What if you could completely automate your job? Some people have. Photo by Brian J. Matis on Flickr.

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

How to program your job • The Atlantic

Brian Merchant:

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It can seem that some of the only workers who have realized any scrap of that rusty old promise of automation are the ones who’ve carved out the code to claim it for themselves.

Programmers, of course, have been writing code that automates their work for decades. Programming generally involves utilizing tools that add automation at different levels, from code formatting to merging to different codebases—most just don’t take it to the extreme of fully or nearly fully automating their job. I chatted, via direct message on Reddit and email, with around a dozen programmers who said they had. These self-automators had tackled inventory management, report writing, graphics rendering, database administration, and data entry of every kind. One automated his wife’s entire workload, too. Most asked to remain anonymous, to protect their jobs and reputations.

“When I started, my job literally took me eight hours a day,” an early self-automator, who I’ll call Gary, told me. He worked for a large corporate hotel chain that was beginning to computerize its workflow in the ‘90s. Gary quickly recognized that he was spending a lot of his time repeating the same tasks, so he started learning to code after-hours. “Over the course of about three months, I built a piece of code in Lotus [1-2-3, then a popular PC spreadsheet program] that not only automated individual repetitive tasks, it effectively automated the entire job.” He didn’t tell his bosses exactly what he had done, and the quality of his working life improved considerably.

“It felt weird to have free time during the day,” he told me. “I spent that time learning about the other systems in the hotel.” He then made himself useful, helping management with bottlenecks in those systems.

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What’s fascinating – even a little surprising – is how those who did this began to feel. They worried that they ought to be doing something, even though they were “doing” their job.
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New autonomous farm wants to produce food without human workers • MIT Technology Review

Erin Winick:

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As the firm’s cofounder Brandon Alexander puts it: “We are a farm and will always be a farm.”

But it’s no ordinary farm. For starters, the company’s 15 human employees share their work space with robots who quietly go about the business of tending rows and rows of leafy greens.

Today Iron Ox is opening its first production facility in San Carlos, near San Francisco. The 8,000-square-foot indoor hydroponic facility—which is attached to the startup’s offices—will be producing leafy greens at a rate of roughly 26,000 heads a year. That’s the production level of a typical outdoor farm that might be five times bigger. The opening is the next big step toward fulfilling the company’s grand vision: a fully autonomous farm where software and robotics fill the place of human agricultural workers, which are currently in short supply.

Iron Ox isn’t selling any of the food it produces just yet (it is still in talks with a number of local restaurants and grocers). So for now, those tens of thousands of heads of lettuce are going to a local food bank and to the company salad bar. Its employees had better love  eating lettuce.

The farm’s non-lettuce-consuming staff consists of a series of robotic arms and movers. The arms individually pluck the plants from their hydroponic trays and transfer them to new trays as they increase in size, maximizing their health and output—a luxury most outdoor farms don’t have. Big white mechanical movers carry the 800-pound water-filled trays around the facility.

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Food is where technology got its big start. Thigh bones of antelopes, axes, knives, ploughs…
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Apple CEO Tim Cook says giving up your data for better services is ‘a bunch of bunk’ • The Washington Post

Hamza Shaban:

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Apple chief executive Tim Cook urged consumers not to believe the dominant tech industry narrative that the data collected about them will lead to better services.

In an interview with “Vice News Tonight” that aired Tuesday, Cook highlighted his company’s commitment to user privacy, positioning Apple’s business as one that stands apart from tech giants that compile massive amounts of personal data and sell the ability to target users through advertising.

“The narrative that some companies will try to get you to believe is: I’ve got to take all of our data to make my service better,” he said. “Well, don’t believe them. Whoever’s telling you that, it’s a bunch of bunk.”

Cook’s remarks come at a pivotal time for Silicon Valley. In the past year, technology companies and their executives have come under unprecedented scrutiny from elected officials and regulators stemming from a variety of issues, including a barrage of data privacy scandals, accusations of toxic corporate culture, the negative impact of tech platforms on political debate, and concerns over tech overuse and addiction. In recent months, growing calls from Capitol Hill have boosted the prospects of new legislation aimed at big tech companies…

…Cook said in the interview that he is “exceedingly optimistic” that the topic of data privacy has reached an elevated level of public debate. “When the free market doesn’t produce a result that’s great for society you have to ask yourself what do we need to do. And I think some level of government regulation is important to come out on that.”

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Are smartphones the next generation consoles? • Strategy Analytics

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By streaming games over networks, and invalidating the need for expensive hardware, game streaming services could potentially eliminate the concept of gaming generations by making any portable device a viable gaming machine. A new report from the User Experience Strategies (UXS) group at Strategy Analytics, Game Streaming: The Last Console Generation?, has assessed existing game streaming and download services to study the user experience issues that can arise from them. Streaming games over the internet could affect gaming in the same way that Netflix has affected video; but there are unique challenges that must be addressed for it to reach mainstream appeal.

Key report findings:

• Though game streaming could invalidate the need for bulky home consoles, proprietary controllers are still required. Since cross-platform games all feature different control schemes, the need for a universal standard is clear.
• It is nearly impossible to guarantee an ideal game streaming service for everyone, which is problematic when the service comes with a monthly charge. Factors like bandwidth and latency are key issues, but other interruptions to a service can affect the overall user experience.
• Games processed in the cloud are free from the limitations of hardware and could allow game developers to create experiences that would be otherwise impossible to achieve on aging hardware.

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That need for proprietary controllers to get the best results is going to be a problem for their thesis.
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FireEye unmasks a new North Korean threat group • Cyberscoop

Sean Lyngaas:

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There is a distinct and aggressive group of hackers bent on financing the North Korean regime and responsible for millions of dollars in bank heists in recent years, according to research from cybersecurity company FireEye.

The group, dubbed APT38, is distinct from other Pyongyang-linked hackers because of its overriding financial motivation — as opposed to pure espionage — and persistent targeting of banks worldwide, FireEye researchers said.

“This is an active … threat against financial institutions all around the world,” Sandra Joyce, FireEye’s vice president of global intelligence, said at a press briefing.

The group was responsible for some of the more high-profile attacks on financial institutions in the last few years, the researchers said, including the $81m heist of the Bangladesh’s central bank in February 2016, and an attack on a Taiwanese bank in October 2017.

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The Bangladesh bank one was widely known, but not the Taiwanese one. North Korea’s GDP is so tiny, and its foreign exchange reserves so tiny that this was a smart move.
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Judge Kavanaugh and the information terrorists trying to reshape America • WIRED

Molly McKew:

»

In 2014, Chuck Johnson explained in a Mother Jones interview how he offered “bounties” to independent online researchers to solve “puzzles” that he gave them. What he said is actually a good description of why QAnon works: “You get all these hobbyists and amateurs and people out there who have a lot of time on their hands, many of whom are retired or they’re a mother, their kids are sleeping while they’re researching, they’re stay-at-home moms, or they’re college students or they’re unemployed or this is their moonlighting thing. All those people are starting to find one another.” It’s that sense of being a part of a bigger mission…

…even before Q was visible at Trump rallies and the media was writing about it, there was a disturbance in the Q-force. In May 2018, Infowars and the others in the Stone cadre started urgently denouncing QAnon, saying it had been “hijacked” by a deep-state information campaign or maybe just by people out to make a buck. For most of the summer, Posobiec teased that he would explain the whole deal.

