’s Law v Math • Medium

Professor Bill Buchanan:

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Within new laws, his government will thus force social media and cloud service providers to hand-over encrypted messages.

When asked how this could be achieved, he said: “Well the laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.”

He then went on to say that cryptographers were the problem, and that we needed them to face up to their responsibilities, and that they just can’t wash their hands of it…

…Last year, as the UK Home Secretary outlined her plans around restrictions on end-to-end encryption, I was called by the BBC about back-doors in cryptography. As it is a subject I know well, and had even presented to a select committee in the House of Commons [here], I said I would be interested in debating the issue. They then they asked if I could put forward the concept of backdoors in encryption, and I said:
“I can’t do that!”

And they said, “Well, we are really struggling to get someone to put that point, couldn’t you just outline the advantages and how it would be possible?”, and I said, “Well, most people with any technical knowledge knows that it is a bad thing, and to provide an academic point-of-view I would have to be critical of it. In fact if I put forward the concept of backdoors in cryptography, I would have no credibility in my field”, and the conversation finished and they didn’t invite me on. Basically I was there to back up a politician who was on the show.

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Another version of “we’ve had enough of experts”. Love the idea of the law of the country outranking the laws of maths.
link to this extract

Google is making Wear OS app quality guidelines mandatory • Android Police

Ryan Whitwam:

»

According to Google, it will begin enforcing the Wear OS app quality guidelines for new apps on October 1st of this year. Existing apps will have until March 4, 2019 to get things together. That means developers will need to take into account both functional and visual criteria. There are detailed guidelines on the Android Dev site, but the blog post notes which issues Google sees most often.

Apparently, Wear developers often don’t test their apps on different screen shapes, which causes interface issues. They also fail to provide Wear OS screenshots in app listings. If these issues aren’t fixed by the above dates, the offending apps won’t show up on the Wear OS Play Store. Importantly, this is separate from the main app review process. Google won’t completely block an app or update if it fails the Wear OS review.

«

Not sure that it’s going to change the trajectory for Wear OS – or Android smartwatches generally – but it’s nice to know that they’ve noticed that app quality matters too.
link to this extract

The Moto P30 announced in China as just the latest in a long line of iPhone X clones

Ryan Whitwam:

»

Everyone wants to make an iPhone clone these days. Well, that’s not exactly new, but it’s harder to clone the iPhone X without screwing it up. That’s why you can’t turn around without seeing a poorly implemented screen notch. Motorola is the latest to take a swing at it with the P30. This phone leaked yesterday, and now it’s official in China.

The P30 is a mid-range all-glass phone with a Snapdragon 636, 6GB of RAM and 64-128GB of storage. The display is 6.2-inches with a 1080p resolution and 19:9 aspect ratio. Since this is a phone for the Chinese market, the phone won’t have Moto’s traditional clean build of Android. Instead, it’s Oreo with the Lenovo ZUI skin.

The display has a rather sizeable notch at the top—it actually seems larger than it needs to be in order to better match the iPhone’s proportions. Around back, there’s a vertical dual camera module off to one side. There’s also a fingerprint sensor in the Motorola logo on the back.

«

Cosmetically, everyone wants to look like the iPhone – apart, these days, from Samsung, which finally discovered its own path with the Edge series.
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Uber narrows loss but is a long way from finding profit • Reuters

Heather Somerville:

»

Uber’s net loss narrowed to $891m in its second quarter ending June 30 from $1.1bn a year earlier. Its adjusted loss before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization was $614m, down from $773m a year earlier.

Net revenue rose more quickly than gross bookings in the second quarter from the prior period as the company dialed back on promotional subsidies of rides.

But its growth faces risks from decisions like that by New York City this month to cap licenses for ride-hailing services for one year. Uber has also had to grapple with corporate scandals and has lingering and costly legal battles, including over its classification of drivers as independent contractors, and federal probes to resolve.

“I remain unimpressed,” said Brent Goldfarb, associate professor of management and entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland. Improving losses by cutting “the lowest hanging fruit doesn’t mean the underlying model is profitable.”

«

With $12bn in quarterly gross bookings (inc rides and Uber Eats), up 40% yoy, 6% qoq. Net revenue of $2.8bn, up 60% yoy, 8% qoq.

With those metrics, it seems quite a long way from finding its breakeven.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

Voting on the blockchain! Super pointless! Photo by Keith Ivey on Flickr.

A selection of 11 links for you. If it were a fruit machine, we’d have hit the jackpot. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Apple looks to develop chip for processing health data • CNBC

Jordan Novet and Christina Farr:

»

Building custom chips for narrow functions can help Apple add new features and improve efficiency of its hardware while protecting its intellectual property from would-be imitatotrs.

A July 10 job posting from Apple’s Health Sensing hardware team says, “We are looking for sensor ASIC architects to help develop ASICs for new sensors and sensing systems for future Apple products. We have openings for analog as well as digital ASIC architects.”

It’s not clear what the sensors would measure, but it appears to be information from the body. An Aug. 1 posting said simply that the team wants to bring on an engineer who can “help develop health, wellness, and fitness sensors.” And a June job listing shows the team was looking to keep working with optical sensors. Currently available Apple Watches have optical sensors that can measure heart rate.

«

link to this extract

Homepod sales may be closer to 1-1.5m than 3m since the speaker launched • Mac Rumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

HomePod shipments totaled an estimated 700,000 units in the second quarter of 2018, giving Apple a roughly 6% share of the worldwide smart speaker market, according to research firm Strategy Analytics.

Strategy Analytics previously estimated HomePod shipments totaled 600,000 units in the first quarter of 2018, suggesting that worldwide shipments have reached 1.3m units since the speaker became available to order in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom in late January.

That figure is much lower than one shared by research firm Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, which recently estimated Apple has sold 3m HomePods in the United States alone since the speaker launched.

The significant variance in the datasets stems from the fact that Apple doesn’t disclose HomePod sales, instead grouping the speaker under its “Other Products” category in its earnings reports, alongside the Apple Watch, Apple TV, AirPods, Beats, iPod touch, and other Apple and third-party accessories.

Apple reported revenue of $3.74bn from its “Other Products” category last quarter, up 37% from $2.73bn in the year-ago quarter.

Shipments aren’t sales, either, so it’s impossible to know exactly how many HomePods ended up in the hands of customers.

If we had to guess, we’d say the Strategy Analytics numbers are probably more within the ballpark, as the HomePod is a niche product.

«

Niche, certainly. Now the question is: could it carve out a bigger niche if it “did more”, a la Amazon Echo and Google Home? Or are those niche too, but just got in earlier to the game, and captured lots of early adopters?

My feeling is that we’ll find out in the next couple of quarters – by January, when we’ve had both CES and sales estimates for the Christmas quarter – whether Amazon and Google (and Apple) have voice-driven speaker hits on their hands, or just another flash in the technological pan. Michael Love, on Twitter, is pretty sure it’s the latter.
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The flourishing business of fake YouTube views • The New York Times

Michael Keller:

»

“I can deliver an unlimited amount of views to a video,” Mr. Vassilev said in an interview. “They’ve tried to stop it for so many years, but they can’t stop it. There’s always a way around.”

After Google, more people search on YouTube than on any other site. It is the most popular platform among teenagers, according to a 2018 study by the Pew Research Center, beating out giants like Facebook and Instagram. With billions of views a day, the video site helps spur global cultural sensations, spawn careers, sell brands and promote political agendas.

Just as other social media companies have been plagued by impostor accounts and artificial influence campaigns, YouTube has struggled with fake views for years.

The fake-view ecosystem of which Mr. Vassilev is a part can undermine YouTube’s credibility by manipulating the digital currency that signals value to users. While YouTube says fake views represent just a tiny fraction of the total, they still have a significant effect by misleading consumers and advertisers. Drawing on dozens of interviews, sales records, and trial purchases of fraudulent views, The New York Times examined how the marketplace worked and tested YouTube’s ability to detect manipulation.

Inflating views violates YouTube’s terms of service. But Google searches for “buying views” turn up hundreds of sites offering “fast” and “easy” ways to increase a video’s count by 500, 5,000 or even five million. The sites, offering views for just pennies each, also appear in Google search ads.

«

This is what happens when you optimise for “engagement”. Compare to Wikipedia…
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Why Wikipedia works • NY Mag

Brian Feldman:

»

On YouTube, I might make one video about the Stoneman shooting, and you might make another with a totally opposite idea of truth; they’d then duke it out in “the marketplace of ideas” (the YouTube search results). On Wikipedia, there’s only one article about the Stoneman shooting, and it’s created by a group of people discussing and debating the best way to present information in a singular way, suggesting and sometimes voting on changes to a point where enough people are satisfied.

Importantly, that discussion is both entirely transparent, and at the same time “behind the scenes.” The “Talk” pages on which editorial decisions are made are prominently linked to on every entry. Anyone can read, access, and participate — but not many people do. This means both that the story of how an article came to be is made clear to a reader (unlike, say, algorithmic decisions made by Facebook), but also that there is less incentive for a given editor to call attention to themselves in the hopes of becoming a celebrity (unlike, say, the YouTube-star economy).

Wikipedia articles also have stringent requirements for what information can be included. The three main tenets are that (1) information on the site be presented in a neutral point of view, (2) be verified by an outside source, and (3) not be based on original research. Each of these can be quibbled with (what does “neutral” mean?), and plenty of questionable statements slip through — but, luckily, you probably know that they’re questionable because of the infamous “[citation needed]” superscript that peppers the website.

Actual misinformation, meanwhile, is dealt with directly. Consider how the editors treat conspiracy theories. “Fringe theories may be mentioned, but only with the weight accorded to them in the reliable sources being cited,” Wikimedia tweeted in an explanatory thread earlier this week. In contrast, platform companies have spent much of the last year talking about maintaining their role as a platform for “all viewpoints,” and through design and presentation, they flatten everything users post to carry the same weight.

«

Succinct, and accurate. What if YouTube was forced to limit itself to a single, checked, accurate video per topic? Sure, it’s like asking musicians to only write one song. Yet there’s that suspicion that there’s a better way to organise it even so.
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Twitter is wrong about Alex Jones: facts are not enough to combat conspiracy theories • The Verge

Laura Hudson:

»

Who doesn’t want to think that the truth will always win in the end, that information not only wants to be free, but that this freedom will lead us toward a more just world — especially when it is your job to share information?

But in our current moment, it is a dangerously naïve idea. While the internet has led to the promotion of important voices we might not have otherwise heard, the last decade has demonstrated with searing clarity that this idea has far more powerfully contributed to the amplification of lies, manipulation, and an epistemological collapse that has deformed human discourse and undermined the very notion of truth.

A growing body of research has demonstrated that the distorted light of modern media does not always lead to illumination. In a 2015 paper, MIT professor of political science Adam Berinsky found that rather than debunking rumors or conspiracy theories, presenting people with facts or corrections sometimes entrenched those ideas further.

Another study by Dartmouth researchers found that “if people counter-argue unwelcome information vigorously enough, they may end up with ‘more attitudinally congruent information in mind than before the debate,’ which in turn leads them to report opinions that are more extreme than they otherwise would have had.”

A 2014 study published by the American Academy of Pediatrics similarly found that public information campaigns about the absence of scientific evidence for a link between autism and vaccinations actually “decreased intent to vaccinate among parents who had the least favorable vaccine attitudes.” When people feel condescended to by the media or told that they are simply rubes being manipulated — even by expert political manipulators — they are more likely to embrace those beliefs even more strongly.

«

This is a terrific article, worth reading in full.
link to this extract

West Virginia’s Voatz blockchain voting pilot … is another single-user blockchain as a database •Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain

David Gerard, quoting West Virginia’s deputy legal counsel:

»

»

Voatz incorporates a series of various security procedures eligible voters must go through before they can even get the chance to cast a vote.

“You take a photo of your photo ID and then they take a selfie of themselves,” Kersey explained. “Facial recognition software is then deployed to compare the photo on the ID and the photo of the person who took the picture. Only if that’s verified will you be registered to use the application and receive a ballot. Once you’re in, it matches you in the application to you in the voter registration.”