In September, his opus supposedly debunking QAnon debuted, outing MicroChip, the aforementioned bot-king, and someone named Dreamcatcher as the creators of QAnon. According to Micro (if any of this is to be believed), they basically just created a word salad out of the stuff Trump supporters believed—the sex trafficking mania, Clinton is about to be arrested, the Generals, Russia’s not a thing, Trump is the savior—and made a list of questions that would tantalize that audience and engage them online.

“It was meant to be funny, to get people’s imaginations going,” Micro said in his interview with Posobiec. “It’s not supposed to go this far.” He said they only wrote a few of the original posts, essentially to bring disparate factions of the Trump movement together, and then someone else took it over.

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Fascinating tour around the insane alt-right conspiracy theories. And their idiot helpers.
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iPhone XS: why it’s a whole new camera • Halide

Sebastiaan de With:

»

After testing the iPhone XS side by side with the X, we found the XS prefers a faster shutter speed and higher ISO level. In other words, it takes photos a lot faster, but comes at the cost of noise.

iPhone X RAW on the left, iPhone XS RAW on the right. Note the increase in visible noise!

Two shots taken with the iPhone X (left) and iPhone XS (right). Taken in RAW so the extra noise can be seen—RAW on iPhone omits any noise-reduction steps. Why does the iPhone XS’ frame have to be noisier?

Remember that line-up of frames showing how the iPhone camera works?

Unless you have bionic arms, it’s impossible to hold your phone perfectly still for this long. To get a sharp, perfectly aligned burst of images, the iPhone needs to take photos really fast. That requires a shorter shutter speed — and that, in turn, means that there will be more noise in the image.
That noise has to be removed, somehow, and that comes at a cost: noise reduction removes a bit of detail and local contrast.

The iPhone XS RAW exposure on the left shows less ‘smoothed’ detail in the reflections, compared to its regular Smart HDR counterpart on the right.

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There’s tons more: as you’d expect from people who developed a camera app. (Thanks @stormyparis for the link.)
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Here come Wi-Fi 4, 5 and 6 in plan to simplify 802.11 networking names • CNet

Jessica Dolcourt:

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Quick quiz: which is better, 802.11n or 802.11ac?

The answer, if you’re familiar with Wi-Fi standards coming from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, is 802.11ac – and by the way, the upcoming 802.11ax is better than both.

But in an effort to make the wireless networking terms more useful and less like alphanumeric gibberish, the Wi-Fi Alliance trade group has some new names it wants for those technologies: Wi-Fi 4, Wi-Fi 5, and Wi-Fi 6.

The idea is to be clearer about what’s better and what your phone or home router can handle without sounding as much like an electronic engineer. Not that there’s anything wrong with electronic engineers, but even techies can have a hard time remembering that IEEE 802.11 means wireless networks, IEEE 1394 governs FireWire data connections, and IEEE 802.3 is about Ethernet network connections.

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THANK. GOD. Also, will the numbers indicate maximum speeds somehow? Hmm, except Wi-Fi 1 (802.11b) would be Wi-Fi 11. Hmm.
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Why you shouldn’t use Facebook to log in to other sites • NY Times

Farhad Manjoo:

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neither Facebook nor third-party sites seem to know the precise extent of the damage. In a statement on Tuesday, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of product management, said the company had “no evidence” that attackers breached other sites through the hack, but that the company was building more sophisticated ways for sites to do their own deeper investigation.

But the mere possibility is highly troubling — and if the hack allowed access to any other sites, Facebook should be disqualified from acting as your sign-on service.

This is a classic you-had-one-job situation. Like a trusty superintendent in a Brooklyn walk-up, Facebook offered to carry keys for every lock online. The arrangement was convenient — the super was always right there, at the push of a button. It was also more secure than creating and remembering dozens of passwords for different sites. Facebook had a financial and reputational incentive to hire the best security people to protect your keys; tons of small sites online don’t — and if they got hacked and if you reused your passwords elsewhere, you were hosed.
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But the extensive hack vaporizes those arguments. If the entity with which you trusted your keys loses your keys, you take your keys elsewhere. And there are many more-secure and just-as-convenient ways to sign on to things online.

The best way is to use a dedicated password manager — a service, like LastPass or 1Password, that creates and remembers strong passwords for different sites. Operating systems and browsers are also getting better at managing passwords; newer iPhones, for instance, let you unlock sites with facial recognition, which is just as convenient as pressing Facebook’s button.

If for some reason you don’t want to use a password manager, you can use another tech giant’s sign-on service. When presented with different ways to sign on to sites, you can choose Google or Microsoft instead of Facebook.

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Though what happens when those single sign-ons (SSOs) at Google or Microsoft get hacked? I did commission a piece at The Guardian back in 2010 or so from a US startup which found that teens didn’t like using Facebook to sign into a new app, because they didn’t feel it was anonymous – that Facebook would know what they were doing.
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More than nine million broken links on Wikipedia are now rescued • Internet Archive

Mark Graham:

»

As part of the Internet Archive’s aim to build a better Web, we have been working to make the Web more reliable — and are pleased to announce that nine million formerly broken links on Wikipedia now work because they go to archived versions in the Wayback Machine.

For more than five years, the Internet Archive has been archiving nearly every URL referenced in close to 300 wikipedia sites as soon as those links are added or changed at the rate of about 20 million URLs/week.

And for the past three years, we have been running a software robot called IABot on 22 Wikipedia language editions looking for broken links (URLs that return a ‘404’, or ‘Page Not Found’). When broken links are discovered, IABot searches for archives in the Wayback Machine and other web archives to replace them with. Restoring links ensures Wikipedia remains accurate and verifiable and thus meets one of Wikipedia’s three core content policies: ‘Verifiability’.

To date we have successfully used IABot to edit and “fix” the URLs of nearly six million external references that would have otherwise returned a 404. In addition, members of the Wikipedia community have fixed more than six million links individually. Now more than nine million URLs, on 22 Wikipedia sites, point to archived resources from the Wayback Machine and other web archive providers.

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This is impressive (and also means that at a stroke the Internet Archive has become the top destination for outgoing clicks from Wikipedia). Any time you want to give money for the IA’s work, feel free – don’t wait for my Christmas charity request.
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Redesigning Siri and adding multitasking features to iOS • UX Design

Kévin Eugène:

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I wanted to imagine an update that I would personally be excited about if it showed up at the WWDC, and this is what I came up with.

Let me introduce you to iOS Mogi.

This is Mogi, a beautiful fishing village near Nagasaki in Japan. I took this picture last year.