The process then involves further verification from the county clerk, staff from the Secretary of State’s office and staff assigned to the effort at Voatz.

“Then you receive your ballot and use Voatz to make selections by clicking on your screen,” Kersey explained. “And when you’re done, you click the vote button.”

Kersey said once the person clicks the vote button, a third and final layer of biometric security is triggered involving either a second “selfie photo” or thumbprint.

“Once it’s good, the vote goes into a digital lockbox. This is where Blockchain comes in.”

«

That is — all the hard work is identifying the voter. Then they put the vote into Voatz’ private database, and take at face value the hype claims of anything labeled “blockchain” being a tamper-proof “digital lockbox” — even as it’s under Voatz’ complete control.

«

In other words, the stuff about the vote being “on the blockchain” is just pointless. Puzzling too why the US feels that physical paper isn’t good enough for the job. Gerard’s book “Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain”, written last year, is an excellent primer on all the hype around blockchain and bitcoin.
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Apple and Huawei flex their strength in a declining tablet market • IDC

»

According to the latest figures published by International Data Corporation (IDC), the overall tablet market for Western Europe declined 10.1% YoY, shipping 6.3 million units in the second quarter of 2018 (2Q18).

Slates exhibited a degree of resilience in the commercial space, following strength in certain niche use-case deployments. However, market saturation, lengthening life cycles and a lack of innovation resulted in the ongoing sluggish demand on the consumer side, leading to an overall decline of 6.1% YoY. In terms of volume, detachables had a challenging quarter, declining by 23.3% YoY. As the market has become increasingly dominated by Apple and Microsoft, and consequently more premium-focused, the range of options available to more price-constrained customers has diminished, leading them to consider cheaper alternatives such as lower end convertibles or even traditional PCs. Furthermore, the announcement of upcoming product releases from the main players likely acted as an inhibiting factor on overall demand this quarter, as customers postponed their purchases in anticipation of these newer devices.

«

Samsung hangs on there in second place, but it’s down more than the market, while Huawei roared up into third place. It’s only selling a third as many as Samsung (and a quarter as many as Apple), but it’s definitely pushing hard.

Apple had a 30% share. And probably a 90% share of the profits. (To reiterate, these are the western Europe figures.)
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Deploying drones • Bloomberg

Brianna Jackson:

»

The reach of drones across US sectors is wide, especially since the unmanned aerial vehicles can go places that may not be safe for workers and are generally faster and less expensive than people. They can be particularly good for inspecting wind turbines and solar farms, according to Bloomberg NEF. In one case, drones took about a week to evaluate the 80 turbines at a German offshore wind farm, a task that would’ve required three months for workers to visually examine each blade.

«

Thus demonstrating my related point about Magic Leap’s pricey AR headset, in a roundabout way: there’s insufficient consumer demand for drones to keep that market afloat. But there’s very real business demand for them, and business is less price-sensitive. The market therefore lies in pricier, more functional machines. Ditto for AR headsets: the consumer use case just isn’t there (it isn’t even there for gaming with VR headsets), so the business/industrial space is the one to aim for.
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FBI warns of ‘unlimited’ ATM cashout blitz • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

»

Organized cybercrime gangs that coordinate unlimited attacks typically do so by hacking or phishing their way into a bank or payment card processor. Just prior to executing on ATM cashouts, the intruders will remove many fraud controls at the financial institution, such as maximum ATM withdrawal amounts and any limits on the number of customer ATM transactions daily.

The perpetrators also alter account balances and security measures to make an unlimited amount of money available at the time of the transactions, allowing for large amounts of cash to be quickly removed from the ATM.

“The cyber criminals typically create fraudulent copies of legitimate cards by sending stolen card data to co-conspirators who imprint the data on reusable magnetic strip cards, such as gift cards purchased at retail stores,” the FBI warned. “At a pre-determined time, the co-conspirators withdraw account funds from ATMs using these cards.”

Virtually all ATM cashout operations are launched on weekends, often just after financial institutions begin closing for business on Saturday. Last month, KrebsOnSecurity broke a story about an apparent unlimited operation used to extract a total of $2.4m from accounts at the National Bank of Blacksburg in two separate ATM cashouts between May 2016 and January 2017.

In both cases, the attackers managed to phish someone working at the Blacksburg, Virginia-based small bank. From there, the intruders compromised systems the bank used to manage credits and debits to customer accounts.

«

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SEC slaps ‘fraudulent’ ICO founder with $30K fine, lifetime ban • CoinDesk

Stan Higgins and Nikhilesh De:

»

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced Tuesday that it had secured new prohibitions against the founder of a company behind an allegedly fraudulent initial coin offering (ICO).

The agency said that it obtained officer-and-director and penny-stock bars against David Laurance and his company, Tomahawk Exploration LLC. Tomahawk, the SEC alleges, sought to raise funds through a “Tomahawkcoin” token sale that utilized misleading marketing materials and false claims about oil drilling licenses.

Further, the Tomahawkcoin is said to have been sold along with the false promise that “token owners would be able to convert the Tomahawkcoins into equity and potentially profit from the anticipated oil production and secondary trading of the tokens,” according to the SEC’s statement on the matter.

According to the Tuesday announcement, Laurance has neither admitted nor denied the SEC’s allegations but he and the company have agreed to the bars along with a $30,000 penalty.

«

A gloomy day on the crypto range: Bitcoin’s value plunged briefly below $6,000, and “Pot Publication High Times Now Says It Won’t Accept Bitcoin in IPO”. Downer.
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Why solar is likely to power the home of the future • The Verge

Angela Chen on US trends, noting that 2m out of 90m US homes have solar panels – but California recently made it a requirement that new homes have solar panels:

»

If solar becomes ubiquitous, we’ll likely see it being integrated with smart energy management systems in the home, predicts Bywater. These will regulate the battery, the home by using different sensors, and the solar panels. “The real trick is for the system to know how to make someone comfortable and how to be aggressive on conserving energy,” he says. It should know the optimal temperature of the home and how to change it based on utility rates and the time of day to save money.

Ultimately, says Baca, “we’re personally looking forward to a day when solar is as ubiquitous as AC.” Very few places had air conditioners when the technology first became available, and now it’s rare to find a builder who would create a new home without it. “People think something’s missing when it’s not there,” he says. “I think that’s where we’re going with solar, and I hope we see it sooner rather than later.”

«

Given the preponderance of air conditioning (AC) systems in the US and its creaking electrical grid, you’d think the power companies would be encouraging local generation like crazy.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

Age-related macular degeneration: a Google algorithm can spot it. Photo by Community Eye Health on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. And emails too now! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Hackers plan to keep GM’s self-driving cars safe • Yahoo News

Rob Pegoraro:

»

Their plan for the autonomous vehicles coming from Cruise, based on the Chevy Bolt electric car, starts with a simple premise: Remove the systems that opened up those other vehicles to remote attacks.

Bluetooth? Forget it — the car is driving itself, so you don’t need hands-free calling. The radio? You’ll listen to your phone anyway. And that fancy touchscreen hardwired into the dashboard doesn’t need to exist either, not when the passengers can interact with the car via a stripped-down, locked-down tablet.

“If you don’t need something, take it out,” Valasek said. It’s Security 101 to reduce a device’s “attack surface” — the parts that respond to outside inputs, and which an adversary could therefore try to exploit. But it hasn’t always been Connected Car 101.

Miller’s and Valasek’s formula also includes a healthy dose of paranoia. Their design calls for the car to refuse any inbound connections — no data will come to the vehicle unless it asks for it first.

And much as in the locked-down framework Apple (AAPL) built for the iOS software inside iPhones and iPads, this autonomous-vehicle system will digitally sign and verify code at all levels, with messages from one component to another encrypted whenever possible.

Miller noted one possible speed bump: The wired networking in many cars is too old to support that encryption. “The components in cars are just so far behind,” he complained.

If this level of security by design sounds like something worth paying extra for — sorry, you can’t. Cruise Automation will run only as a ride-hailing service, like an Uber or Lyft but devoid of life forms in the driver’s seat.

That solves the issue of how you sell a car without a radio or Bluetooth: You don’t have to.

«

Clever – and probably necessary.
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The tech industry’s psychological war on kids • Medium

Richard Freed is a psychologist treating children and adolescents:

»

Nestled in an unremarkable building on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, California, is the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, founded in 1998. The lab’s creator, Dr. B.J. Fogg, is a psychologist and the father of persuasive technology, a discipline in which digital machines and apps — including smartphones, social media, and video games — are configured to alter human thoughts and behaviors. As the lab’s website boldly proclaims: “Machines designed to change humans.”

Fogg speaks openly of the ability to use smartphones and other digital devices to change our ideas and actions: “We can now create machines that can change what people think and what people do, and the machines can do that autonomously.” Called “the millionaire maker,” Fogg has groomed former students who have used his methods to develop technologies that now consume kids’ lives. As he recently touted on his personal website, “My students often do groundbreaking projects, and they continue having impact in the real world after they leave Stanford… For example, Instagram has influenced the behavior of over 800 million people. The co-founder was a student of mine.”

Intriguingly, there are signs that Fogg is feeling the heat from recent scrutiny of the use of digital devices to alter behavior. His boast about Instagram, which was present on his website as late as January of 2018, has been removed. Fogg’s website also has lately undergone a substantial makeover, as he now seems to go out of his way to suggest his work has benevolent aims…

«

This is a long piece, but full of remarkable insights into what’s happening with children.
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Artificial intelligence ‘did not miss a single urgent case’ • BBC News

Fergus Walsh:

»

A team at DeepMind, based in London, created an algorithm, or mathematical set of rules, to enable a computer to analyse optical coherence tomography (OCT), a high resolution 3D scan of the back of the eye.

Thousands of scans were used to train the machine how to read the scans. Then, artificial intelligence was pitted against humans. The computer was asked to give a diagnosis in the cases of 1,000 patients whose clinical outcomes were already known.

The same scans were shown to eight clinicians – four leading ophthalmologists and four optometrists. Each was asked to make one of four referrals: urgent, semi-urgent, routine and observation only.

Artificial intelligence performed as well as two of the world’s leading retina specialists, with an error rate of only 5.5%. Crucially, the algorithm did not miss a single urgent case.

The results, published in the journal Nature Medicine , were described as “jaw-dropping” by Dr Pearse Keane, consultant ophthalmologist, who is leading the research at Moorfields Eye Hospital.

He told the BBC: “I think this will make most eye specialists gasp because we have shown this algorithm is as good as the world’s leading experts in interpreting these scans.”

Artificial intelligence was able to identify serious conditions such as wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD), which can lead to blindness unless treated quickly. Dr Keane said the huge number of patients awaiting assessment was a “massive problem”.

«

Contrast this with IBM’s Watson, trying to solve cancer and doing badly. This has a better data set, clearer pathways to disease, and is better understood generally. Part of doing well with AI is choosing the correct limits to work within.

And this won’t replace the doctors; it will just be a pre-screen.
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Exclusive: Google tracks your movements, like it or not • Associated Press

Ryan Nakashima:

»

For the most part, Google is upfront about asking permission to use your location information. An app like Google Maps will remind you to allow access to location if you use it for navigating. If you agree to let it record your location over time, Google Maps will display that history for you in a “timeline” that maps out your daily movements.

Storing your minute-by-minute travels carries privacy risks and has been used by police to determine the location of suspects — such as a warrant that police in Raleigh, North Carolina, served on Google last year to find devices near a murder scene. So the company will let you “pause” a setting called Location History.

Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you’ve been. Google’s support page on the subject states: “You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.”

That isn’t true. Even with Location History paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking.

For example, Google stores a snapshot of where you are when you merely open its Maps app. Automatic daily weather updates on Android phones pinpoint roughly where you are. And some searches that have nothing to do with location, like “chocolate chip cookies,” or “kids science kits,” pinpoint your precise latitude and longitude — accurate to the square foot — and save it to your Google account.

The privacy issue affects some two billion users of devices that run Google’s Android operating software and hundreds of millions of worldwide iPhone users who rely on Google for maps or search.