« Hey Siri, help me »
The first part of this concept is focused on Siri. The idea here is not to create new commands, rather to display existing vocal requests that work well (like « Find me a good restaurant nearby » or « Get me pictures of Japan I took last year ») in a different way so they could be more useful to the user.
In iOS Mogi, Siri has been designed around a concept I call parallel help. The idea is to have a vocal assistant that is non-intrusive (it won’t take the whole screen like it does today), context aware, and can do things in the background for the user while they are doing something else.
As images are more explicit than words, here’s a very simple example:

Using Siri in Messages.
When using apps, Siri takes the shape of a notification so as to be less intrusive as possible (if summoned from the lock screen or the home screen, it will still be fullscreen).

In the example above, I ask Siri to show me pictures of Japan as I want to send one to my friend Yannick. Once the request is fulfilled, the result is displayed in the Siri notification so I can continue to do what I was doing without being interrupted. I can swipe down the notification to reveal more and select the photos I want to send.

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Like that? He’s only just getting started. The idea of Siri as a really helpful full-time assistant which you call on (rather than which prods you annoyingly, Clippy-style) is truly attractive.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: sorry about the spelling error 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.

Surprise! Over half the online complaints about this film came from bots and trolls. Photo by Brian Crawford on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Tax that return. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Microsoft Surface Pro 6 announced with a new matte black finish, quad-core processors • The Verge

Tom Warren:

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Microsoft’s Surface chief, Panos Panay, says the company has overhauled the inside of the Surface Pro 6 so it has improved cooling. That means the Surface Pro 6 now supports quad-core processors, and Microsoft claims it will be 67% faster than the previous model.

This new internal design should also help improve battery life. Microsoft says the Surface Pro 6 will last for 13.5 hours on battery life. While there’s an internal redesign, the outside looks very familiar. It’s still 1.7 pounds, and it has the same 12.3-inch display and up to 16GB of RAM inside.

Unfortunately, the Surface Pro 6 will include the same connectivity and external design as the existing model, which means there are still no USB-C ports. It’s surprising Microsoft still isn’t adopting USB-C in its flagship Surface Pro, especially given the company has introduced this new connector on both the Surface Go and Surface Book 2.

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“Matte black finish” is the key point for the headline? And still USB-C can’t get any love.
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Amazon’s $15-per-hour minimum wage will change how Americans see work • Bloomberg

Conor Sen:

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Amazon’s move may have ripple effects in a way that fast food companies and other retailers haven’t because of the influence of Amazon in the corporate world and in the minds of upper-middle-class Americans. Even as Walmart has arguably been a better corporate citizen in moving its company in more of a pro-worker direction than Amazon has in recent years, Amazon is seen as an innovative and sexy technology company in a way that Walmart isn’t. Amazon making a big public move to raise worker pay will get broader cohorts of companies to do the same. Look for this as companies start to report third-quarter earnings over the next few weeks.

If $15 an hour becomes the new standard for entry-level wages in corporate America, its impact may be felt most broadly among middle-class workers. Average hourly earnings for non-managerial workers in the U.S. were $22.73 an hour in August. The historically low level of jobless claims and unemployment, combined with $15 an hour becoming an anchor in people’s minds, could make someone people earning around that $22 mark feel more secure in their jobs. Instead of worrying about losing their job and being on the unemployment rolls for a while, or only being able to find last-ditch work that pays $9 or $10 an hour, the “floor” may be seen as a $15 an hour job.

That creates a whole new set of options for middle-class households. In 2017, the real median household income in the U.S. was $61,372, which is roughly what two earners with full-time jobs making $15 an hour would make. A $15-an-hour floor might embolden some workers to quit their jobs to move to another city even without a job offer there. It might let some workers switch to part-time to focus more time on education, gaining new skills or child care.

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Of course in the US they’d also need some confidence about health care, which is never a given when you move in the US.
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Eleven takeaways from the NYT’s investigation into Trump’s wealth • The New York Times

Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and David Barstow:

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The Trumps created a company that siphoned cash from the empire.

The first major component was creating a company called All County Building Supply & Maintenance. On paper, All County was Fred Trump’s purchasing agent, buying everything from boilers to cleaning supplies. But All County was, in fact, a company only on paper, records and interviews show — a vehicle to siphon cash from Fred Trump’s empire by simply marking up purchases already made by his employees. Those millions in markups, effectively untaxed gifts, then flowed to All County’s owners — Donald Trump, his siblings and a cousin.

Lee-Ford Tritt, a leading expert in gift and estate tax law at the University in Florida, said the Trumps’ use of All County was “highly suspicious” and could constitute criminal tax fraud. “It certainly looks like a disguised gift,” he said.

All County also had an insidious downside for Fred Trump’s tenants. He used the padded invoices to justify higher rent increases in rent-regulated buildings, records show.

Mr. Harder, the president’s lawyer, disputed The Times’s reporting: “Should The Times state or imply that President Trump participated in fraud, tax evasion or any other crime, it will be exposing itself to substantial liability and damages for defamation.”

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And there’s loads more. Trump didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. Wonder what his up-to-date tax returns would show. Wonder if Robert Mueller is looking at those.
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Vigilante engineer stops Waymo from patenting key lidar technology • Ars Technica

Mark Harris:

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Following a surprise left-field complaint by Eric Swildens, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has rejected all but three of 56 claims in Waymo’s 936 patent, named for the last three digits of its serial number. The USPTO found that some claims replicated technology described in an earlier patent from lidar vendor Velodyne, while another claim was simply “impossible” and “magic.”

Swildens, who receives no money or personal advantage from the decision, told Ars that he was delighted at the news. “The patent shouldn’t have been filed in the first place,” he said. “It’s a very well written patent. However, my personal belief is that the thing that they say they invented, they didn’t invent.”

The 936 patent played a key role in last year’s epic intellectual property lawsuit with Uber. In December 2016, a Waymo engineer was inadvertently copied on an email from one of its suppliers to Uber, showing a lidar circuit design that looked almost identical to one shown in the 936 patent…

…Remarkably, Swildens does not work for Uber or for Velodyne, nor for any other self-driving developer—he works for a small cloud computing startup. Swildens became interested in the patent when it surfaced during the Uber case, and he saw how simple Waymo’s lidar circuit seemed to be. “I couldn’t imagine the circuit didn’t exist prior to this patent,” he told Wired last year.

Swildens’ research uncovered several patents and books that seemed to pre-date the Waymo patent. He then spent $6,000 of his own money to launch a formal challenge to 936. Waymo fought back, making dozens of filings, bringing expert witnesses to bear, and attempting to re-write several of the patent’s claims and diagrams to safeguard its survival.

The USPTO was not impressed. In March, an examiner noted that a re-drawn diagram of Waymo’s lidar firing circuit showed current passing along a wire between the circuit and the ground in two directions—something generally deemed impossible.

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As everyone on Twitter has been saying, not all heroes wear capes.
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Star Wars: The Last Jedi abuse blamed on Russian trolls and ‘political agendas’ • The Guardian

Andrew Pulver:

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Morten Bay, a research fellow at the University of Southern California (USC), analysed Twitter activity about the film and concluded that more than 50% of posts are by “bots, trolls/sockpuppets or political activists using the debate to propagate political messages supporting extreme rightwing causes and the discrimination of gender, race or sexuality. A number of these users appear to be Russian trolls.”