Storing location data in violation of a user’s preferences is wrong, said Jonathan Mayer, a Princeton computer scientist and former chief technologist for the Federal Communications Commission’s enforcement bureau. A researcher from Mayer’s lab confirmed the AP’s findings on multiple Android devices; the AP conducted its own tests on several iPhones that found the same behavior.

«

It’s amazing. Location tracking comes up as a topic every two years or so, and it’s always Google (and sometimes Facebook); Apple has managed to stay out of it since 2010. And then it fizzles away. Jonathan Mayer’s involvement is repetitive too: he noted Google hacking Safari’s cookies for ad tracking a few years back.
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Instagram Stories at two: what price have we paid for recording everything? • Esquire

Olivia Ovenden:

»

As well as turning holidays into a highlights reel, Stories has forever altered the witching hours of drunken evenings out which are now witnessed by hundreds before the night even ends. On Sunday mornings I now watch a sped-up reel of friends and fleeting acquaintances doing shots or wrestling on the night bus like a trailer advertising their Saturday night.

“I have definitely seen my friends acting up for the camera,” 30-year-old Matt tells me. “It’s always been the case with Instagram but Stories make it so much worse because you’re basically encouraged to share as much as possible.”

Dating, now, also has the added pressure and thrill of knowing exactly when someone you like has looked at what you’ve uploaded. The downside is that this becomes a game of cat and mouse that requires a lot of ‘brand maintenance’.

Lara, 27, tells me she found recording a digest of her day to impress someone exhausting. “I had to delete the app on my phone for a while because I would stage these ridiculous scenes when drunk to impress a guy I was dating,” she says. “I hoped it made my life look like some non-stop party but looking back they were so awful. Even when I was sober I’d get dressed up, post something misleading and see how long until he looked at it.”

«

This sounds like a modern form of torture.
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How to lose $3 billion of bitcoin in India • Bloomberg

Archana Chaudhary and Jeanette Rodrigues:

»

…on Jan. 4, 2018, the state of Texas filed a cease-and-desist order against BitConnect. North Carolina followed five days later. The news came as the price of bitcoin crashed.

Amid the ensuing market turmoil, the Reserve Bank of India announced measures that virtually banned crypto transactions. Cryptocurrency exchanges responded with a lawsuit that is due to resume hearings in the Supreme Court in September.

Investigators across Gujarat and in the Indian capital of New Delhi say complaints about crypto frauds began pouring in after the U.S. cease-and-desist letters.

Still, those who had been trying to hide untaxed cash were in a quandary. If they went to the authorities, they would have to declare their investments.

So Bhatt and nine accomplices – including Paladiya – kidnapped two BitConnect representatives in Surat and demanded 2,256 bitcoin as ransom, CID investigators alleged. Paladiya, however, wanted more. He contacted his influential uncle, Kotadiya, and tapped the latter’s network in the local police to double-cross Bhatt and allegedly extort his bitcoin, according to allegations in police documents and interviews with investigators.

They were confident of success, gambling that Bhatt wouldn’t go to the authorities and certain that the anonymity of bitcoin would make the heist untraceable, according to the investigators.

They were wrong. Bhatt pressed charges.

«

All as a result of Narandra Modi’s move to ban high-denomination currency in November 2016 – just at the sort of time bitcoin began taking off.
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Vietnam confirms suspension of Bitcoin, cryptocurrency miner imports • Cryptocurrency News

Samburaj Das:

»

Domestic businesses and individuals have stopped importing crypto mining equipment altogether since the beginning of July, according to the Ho Chi Minh City (HCM) Customs Department, as reported by Viet Nam News on Monday.

Officials from Vietnam’s largest city said individuals and firms had imported as many as 3,664 application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) devices in the first half of 2018. 3,000 machines were notably imported by four enterprises involved in mining operations with the rest imported by individuals and organizations who did not include import tax codes, the authority said. A majority of the devices were revealed to be Antminer models, a brand of cryptocurrency mining equipment developed by industry giant Bitmain.

As reported previously, Vietnam’s Ministry of Finance (MoF) first proposed the blanket ban in June after authorities in the nation increased their scrutiny into the domestic crypto sector following a nationwide ICO-fraud that reportedly conned an estimated $660 million from 32,000 domestic investors. The fallout led Vietnam’s prime minister ordering six government ministries, the police, and the central bank to investigate the scam.

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Media democratization and the rise of Trump • ROUGH TYPE

Nicholas Carr, reviewing the new book “Trump and the Media” – a collection of essays:

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One contentious question is whether social media in general and Twitter in particular actually changed the outcome of the vote. Keith N. Hampton, of Michigan State University, finds “no evidence” that any of the widely acknowledged malignancies of social media, from fake news to filter bubbles, “worked in favor of a particular presidential candidate.” Drawing on exit polls, he shows that most demographic groups voted pretty much the same in 2016 as they had in the Obama-Romney race of 2012. The one group that exhibited a large and possibly decisive shift from the Democratic to the Republican candidate were white voters without college degrees. Yet these voters, surveys reveal, are also the least likely to spend a lot of time online or to be active on social media. It’s unfair to blame Twitter or Facebook for Trump’s victory, Hampton suggests, if the swing voters weren’t on Twitter or Facebook.

What Hampton overlooks are the indirect effects of social media, particularly its influence on press coverage and public attention. As the University of Oxford’s Josh Cowls and Ralph Schroeder write, Trump’s Twitter account may have been monitored by only a small portion of the public, but it was followed, religiously, by journalists, pundits, and politicos. The novelty and frequent abrasiveness of the tweets — they broke all the rules of decorum for presidential campaigns — mesmerized the chattering class throughout the primaries and the general election campaign, fueling a frenzy of retweets, replies, and hashtags. Social media’s biggest echo chamber turned out to be the traditional media elite.

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The woman who just cost Google $5bn revealed her next target, and it could spell trouble for Apple • Business Insider

Jake Kanter:

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In a written answer to a question from an EU lawmaker, [Margrethe] Vestager said her team is about to launch a review of smartphone chargers, amid concerns that tech firms have not acted on a promise to standardize charging points.

Apple, Samsung, Huawei, and Nokia were among 14 companies to sign a voluntary deal in 2009, agreeing to harmonize chargers for new models of smartphones coming into the market in 2011.