The supposed fan hostility to The Last Jedi is a well-known phenomenon, with actors such as Kelly Marie Tran experiencing extreme levels of abuse, and campaigns cropping up to lower the film’s rating on critics’ aggregators and fund a remake. However, Bay’s research indicates that not only are negative comments on social media about the film in a minority, but the “anti-Jedi” campaign has been designed to serve a wider political purpose. “The study finds evidence of deliberate, organised political influence measures disguised as fan arguments,” Bay writes. The likely objective of these measures is increasing media coverage of the fandom conflict, thereby adding to and further propagating a narrative of widespread discord and dysfunction in American society.”

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Related: Twitter has tweaked its rules on fake accounts and behaviour ahead of the US mid-term elections. Notable (to me at least) that Del Harvey, its veep of Trust & Safety, is a co-author: she has been very busy in the past few months, having been away (literally) for some time before. Now “challenging” 9.4m accounts per week.
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The Big Disruption • Medium

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Something is fishy at Anahata—and it’s not just the giant squid that serves as a mascot for the world’s largest tech company. A prince in exile is working as a product manager. The sales guys are battling with the engineers. The female employees are the unwitting subjects of a wild social experiment. The VPs are plotting against each other. And the yoga-loving, sex-obsessed CEO is rumored to be planning a moon colony, sending his investors into a tizzy. Is it all downhill from here? Or is this just the beginning of a bold new phase in Anahata’s quest for global domination?

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Jessica Powell used to work at Google. I have to say that I think it would be hard for her satire (available in its entirety on Medium, for free) to do better than The Circle.
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This is how cyber attackers stole £2.26m from Tesco Bank customers • ZDNet

Danny Palmer:

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the FCA’s newly published report into the Tesco Bank attack details how hackers were able to make off with over £2m over the course of 48 hours in November 2016.

The attack started at 02:00 on Saturday, 5 November 2016; by 04:00, Tesco Bank’s fraud analysis and detection system started sending automatic text messages to the bank’s personal current account holders asking them to call about “suspicious activity” on their accounts, which is how the bank itself first became aware of the attack.

As the fraud attempts increased, the calls quickly overwhelmed Tesco Bank’s fraud prevention line. Although Tesco Bank’s controls stopped almost 80% of the unauthorised transactions, the attack affected 8,261 out of 131,000 Tesco Bank personal current accounts.

The attackers most likely used an algorithm which generated authentic Tesco Bank debit card numbers and, using those virtual cards, they attempted to make thousands of unauthorised debit card transactions.

The FCA said Tesco Bank’s failures include the way in which the bank distributed debit card numbers and mistakes made in the reaction to the attack which meant that no action was taken for almost a day after the incident was first uncovered.

A number of deficiencies in the way Tesco Bank handled security left customers vulnerable to cyber attackers in an incident that was “largely avoidable”, said the FCA analysis of the incident which Tesco Bank had to this point been tight-lipped about – to the frustration of other financial institutions.

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And 21 hours (that’s to 11pm on the day of an attack that started 0200) for the Financial Crime Operations Team to contact the Fraud Strategy Team. “In the meantime, nothing had been done to stop the attack.” Attack (or at least fake transaction) source: Brazil.

But it gets worse. Oh, yes.
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Why a new fake news law in Singapore could be a big test for Facebook, Google, and Twitter • Buzzfeed News

Craig Silverman:

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In early September, Kirsten Han began seeing messages on Facebook and Twitter calling her a “treacherous sow” and saying she should be executed for treason.

“You bloody rotten stinking traitors trying to get foreigners to overthrow the Singapore government and trying to destroy people live [sic] here,” read one Facebook comment. “You batch of traitors deserve death and nothing else.”

Han is a Singaporean journalist and activist, and a frequent critic of the ruling party’s approach to press freedom and use of the death penalty. She’s used to online criticism, but this was more extreme in tone and content. It also struck her as a case study in how the government itself can be a source of false allegations.

It began with a Facebook post from Han’s business partner, Ping Tjin Thum. Thum is a Singaporean academic based at the University of Oxford who was admitted to Harvard at 16 and competed in the Olympics for Singapore. He and Han run a small, member-funded nonprofit media company called New Naratif that reports on Southeast Asia and advocates for democracy in the region.

At the end of August, Han, Thum, and other activists from Singapore traveled to Malaysia to meet the newly elected prime minister. After they returned, Thum wrote on Facebook that he’d encouraged the prime minister “to take leadership in Southeast Asia for the promotion of democracy, human rights, freedom of expression, and freedom of information.”

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It’s going to be a law that only applies to people the government doesn’t like, one suspects.
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Apple Watch apps instantly went 64-bit thanks to obscure Bitcode option • Venturebeat

Jeremy Horwitz:

»

An obscure feature in Apple’s Xcode development software enabled Apple Watch apps to make an instant transition from 32-bit to 64-bit last month, an unheralded win for Apple Watch developers inside and outside the company. The “Enable Bitcode” feature was introduced to developers three years ago, but the Accidental Tech Podcast suggests that it was quietly responsible for the smooth launch of software for the Apple Watch Series 4 last month.

Support for Bitcode was originally added to Xcode 7 in November 2015, subsequently becoming optional for iOS apps but mandatory for watchOS and tvOS apps. Bitcode is an “intermediate representation” halfway between human-written app code and machine code. Rather than the developer sending a completely compiled app to the App Store, enabling Bitcode provides Apple with a partially compiled app that it can then finish compiling for whatever processors it wants to support.

The feature was forward-thinking enough that reports of its existence in 2015 called its most obvious use, “recompil[ing] bitcode-encoded App Store apps without any work from developers … unlikely to happen.” But that’s exactly what did happen in September 2018 with the release of the Apple Watch Series 4, which transitioned from the 32-bit Apple S3 processor to the 64-bit Apple S4. There was no waiting period for new 64-bit apps after the release of the new Watch last month, and developers didn’t even have to recompile their 32-bit apps; the apps just worked, and noticeably faster than before, on the new devices.

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The Series 4 has a dual-core 64-bit processor, which is why 64-bit apps run faster. (The introuction of the 64-bit 5S led to 32-bit apps crashing more often.)
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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.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Revolutionary in its day, is Gmail crimping people now? Photo by Peter Forret on Flickr.

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

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

Google hasn’t updated Gmail, Drive, Photos storage limit in 5 years. Now what? • CNBC

Jordan Novet:

»

2013 was the most recent time Google raised the [Gmail storage] limit — bringing it up 50% to 15GB.

But now it’s been five years since Google gave free users more room for stuff. (Google did introduce free and unlimited storage of images and videos through Google Photos in 2015, but if you want that free tier, you’ll need to be okay with content getting compressed or resized.)

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

My specific situation was helped along because a few years ago bought a Chromebook as a sort of backup computer. The purchase happened to come with a perk: 100GB of free storage.

But last month, Google emailed me and let me know that the extra storage would soon be going away. It turns out the promotion lasted two years.

As of today, I’m back to being just another Google account holder with 15GB of standard-issue free storage. But my data takes up more than 21GB. When I checked my Gmail inbox this morning, there was a pink banner on top instructing me to free up space or pay. In Google Drive, the icon on the left that shows how much space is left is now colored red. Conveniently there is a link below to “UPGRADE STORAGE.”