Vestager said progress against this aim had not been good enough. “Given the unsatisfactory progress with this voluntary approach, the Commission will shortly launch an impact assessment study to evaluate costs and benefits of different other options,” she said.

This could spell all sorts of trouble for Apple. Android phones use either USB-C and micro-USB connectors into the handset, and Apple’s proprietary Lightning connector is something of an outlier. This may make it an obvious target for Vestager’s investigation.

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Vestager’s intent is to reduce e-waste – that when someone buys a new phone, they don’t need to throw out the charger from their old one. Pre-smartphones, this used to be a terrible problem: Sony, Nokia and Motorola all had different, incompatible chargers.

Now it’s the Android phones where you find incompatibility, to be honest. All of Apple’s are Lightning (unlike 2012, when you could still buy 32-pin phones, but Lightning had come in). And all Apple’s chargers have a USB-A socket, so you can use them with other leads.

I can see Vestager might want to go somewhere with this, but I’m not sure how well it’s going to work.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

IBM says its Watson system is “making a difference”. Reality begs to differ. Photo by ibmphoto24 on Flickr.

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A selection of 12 links for you. It’s as if we were never away! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The Power User Curve: The best way to understand your most engaged users • Andrew Chen

Andrew Chen:

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Power users drive some of the most successful companies — people who love their product, are highly engaged, and contribute a ton of value to the network. In ecommerce marketplaces it’s power sellers, in ridesharing platforms it’s power riders, and in social networks it’s influencers.

All companies want more power users, but you need to measure them before you can find (and retain) them. While DAU/MAU — dividing daily active users (DAUs) by monthly active users (MAUs or monthly actives) — is a common metric for measuring engagement, it has its shortcomings.

Since companies need a richer and more nuanced way to understand user engagement, we’re going to introduce what we’ll call the “Power User Curve” — also commonly called the activity histogram or the “L30” (coined by the Facebook growth team). It’s a histogram of users’ engagement by the total number of days they were active in a month, from 1 day out of the month to all 30 (or 28, or 31) days. While typically reflecting top-level activity like app opens or logins, it can be customized for whatever action you decide is important to measure for your product.

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Chen’s articles are always fascinating; this one gets into whether a product/service would be best monetised through a subscription or advertising – revealed just through the DAU/MAU power user curve.
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Newton Mail to shut down service September 25th • MacStories

John Voorhees:

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Newton, which began life as CloudMagic in 2013, will shut down its email subscription service on September 25, 2018. According to the company’s CEO, Rohit Nadhani:

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We explored various business models but couldn’t successfully figure out profitability & growth over the long term. It was hard; the market for premium consumer mail apps is not big enough, and it faces stiff competition from high quality free apps from Google, Microsoft, and Apple. We put up a hard and honest fight, but it was not enough to overcome the bundling & platform default advantages enjoyed by the large tech companies.

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CloudMagic was relaunched as a subscription email service and renamed Newton in 2016. According to Nadhani’s post, the company, which offered iOS, Mac, Android, and Windows versions of its email client, served over four million customers, 40,000 of whom signed up as paying subscribers.

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That’s less than a 1% signup for software that’s probably quite good. Trying to get people to pay for email is one of the modern world’s most difficult tech sales jobs.
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Microsoft Surface Go review: a little goes a long way • The Verge

Dieter Bohn:

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The Surface Go is a 10-inch hybrid tablet-laptop Windows computer. It’s just really small, honestly. That seems like an obvious point to make, but it’s the essence of what the Surface Go is: A very tiny Surface. I said in my last video that I have a soft spot for tiny computers. They’re just a little more convenient to carry around and the tradeoffs in performance are usually worth it for me. The sign of a good tiny computer is that you have to check to make sure it’s actually in your bag when you leave the house. And I have had to check several times — it weighs 1.15 pounds on its own.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is typing on the slightly-less-than-full-size keyboard. I found it only took me a few hours to get used to it, and I’ve been able to jam along without more typos that usual. It uses traditional scissor switches, which means that there’s good key travel. The keys themselves are slightly domed, which might help just a little with accuracy. The glass Precision trackpad is similarly good — just big enough so that you don’t feel cramped using it.

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Bohn really, really likes the Surface Go. Notable that Apple’s offering 9.7in and 10.5in tablets: it’s as if consensus is gravitating around 10in as the idea for the toaster-fridge form factor.
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More than 1,000 U.S. news sites are still unavailable in Europe, two months after GDPR took effect • Nieman Journalism Lab

Jeff South:

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Joseph O’Connor, a self-described “rogue archivist” in the United Kingdom, has been tracking the issue. He started after a gunman killed five staff members of the Capital Gazette on June 28. O’Connor wanted to read about the shooting, but the paper in Annapolis, Maryland, and the nearby Baltimore Sun, both Tronc properties, are blocked in Europe.

As of Monday, O’Connor found that more than 1,000 news sites were unavailable in the EU. They included more than 40 broadcast websites and about 100 sites operated under GateHouse’s Wicked Local brand.

GateHouse and Tronc did not respond to requests for comment about the GDPR. Lee Enterprises has no plans to comply. Company spokesperson Charles Arms said Lee’s websites wouldn’t draw enough visitors from the more than 30 countries in the EU and the European Economic Area to justify compliance.

“Internet traffic on our local news sites originating from the EU and EEA is de minimis, and we believe blocking that traffic is in the best interest of our local media clients,” Arms said.

From a financial standpoint, that position is justified, according to Alan Mutter, who teaches media economics at the University of California at Berkeley. He said international web traffic might benefit The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post but “ads served in Paris, Palermo, or Potsdam don’t help advertisers in Peoria.”

But being available in Europe can help customer relations. And about 16 million Americans visited Europe last year.

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Tronc’s lack of response is fairly typical. It’s a big company but it doesn’t care about anything beyond its tiny view. At least Instapaper, under new management, is available in Europe again.
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Inside Magic Leap’s quest to remake itself as an ordinary company (with a real product) • Wired

Jessi Hempel has been to visit Magic Leap (which has been given $2.3bn in venture funding) multiple times. Now it’s selling $2,295 AR headsets to developers:

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The Icelandic band Sigur Rós worked with Magic Leap to build an electrifyingly beautiful visual sound experience. But Magic Leap has also provided a way for developers to input a tiny snippet of code into their existing projects and refer to 3-D models to render web pages in 3-D in Magic Leap’s Helio browser. So, you can open a demo of The New York Times in Magic Leap’s Helio browser, just as you might on your desktop. But by adding a small snippet of code that renders a 3-D model, The New York Times can also show you a news photo rendered in 3-D so you can more closely explore it.

In seeding developers, Magic Leap is attempting to steer the design direction of its technology. Sure, 40% of the developers who received the goggles early are focused on gaming and entertainment, use cases that have been the company’s mainstay. But Magic Leap has also developed tools for corporate communication (Imagine Zoom, but if your entire conference party were avatars sitting around a digital conference table.) Roughly 10% of the company’s existing developers come from healthcare and medical imaging, which isn’t surprising given Abovitz’s background.

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I suspect the gaming thing will go nowhere: who’s going to spend $2,295 on AR glasses for gaming? Even if the price halves, that’s still $1,000. The market would be tiny.

I predict that in 18 months’ time or so Magic Leap will pivot to industrial and commercial applications: there, you aren’t asking consumers to spend huge sums of money. You get the company to pay.
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Why everyone is following less on Twitter (and regaining their sanity) • Inc.com

Damon Brown:

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We can only pay attention to so many things. Political climate aside, there are only so many people you can hear at once – and, at a certain time, you won’t be able to truly engage.

I discovered this in 2012 and, as I shared in this column, I dropped from following thousands of people to only 300:

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I loved sharing varied opinions and conversations. I eventually started to feel suffocated, though–as if a continual sea of commentary was constantly thrashing me against the rocks. I realized that I was following too many people. I love initiating and enabling passionate, one-on-one conversations, and it was becoming debilitating to do that while following thousands of people. Instead, I took a drastic approach: Around 2012, I began culling the people I followed down to the most essential and insightful. It’s been tough, but I regularly keep my following group to around 300–the number of people I can consistently engage during the day. Instead, I use Twitter lists to keep up with other people without having the heavy news feed. Figure out how many people you can comfortably be connected with on your favorite social-media platform and stick with that number.

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Today, I’m at around 250. These are the people, organizations and movements I care about, those that have the biggest impact on my ideas and the arguments I most want to share.

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I’ve seen a few people do this, and it’s obvious that you’ll get a much calmer version of Twitter. (Turning off retweets has a similar effect.) It also reinforces the filter bubble, though.
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IBM has a Watson dilemma • WSJ

Daniela Hernandez and Ted Greenwald:

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“Watson represents a technology breakthrough that can help physicians improve patient outcomes,” said Herbert Chase, a professor of biomedical informatics at Columbia University, in a 2012 IBM press release.

Six years and billions of dollars later, the diagnosis for Watson is gloomy.

More than a dozen IBM partners and clients have halted or shrunk Watson’s oncology-related projects. Watson cancer applications have had limited impact on patients, according to dozens of interviews with medical centers, companies and doctors who have used it, as well as documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

In many cases, the tools didn’t add much value. In some cases, Watson wasn’t accurate. Watson can be tripped up by a lack of data in rare or recurring cancers, and treatments are evolving faster than Watson’s human trainers can update the system. Dr. Chase of Columbia said he withdrew as an adviser after he grew disappointed in IBM’s direction for marketing the technology.

No published research shows Watson improving patient outcomes.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to reinvent the world, from how businesses operate to the types of jobs people hold to the way wars are fought. In health care, AI promises to help doctors diagnose and treat diseases as well as help people track their own wellness and monitor chronic conditions. Watson’s struggles suggest that revolution remains some way off.

IBM said Watson has important cancer-care benefits, like helping doctors keep up with medical knowledge. “This is making a difference,” said John Kelly, IBM senior vice president. “The data says and is validating that we’re on the right track.”

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All the numbers are going in the wrong direction for Watson. As this says, the problem is more that the dataset is really unclear: we don’t understand cancer well enough. Chris Mims, a WSJ writer, put it succinctly: “Outright fraud aside, hard to think of anything in tech where there’s been a bigger delta [gap] between what was advertised and the reality than IBM’s Watson.”
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Windows malware WannaCry delays manufacturing of the next iPhone processor • Motherboard

Samantha Cole:

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Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (TSMC) admitted that the attack was possible because of an unpatched Windows 7 system, which was vulnerable to the infamous ransomware WannaCry while the company was installing a new tool. The infection happened when a supplier connected tainted software to TSMC’s network without a virus scan, according to Bloomberg.

TSMC is Apple’s exclusive supplier of the iPhone’s A-series chips. The attack, which cost the manufacturer $250m, could have been prevented, because it left its Windows 7 systems unpatched. The patch has been available for approximately a year.

The WannaCry virus started spreading in 2017, and has infected 200,000 computers across 150 countries. As a relatively old virus, you can easily protect against it by keeping your PC software updated, which TSMC apparently failed to do. Because there are so many systems still out there that are still not being properly patched, we can still see infrastructure like TSMC that’s vulnerable to the same attacks a year later.

In an official statement, TSMC said that the company expects the incident to “cause shipment delays and additional costs,” with third quarter revenue taking as 3% hit. But analysts say that the company was prepared for this kind of attack, and its customers might not see much of a difference in shipping delays or costs.

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Lasted five days; how many A12 processors had TSMC made already? How much has this affected it? If it’s five days, then probably not that much, truth be told. And once the systems are restored, it’s all as it was before.

Though of course it would be a wonderful hacking story to put a bug in the A12. Except that this was just an accident.
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‘Like selling crack to children’: a peek inside the Silicon Valley grift machine • NY Mag

Corey Pein:

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I got a deeper look at these methods when I dropped by the annual Startup Conference at the historic downtown Fox Theater in Redwood City. Inside the auditorium, Stanford grad and start-up founder Nir Eyal captivated a crowd of several hundred with a distillation of his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, which promised to give marketers the key to the unconscious mind…

…Eyal presented several categories of virtual tchotchkes companies might offer in exchange for people’s money or attention. One category he called “rewards of the tribe,” which he described as “things that feel good, have an element of variability, and come from other people” — like Likes. Another category: “rewards of the hunt,” which involved “the search for resources” such as food. “In our modern society, we buy these things with money,” Eyal said. The addictive power of slot machines offered one example of how marketers could manipulate people’s animal instincts. Video-game companies like Zynga had taken those Pavlovian processes to a new level, bringing players to the peak of excitement and then hitting them up for cash, which is sort of like a mystery movie that pauses itself mid-plot-twist and demands that you insert a coin.