These days, through the Google One plan the company introduced this year, you can have 100GB for $19.99 per year. And $9.99 per month now gets you 2TB of storage, 100% more than before. Those prices aren’t crazy — and I understand Google’s desire to get customers paying for storage so it can grow and further diversify away from advertising — but it’s the principle of the thing.

I keep thinking back to Larry Page’s words “all the storage I need.” Did Page and others believe that would only be applicable for a few years? I hope not.

«

Gmail is the world’s biggest email service, so any increment must cost Google heftily. It’s either that, or the world’s running out of storage. (Wouldn’t that be a thing? No room left on the internet.)
link to this extract

Pushing the limits of streaming technology • Google blog

Catherine Hsiao:

»

Streaming media has transformed the way we consume music and video, making it easy to instantly access your favorite content. It’s a technically complex process that has come a long way in a few short years, but the next technical frontier for streaming will be much more demanding than video.

We’ve been working on Project Stream, a technical test to solve some of the biggest challenges of streaming. For this test, we’re going to push the limits with one of the most demanding applications for streaming—a blockbuster video game.

We’ve partnered with one of the most innovative and successful video game publishers, Ubisoft, to stream their soon-to-be released Assassin’s Creed Odyssey® to your Chrome browser on a laptop or desktop. Starting on October 5, a limited number of participants will get to play the latest in this best-selling franchise at no charge for the duration of the Project Stream test.

The idea of streaming such graphically-rich content that requires near-instant interaction between the game controller and the graphics on the screen poses a number of challenges.  When streaming TV or movies, consumers are comfortable with a few seconds of buffering at the start, but streaming high-quality games requires latency measured in milliseconds, with no graphic degradation.

«

So… it’s PC gaming except done by streaming? So you could have lower-spec PCs, and bin your console? Maybe a worry for Sony and Microsoft.
link to this extract

Microsoft Surface event 2018: 5 things to expect • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Microsoft is holding a media event on Tuesday in New York City. Described only as a “moment of your time,” the event is likely to focus on Surface hardware, Windows 10 features, and Microsoft’s new productivity push to win back consumers. Microsoft’s Surface chief, Panos Panay, will be attending the event and it will be the company’s first big Surface / Windows press event since former Windows chief Terry Myerson departed over the summer. It’s a chance for Microsoft to show where Windows is heading, unveil the latest Surface hardware, and perhaps surprise us with something new.

«

TL;DR: refreshes of the existing stuff, but without adding USB-C if it doesn’t already have it.
link to this extract

HP attempts to refresh the two-in-one with the leather-and-metal Spectre Folio • Ars Technica

Valentina Palladino:

»

The Spectre Folio may look like a convertible that’s covered in leather, but it’s not that simple. The leather is actually built into the PC—you can’t remove it, and HP doesn’t want you to. The leather soft chassis adheres to the magnesium and aluminum hard chassis in a construction that you won’t be able to see with your own eyes—it’s all under the surface.

While it’s classified as a convertible, it can flex into positions that were previously limited to tablets with keyboard covers. It can act as a laptop but instantly slide down into tablet mode as well. Instead of the traditional tent mode that other convertibles can achieve, the screen portion of the Spectre Folio can sit in a slot in front of the keyboard, turning it into a device ideal for photo and video viewing.

The Spectre Folio will have either an FHD or 4K touchscreen, both of which support inking, and the device will come with a stylus as well. It runs on 8th Gen Intel Core i5 and i7 Y-series processors and can support up to 8GB of RAM and 2TB of storage. HP claims the device will last at least 18 hours on a single charge. While super thin, the Spectre Folio contains two Thunderbolt 3 ports and one USB Type-C port, all of which support charging.

«

A picture (below) from The Verge shows how the keyboard is covered by the screen when you want “tablet time”; the screen can then lay flat outward, or flat inward. At least they’re trying.

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3rd-generation Chromecast leaks ahead of Google’s launch • 9to5Google

Ben Schoon:

»

It’s been over three years since Google last refreshed its most popular product, the Chromecast. We’ve been hearing bits of information for the past few months about a possible refresh incoming, and now it seems someone has gotten their hands on the 3rd-generation Chromecast a bit early.

A Redditor posted this weekend an image of a new Chromecast he bought from a local Best Buy which was unboxed to find something that looks a bit different from a typical Chromecast. While none of the internal specifications have come out due to this leak, we can see how Google has altered the design of the beloved streaming dongle.

The comparison picture posted shows the 3rd-generation Chromecast right alongside a 2nd-generation model, and the differences are clear. Both do share the same basic design with a circular body housing the components and an HDMI cable attached to connect to the TV. According to the Redditor, this new hardware ditches the magnetic connector that allows easy management of that HDMI cable, though.

«

Over three years since the Chromecast was updated? Did they find the Platonic form, or did it hit market saturation early? (I suspect the latter.) The Chromecast has always struck me as an odd device in that it does so little for Google: it might reveal a bit of what people do at home, but it isn’t crucial to anything.
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Take control of your commute with Google Maps • Google blog

Ramesh Nagarajan is group product manager for Google Maps:

»

Why are commutes so stressful? They’re unpredictable and long. Commute data in 25 North American cities tells us daily commute times during rush hour traffic can be up to 60% longer than what you expect when you start your drive—resulting in a lot of stress, missed meetings, and skipped breakfasts. According to historical Google Maps data, people in North America spend a full day per month commuting—which almost adds up to a two-week vacation each year.  Plus, a bad commute can negatively impact the rest of your day, long after the actual commute is over.

Today, we’re rolling out new features on Google Maps to help you take control of your daily commute— enabling you to plan ahead, prepare for the inevitable disruptions, and possibly avoid them altogether. Oh, and we’ll also help you have a bit of fun along the way…

…Sprinting to the subway station only to find that your train is delayed is our least favorite way to start the day. Now, transit riders in 80 regions worldwide will be able to see exactly where their bus or train is in real time on the map. This will help you plan your day more efficiently—you’ll know if you can spend an extra few minutes grabbing coffee, or if you really do need to make a run for it to catch your bus. And in Sydney, we’ve partnered with Transport New South Wales to show how full you next bus or train is – so you’ll know whether or not you’ll get a seat. This feature will be coming to more cities around the globe soon.

«

That’s quite a nifty feature. Open data, one assumes, so Apple could use it in time. Set a timer…
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Fully driverless Waymo taxis are due out this year, alarming critics • Ars Technica

Timothy Lee:

»

Waymo, Google’s self-driving car project, is planning to launch a driverless taxi service in the Phoenix area in the next three months. It won’t be a pilot project or a publicity stunt, either. Waymo is planning to launch a public, commercial service—without anyone in the driver’s seat.

And to date, Waymo’s technology has gotten remarkably little oversight from government officials in either Phoenix or Washington, DC.

If a company wants to sell a new airplane or medical device, it must undergo an extensive process to prove to federal regulators that it’s safe. Currently, there’s no comparable requirement for self-driving cars. Federal and state laws allow Waymo to introduce fully self-driving cars onto public streets in Arizona without any formal approval process.

That’s not an oversight. It represents a bipartisan consensus in Washington that strict regulation of self-driving cars would do more harm than good.

“If you think about what would be required for some government body to examine the design of a self-driving vehicle and decide if it’s safe, that’s a very difficult task,” says Ed Felten, a Princeton computer scientist who advised the Obama White House on technology issues.

«

Pretty much impossible to prove “safe”. But how safe? Safer than a human? My suspicion is that they will be safer than humans in general, but do some strange things leading to accidents when humans wouldn’t have.
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A penthouse made for Instagram • NY Times

Sapna Maheshwari:

»

This penthouse apartment in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood is awash in natural light, with high ceilings, gleaming hardwood floors and a rooftop deck. The living room area includes a sofa in the rosy hue known as millennial pink, the kitchen comes equipped with a floor-to-ceiling wine fridge, and the library nook is filled with books chosen for their appearance, not their contents. The white walls are spotless, and there is never any clutter.

Nobody lives here.

The 2,400-square-foot space — which rents for $15,000 a month — was designed as a backdrop for Instagram stars, who have booked it through October.

It was opened in August by Village Marketing, an agency that connects advertisers like the eyewear company Warby Parker and the Equinox fitness company to the social media personalities known as influencers. The ones who work with Village Marketing — mostly stylish young women who are paid to promote products on Instagram — have amassed huge followings with images that capture an idealized version of daily life.

«

SHOCKING! Well no, not really. Spaces reserved for modelling have existed for decades – as long as portraiture. What has happened is that Instagram has created a new slice of people who do that too. It’s a democratisation, not a debasement.
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A wise man leaves Facebook • The New York Times

Kara Swisher:

»

When tech executives don’t like a thing I have written, I typically get a call full of gnashing teeth and why-are-you-so-mean plaintiveness. But when I recently declared on Instagram that I was sick of Instagram and had major issues with the service, [Instagram co-founder Kevin] Systrom texted and asked me why. It was neither a suck-up nor did he try to debate me.

So, I told him: It’s performative; it makes people feel badly, even if it’s beautiful; it has turned into a brag book of strivers; it is a museum and not a place to connect; it has stolen too many of its ideas from Snapchat. That said, I saw the good side, too, and wanted him to make it easier to find the many delightful things, like photographers and funny people, that made the platform joyful.

Unlike other hot-house-flower zillionaires I cover, this criticism did not slay Mr. Systrom. Maybe I am setting a low bar, but I admire him for being someone who can always take it, and that quality will be sorely missed at Facebook.

Even more important, unlike Mr. Zuckerberg, who in a recent podcast with me was unable to articulate how he felt about the high price society had paid for his success, Mr. Systrom is reflective and self-critical about the challenges that social media faces and the damage that it has done.

That was the case at a recent talk I had with him at a hopelessly hip coffee place in San Francisco, where I was left with one thought: He should be the chief executive of Facebook.

One thing he said seemed particularly wise, so I asked him if I could put it on the record, and he agreed.

“Social media is in a pre-Newtonian moment, where we all understand that it works, but not how it works,” Mr. Systrom told me, comparing this moment in the tech world to the time before man could explain gravity. “There are certain rules that govern it and we have to make it our priority to understand the rules, or we cannot control it.”

«

link to this extract

Imaginary worlds dreamed by BigGAN • Letting neural networks be weird

Janelle Shane:

»

These are some of the most amazing generated images I’ve ever seen. Introducing BigGAN, a neural network that generates high-resolution, sometimes photorealistic, imitations of photos it’s seen. None of the images below are real – they’re all generated by BigGAN.

The BigGAN paper is still in review so we don’t know who the authors are, but as part of the review process a preprint and some data were posted online. It’s been causing a buzz in the machine learning community. For generated images, their 512×512 pixel resolution is high, and they scored impressively well on a standard benchmark known as Inception. They were able to scale up to huge processing power (512 TPUv3′s), and they’ve also introduced some strategies that help them achieve both photorealism and variety. (They also told us what *didn’t* work, which was nice of them.) Some of the images are so good that the researchers had to check the original ImageNet dataset to make sure it hadn’t simply copied one of its training images – it hadn’t.

Now, the images above were selected for the paper because they’re especially impressive. BigGAN does well on common objects like dogs and simple landscapes where the pose is pretty consistent, and less well on rarer, more-varied things like crowds. But the researchers also posted a huge set of example BigGAN images and some of the less photorealistic ones are the most interesting.

«

Keep reading, though, and you’ll encounter some truly weird images. The clocks are in some ways the oddest: familiar yet wrong. How long before entire films are being generated like this? It would be like a waking dream.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Do these guys think they’re going to succeed with lighting like that? Photo by Arend Kuester on Flickr.

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

A selection of 12 links for you. Why not? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Exclusive: Tim Berners-Lee tells us his radical new plan to upend the world wide web

Katrina Brooker:

»

Ever since revelations emerged that Facebook had allowed people’s data to be misused by political operatives, Berners-Lee has felt an imperative to get this digital idyll into the real world. In a post published this weekend, Berners-Lee explains that he is taking a sabbatical from MIT to work full time on Inrupt. The company will be the first major commercial venture built off of Solid, a decentralized web platform he and others at MIT have spent years building.

If all goes as planned, Inrupt will be to Solid what Netscape once was for many first-time users of the web: an easy way in. And like with Netscape, Berners-Lee hopes Inrupt will be just the first of many companies to emerge from Solid.

“I have been imagining this for a very long time,” says Berners-Lee. He opens up his laptop and starts tapping at his keyboard. Watching the inventor of the web work at his computer feels like what it might have been like to watch Beethoven compose a symphony: It’s riveting but hard to fully grasp. “We are in the Solid world now,” he says, his eyes lit up with excitement. He pushes the laptop toward me so I too can see.

On his screen, there is a simple-looking web page with tabs across the top: Tim’s to-do list, his calendar, chats, address book. He built this app–one of the first on Solid–for his personal use. It is simple, spare. In fact, it’s so plain that, at first glance, it’s hard to see its significance. But to Berners-Lee, this is where the revolution begins. The app, using Solid’s decentralized technology, allows Berners-Lee to access all of his data seamlessly–his calendar, his music library, videos, chat, research. It’s like a mashup of Google Drive, Microsoft Outlook, Slack, Spotify, and WhatsApp.

The difference here is that, on Solid, all the information is under his control. Every bit of data he creates or adds on Solid exists within a Solid pod–which is an acronym for personal online data store. These pods are what give Solid users control over their applications and information on the web. Anyone using the platform will get a Solid identity and Solid pod. This is how people, Berners-Lee says, will take back the power of the web from corporations.

«

Hmm. Big intentions. Lot of inertia.
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Facebook logs 90 million people out of their accounts after security breach • The Washington Post

Brian Fung:

»

The hackers were able to gain access to profile information, such as users’ names, home towns and genders, Facebook said. They may have had access to more information, but Facebook said its investigation is in the early stages. No credit card information was exposed, Facebook executives said, and so far there is no evidence that the attackers sought to access private messages or post fraudulent messages from the accounts.

“This is a serious issue, and we’re committed to addressing it,” said Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. “This underscores that there are constant attacks from people who are trying to take over accounts or steal information from people in our community.”

Facebook said it discovered the breach Tuesday after noticing a spike in user activity on Sept. 16., which prompted engineers to investigate. They found three interlocking bugs on Facebook’s website that attackers had been using to gain access to accounts.

The attackers exploited Facebook’s systems through a flaw in the company’s “View As” feature, the company said, which allows a user to view his or her own profile as somebody else might see it.

Embedded in the “View As” feature was a video uploader that was incorrectly generating security tokens — pieces of code that, under normal circumstances, are designed to let a user remain logged in even after navigating away from Facebook’s website.

«

The uploader being designed to let people send Happy Birthday messages. And those tokens, stolen, could let the hackers log into any service that used Facebook logins. The dangers of monoculture.
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Use of internet, social media, digital devices plateaus in US • Pew Research Center

»

The shares of US adults who say they use the internet, use social media, own a smartphone or own a tablet computer are all nearly identical to the shares who said so in 2016. The share who say they have broadband internet service at home currently stands at 65% – nearly identical to the 67% who said this in a survey conducted in summer 2015. And when it comes to desktop or laptop ownership, there has actually been a small dip in the overall numbers over the last two years – from 78% in 2016 to 73% today.

A contributing factor behind this slowing growth is that parts of the population have reached near-saturation levels of adoption of some technologies. Put simply, in some instances there just aren’t many non-users left. For example, nine-in-ten or more adults younger than 50 say they go online or own a smartphone. And a similar share of those in higher-income households have laptops or desktops.

«

Notice that dip in desktop/laptop use, while tablet use inched up. Although I suspect that tablets plus smartphones have consumed that gap in PC use.

If that’s continued in two years’ time, it’ll be a clear trend. Check back in 2020!
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Elon Musk steps down as Tesla’s chairman in settlement with S.E.C. over go-private tweet • The New York Times

Matthew Goldstein:

»

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced the deal two days after it sued Mr. Musk in federal court for misleading investors over his post on Twitter last month that he had “funding secured” for a buyout of the electric-car company at $420 a share.

The deal with the SEC will allow him to remain as chief executive, something he could have jeopardized if he had gone to battle with the agency.

It is not clear why Mr. Musk changed his mind so quickly.

People familiar with the situation, who were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, said lawyers for Mr. Musk and the company moved to reopen the talks with the SEC on Friday. During that time, one of Tesla’s lawyers became instrumental in securing a deal with the SEC, according to a person familiar with the negotiations.

The whipsaw events of the past few days followed a series of self-inflicted wounds by Mr. Musk.

«

Basically, someone managed to calm Musk down for long enough to tell him that he was going to lose everything if he couldn’t make a concession.

Wonder if they’ve managed to wrestle his Twitter account away from him.
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Microsoft puts its touch-friendly Office apps for Windows 10 on hold • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Microsoft first started work on its touch-friendly Office apps for Windows 8.1 more than five years ago. Designed for tablets or laptops with touchscreens, the apps are lightweight and speedy versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Microsoft has updated them regularly for Windows 10, but now that the company has halted work on Windows 10 Mobile, it’s also halting work on these Office apps.

The apps aren’t fully dead yet, but Microsoft is no longer developing new features for them. “We are currently prioritizing development for the iOS and Android versions of our apps; and on Windows, we are prioritizing Win32 and web versions of our apps,” explains a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge.

The reprioritization isn’t all that surprising given the state of dedicated universal Windows apps on Windows 10 and the Microsoft Store. These touch-friendly versions of Office were once a great example of what developers could achieve if they made universal Windows apps, but Microsoft now lets developers simply package existing desktop apps and list them in the store.

«

Meanwhile, people are saying “Apple MUST release a touchscreen Mac or it is dead!” Nope. Wasn’t true then, still isn’t true. (Touch-free version of iOS apps, as in Marzipan ones, are a different matter.)
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How America failed women • EAnd

Imair Haque:

»

American women are severely underrepresented in positions of power — so much that it’s almost comical. America’s one of the very, very few countries, by this point in history, which has never had a female head of state. Congress is 20% women, but society is 51% women. The Senate is also 20% women, but society is 51% women. Maybe you don’t see my point. Let me make it crystal clear. In Sweden, parliament is 45% women. In Denmark, 40%. In France, 39%. In Germany, 37%. Do you see how stunning this difference is? In the rest of the rich world, women have twice as much political representation — they are almost to the point of true representational parity. But in America, women are not even half people yet, in terms of representational parity.

In fact, even in much poorer countries, women hold far more political power than American women do. In Mozambique and South Africa, women are 40% of legislators. In Vietnam, Mauritania, Kazakhstan, and Laos, 20%-30%. Do you know which country has the same number of women in political office as America? Pakistan. That’s a grim place to be, my friends — let me make it sharper precisely why.

American patriarchy has been spectacularly, singularly successful in keeping power from women. In global terms, it is one of the most successful patriarchies of all — as successful, in the most crucial ways, as a place like Pakistan. Yes, really (no, Pakistani women don’t have to wear niqabs, that’s an American fairy tale.) That lack of rights has had very real consequences, the most significant of which is that American women simply don’t hold much — or nearly enough — power in society. That was the point of refusing to ratify international conventions or constitutional amendments — not to give women rights, and therefore, to keep them relatively socially powerless.

«

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the female Supreme Court Justice, was once asked how many women she thought should be on the court: “nine would be a good number,” she replied. (Nine is the full complement.) For how long? “Oh, only as long as men have had a majority.” (200-odd years.)
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Hackers expose frailty of robots • Financial Times

Aliya Ram:

»

In 2017, Lucas Apa and Cesar Cerrudo, security researchers with the consultancy IOActive, showed that the version 2.5.5 of Pepper could be hacked through its software because of vulnerabilities that were discovered when it was connected to a network. They demonstrated that the robot could be controlled remotely, its limbs manipulated and its cameras used to spy on users.

Yet more than a year later, SoftBank has not patched the software, according to an analysis of its change logs by Mr Apa. He told the FT that the Japanese conglomerate had told him it could not fix the problem.

He says: “We were very disappointed by this answer, but we understand that with any new technology it is very hard for manufacturers to get the attention or investment [they need].”

SoftBank says that users were asked to maintain Wi-Fi network security and set robot passwords correctly. “We will continue to improve our security measures on Pepper, so we can counter any risks we may face,” the company says.

Pepper is just one of several robots that Mr Apa and Mr Cerrudo tested last year. They found that others, including those manufactured by UBTech Robotics, Robotis, Universal Robots, Rethink Robotics and Asratec Corp, could be hacked too.

The matter has also been raised by Bundesnetzagentur, the telecoms watchdog in Germany, which last year told parents to destroy talking dolls called Cayla because hackers could use an unsecured Bluetooth device to make the toy reveal personal data.

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Isn’t this more like “hackers expose frailty of systems”? It’s not particularly the robots.
link to this extract

Apple looks down on ads but takes billions from Google • Bloomberg

Shira Ovide:

»

In new research, [Goldman Sachs] estimated that about $9bn of Apple’s expected 2018 services segment revenue — about one-quarter of the estimated total — has almost nothing to do with Apple itself.

Goldman estimated the $9bn is coming from Google, which pays Apple for the privilege of being the built-in search engine on Apple’s Safari web browsers, on Siri and some other spots on Apple devices. Google constantly talks about the pile of money it’s paying to Apple and others, 1 and Google investors track it fanatically. Apple, by contrast, never talks about its revenue stream from Google, and investors never seem to care about it. If Goldman’s figure is correct, however, it should dent investors’ beliefs about Apple’s business transformation, and it calls into question Apple’s moral proclamations about digital advertising.

Most estimates of Apple’s revenue from Google are more like $3bn to $4bn a year rather than double or triple that figure. But it is true that in its recent financial reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Apple has listed “licensing” as the first in a short list of contributors to sales growth in its services segment. “Licensing” includes the money that Apple is collecting from its search contract with Alphabet Inc.’s Google and other sources, including a legal settlement with Samsung…

…give Apple credit for not itself employing an aggressive system to harvest personal information for advertising purposes. What if instead Apple is generating one-quarter of its services revenue from enabling Google’s aggressive system of harvesting personal information for advertising purposes? Make no mistake — that is what Apple is doing by cashing those 10-figure checks from Google.

That feels worse, because Apple gets to collect a high-profit pile of money from the spoils of digital advertising without having to be accountable for the downsides of that digital advertising system. It’s perfect, and perfectly hypocritical.

«

Neil Cybart, a former Wall St analyst, poured cold water on the $9bn figure (he puts all of Licensing as less than $4bn for all of 2017). As to the “harvesting personal information” – Google doesn’t get location data from phones unless people directly consent. It can’t grab peoples’ information unless they consent. This contrasts starkly with Google tracking people on Android even when they ask it to stop.
link to this extract

What if everything we know about dark matter is totally wrong? • Wired

Katia Moskvitch:

»

Despite huge pots of money being poured since the 1970s into dark matter experiments on, under or above Earth, despite endless late nights spent doing calculations, and despite plenty of media coverage, researchers keep getting nowhere. Apart from SNOLAB, there is the LUX experiment in Lead, South Dakota, one mile underground in an abandoned gold mine. It has obtained zero results. In France, the EDELWEISS experiment in a lab under the French Alps, under 1.7 km of rock, has found nothing. The PandaX experiment in the Jin-Ping sub-terrain laboratory in China hasn’t spotted any particles either. In India, Jaduguda Underground Science Laboratory opened last year, 550 meters below the surface at an operating uranium mine. So far, they have found nothing (well, they’ve only been looking for a year). And on, and on, and on.

The leading theory is that dark matter is made out of particles that interact with normal, atomic, matter or light only through gravity – by exerting a gravitational pull. SuperCDMS will be looking for a very specific type of such exotic particles, so-called WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. That’s the main (some say most obvious) dark matter candidate several detectors are searching for. Scientists are even trying to create these particles in the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva (which cost nearly $7bn to build). But all in vain.

So just how much longer can researchers justify that they are looking for something unknown and finding nothing, but still get away with asking for more money to look for nothing… just a little bit longer? Well, turns out that for the researchers who have devoted their whole life to dark matter, null results are ultra-important – nearly as important as finding something.

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If we stopped looking for dark matter, what would happen to all the dark matter articles? I mean, we’d know that the desire to write them was out there, but how would we prove it existed?
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Instagram is deciding the future of concerts, says LeRoy Bennett • Rolling Stone

Amy X Wang:

»

Artists these days have a new concern at the forefront of their minds when designing tours and concerts: how they look not just to live audiences — but also to millions, and potentially billions, of people at home. A chief driver of that worry is Instagram.

In the last year, the social media app has added 300 million monthly active users — doubling in size and bringing its total global user count to twice the size of the population of the United States. Of that immense user base, nearly half follow 10 or more verified musicians. And even more are making regularly posts and Instagram stories about music, with concerts a particularly popular photo and video subject. “A show no longer starts when the curtain rises,” entertainment architect Ray Winkler, who designed Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s On the Run II tour, told Rolling Stone earlier this summer. “The show starts the moment the first person takes a picture of it.

As Instagram continues on its explosive growth trajectory, artists are employing all sorts of tactics ranging from practical to outlandish to ramp up the visuals of their tours and the create the perfect “Instagram moment,” says longtime concert designer LeRoy Bennett, who’s produced iconic shows for Madonna, Prince, Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney and a litany of other household names. Rolling Stone caught up with Bennett on how the trend is changing the concert industry — and where it will go from here.

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Telling quote:

»

It can be a pain in the ass when it comes to the lighting side of things, because artists will look at these Instagrams and they get upset thinking that’s how they looked during the show when someone just took a bad photograph.

«

link to this extract

Google’s new ‘Potential Trips’ will plan a vacation for you • Condé Nast Traveler

Meredith Carey:

»

For two years, Google has been trawling through your emails for hotel bookings, flight reservations, train tickets, and more, packaging them up with a nice pretty bow in its Trips app. Now, it’s taking that personal-assistant thing one step further: by helping you plan “potential trips” in the future, piecing together the on-and-off research you’ve been doing online, Richard Holden, Google’s VP of product management, said at the Skift Global Forum in New York City this morning.

Since there are few details—it will launch on mobile in the U.S. in the “next few weeks”—Holden’s own words can explain it best. “You may have done research on Google a trip to Milan, but you haven’t actually booked it. We have all the research you’ve done—you may have starred things in Maps that you want to visit—so when you go back to Google, you’ll see ‘Upcoming trips’ but you’ll also see ‘Potential trip to Milan,’ which will show all of that recent research you’ve done, so you can pick up where you left off,” he says…

…as Traveler’s Brad Rickman wrote last year when new Trips features rolled out, it was nice to have a travel agent and partner that “actually knows something about [you]—has been there with [you], not just strolling alongside but paying attention.”

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That is what we want out of these assistants, isn’t it? That they’ll pay attention to what we do.
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Forget viewability: your ads aren’t serving • Ad Exchanger

Daniel Rosenblatt is in charge of Uber’s “rider display marketing”:

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In late Q4, we launched a series of small rich-media-based mobile brand campaigns to dip our toes in the water and establish performance benchmarks. We ran the tests for a few days then reviewed the data. This health check uncovered some odd trends.

First, our click-through rates were almost zero. For in-app static 300x250s with impression and click trackers, we could sometimes see as high as 2% click-through rates (CTRs). But exciting, motion-enabled, dynamic ads were generating sub-0.10% CTRs. It just didn’t make sense. On top of that, incrementality was completely flat across various short-term metrics.

Something was wrong. We were buying significant inventory across well-known, major exchanges, but it was as if our ads weren’t being served at all.

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When he looked into it, it turned out that publishers were saying their pages could accept any ad, even if they couldn’t; and ad networks weren’t bothering to check.

Upshot: Uber pulled all its ads from the networks that didn’t bother to check. But clearly, there are tons of ads which aren’t being shown. That saying about “50% of my money spent on advertising is wasted”? Still true online, it seems.
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