I wasn’t qualified to judge the neuroscientific basis of Eyal’s pitch, but pop-sci of this sort sent my bullshit detector whooping like a Klaxon. Whether or not his theories worked, it was disturbing to hear such an eagerness to exploit human behavioral tics for the sake of profit. Was this how Silicon Valley intended to make the world a better place? Was there anyone they wouldn’t empower with these manipulative tools, for the right price?

“There’s one more thing I’d like to discuss: the morality of manipulation,” Eyal went on. “I know what that nervous laughter is about … I know some of you were thinking, ‘Is this kosher?’ If you had that response, bravo.” Eyal conceded that digital gadgets may be “the cigarettes of this century,” but said he was optimistic that these addictive products could be used for “good” and to “help people live healthier, happier, more productive” lives.

Eyal wrapped up with a slide of Mahatma Gandhi, although El Chapo might’ve been a better choice. “I encourage you to build the change you wish to see in the world,” he concluded, then basked in applause.

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Inside Twitter’s struggle over what gets banned • NY Times

Cecilia Kang and Kate Conger:

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On Friday, to provide more transparency about its decision making, Twitter invited two New York Times reporters to attend the policy meeting. During the one-hour gathering, a picture emerged of a 12-year-old company still struggling to keep up with the complicated demands of being an open and neutral communications platform that brings together world leaders, celebrities, journalists, political activists and conspiracy theorists.

Even settling on a definition of dehumanizing speech was not easy. By the meeting’s end, Mr. Dorsey and his executives had agreed to draft a policy about dehumanizing speech and open it to the public for their comments.

In an interview on Friday, Mr. Dorsey, 41, said he was “O.K. with people not agreeing” with his decision to keep Mr. Jones’s account live.

“I don’t see this as an end point, I see this as maintaining integrity with what we put out there and not doing random one-off interpretations,” he said.

But Mr. Dorsey also said that while Twitter’s longtime guiding principle has been free expression, the company is now discussing “that safety should come first.” He added, “That’s a conversation we need to have.” He said he was thinking deeply about human rights law and listening to audiobooks on speech and expression.

Karen Kornbluh, a senior fellow of digital policy at the Council of Foreign Relations, said Mr. Dorsey had mishandled the Infowars situation but added that dealing with matters of free speech on social media is highly complex.

“There is no due process, no transparency, no case law, and no expertise on these very complicated legal and social questions behind these decisions,” she said.

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Twitter didn’t want the meeting participants named (because they’d get trolled and alt-right idiots would dox them). It’s clear, though, that this struggle over what is permissible is the crucial struggle for social media this year.
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It’s time to end the yearly smartphone launch event • Motherboard

Owen Williams:

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As smartphone sales begin to stall and phone makers clamber to figure out what’s next, we’re in a period of uncertainty: is the decade of continued, unprecedented growth going to come back? Analysts have been firing warning flares for almost a year now, saying that smartphone shipments are beginning to slow, but the effects have felt on time delay as minor innovations continued to flow in the meantime. In Q4 of 2017, analysts saw the first global decline in smartphone shipments, which hasn’t gotten any better, with reports of slowing European sales continuing and even the chipmakers themselves reporting a shift.

We’ve already seen an example of the consequences of a industry shift first hand: HTC’s gradual decline. Just a few years ago the company sold millions of phones a quarter, and was consistently a top handset manufacturer, but today, it’s essentially non-existent, with much of the handset division sold to Google in 2017.

The PC industry has already faced this problem. As it peaked and began declining, we saw dozens of device manufacturers from Compaq to Sony throw in the towel year after year, as the pie began to shrink. I believe that we’re seeing the beginning of phones lasting longer than ever, and ultimately becoming boring to the consumer. Phones are getting ever-closer to commoditization.

Samsung’s event today made it clear that the smartphone has gone over that peak, and we’re in new territory now: smartphone makers are out of fresh ideas. It’s just another beautiful, complicated, technologically advanced rectangle.

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Of course Samsung takes two bites at this, by having big launches for the Galaxy S and the Note, where almost everything is known ahead of time. But just as most smartphone reviews have been pointless for a year or two now – really new features apart, there’s nothing new to say – so it is with these launches. But the companies rely on the media, and the media rely on the companies. Symbiosis in action.
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‘Elitist’: angry book pirates hit back after author campaign sinks website • The Guardian

Alison Flood:

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Authors have been called elitist by book pirates, after they successfully campaigned to shut down a website that offered free PDFs of thousands of in-copyright books.

OceanofPDF was closed last week after publishers including Penguin Random House and HarperCollins issued hundreds of takedown notices, with several high-profile authors including Philip Pullman and Malorie Blackman raising the issue online. Featuring free downloads of thousands of books, OceanofPDF had stated on its site that it sought to make information “free and accessible to everyone around the globe”, and that it wanted to make books available to people in “many developing countries where … they are literally out of reach to many people”.

Before the site was taken down, one of its founders told the Bookseller that it was run by a team of four who worked based on user requests: “Once we get an email from a user requesting a book that he/she cannot afford/find in the library or if he has lost it, we try to find it on their behalf and upload on our site so that someone in future might also get it.”

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As someone who writes books (and is married to someone who writes books), the obvious answer to this “new libraries” argument is that there are lots of billionaires (and even plain old millionaires) in the developing world and beyond who ought to be happy to set up real libraries with proper funding, which would mean that you could lend books – thus fulfilling the original aim – and make sure that creators were properly rewarded, thus meaning there would be more in the future.

This is a different argument, by the way, from those around scientific papers and publications, where you often end up paying twice: once for the research done with public funds, and then to read it in the private publication.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified