Could your smart speaker find this local pop-up shop? Or play the album? CC-licensed photo by Vladimir on Flickr.

This is the last Start Up (and probably Overspill entry) of the year. Have a wonderful break and we’ll meet again on 14 January 2019. In a few weeks we’ll cross the 1,000 mark. Exciting!

It’s charity time: ahead of Christmas, I’m encouraging readers to make a donation to charity; a different one each day.
Once again, we’re urging you to donate to
Shelter, the charity which aims to help the homeless.

Readers in the US can donate to any of the many related charities. Please give as generously as you feel you can.

A selection of 11 links for you. The last of the year! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The Amazon Alexa eavesdropping nightmare came true • Gizmodo

Jennings Brown on how a German citizen requested their Alexa data under GDPR – and got someone else’s instead, which they shared with C’t magazine:

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C’t magazine listened to many of the files and was able “to piece together a detailed picture of the customer concerned and his personal habits.” It found that he used Alexa in various places, has an Echo at home, and has a Fire device on his TV. They noticed that a woman was around at times. They listened to him in the shower.

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We were able to navigate around a complete stranger’s private life without his knowledge, and the immoral, almost voyeuristic nature of what we were doing got our hair standing on end. The alarms, Spotify commands, and public transport inquiries included in the data revealed a lot about the victims’ personal habits, their jobs, and their taste in music. Using these files, it was fairly easy to identify the person involved and his female companion. Weather queries, first names, and even someone’s last name enabled us to quickly zero in on his circle of friends. Public data from Facebook and Twitter rounded out the picture.

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Using the information they gathered from the recordings, the magazine contacted the victim of the data leak. He “was audibly shocked,” and confirmed it was him in the recordings and that the outlet had figured out the identity of his girlfriend. He said Amazon did not contact him.

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link to this extract

Annual smart speaker IQ test • Loup Ventures

Gene Munster (of “Apple will make a TV!” fame) and Will Thompson:

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We asked each smart speaker the same 800 questions, and they were graded on two metrics: 1. Did it understand what was said? 2. Did it deliver a correct response? The question set, which is designed to comprehensively test a smart speaker’s ability and utility, is broken into 5 categories:

• Local – Where is the nearest coffee shop?
• Commerce – Can you order me more paper towels?
• Navigation – How do I get to uptown on the bus?
• Information – Who do the Twins play tonight?
• Command – Remind me to call Steve at 2 pm today.

…Google Home continued its outperformance, answering 86% correctly and understanding all 800 questions. The HomePod correctly answered 75% and only misunderstood three, the Echo correctly answered 73% and misunderstood eight questions, and Cortana correctly answered 63% and misunderstood just five questions.

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You’d seriously ask a speaker in your home where the nearest coffee shop is? And how to get “uptown” (?) on the bus? What about “Will you send my data to the wrong person?” And I’d rather test it with something like “Play the Arctic Monkeys’ latest album”. (A command I highly recommend, by the way.)
link to this extract

Fortnite teen hackers ‘earning thousands of pounds a week’ • BBC News

Joe Tidy, BBC cybersecurity reporter:

»

Children as young as 14 are making thousands of pounds a week as part of a global hacking network built around the popular video game Fortnite.

About 20 hackers told the BBC they were stealing the private gaming accounts of players and reselling them online.

Fortnite is free to play but is estimated to have made more than £1bn through the sale of “skins”, which change the look of a character, and other add-ons. This fuels a growing black market. Hackers can sell player accounts for as little as 25p or hundreds of pounds, depending on what they contain.

The items are collected as in-game purchases but are purely cosmetic and do not give gamers any extra abilities. Fortnite-maker Epic declined to comment on the investigation but said it was working to improve account security. The game has more than 200 million players.

One British hacker said he got involved at the age of 14 earlier this summer, when he himself became the victim of a hack. Speaking from his bedroom via a video chat, wearing a baseball cap and bandana to hide his identity, the teenager said he had spent about £50 of his pocket money to build up a collection of skins, when he had woken up to a message that changed everything.

“The email said that my password had been changed and two-factor authentication had been added by someone else. It felt horrible,” he recalled.

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Noted in passing: the BBC now has a cybersecurity reporter. Bet he’s busy.
link to this extract

K-Cup creator John Sylvan regrets inventing Keurig coffee pod system • CBC News

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As the man who invented them, Sylvan might have been pleased with their popularity. But he left the company in 1997, selling his ownership of the product for $50,000.

To this day, he still doesn’t understand why people like them. “I find them rather expensive,” he said.

So, how does he make coffee? “I make a pot of coffee in the morning into a thermal carafe,” he says. “Before I go to bed … I put the coffee and water in, and when I wake up there’s a pot of coffee,” he deadpans. “We throw away a lot of coffee but it’s so cheap on a per-cup basis.”

Canadian coffee firm takes Keurig to court in pod spat
Coffee starts to deteriorate the minute it comes in contact with oxygen, which is why at grocery stores, coffee is typically either sold in a foil bag or an aluminum tin, because both are impervious to air.

Plastic doesn’t have the same properties, but the K-Cup basically achieves the same thing, while being able to be heated with hot water, by incorporating four different layers and types of plastic. That’s problematic for recycling, because the process requires different recyclable materials to be separated into different groups.

For its part, Keurig Green Mountain pledges to have fully recyclable K-Cups by 2020, but by the company’s own admission, the cups aren’t recyclable at the moment.

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link to this extract

Does AI make strong tech companies stronger? • Benedict Evans

»

We can’t actually describe all of the logical steps we use to walk, or to recognise a cat. With machine learning, instead of writing rules, you give examples (lots of examples) to a statistical engine, and that engine generates a model that can tell the difference. You give it 100,000 pictures labelled ‘cat’ and 100,000 labelled ‘no cat’ and the machine works out the difference. ML replaces hand-written logical steps with automatically determined patterns in data, and works much better for a very broad class of question – the easy demos are in computer vision, language and speech, but the use cases are much broader. Quite how much data you need is a moving target: there are research paths to allow ML to work with much smaller data sets, but for now, (much) more data is almost always better.  

Hence the question: if ML lets you do new and important things and ML is better the more data you have, then how far does that mean that companies that are already big and have lots of data get stronger? How far are there are winner-takes-all effects? It is easy to imagine virtuous circles strengthening a winner: ‘more data = more accurate model = better product = more users = more data’. From here it’s an easy step to statements like ‘Google / Facebook / Amazon have all the data‘ or indeed ‘China has all the data’ – the fear that the strongest tech companies will get stronger, as will countries with large populations and ‘permissive’ attitudes to centralised use of data.   

Well, sort of.

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Always worth reading.
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Slack bans Iranian academic living in Canada because of sanctions • Motherboard

Joseph Cox:

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The spokesperson added that Slack determines these violations by banning users who use IP addresses from banned countries.

“Our systems may have detected an account and/or a workspace owner on our platform with an IP address originating from a designated embargoed country. If our systems indicate a workspace primary owner has an IP address originating from a designated embargoed country, the entire workspace will be deactivated,” the statement read.

It is not clear if Abdi did connect from an Iranian IP address; he did not respond to requests for comment. He did tweet that he cannot rule out the possibility of Slack connecting when he travelled to Iran earlier in the year.

Regardless, experts say determining which users have violated based on IP address is not the best way to enforce sanctions.

“If they looked into the account, saw where they are employed/where their bank accounts are and realize there is no flow of money between Iran and US/Canada because of this login, they surely would have no reason to do this,” Mahsa Alimardani, a researcher with freedom of expression organisation Article 19 and a doctoral student at the Oxford Internet Institute, told Motherboard in an online chat.

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Tricky. The US is aggressive with its sanctions enforcement, and if someone has used an Iranian IP address, you can bet a company is going to block that account. Better safe than sorry in the current climate: Slack won’t want to end up before a judge being fined.
link to this extract

Apple to pull some iPhones in Germany as Qualcomm extends global wins • Reuters

Jörn Poltz and Stephen Nellis:

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Qualcomm’s win in Germany comes weeks after it secured a court order to ban sales of some iPhone models in China. Apple, which is contesting both rulings, has continued to offer its iPhones in China but made changes to its iOS operating system in the wake of the Chinese order.

The German victory may affect only a few million iPhones out of the hundreds of millions that Apple sells each year. Still, it is a small but clear win in a complex legal battle that will spin into overdrive in the coming months as antitrust regulators and Apple both take Qualcomm to court in the United States…

…Qualcomm is not pursuing the software patents in the Chinese case in other jurisdictions and suffered an early loss while pursuing a US sales ban on the US version of the hardware patent at issue in Germany.

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The phones being pulled are the iPhone 7 and 8. It feels like a rerun of 2010, with the Samsung bickering.
link to this extract

He tried to fake his way to fame and got caught red-handed. Or did he? • BBC News

Jessica Lussenhop on Threatin, the band (really one person) who faked a fanbase to get a European tour:

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As he explained his tactics, Jered [Threatin] was relaxed, confident – not the slightest bit embarrassed. But that’s because he had something he was eager to show me – a series of emails that he said he sent out under yet another alias, a Gmail account belonging to “E. Evieknowsit”.

“URGENT: News tip,” the subject line read.

“The musician going by the name Threatin is a total fake. He faked a record label, booking agent, facebook likes, and an online fanbase to book a European tour. ZERO people are coming to the shows and it is clear that his entire operation is fake,” he wrote, including links to all his phoney websites.

“Please don’t let this man fake his way to fame… Please Expose him.”

The first such message he showed me was dated 2 November, a day into the Breaking the World Tour, and a week before the first news reports were published. He says he sent the messages out to a database of reporters’ emails he keeps in a massive Excel spreadsheet on his laptop – to outlets like the Huffington Post, Spin, Consequence of Sound, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Pitchfork, New York Times, MetalSucks and, yes, the BBC. Although it was unclear if the tips directly resulted in coverage, some of the emails appear to have predated articles.

During the tour, when the bandmates weren’t looking or in another room, Eames claimed he was on his phone on Facebook under his various aliases, stoking the controversy.

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Long read. You start wondering, is this one of those things where they say portentously “It’s ART, you see.”
link to this extract

John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team • Apple

»

John Giannandrea has been named to the company’s executive team as senior vice president of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Strategy. He joined Apple in April 2018.

Giannandrea oversees the strategy for AI and Machine Learning across all Apple products and services, as well as the development of Core ML and Siri technologies. His team’s focus on advancing and tightly integrating machine learning into Apple products is delivering more personal, intelligent and natural interactions for customers while protecting user privacy. 

“John hit the ground running at Apple and we are thrilled to have him as part of our executive team,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Machine learning and AI are important to Apple’s future as they are fundamentally changing the way people interact with technology, and already helping our customers live better lives. We’re fortunate to have John, a leader in the AI industry, driving our efforts in this critical area.” 

«

Only taken seven years, but Siri now has his/her own veep. And note the points about ML/AI being “important”. Not “essential”?
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Did Google intentionally cripple Edge’s YouTube performance? • Medium

Jeremy Noring:

»

Recently this article has been making the rounds on Slashdot and other tech sites. The TL;DR of the article is a Microsoft intern insinuates that Google may have intentionally crippled Edge video rendering performance on YouTube:

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I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn’t keep up. For example, they recently added a hidden empty div over YouTube videos that causes our hardware acceleration fast-path to bail (should now be fixed in Win10 Oct update). Prior to that, our fairly state-of-the-art video acceleration put us well ahead of Chrome on video playback time on battery, but almost the instant they broke things on YouTube, they started advertising Chrome’s dominance over Edge on video-watching battery life. What makes it so sad, is that their claimed dominance was not due to ingenious optimization work by Chrome, but due to a failure of YouTube. On the whole, they only made the web slower.

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My initial reaction to this wasn’t “gee, that’s suspicious…” but more along the lines of “wait a minute… I’m pretty sure I’ve written that exact code?”

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He suggests it’s more the collision between accessibility and the way that Edge interacts with HTML5 video. In general, go with Hanlon’s Law.
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I’m an expert on negotiations, and I have some advice for Theresa May • NY Times

Deepak Malhotra is a professor who has sat in on and advised many negotiations:

»

Mrs. May should do what she has resisted so far: announce her intention to hold a second Brexit referendum if she cannot get enough support for her deal. This is a one-two punch. First, it presents a credible threat to reluctant conservative members of Parliament who would prefer nearly anything to holding another referendum and, potentially, having Remain win. If this threat somehow fails to move enough votes, and Mrs. May’s deal is dead, the second punch follows through on the threat and lets voters vote again — having now witnessed the reality of Brexit — whether to leave or remain in the European Union. When all else fails, this helps avoid Mrs. May’s least preferred option: no deal.

«

I thought this would be nonsense, but the logic (of which this is the conclusion – it’s to get her deal through, not to have a another referendum) is powerful.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: the link in yesterday’s set to risks of vaping was from 2015. The UK government apparently hasn’t updated its advice since then.

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.

Vaping is significantly safer than tobacco smoking, a new British government-funded study says. CC-licensed photo by Vaping360 on Flickr.

It’s charity time: ahead of Christmas, I’m encouraging readers to make a donation to charity; a different one each day.
Today’s (given events at Wednesday’s PMQs) is
Action On Hearing Aid, which aims to provide vital support to thousands of people affected by deafness, tinnitus and hearing loss.

Readers in the US can donate to the National Association of the Deaf. Please give as generously as you feel you can.

A selection of 10 links for you. But have you got all the presents? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

As Facebook raised a privacy wall, it carved an opening for tech giants • The New York Times

Gabriel J.X. Dance, Michael LaForgia and Nicholas Confessore:

»

Pushing for explosive growth, Facebook got more users, lifting its advertising revenue. Partner companies acquired features to make their products more attractive. Facebook users connected with friends across different devices and websites. But Facebook also assumed extraordinary power over the personal information of its 2.2 billion users — control it has wielded with little transparency or outside oversight.

Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.

The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.

Facebook has been reeling from a series of privacy scandals, set off by revelations in March that a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, improperly used Facebook data to build tools that aided President Trump’s 2016 campaign. Acknowledging that it had breached users’ trust, Facebook insisted that it had instituted stricter privacy protections long ago. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, assured lawmakers in April that people “have complete control” over everything they share on Facebook.

But the documents, as well as interviews with about 50 former employees of Facebook and its corporate partners, reveal that Facebook allowed certain companies access to data despite those protections. They also raise questions about whether Facebook ran afoul of a 2011 consent agreement with the Federal Trade Commission that barred the social network from sharing user data without explicit permission.

«

Facebook has responded on its PR page, and insists the access that was given was with consent, and didn’t break the FTC decree. Also: “most of these features are now gone.” (Me: “Most”?)

Related: [Washington] DC attorney general sues Facebook over alleged privacy violations from Cambridge Analytica scandal.
link to this extract

E-cigarettes around 95% less harmful than tobacco estimates landmark review • GOV.UK

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An expert independent evidence review published today by Public Health England (PHE) concludes that e-cigarettes are significantly less harmful to health than tobacco and have the potential to help smokers quit smoking.

Key findings of the review include:

• the current best estimate is that e-cigarettes are around 95% less harmful than smoking
• nearly half the population (44.8%) don’t realise e-cigarettes are much less harmful than smoking
• there is no evidence so far that e-cigarettes are acting as a route into smoking for children or non-smokers

The review, commissioned by PHE and led by Professor Ann McNeill (King’s College London) and Professor Peter Hajek (Queen Mary University of London), suggests that e-cigarettes may be contributing to falling smoking rates among adults and young people. Following the review PHE has published a paper on the implications of the evidence for policy and practice.

The comprehensive review of the evidence finds that almost all of the 2.6 million adults using e-cigarettes in Great Britain are current or ex-smokers, most of whom are using the devices to help them quit smoking or to prevent them going back to cigarettes. It also provides reassurance that very few adults and young people who have never smoked are becoming regular e-cigarette users (less than 1% in each group).

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Not surprising. The only risk is continuing nicotine addiction, and the cancers associated – oral, throat. But so much less dangerous than the smoke of tobacco.
link to this extract

Third Canadian detained in China amid Huawei dispute • Reuters

David Ljunggren:

»

A third Canadian has been detained in China following the arrest of a Chinese technology executive in Vancouver, a Canadian government official said on Wednesday amid a diplomatic dispute also involving the United States.

The detentions of the Canadians followed the Dec. 1 arrest in Vancouver of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, at the request of the United States, which is engaged in a trade war with China.

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Another victim of Trump’s transactional diplomacy: the Chinese expect he’ll ignore US law and trade them for Meng once she’s extradited.
link to this extract

Dirty dealing in the $175bn Amazon Marketplace • The Verge

Josh Dzieza:

»

Last August, Zac Plansky woke to find that the rifle scopes he was selling on Amazon had received 16 five-star reviews overnight. Usually, that would be a good thing, but the reviews were strange. The scope would normally get a single review a day, and many of these referred to a different scope, as if they’d been cut and pasted from elsewhere. “I didn’t know what was going on, whether it was a glitch or whether somebody was trying to mess with us,” Plansky says.

As a precaution, he reported the reviews to Amazon. Most of them vanished days later — problem solved — and Plansky reimmersed himself in the work of running a six-employee, multimillion-dollar weapons accessory business on Amazon. Then, two weeks later, the trap sprang. “You have manipulated product reviews on our site,” an email from Amazon read. “This is against our policies. As a result, you may no longer sell on Amazon.com, and your listings have been removed from our site.”

A rival had framed Plansky for buying five-star reviews, a high crime in the world of Amazon. The funds in his account were immediately frozen, and his listings were shut down. Getting his store back would take him on a surreal weeks-long journey through Amazon’s bureaucracy, one that began with the click of a button at the bottom of his suspension message that read “appeal decision.”

…Sellers are more worried about a case being opened on Amazon than in actual court, says Dave Bryant, an Amazon seller and blogger. Amazon’s judgment is swifter and less predictable, and now that the company controls nearly half of the online retail market in the US, its rulings can instantly determine the success or failure of your business, he says. “Amazon is the judge, the jury, and the executioner.”

Amazon is far from the only tech company that, having annexed a vast sphere of human activity, finds itself in the position of having to govern it. But Amazon is the only platform that has a $175bn prize pool tempting people to game it, and the company must constantly implement new rules and penalties, which in turn, become tools for new abuses, which require yet more rules to police.

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link to this extract

Pinterest readies itself for early 2019 IPO • WSJ

Maureen Farrell:

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Pinterest Inc. is actively preparing for an IPO that could come as soon as April, according to people familiar with the company’s plans, the latest in a line of tech companies ramping up plans to go public.

Pinterest has told bankers it could choose its slate of underwriters to run the initial-public-offering process as soon as January, these people said. It could achieve a valuation in the public market at or in excess of $12 billion—the level at which it most recently raised funding, some of the people said. Valuations can change until a company prices its initial public offering.

In September, Pinterest surpassed more than 250 million monthly active users, who visit the site to browse through billions of images on topics ranging from living-room furniture to dinner recipes and tattoos. The company generates revenue from ads scattered across its site and is poised to generate revenue in excess of $700m this year, up 50% from the prior year, according to a person familiar with the matter.

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With revenues like that, it might even be making a profit. How soon before we hear it has been taken over by Nazis and pornographers?
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How Amazon Alexa uses machine learning to get smarter • WIRED

Brian Barrett:

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Because many voice assistant improvements aim to reduce friction, they’re almost invisible by design. Over the past year, Alexa has learned how to carry over context from one query to the next, and to register follow-up questions without having to repeat the wake word. You can ask Alexa to do more than one thing in the same request, and summon a skill—Alexa’s version of apps—without having to know its exact name.

Those may sound like small tweaks, but cumulatively they represent major progress toward a more conversational voice assistant, one that solves problems rather than introducing new frustrations. You can talk to Alexa in a far more natural way than you could a year ago, with a reasonable expectation that it will understand what you’re saying.

Those gains have come, unsurprisingly, through the continued introduction and refinement of machine learning techniques. So-called active learning, in which the system identifies areas in which it needs help from a human expert, has helped substantially cut down on Alexa’s error rates. “That’s fed into every part of our pipeline, including speech recognition and natural language understanding,” says Rohit Prasad, vice president and chief scientist of Amazon Alexa. “That makes all of our machine learning models look better.”

…The benefits of the machine learning improvements manifest themselves across all aspects of Alexa, but the simplest argument for its impact is that the system has seen a 25% reduction in its error rate over the last year. That’s a significant number of headaches Echo owners no longer have to deal with.

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link to this extract

Kids apps on Google Play have “disturbing” content and may violate privacy laws, says letter to FTC • Buzzfeed

Virginia Hughes:

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Google is marketing apps to kids that share personal data with third parties, show manipulative ads, and are rife with creepy images — from graphic plucking of eyelashes to rubbing oil on scantily clad pregnant women — according to a new review.

In a 99-page letter sent to the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and 21 other child advocacy groups argue that the government should investigate Google for misrepresenting these apps as safe for families. Two Democratic lawmakers, Sen. Tom Udall and Rep. David Cicilline, also support the letter.

“Google doesn’t really have any incentive to clean up its own app store,” said Josh Golin, executive director of the CCFC, because app makers give Google 30% of the revenue for every app purchase and in-app purchase. “The things that are concerning and problematic, they actually profit off of.”

Apple’s App Store lists some of the same apps, though it has stricter rules for those allowed in its “Kids” category. And Google has done little to address the problem, Golin said, despite getting public heat since April.

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The illustrations show that they really are creepy images.
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BT suspends free calls from new wi-fi hubs after drug dealers dominate use • Eastlondonlines

Thames Menteth-Wheelwright:

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British Telecom has suspended calls from all of its futuristic InLink phone kiosks in Tower Hamlets after it emerged that the service was being used to facilitate drug dealing.

The 16 5G-enabled phone kiosks, which have replaced traditional red phone boxes, give users 30-second free phone calls to mobile devices and supply public streets with free, high-speed Wi-Fi and touchscreen web services.

Since December 6, these free calls have been temporarily suspended by BT. This follows six months of pressure from local councillors and the Metropolitan Police to suspend the service after investigations showed that drug users and dealers were using free calls to coordinate deals and drug drops.

The council said that the borough’s CCTV unit had watched an InLink for a day and found that out of 80 calls made on its free telephone, 72 of them were to buy drugs.

According to E+T magazine, the decision comes after senior police officers and InLink managers were brought face to face at a meeting in October organised by Tower Hamlets Council…

…Police and councils have halted InLink’s installation of a further 1000 kiosks in other towns and cities across the UK following Tower Hamlets’ example.

According to E+T, Bristol City Council barred 20 out of 25 InLink applications after local police objected, citing concerns raised in the east London borough.

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Goose: cooked.
link to this extract

TikTok has a Nazi problem • Motherboard

Joseph Cox:

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Users on mega popular children’s lip-synching app TikTok are sharing calls for violence against people of colour and Jews, as well as creating and sharing neo-Nazi propaganda, Motherboard has found.

Some accounts verbatim read “kill all n*****,” “all jews must die,” and “killn******.” (The words are uncensored on the app, which is a sort of melding of Vine and Instagram that allows users to create short videos synced to music.)

Motherboard found the content on the Chinese-made app, which is used by hundreds of millions people, many including teenagers and children in the United States, within minutes of starting a basic search.

“We’ve never talked to Tik Tok, but clearly we need to,” Heidi Beirich, director of the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), told Motherboard in an email. “They need the site to be cleaned up—and now.”

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I’d love to know how well this problem (and the previous problem, in the linked article in the body, of nudes) correlates with growth in numbers of American users.
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‘It’s been a rout’: Apple’s iPhones fall flat in world’s largest untapped market • WSJ

Newley Purnell and Tripp Mickle:

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Amit Rajput, who runs a counter selling iPhones in a busy electronics shop here, cuts a lonely figure. He is lucky to sell one device a day, compared with the 10 or more smartphones his colleagues at desks for Samsung Electronics Co. , Nokia Corp. and China’s Oppo sell daily in the same store.

As customers walk past his display, he recalls a different time in 2013 when he sold as many as 80 iPhones a day. Now most people want to pay less than $300 for their devices—a fraction of what Apple’s newer models cost.

Smartphone makers, facing sputtering growth in the rest of the world, have looked to India to make up the difference. With 1.3 billion consumers, the country is the world’s biggest untapped tech market. Just 24% of Indians own smartphones, and the number of users is growing faster than in any other country, according to research firm eMarketer.

How has that worked out for one of America’s most valuable companies?

The number of iPhones shipped in India has fallen 40% so far this year compared with 2017, and Apple’s market share there has dropped to about 1% from about 2%, research firm Canalys estimates…

…India’s market presents unique challenges. While competitors tweaked their phones to address local consumer concerns—increasing battery life, for example, and offering less expensive models—Apple took an inflexible stand on its pricing and products. Friction with the government hasn’t helped.

Whether the company can get its phones into the pockets of the world’s next billion smartphone buyers—in India as well as in other emerging markets, such as Indonesia and parts of Latin America—will help determine how much the company will grow in the coming decade.

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link to this extract

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: while high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is used for almost half of sweetening in the US (while sucrose, from sugar, is used for 90% in the rest of the world), it isn’t reckoned to be a principal cause of obesity on its own. Thanks to Pete Kleinschmidt for the pointer.

American ketchup: sweetened with corn syrup, which isn’t as nice as real sugar. But why? CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart on Flickr.

It’s charity time: ahead of Christmas, I’m encouraging readers to make a donation to charity; a different one each day.
Today’s is
Cancer Research, which aims to help fund research to end cancer.
Readers in the US: the American Cancer Society takes donations Please give as generously as you feel you can.

A selection of 9 links for you. Done all the cards? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

This health startup won big government deals—but inside, doctors flagged problems • Forbes

Parmy Olson:

»

the spectacle of brash tech entrepreneurs making outsized claims for their products is hardly a new phenomenon. Neither would matter very much except for the fact that Babylon has two contracts with Britain’s National Health Service, which runs one of the world’s largest nationalized healthcare systems. Babylon’s GP At Hand app offers 35,000 NHS patients video calls and access to its triage chatbot for advice on whether to see a doctor. The NHS is also encouraging 2 million citizens in North London to use NHS 111: Online, an app from Babylon that primarily features a triage chatbot as an alternative to the NHS advice line. Neither uses Babylon’s diagnostic advice chatbot, but the company has talked about bringing this feature to its NHS apps, staff say.

The NHS’s motivations are clear and noble: It wants to save money and produce better health outcomes for patients. Britain will spend nearly $200bn on its national healthcare system in 2020, a sum equivalent to about 7% of GDP. That slice of GDP has doubled since 1950, and the country desperately needs to find a way to rein in costs while still providing a benefit that is seen as central to the UK’s social contract. 

Reducing emergency room visits is a logical step, since they cost the NHS $200 on average per visit, a total of $4bn in the past year, while waiting times are increasing and at least 1.5 million Brits go to the emergency room when they don’t need to. Babylon’s cost-saving chatbot could be a huge help. If it worked better. 

There are some doubts, for instance, about whether the software can fulfill one of its main aims: keeping the “worried well” from heading to the hospital. Early and current iterations of the chatbot advise users to go for a costly emergency room visit in around 30% of cases, according to a Babylon staffer, compared with roughly 20% of people who dial the national health advice line, 111. It’s not clear how many patients take that advice, and Babylon says it doesn’t track that data. 

«

Another amazing exposé from Olson. One of Babylon’s biggest boosters is the current health secretary Matt Hancock. Perhaps he’ll read this and think again.
link to this extract

Twitter rolls out ‘sparkle button’ to let users hide the algorithmic feed • TechCrunch

Lucas Matney:

»

Twitter is giving users the ability to easily switch between seeing the latest tweets first and seeing the company’s algorithmically chosen “Top Tweets” when they open the app.

The company began testing this feature a few weeks ago, but they are officially rolling it out globally to all iOS users today, with Android and desktop users likely getting access to the feature sometime in January, according to the company.

This is part-resolution and part extended cop-out for Twitter, which has spent the better part of the past couple of years figuring out how to satisfy a need for growth with vocal, loyal users who want the act of opening the app to continue to mean getting the immediate pulse of the internet.

«

A rare win for the good old reverse chronological there, but only if people discover the magic button.
link to this extract

Influencers are faking brand deals • The Atlantic

Taylor Lorenz:

»

“People know how much influencers charge now, and that payday is nothing to shake a stick at,” said Alyssa Vingan Klein, the editor in chief of Fashionista, a fashion-news website. “If someone who is 20 years old watching YouTube or Instagram sees these people traveling with brands, promoting brands, I don’t see why they wouldn’t do everything they could to get in on that.”

But transitioning from an average Instagram or YouTube user to a professional “influencer”—that is, someone who leverages a social-media following to influence others and make money—is not easy. After archiving old photos, redefining your aesthetic, and growing your follower base to at least the quadruple digits, you’ll want to approach brands. But the hardest deal to land is your first, several influencers say; companies want to see your promotional abilities and past campaign work. So many have adopted a new strategy: fake it until you make it.

Sydney Pugh, a lifestyle influencer in Los Angeles, recently staged a fake ad for a local cafe, purchasing her own mug of coffee, photographing it, and adding a promotional caption carefully written in that particular style of ad speak anyone who spends a lot of time on Instagram will recognize. “Instead of [captioning] ‘I need coffee to get through the day,’ mine will say ‘I love Alfred’s coffee because of A, B, C,’” Pugh told me. “You see the same things over and over on actual sponsored posts, so it becomes really easy to emulate, even if you’re not getting paid.”

«

Pretending to have a sort-of job is the new having a sort-of job.
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The future of television? Binge-watching is only the beginning • WSJ

Stinson Carter:

»

Television, as most people have known it for most of their lives, is no more. “At some point you’ll get to a place where thinking about television from a linear standpoint will be like dial-up internet,” says Hulu CEO Randy Freer. “It’s a great time for content; not a great time for cable networks. I think what will happen is: Cable networks that have been able to create brands for themselves will have an opportunity to expand and figure out how they present to consumers.”

Cable networks with a clear identity have a critical advantage in a subscription-based world, while networks with less-defined name recognition—those that have been just another channel in the cable lineup—will likely find it hard to entice the growing ranks of broadband-only consumers to buy an à la carte monthly subscription service.

HBO is moving into the new era. “In the domestic market of the United States, where there is a surfeit of content more than ever, I personally think that brands matter more than ever,” says HBO chairman and CEO Richard Plepler. In 2017, HBO had its biggest subscriber growth yet, proving that premium cable brands can still thrive alongside the likes of Netflix. “This isn’t binary; Netflix can grow and HBO can grow,” Plepler says. “We’ve always wanted to make HBO available however, wherever and whenever a consumer wants it.”

«

American consumers are waking up to how badly off they are; the cable companies are basically extortion rackets which use live sports as the way to tie them in to colossal monthly charges. Unravel those, and it all starts falling apart. The lack of adverts on Netflix (less so Hulu) has proven very attractive both to viewers and to writers.

But notice: YouTube isn’t in there as a “channel” that people watch on a TV, as far as I can tell.
link to this extract

Iranian phishers bypass 2FA protections offered by Yahoo Mail and Gmail • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

A recent phishing campaign targeting US government officials, activists, and journalists is notable for using a technique that allowed the attackers to bypass two-factor authentication (2FA) protections offered by services such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail, researchers said Thursday. The event underscores the risks of 2FA that relies on one-tap logins or one-time passwords, particularly if the latter are sent in SMS messages to phones.

Attackers working on behalf of the Iranian government collected detailed information on targets and used that knowledge to write spear-phishing emails that were tailored to the targets’ level of operational security, researchers with security firm Certfa Lab said in a blog post. The emails contained a hidden image that alerted the attackers in real time when targets viewed the messages. When targets entered passwords into a fake Gmail or Yahoo security page, the attackers would almost simultaneously enter the credentials into a real login page. In the event targets’ accounts were protected by 2FA, the attackers redirected targets to a new page that requested a one-time password [OTP].

“In other words, they check victims’ usernames and passwords in realtime on their own servers, and even if two-factor authentication such as text message, authenticator app or one-tap login are enabled they can trick targets and steal that information too,” Certfa Lab researchers wrote.

In an email, a Certfa representative said company researchers confirmed that the technique successfully breached accounts protected by SMS-based 2fa.

«

It isn’t that hard, when you think about it: if you can get someone to believe they’re at a login page (feasible given how easy it is to get a security certificate for a page), you can use the time – about 30 seconds – to use the OTP. What isn’t widely known is that OTPs last longer than the 30 seconds they claim. (Yes, I wrote about this in Cyber Wars.)

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Why ketchup in Mexico tastes so good • American Institute for Economic Research

Jeffrey Tucker:

»

The US has a mighty import quota for sugar that limits imports to keep the price as high as possible for American consumers. “Imports of sugar into the United States are governed by tariff-rate quotas (TRQs), which allow a certain quantity of sugar to enter the country under a low tariff,” says the USDA. “The USDA establishes the annual quota volumes for each federal fiscal year (beginning October 1) and the U.S. Trade Representative allocates the TRQs among countries.”

As a result, US consumers and producers pay approximately three times the world price of sugar. This discourages its use relative to substitutes. Yes, this is happening to you and me every day, and these price signals have dramatically affected our diets. This is because the decision of producers to use corn syrup instead of sugar in a highly price competitive market makes economic sense.

Try to go without corn syrup for a few days. It’s not easy. It’s true, for example, that Heinz offers a product called Simply Heinz that uses pure sugar, not high-fructose corn syrup. But that product costs nearly $1 more than the standard bottle of ketchup. You are at the grocery aisle. You are price conscious. One bottle costs a dollar less than the other, and the taste difference between the two seems barely discernible.

Only high-end, fussy, conscious consumers go for the high-end product. You can see why people desire to pay less. Prices matter. Central planning has caused this, and massive numbers of American health problems along with it.

«

From February, but nothing’s changed. The sugar tariff was first imposed in 1816 to protect plantations (with slaves) in Louisiana. Still going strong 200 years later.
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Who will be in control of your home this Christmas? • Kantar Worldpanel

»

Duncan Stark, vice president at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, comments: “Of the fifth of the homes with a smart speaker, 60% have just one device – predominantly located in the living room – so manufacturers have a big chance to push this hardware for new and existing buyers this Christmas.

“However, almost three quarters of consumers still don’t see the point in smart speakers – a significant number for a technology that’s been fairly mainstream since around 2016.  Manufacturers need to do more to demonstrate the positive impact that owning such a device can have – like the fact that more than a quarter of owners say it’s led them to listen to more music than they used to or that 10% use their phones less. Our research shows that more than half of current owners are likely to strongly recommend their smart speaker.”

The latest Kantar Worldpanel ComTech figures on voice assisted device ownership in the US show:

• 27% of owners listen to more music than they used to
• 15% have switched to a different music streaming service since buying a voice assistant
• 13% have started using a music streaming service for the first time
• 12% have switched from a free to a paid music streaming service
• 11% ensure new electronic devices they buy are compatible with their virtual assistant

Meanwhile, worries about hacking and data security affect almost a fifth of shoppers – something which manufacturers will need to make sure they are addressing.

«

That stat about 15% having changed to a different service is notable. Only 3% of homes total, but quite a slice: there are about 126m households in the US, so that’s 3.8m households. Probably almost all of those are wins for Amazon.
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Why you should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war • Towards Data Science

Isaac Faber:

»

If a prediction does not obey some fundamental characteristics, it should not be marketed as a probability. More importantly, a prediction should be judged from the time it is given to the public and not just the moment before the event. A forecaster should be held responsible for both aleatory and epistemic uncertainty.

When viewed this way, it is clear that FiveThirtyEight reports too much noise leading up to an event and not enough signal. This is great for driving users to read long series of related articles on the same topic but not so rigorous to bet your fortune on. Taleb’s and Silver’s take on how FiveThirtyEight should be judged can be visualized like this.

Taleb vs. Silver’s different take on how FiveThirtyEight should be judged in 2016

Because there is so much uncertainty around non-linear events, like an election, it could reasonably be considered frivolous to report early stage forecasts. The only conceivable reason to do so is to capture (and monetize?) the interest of a public which is hungry to know the future. I will not go into the technical arguments; Taleb has written and published a paper on the key issues with a solution.

«

“Too much noise, not enough signal” – but elections mostly are noise, and figuring out what is signal can only be done afterwards. (And everyone can argue it differently.)
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Non-disclosure Apple • DIGITS to DOLLARS

Jonathan Goldberg looks back to the 2000s, when everyone used to disclose their handset sales figures:

»

The industry research shops (e.g. Gartner) sold [product sales forecast] models for other product segments, but those were fragile and prone to breaking under heavy scrutiny. For handsets, everyone involved could make sound judgments, while the other segments were prone to problems stemming from a general lack of data.

All of this started to break down after the launch of the iPhone. Many companies got themselves backed into reporting corners as their data increasingly painted the wrong picture. Apple did not pursue market share, as we first argued back in May of 2009 (email us if you would like a copy of the original note). Apple was pursuing profit share. It took several years for the other handset companies to realize that their record shipment data was useless for explaining why their profits were plummeting. Then with the early waves of Android, the former leaders’ market shares also started plummeting. And so one by one all the others stopped reporting unit figures.

We remember one example of why this data was important for the companies that were slowly stopping to report it. Around 2009, the India analyst for one of the third party research shops reported market share data that showed Nokia had lost a huge chink of market share there. Nokia actually issued an official statement denying this. The analysis company’s other analysts all chimed in as well, siding with Nokia and not their colleague. We believe the analysts was actually fired, and certainly faced reprimand when his own employers sided with one of their largest customers over their own analyst. But it turns out he was right, he had the correct data, Nokia had very rapidly gone from market share leader to number two player, and they were losing share to a swarm of China-based handset companies. By denying the reality, Nokia turned a blind eye to its growing problem, and ultimately the company was pushed from the handset market entirely.

«

So why is Apple now going to stop reporting those numbers? Optics, he thinks:

»

Investors, in particular, tend to analyze data to death. They have to make big decisions (with other people’s money) based on whatever data they can gather. Then they build models to make predictions which can have a huge impact on their valuation decisions. In Apple’s case, this means they will take any declines in unit shipments and extrapolate those numbers out to the heat death of the universe.

«

link to this extract

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If Marx used an Android phone, you’d be able to break into it. CC-licensed photo by Stuart Chalmers on Flickr.

It’s charity time: ahead of Christmas, I’m encouraging readers to make a donation to charity; a different one each day.
Today’s is
Book Aid International. Every £2 you give could send another book to a child living with war
Readers in the US can donate too. Please give as generously as you feel you can.

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

The deadly recklessness of the self-driving car industry • Gizmodo

Brian Merchant:

»

The newest and most glaring example of just how reckless corporations in the autonomous vehicle space can be involves the now-infamous fatal crash in Tempe, Arizona, where one of Uber’s cars struck and killed a 49-year-old pedestrian. The Information obtained an email reportedly sent by Robbie Miller, a former manager in the testing-operations group, to seven Uber executives, including the head of the company’s autonomous vehicle unit, warning that the software powering the taxis was faulty and that the backup drivers weren’t adequately trained.

“The cars are routinely in accidents resulting in damage,” Miller wrote. “This is usually the result of poor behavior of the operator or the AV technology. A car was damaged nearly every other day in February. We shouldn’t be hitting things every 15,000 miles. Repeated infractions for poor driving rarely results in termination. Several of the drivers appear to not have been properly vetted or trained.”

That’s nuts. Hundreds of self-driving cars were on the road at the time, in San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Santa Fe, and elsewhere. The AV technology was demonstrably faulty, the backup drivers weren’t staying alert, and despite repeated incidents—some clearly dangerous—nothing was being addressed. Five days after the date of Miller’s email, a Volvo using Uber’s self-driving software struck Elaine Herzberg while she was slowly crossing the street with her bicycle and killed her. The driver was apparently streaming The Voice on Hulu at the time of the accident.

This tragedy was not a freak malfunction of some cutting-edge technology—it is the entirely predictable byproduct of corporate malfeasance.

«

There isn’t a great deal that’s new here (apart from his efforts to get Tesla to explain its thinking on autonomous driving), but gathering it in one place is quite startling.
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Google’s secret China project “effectively ended” after fight • The Intercept

Ryan Gallagher:

»

Google has been forced to shut down a data analysis system it was using to develop a censored search engine for China after members of the company’s privacy team raised internal complaints that it had been kept secret from them, The Intercept has learned.

The internal rift over the system has had massive ramifications, effectively ending work on the censored search engine, known as Dragonfly, according to two sources familiar with the plans. The incident represents a major blow to top Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, who have over the last two years made the China project one of their main priorities.

The dispute began in mid-August, when the The Intercept revealed that Google employees working on Dragonfly had been using a Beijing-based website to help develop blacklists for the censored search engine, which was designed to block out broad categories of information related to democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that are enforced by the country’s authoritarian Communist Party government.

«

There’s some doubt, even among those who pushed against this, whether Google really has shut it down. Wait and see.
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Uncovering what your phone knows • The New York Times

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries on how they got the data for that “your phones are tracking you, and the data is being sold” story from last week:

»

I wrote an article in May about a company that bought access to data from the major US cellphone carriers. My reporting showed that the company, Securus Technologies, allowed law enforcement to get this data, and officers were using the information to track people’s locations without a warrant. After that article ran, I started getting tips that the use of location data from cellphones was more widespread than I had initially reported. One person highlighted a thread on Hacker News, an online forum popular with technologists. On the site, people were anonymously discussing their work for companies that used people’s precise location data.

I called sources who knew about mapping and location data. Many had worked in that field for more than a decade. I also partnered with other Times reporters, Natasha Singer and Adam Satariano, who were looking into something similar. These conversations were the start of an investigation into how smartphone apps were tracking people’s locations, and the revelation that the tipsters were right — selling location data was common and lucrative.

On a big investigation like this one, hours and even days of work can go into a single paragraph or even a sentence. This is especially true in technology investigations because the subject matter is so detailed; combing through data and conducting technical tests is time consuming.

«

link to this extract

Remove Background from Image • remove.bg

»

Remove Image Background FREE, 100% automatically – in 5 seconds – without a single click.

Remove.bg is a free service to remove the background of any photo. It works 100% automatically: You don’t have to manually select the background/foreground layers to separate them – just select your image and instantly download the result image with the background removed!

«

Uses “sophisticated AI technology”. Only works on people and faces. They say they delete the results from their servers after an hour.

Pretty good, if you have a need for cutouts.
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We broke into a bunch of Android phones with a 3D-printed head • Forbes

Thomas Brewster:

»

For our tests, we used my own real-life head to register for facial recognition across five phones. An iPhone X and four Android devices: an LG G7 ThinQ, a Samsung S9, a Samsung Note 8 and a OnePlus 6. I then held up my fake head to the devices to see if the device would unlock. For all four Android phones, the spoof face was able to open the phone, though with differing degrees of ease. The iPhone X was the only one to never be fooled.

There were some disparities between the Android devices’ security against the hack. For instance, when first turning on a brand new G7, LG actually warns the user against turning facial recognition on at all. “Face recognition is a secondary unlock method that results in your phone being less secure,” it says, noting that a similar face can unlock your phone. No surprise then that, on initial testing, the 3D-printed head opened it straightaway.

Yet during filming, it appeared the LG had been updated with improved facial recognition, making it considerably more difficult to open. As an LG spokesperson told Forbes, “The facial recognition function can be improved on the device through a second recognition step and advanced recognition which LG advises through setup. LG constantly seeks to make improvements to its handsets on a regular basis through updates for device stability and security.” They added that facial recognition was seen as “a secondary unlock feature” to others like a PIN or fingerprint.

There’s a similar warning on the Samsung S9 on sign up. “Your phone could be unlocked by someone or something that looks like you,” it notes. “If you use facial recognition only, this will be less secure than using a pattern, PIN or password.” Oddly, though, on setting up the device the first presented option for unlocking was facial and iris recognition.

«

Windows Hello didn’t let him in either. An absurd spinoff of this story (not by Brewster) suggests police might now use 3D printed heads to break into suspects’ phones. Duh. You just show the phone to them. (Assuming you’ve got them before the unlock timeout.)
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How Russian trolls used meme warfare to divide America • WIRED

»

Conversations around the [Russian] Internet Research Agency [IRA] operations traditionally have focused on Facebook and Twitter, but like any hip millennial, the IRA was actually most obsessive about Instagram. “Instagram was perhaps the most effective platform for the Internet Research Agency,” the New Knowledge researchers write. All in, the troll accounts received 187 million engagements on Instagram, and about 40% of the accounts they created had at least 10,000 followers.

That isn’t to say, however, that the trolls neglected Twitter. There, the IRA deployed 3,841 accounts, including several personas that “regularly played hashtag games.” That approach paid off; 1.4 million people engaged with the tweets, leading to nearly 73 million engagements. Most of this work was focused on news, while on Facebook and Instagram, the Russians prioritized “deeper relationships,” according to the researchers. On Facebook, the IRA notched a total of 3.3 million page followers, who engaged with their politically divisive content 76.5 million times. Russia’s most popular pages targeted the right wing and the black community. The trolls also knew their audiences; they deployed Pepe memes at pages intended for right-leaning millennials, but kept them away from posts directed at older conservative Facebook users. Not every attempt was a hit; while 33 of the 81 IRA Facebook pages had over 1,000 followers, dozens had none at all.

That the IRA trolls aimed to pit Americans against each other with divisive memes is now well known. But this latest report reveals just how bizarre some of the IRA’s outreach got. To collect personally identifying information about targets, and perhaps use it to create custom and Lookalike audiences on Facebook, the IRA’s Instagram pages sold all kinds of merchandise. That includes LGBT sex toys and “many variants of triptych and 5-panel artwork featuring traditionally conservative, patriotic themes.”

«

You might think America has done pretty well at dividing itself over the past 20 years. And you’d be right. The report is highly recommended.
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How Britain grapples with nationalist dark web • POLITICO

Tom McTague:

»

For May’s government, populist news sites are an increasing threat. Under previous prime ministers, like Tony Blair, Gordon Brown — or even the early years of David Cameron — a handful of newspapers and television stations served as news gatekeepers, picking out what they considered important and beaming it to a mass audience.

Some publications were hostile, of course, but they were known quantities, their editors contactable, their reporters easy to berate. Today’s news media has broken completely free of these bounds.

News, fake news, information and disinformation now reaches voters through a collection of social media pages, messaging apps, video platforms and anonymous websites spreading content beyond the control of anyone in Whitehall — or the Élysée in France, as Emmanuel Macron is discovering.

“Who do you ring?” asked one exasperated No. 10 official when asked about these sites. “You don’t know who these people are.”

At 12:50 p.m. on April 25, 2018, a new British political news website was registered in Scottsdale, Arizona. Within weeks, PoliticalUK.co.uk was producing some of the most viral news stories in the U.K. and had been included on briefing notes circulated in No. 10.

The website — specializing in hyper-partisan coverage of Brexit, Islam and Tommy Robinson — has no named editor and one reporter using a pen name. Its owner is anonymous, having registered the site with the U.S. firm “Domains By Proxy” whose catch line, beaming out from its homepage, reads: “Your privacy is nobody’s business but ours.”

The website itself does not provide any contact details. It has no mission statement. It has a small but growing following on Twitter but no branded Facebook page or YouTube channel.

And yet, since PoliticalUK.co.uk started publishing stories at the end of April, the site has amassed more than 3 million interactions on social media, with an average of 5,000 “engagements” for every story it has published — far more than most national newspapers.

«

link to this extract

NY Times columnist Nick Kristof led the charge to get Facebook to censor content, now whining that Facebook censors his content • Techdirt

Mike Masnick:

»

When pushing for FOSTA, Kristof wrote the following:

»

Even if Google were right that ending the immunity for Backpage might lead to an occasional frivolous lawsuit, life requires some balancing.

For example, websites must try to remove copyrighted material if it’s posted on their sites. That’s a constraint on internet freedom that makes sense, and it hasn’t proved a slippery slope. If we’re willing to protect copyrights, shouldn’t we do as much to protect children sold for sex?

«

As we noted at the time, this was an astoundingly ignorant thing to say, but of course now that Kristof helped get the law passed and put many more lives at risk, the “meh, no big deal if there are some more lawsuits or more censorship” attitude seems to be coming back to bite him.

You see, last week, Kristof weighed in on US policy in Yemen. The core of his argument was to discuss the horrific situation of Abrar Ibrahim, a 12-year-old girl who is starving in Yemen, and weighs just 28 pounds. There’s a giant photo of the emaciated Ibrahim atop the article, wearing just a diaper. It packs an emotional punch, just as intended.

But, it turns out that Facebook is blocking that photo of Ibrahim, claiming it is “nudity and sexual content.” And, boy, is Kristof mad about it. [He tweeted his outrage that Facebook “repeatedly blocked the photo”.]

Hey, Nick, you were the one who insisted that Facebook and others in Silicon Valley needed to ban “sexual content” or face criminal liability. You were the one who insisted that any collateral damage would be minor. You were the one who said there was no slippery slope.

Yet, here is a perfect example of why clueless saviors like Kristof always make things worse, freaking out about something they don’t understand, prescribing the exact wrong solution. Moderating billions of pieces of content leads to lots of mistakes.

«

In its way, almost exactly the same mistake as with the famous “napalm girl” in 2016. That one involved the Norwegian prime minister. Facebook’s systems haven’t improved since then.
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Central Londoners to be subjected to facial recognition test this week • Ars Technica

Cyrus Farivar:

»

This trial marks the seventh such trial in London since 2016. In addition to the December 17-18 tests, authorities have said there will be three more tests which have yet to be scheduled.

According to the police, these trials, which “will be used overtly with a clear uniformed presence and information leaflets will be disseminated to the public,” are set to take place specifically in the vicinity of Soho, Piccadilly Circus, and Leicester Square.

The Met noted in a statement that anyone who declines to be scanned “will not be viewed as suspicious by police officers.”

Law enforcement in South Wales has also previously tested this technology, among other locales around the United Kingdom. Numerous tests in the United States have shown that this technology can be flawed, particularly when in use against non-white suspects.

Here in the US, the technology has already become quietly pervasive.

«

link to this extract

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Would you, could you, should you replace the spring in a pogo stick with repelling magnets? CC-licensed photo by mac morrison on Flickr.

It’s charity time: ahead of Christmas, I’m encouraging readers to make a donation to charity; a different one each day.
Today’s is
the Royal National Institute for the Blind, which aims to help the blind and partially sighted.
Readers in the US: this page shows similar charities in the US. Choose one. Please give as generously as you feel you can.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. How’s the shopping going? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Can repelling magnets replace the spring in a pogo stick? • K+J Magnetics

»

We receive quite a few questions about replacing compression springs with repelling magnets.  Is it possible?  Can it be done?  What magnets should be used to replace a given spring?

It’s possible, but tricky.  Magnets aren’t a one-to-one replacement – magnets behave differently than springs.

There are many of pros and cons using springy magnets in such situations.  Magnets are more expensive than coil springs, but you can have them act across an air gap.  We’re not going to focus on these comparisons here.  We wanted to explore the differences in the behavior of springs vs. magnets.

Let’s try it!

«

There is a problem, though: mechanical springs’ force is linearly proportional to displacement, while magnets’ repulsive force is geometrically proportional to displacement. It would feel weird.

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A glimpse into Microsoft history which goes some way to explaining the decline of Windows • Tim Anderson’s IT Writing

Tim Anderson:

»

Why is Windows in decline today? Short answer: because Microsoft lost out and/or gave up on Windows Phone / Mobile.

But how did it get to that point? A significant part of the story is the failure of Longhorn (when two to three years of Windows development was wasted in a big reset), and the failure of Windows 8.

In fact these two things are related. Here’s a post from Justin Chase; it is from back in May but only caught my attention when Jose Fajardo put it on Twitter. Chase was a software engineer at Microsoft between 2008 and 2014.

Chase notes that Internet Explorer (IE) stagnated because many of the developers working on it switched over to work on Windows Presentation Foundation, one of the “three pillars” of Longhorn. I can corroborate this to the extent that I recall a conversation with a senior Microsoft executive at Tech Ed Europe, in pre-Longhorn days, when I asked why not much was happening with IE. He said that the future lay in rich internet-connected applications rather than browser applications. Insightful perhaps, if you look at mobile apps today, but no doubt Microsoft also had in mind locking people into Windows.

«

As the post shows, it’s odd how you only see how the dominoes are lined up in retrospect.
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Taxi app warned women to take ‘prudence’ and ‘share ride details with family’ • Sky News

Rowland Manthorpe:

»

Ola, an Indian taxi-hailing giant which staged a high-profile UK launch in August, included the warning to women in a set of terms and conditions on its UK website.

The same terms and conditions also advised women passengers “to share the ride details with family, friends, relatives”.

After being alerted to the presence of the clauses, Ola changed the text of its terms and conditions, blaming a “technical error”.

An Ola spokesperson told Sky News the text was accidentally copied and pasted from a separate set of terms and conditions, which applied “to a specific car-pool service that was previously offered only in India”.

The firm stressed that the warning to women had never been part of its official UK terms and conditions, and that they were “not in any of our current global T&Cs”.

However, their inclusion has raised questions about the licensing process for ride-hailing services, which vets apps such as Ola to ensure they are safe and suitable for use by the public…

…Two of the councils involved, Cardiff City Council and Bristol Council, told Sky News it did not check terms and conditions – which lay out the rules for what is permitted on apps – as part of its vetting process.

“Terms and conditions that are entered into as part of signing up for the app are not part of the application process,” said a spokesperson for Cardiff City Council, which granted Ola a five-year license on 22 May 2018.

«

Might change their tune soon.
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Faraday Future CEO’s long trail of debt is finally catching up to him • The Verge

Sean O’Kane:

»

Jia Yueting, the CEO and a co-founder of troubled EV startup Faraday Future, has a notorious history with money. While his rise to fame and fortune in China was built partly around his vision — he started a streaming company in 2004 called LeTV, well before Netflix shifted away from DVDs — it was also built on financial debt. For years, he followed a relatively simple formula. He found success with LeTV, borrowed against that success to try new things under the umbrella of “LeEco,” then borrowed against those ventures to do even more, stacking up debt along the way. With China’s economy booming at the time, and a large shadow banking system emerging that made borrowing easy, he was off to the races.

More than a decade later, Jia finds himself living in a mansion — one of a few that he owns, in fact — on the coastal cliffs of Rancho Palos Verdes, California. While that might sound like the dream life, Jia isn’t there out of choice. He’s been living there since last summer in self-exile, because that long trail of debt that he built up in China is finally catching up to him.

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When the tide goes out, you discover who’s been swimming naked.

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Huawei Watch GT review: When hardware and software don’t mesh • Ars Technica

Valentina Palladino:

»

The Watch GT has numerous activity- and sleep-tracking sensors inside, including an accelerometer, gyroscope, barometer, optical heart-rate monitor, and built-in GPS.

What it doesn’t have are NFC technology for contactless payments or onboard storage for saving music. Both would have complemented the onboard GPS by allowing users to go for a run without their wallets or phones. The Watch GT also doesn’t support Wi-Fi on its own, meaning it won’t receive alerts when your smartphone is out of Bluetooth range. This is a feature we take for granted now on high-end smartwatches like Apple Watches and Wear OS devices, making it noticeably and confusingly absent on the Watch GT.

But Huawei equipped the Watch GT with a battery that’s designed to last a whopping two weeks on a single charge, with heart-rate monitoring turned on. With GPS turned on as well, you should get up to 22 hours of battery life. Huawei goes so far as to say that you could get 30 days of life when you turn heart-rate monitoring off.

I wouldn’t want to turn off heart-rate monitoring because that’s one of the main reasons I wear a smartwatch at all. If you wear a device like this to keep track of your health in general, I don’t recommend turning this feature off. I didn’t and my Watch GT was down to 50% after wearing it for six days and nights, recording one-hour long workouts on all but one of those days. That’s still a stellar battery life and one that puts those of other smartwatches to shame.

«

The lack of Wi-Fi helps explain the long battery life – but also means you don’t get alerts when out of your phone’s Bluetooth range. But her key complaint is that you can’t get other exercise apps, such as RunKeeper and so on. That’s unlikely to change.
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What comes next in that contested election in North Carolina • FiveThirtyEight

Nathaniel Rakich on an election to the US House of Representatives, apparently won by 905 votes by the GOP candidate, which is now in doubt over postal ballots:

»

As we highlighted two weeks ago, Bladen County and neighboring Robeson County had unusually high levels of absentee ballots requested or cast. Harris also received an incredibly high proportion of the mail-in absentee votes in Bladen considering how few registered Republicans voted by mail there. Only 19% of Bladen County’s accepted mail-in absentee ballots were cast by registered Republicans, yet mail-in absentee ballots leaned heavily Republican; in every other county in the 9th District, mail-in ballots favored the Democrat.

But new information digs down past the county level to find anomalies in certain types of neighborhoods. In an analysis of absentee-by-mail ballots in the 9th District, Kevin Morris and Myrna Pérez at the Brennan Center for Justice found that mail-in absentee ballots from low-income Census tracts were more likely to have been spoiled (that is, declared invalid) than those from high-income areas in the 9th and those from low-income areas outside the 9th. Low-income neighborhoods also had a higher rate of unreturned mail-in ballots. If someone was in fact running a large-scale election-tampering operation, the increase in unreturned ballots could mean that someone was discarding some legitimate ballots before they could be returned, or that voters themselves were discarding ballots fraudulently requested in their names by someone hoping to intercept them and fill them out. According to Morris and Pérez, this discrepancy in the returned ballot rate could be an indication that lower-income voters were specifically targeted for election fraud.

The Raleigh News & Observer calculated that in Robeson County, 69% of mail-in absentee ballots requested by Native American voters and 75% of those requested by African-American voters were not returned, well out of line with the rest of the district. The Brennan Center also found that nonwhite voters’ ballots were more likely to be spoiled.

«

The key part of this story is that the apparent fraud was picked up by statistics: the numbers from different areas didn’t tally with those in Bladen, which was a wild outlier. Data exposes lies as well as truths.
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Why YouTube’s biggest star can’t be cancelled • NY Mag

Max Read:

»

In general, PewDiePie’s frequent controversies seem to have no real effect on his popularity. In 2017, at a little over 50 million subscribers, he lost a lucrative partnership with Disney over a series of videos in which he paid Indian men on the gig website Fiverr — as a sort of black-humored social experiment — to record themselves holding signs saying things like “Death to All Jews”; later that year, he called an opponent a “fucking nigger” while livestreaming a video game. And yet, [Felix] Kjellberg [to give him his real name] remains YouTube’s biggest star, to the tune of 75 million subscribers, 19 billion views, tens of millions of dollars, and the adoration of millions of adolescents worldwide. If you come from outside YouTube, where letting a single N-bomb slip can be enough to end your career permanently, this sequence of events is baffling: How can someone flirt so frequently and so explicitly with racist slurs and anti-Semitic jokes and thrive?

One quick and easy answer is “because YouTube lets him.” There are reasons YouTube doesn’t want to get deeply involved, both cynical (he’s a huge, engagement-driving star) and earnest (YouTube feels uncomfortable wielding its absolute power over its own platform so nakedly) — but it’s important to keep in mind that the company has both the practical and the formal power to remove Kjellberg from its site, or find other ways to punish or limit him, the way a movie studio or television network might distance themselves from an anti-Semitic movie star…

…This dynamic is exacerbated by an evolving sense of persecution on the part of YouTubers and their audiences. As the researcher Crystal Abidin wrote in an excellent explainer of the reaction to Kjellberg’s anti-Semitic joke sign videos, many YouTubers interpreted Wall Street Journal articles about Kjellberg not as neutral reporting but as a tactic in a “a struggle between Influencers and legacy media more generally.” And why shouldn’t they? By the logic of platform rewards systems — which value high-engagement figures — it makes sense to imagine that, as Abidin puts it, “legacy media is capitalizing on the digitally-native popularity of PewDiePie to reel in clicks on their articles,”

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link to this extract

Apple says iOS update will avoid Qualcomm patents, China iPhone ban • Ars Technica

Timothy Lee:

»

On Monday, Qualcomm announced that a Chinese court had banned the sale of most iPhone models. However, Apple’s newest models, the iPhone XS and XR, were not covered by the ban because they had not yet been introduced when Qualcomm filed its lawsuit late last year.
Qualcomm remedied that oversight this week, asking the same Chinese court to ban sales of the XS and XR.

But Apple isn’t ready to capitulate to Qualcomm’s demands. The company claims that the ruling is specific to an earlier version of iOS, iOS 11. Apple claims that the current version, iOS 12, doesn’t infringe Qualcomm’s patents—though Qualcomm denies this. The iPhone models mentioned in the ban continue to be available for purchase in China.

Apple has asked a Chinese court to reconsider the ban. And on Friday, Apple told Reuters it would push out a software update to work around Qualcomm’s patents, clearing the way for Apple to continue selling all iPhone models in China. Apple claims that Qualcomm’s patents cover “minor functionality” of the iPhone operating system.

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Probably won’t be that easy; Qualcomm likely feels it’s finally found some winning ground.
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Garmin sets eyes on medical wearables with its latest partnership • Wareable

Hugh Langley:

»

“Combining the sensor data from Garmin wearables with the data capture and analytical expertise of the Actigraph platform creates a powerful solution for many different patient monitoring applications,” said Travis Johnson, global product lead at Garmin Health, in a nice summary statement.

As for how Actigraph benefits, it’s getting access to Garmin’s wearables, which means long battery life – which means better study results.

Back to Garmin: it needs to keep up with Apple and Fitbit, which are phasing into medical-grade offerings themselves. The Apple Watch just became an ECG monitor, while Fitbit promises its wearables will soon be offering similar features.

Garmin has both beat as far as its sports watches go, but it risks falling behind as these wearables transition from fitness trackers to essential medical tools.

The partnership with Actigraph isn’t its first foray into more serious health tracking though. Most recently it announced a partnership with health analytics company Fitabase to aid health research. It also teamed up with Cardiogram to leverage the company’s advanced heart rate technology.

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The “Yellow Vest” riots in France are what happens when Facebook gets involved with local news • Buzzfeed News

Ryan Broderick and Jules Darmanin:

»

what’s happening right now in France isn’t happening in a vacuum. The Yellow Vests movement — named for the protesters’ brightly colored safety vests — is a beast born almost entirely from Facebook. And it’s only getting more popular. Recent polls indicate the majority of France now supports the protesters. The Yellow Vests communicate almost entirely on small, decentralized Facebook pages. They coordinate via memes and viral videos. Whatever gets shared the most becomes part of their platform.

Due to the way algorithm changes made earlier this year interacted with the fierce devotion in France to local and regional identity, the country is now facing some of the worst riots in many years — and in Paris, the worst in half a century.

This isn’t the first time real-life violence has followed a viral Facebook storm and it certainly won’t be the last. Much has already been written about the anti-Muslim Facebook riots in Myanmar and Sri Lanka and the WhatsApp lynchings in Brazil and India. Well, the same process is happening in Europe now, on a massive scale. Here’s how Facebook tore France apart…

…These pages [fuelling the protests] weren’t exploding in popularity by coincidence. The same month that [a Portuguese bricklayer called Leandro Antonio] Nogueira set up his first [Facebook protest] group [in January], Mark Zuckerberg announced two algorithm changes to Facebook’s News Feed that would “prioritize news that is trustworthy, informative, and local.” The updates were meant to combat sensationalism, misinformation, and political polarization by emphasizing local networks over publisher pages. One change upranks news from local publishers only. Another change made the same month prioritizes posts from friends and family, hoping to inspire back-and-forth discussion in the comments of posts.

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Facebook is now so powerful that little tweaks to its Newsfeed can destabilise countries by conjoining all the most crazy conspiracy theorists. Happy holidays, everyone!
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New Bluetooth tech could make AirPod clones much better • ExtremeTech

Ryan Whitwam:

»

Apple’s AirPods use standard A2DP to connect to the phone, but that’s only good for one connection. Apple has its own Bluetooth stack and hardware that allows the second earbud to sniff the first connection and establish a link. Other companies use technologies like Near Field Magnetic Induction to bridge the two earbuds. This is expensive, and the results are often imperfect.

You might not be familiar with Tempow, but it’s been building to this announcement for years. Probably its most visible partnership was the Moto X4 last year. That phone included a feature called “Wireless Sound System.” Using Tempow’s custom Bluetooth stack, you could pair multiple Bluetooth devices to the phone to create a surround sound system. Now it’s offering to license the technology specifically for wireless earbuds, which it calls Tempow True Wireless. Unlike Apple’s AirPod approach, Tempow’s multi-point Bluetooth tech uses standard chipsets — it’s just the software that changes. According to the company, Tempow True Wireless saves bandwidth because you don’t need to re-transmit sound between the earbuds. That means high-fidelity codecs like LDAC are within reach. It also says battery life could improve by up to 50% for the same reason.

The primary drawback is that you’d need earbuds and a phone that understands the Tempow-hacked Bluetooth stack. So, the phone knows it can stream the left channel to one earbud and the right to the other. Meanwhile, the earbuds know how to broadcast their identities and operate as separate audio targets. They’d be like tiny individual Bluetooth speakers in your ears.

Tempow is just announcing the availability of Tempow True Wireless — it doesn’t have any partners yet.

«

Expect it will be bidding hard at CES to find them, or announce them. It’s only a few weeks away.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

From next year, your smart speaker might be able to distinguish the sound of this can being opened. CC-licensed photo by TheFoodJunk on Flickr.

It’s charity time: ahead of Christmas, I’m encouraging readers to make a donation to charity; a different one each day.
Today’s is
Centrepoint, which aims to give homeless young people a future.
Readers in the US: this page shows similar charities in the US. Choose one. Please give as generously as you feel you can.

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. Duodecimally. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Dear tech companies: I don’t want to see pregnancy ads after my child was stillborn – The Washington Post

Gillian Brockell:

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Dear Tech Companies:

I know you knew I was pregnant. It’s my fault, I just couldn’t resist those Instagram hashtags — #30weekspregnant, #babybump. And, silly me! I even clicked once or twice on the maternity-wear ads Facebook served up. What can I say, I am your ideal “engaged” user.

You surely saw my heartfelt thank-you post to all the girlfriends who came to my baby shower, and the sister-in-law who flew in from Arizona for said shower tagging me in her photos. You probably saw me googling “holiday dress maternity plaid” and “babysafe crib paint.” And I bet Amazon.com even told you my due date, Jan. 24, when I created that Prime registry.

But didn’t you also see me googling “braxton hicks vs. preterm labor” and “baby not moving”? Did you not see my three days of social media silence, uncommon for a high-frequency user like me? And then the announcement post with keywords like “heartbroken” and “problem” and “stillborn” and the 200 teardrop emoticons from my friends? Is that not something you could track?

«

Facebook’s VP of advertising responded, with a heartfelt response, to explain that the ads she was then shown, which thought she was now a mother, could have been blocked (on Facebook, at least) in Settings – Ad Preferences – Hide ad topics – Parenting.

A long way down though; what we truly want is systems that do watch and are attentive to us – including the bad part.
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Smarter voice assistants recognize your favorite brands—and health • Communications of the ACM

»

At January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a boost to the artificial intelligence (AI) that allows smart speakers like the Echo, Google Home, and Apple Homepod to reliably recognize everyday sounds—and to act on them—is set to lend the devices powerful new capabilities, including the ability to recognize your favorite brands from the noises they make.

Based on sound recognition technology from a British AI startup called Audio Analytic, these capabilities include allowing voice assistants to recognize the sounds of the brands you use day to day, to boost your home’s security by listening out for out-of-the-ordinary “anomalous” sounds around the house, and, for the first time, to collect health data by recognizing coughs, sneezes, sniffles, yawns, and snores, in order to recommend medicines, or pharmacies.

…[But] University of Michigan engineers Florian Schaub and Josephine Lau told the 21st ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSAW 2018) in November that smart speaker makers need to design effective, usable privacy controls—because the risk to our privacy is increasing as voice assistants are fast migrating beyond tabletop speakers to our cars, smartwatches, fitness trackers, wearables, wireless headsets, TV streaming boxes, security cameras, and smart heating/lighting controllers.

All these platforms are able to exploit the patent pending “brand sonification” technology that Audio Analytic will be plugging at CES 2019, the Consumer Technology Association’s annual event in Las Vegas in January.

The basic idea behind brand sonification, according to Audio Analytic CEO Chris Mitchell, “is to have voice assistant devices respond to the sounds that brands make when they are used.”

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“The sounds that brands make when they are used”? The advertising-oriented mind is so weird.
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Apple Music removes ability for artists to post to Connect, posts removed from Artist Pages and For You • 9to5Mac

Zac Hall:

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Apple Music Connect appears to slowly be going the way of iTunes Ping. Apple has started notifying Apple Music artists that it is removing the ability for artists to post content to Apple Music Connect, and previously posted Apple Music Connect content is being removed from the For You section and Artist Pages in Apple Music. Connect content will still be viewable through search results on Apple Music, but Apple is removing artist-submitted Connect posts from search in May

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Nobody will be able to update it from the end of this month. So it’s dead. That’s the second time Apple has tried this, and the second time it’s failed. As an artist – or an artist’s social media manager – why would you want to update that when you could do it on your own site? Or on Twitter? Or Facebook? Apple has never got social networks right.
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Apple plans new $1bn campus for Austin, Texas • Reuters

Aishwarya Venugopal:

»

The iPhone maker also said it plans to expand in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City, California, and add hundreds of jobs in Pittsburgh, New York and Boulder, Colorado, over the next three years.

Apple said at the start of the year it would invest $30bn in the United States, taking advantage of a windfall from U.S. President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax code overhaul.

The 133-acre campus in Austin will be less than a mile from Apple’s existing facilities and initially have 5,000 employees. The jobs created would be in engineering, research and development, operations and finance.

Amazon.com in November said it will create more than 25,000 jobs in both New York and the Washington, D.C. area by opening massive new offices. The two technology companies chose cities with a wealth of white-collar workers and high employment, bypassing other regions that may have required more investment.

Austin is one of the fastest-growing U.S. cities with a population of nearly 1 million, and is home to the University of Texas and other tech companies including Dell Technologies Inc in nearby Round Rock, Texas, and IBM.

Apple’s existing facility in north Austin has more than 6,000 workers, the most outside its headquarters in Cupertino, California. With the new campus, the company will become the largest private employer in the city.

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YouTube Rewind hides its community’s biggest moments to appease advertisers • The Verge

Julia Alexander:

»

The message from YouTube to marketers was clear: these are the people you want to invest time to watch and whose videos you should run ads on.

Jake and Logan Paul don’t appear in this year’s Rewind. Neither does KSI. PewDiePie, David Dobrik, Shane Dawson, and Erika Costell — some of the most talked-about YouTube creators this year — are also absent. It’s unclear who was asked and who wasn’t, but their absences are some of the biggest questions fans have after watching the video.

The reaction from the YouTube community is openly hostile; there are more than 250,000 downvotes on the video at the time of this writing — nearly 100,000 more than those who upvoted it. It’s not that YouTube’s video completely misses the mark. There are references to trends like mukbang videos (a popular food challenge), conversations about creator burnout, spotlights on popular collaboration teams like Sister Squad (Emma Chamberlain, James Charles, and the Dolan Twins) and, of course, Fortnite.

Ignoring the moments that YouTube’s community cares about and pays attention to, like a boxing match that brought in nearly 1 million live viewers, hides an enormous part of the platform’s cultural shift. It feels disingenuous, like YouTube is hiding its uglier side under a carpet while showing guests around.

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This year’s YouTube Rewind is now the most disliked video in the history of YouTube – 9m dislikes v 2m likes.
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‘Russia’s most modern robot’ revealed to be just a person in a suit • The Independent

Andrew Griffin:

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Video of the event went around the world, showing him taking part in banter with people on stage and being led through a series of dances. Its success was used to encourage children to explore robotics, and as proof of a technological breakthrough.

It was clear that if the robot was real it would be one of the most advanced examples of robotics in the world. Soon after that celebration, however, it became clear that it was so lifelike because it was literally alive, with a man standing inside its body controlling its functions.

Local reports straight away noted a variety of things wrong with the robot.

It wasn’t clear where the sensors that would allow it to take in the world were placed, for one. It only seemed to have LED lights in its head, rather than any visible camera or other sensors to allow it to understand its environment.

It also appeared to have come entirely out of nowhere. The robots made by Boston Dynamics – often touted as the leading company in creating robots that move like humans – have taken years to develop even simple abilities, and iheir movements are far behind some of those shown during the demonstration.

Its dancing seemed a little too human, too: its movements were clumsy – like a person trying to dance while struggling with the weight of a robot suit, not a robot that had been taught to dance, as claimed.

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Just explain how “a person trying to dance while struggling with the weight” looks different from a clumsy robot that has been taught to dance?
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In France, school lessons ask: which Twitter post should you trust? • The New York Times

Adam Satariano and Elian Peltier:

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A group of teenagers recently swarmed into a room at Collège Henri Barbusse near Lyon, France, for a class typically dedicated to learning Spanish. But on that Wednesday, an unusual lesson awaited them.

Five posts from Twitter were up on the board. The assignment: Decipher whether they were trustworthy or suspect.

The ninth graders quickly focused on a post by the far-right politician Marine Le Pen, related to a headline-grabbing incident in France when a teenager had threatened a teacher. One student said Ms. Le Pen’s post could be trusted because her account had been verified by Twitter. But Samia Houbiri, 15, piped up that Ms. Le Pen simply wanted attention.

“She picks a topic, she exaggerates things, and then people will say, ‘She’s right, I should vote for her,’” Ms. Houbiri said.
At the front of the class, Sandra Laffont, a journalist teaching the workshop, nodded and said, “Politicians may sometimes exaggerate reality because their goal is to convince people that their ideas are the right ones.”

The class was part of a novel experiment by a government to work with journalists and educators to combat the spread of online misinformation. France is coordinating one of the world’s largest national media and internet literacy efforts to teach students, starting as early as in middle school, how to spot junk information online.

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Bonne idée.
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‘They don’t care’: Facebook factchecking in disarray as journalists push to cut ties • The Guardian

Sam Levin:

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[Brooke] Binkowski, who left [fact-checking site] Snopes earlier this year and now runs her own factchecking site, which does not partner with Facebook, said the Facebook-Snopes partnership quickly became counterproductive. During early conversations with Facebook, Binkowski said she tried to raise concerns about misuse of the platform abroad, such as the explosion of hate speech and misinformation during the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar and other violent propaganda.

“I was bringing up Myanmar over and over and over,” she said. “They were absolutely resistant.”

Binkowski, who previously reported on immigration and refugees, said Facebook largely ignored her: “I strongly believe that they are spreading fake news on behalf of hostile foreign powers and authoritarian governments as part of their business model.”

Kim LaCapria recently left Snopes as a content manager and factchecker partly due to her frustrations with the Facebook arrangement. She said it quickly seemed clear that Facebook wanted the “appearance of trying to prevent damage without actually doing anything” and that she was particularly upset to learn that Facebook was paying Snopes: “That felt really gross … Facebook has one mission and factchecking websites should have a completely different mission.”

Binkowski said that on at least one occasion, it appeared that Facebook was pushing reporters to prioritize debunking misinformation that affected Facebook advertisers, which she thought crossed a line: “You’re not doing journalism any more. You’re doing propaganda.”

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Facebook didn’t like this, and put out a grumpy response, principally about the advertiser/misinformation point in that latter paragraph.
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Word processor inventor Evelyn Berezin has died • Quartz

Corinne Purtill:

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After graduating from New York University in 1945 with a degree in physics, Berezin became interested in the nascent computer industry. Her particular expertise was building computing networks for a specific task. In 1962, as an employee of the company Teleregister, she built a computerized booking system for United Airlines, the first system of its kind.

Yet opportunities for women in tech’s early days were extremely limited. Berezin told NPR that a 1960 job offer from the New York Stock Exchange was rescinded because, the hiring manager told her apologetically, “They said that you were a woman, you’d have to be on the stock market floor from time to time. And the language on the floor was not for a woman’s ears.”

If she wanted to move up at a company, she realized, she would have to create it herself. She founded Redactron in 1969 with the goal of creating a tool that would revolutionize the workplace—the word processor. Two years later, Redactron brought to market the Data Secretary, a device that transformed the laborious work of producing documents. Redactron sold 10,000 of its $8,000 machines to law firms and corporate offices before being sold in 1976, as its larger competitor IBM flooded the market with alternatives, according to the New York Times.

Berezin went on to serve on the boards of several companies and as a fellow of the Computer History Museum. She was inducted in 2011 into the Women in Technology Hall of Fame.

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Not into the Technology Hall of Fame? Those two inventions are basically what keeps the modern world going.
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Make the iPad more like the Mac – Medium

Radu Dutzan got Luna Display, which turns the iPad into a touchscreen for the Mac:

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On the macPad, things are radically different. You need to keep in mind that touches are immediately interpreted as clicks by Luna, so scrolling works only with two fingers, and tapping and dragging with one finger (aka swiping) is usually interpreted as a click-drag gesture that triggers selection on the Mac. That puts you on your toes, because swiping is a very natural gesture on touch devices—you don’t even think about it. But once you wrap your head around this, you see that tapping and dragging to select is actually a much more efficient interaction that whatever we’re doing today on iOS text fields, or in apps like Keynote for iOS. Seriously, what are we doing with text and object selection on the iPad? Whatever it is, it’s kinda awful, especially after trying out tap-and-drag selection on the macPad.

There are so many places where the iPad could benefit from some adaptation of tap-and-drag selection. It’s such a better model that imagining the interaction is worth the effort: there already is a heuristic somewhere on iOS that starts measuring for how long you’ve kept your finger still after starting a touch in order to decide whether to transition from a scrolling gesture to a drag. That same heuristic could be applied to iPad text fields and layout apps such as Keynote: after holding a touch still on a text field or on the canvas for a set amount of time, the gesture could become a selection drag, and moving your finger could begin selecting the text or objects encompassed by the net dragged distance.

What about the desktop? Well, what about it? The Mac has it because its fundamental organizational unit—its main metaphorical currency—is files, and since we keep files scattered around IRL, we have a digital equivalent on the Mac’s desktop. The iPad’s currency is apps, so if we have an iPad OS with windows, spaces, and Mission Control, and a classic icon-based app launcher on a separate modal layer, then what should be on the ‘base’ layer? Well, what about widgets and a set of user-defined or suggested shortcuts?

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Inch by inch, this stuff is getting figured out, it seems.
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Totally non-evil ICE arrests 170 immigrants trying to save babies from baby jails • Wonkette

Stephen Robinson:

»

It’s the holiday season, and in between debating the merits of Love Actually and “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” you’ve probably wondered what’s going on with all those migrant children the Trump administration separated from their families. Turns out they’ve been used as collateral for even greater acts of evil.

The friendly folks at US Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) announced Tuesday that federal authorities have arrested 170 immigrants who came forward to sponsor migrant children in government custody. This is the result of a new, fun rule the Department of Homeland Security put into effect this summer. It allows immigration authorities to examine the criminal background and legal status of anyone who attempts to sponsor the unaccompanied minors — usually parents or close relatives already in the country. They can even check the papers of any other adults living in their home, including Grandma.

It’s a masterclass in evil: use defenseless children as bait to lure immigrants to the authorities. It’s like when scofflaws show up at police headquarters to collect their “free prize,” which is actually just jail. Of course, this is far more repulsive because the government is preying on immigrants’ concern for the well-being of their family members. This is usually why it’s Lex Luthor who kidnaps Lois Lane or Martha Kent. You don’t see Superman holding Lex’s sister hostage in return for an orderly surrender. Although ruthlessly efficient, it would lead to a much shorter and more depressing movie.

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Wow. That is really benthically evil. One has to imagine that people sat around a table and planned this to see quite how evil they were; the banality of planning it, minuting it, and getting it carried out. And you can also bet they were pleased with themselves. The children, meanwhile, are still in jail for no offence they knowingly committed.
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Apple can’t win over media with its old approach • Bloomberg

Shira Ovide:

»

Bloomberg News detailed on Wednesday why some news and magazine publishers are wary of Apple’s effort to refashion Texture, a company Apple acquired this year that offers a collection of digital magazines for $10 a month. One concern is that Apple could lure publications’ current subscribers, who might save money by reading the same articles on a revamped Texture instead.

It struck me that Apple is repeating many of the same missteps from its earlier digital news and magazine hub called Newsstand and from its multiple attempts at subscriptions for online television. And I’m equally surprised that Apple’s vision for Newsstand 2.0 — or at least what journalists have unearthed so far — seems unoriginal and potentially misguided. 

Reading about Apple’s negotiations, I had flashbacks to 2010, when I spent a chunk of time writing about Apple’s first significant stab at an iPad storefront for newspapers and magazines. What Apple called Newsstand wasn’t a single fee for an array of publications like what Apple is developing now, but fears about Apple cannibalizing existing sales and controlling data on publications’ subscribers were sticking points with many partners then, too. Newsstand flopped, and participating publishers wasted time and resources on Steve Jobs’s ill-conceived plan. 

It was utterly predictable that many of those same publishers would have similar misgivings about Newsstand 2.0, but Apple’s reported pitch hasn’t changed in eight years: We’re Apple, and this will draw masses who wouldn’t have otherwise subscribed to your newspapers or magazines. Apple may be right, but the publishers that Apple really wants believe they’re better off luring readers on their own without Apple serving as a middleman.

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The content game isn’t what it was back in 2002-3, when Steve Jobs negotiated with record labels to create the iTunes Music Store.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Were the Chinese behind the hack of the Starwood – and Marriott – hotels? That’s the growing suspicion. CC-licensed photo by Matt@TWN on Flickr.

It’s charity time: ahead of Christmas, I’m encouraging readers to make a donation to charity; a different one each day.
Today’s is
Crisis, the charity aiming to end homelessness.
Please give as generously as you feel you can.

A selection of 11 links for you. By a simple majority. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Marriott data breach is traced to Chinese hackers as US readies crackdown on Beijing • The New York Times

David E. Sanger, Nicole Perlroth, Glenn Thrush and Alan Rappeport:

»

While American intelligence agencies have not reached a final assessment of who performed the hacking, a range of firms brought in to assess the damage quickly saw computer code and patterns familiar to operations by Chinese actors.

The Marriott database contains not only credit card information but passport data. Lisa Monaco, a former homeland security adviser under Mr. Obama, noted last week at a conference that passport information would be particularly valuable in tracking who is crossing borders and what they look like, among other key data.

But officials on Tuesday said it was only part of an aggressive operation whose centerpiece was the 2014 hacking into the Office of Personnel Management. At the time, the government bureau loosely guarded the detailed forms that Americans fill out to get security clearances — forms that contain financial data; information about spouses, children and past romantic relationships; and any meetings with foreigners.

Such information is exactly what the Chinese use to root out spies, recruit intelligence agents and build a rich repository of Americans’ personal data for future targeting. With those details and more that were stolen from insurers like Anthem, the Marriott data adds another critical element to the intelligence profile: travel habits.

James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic Studies in Washington, said the Chinese have collected “huge pots of data” to feed a Ministry of State Security database seeking to identify American spies — and the Chinese people talking to them.

“Big data is the new wave for counterintelligence,” Mr. Lewis said.

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link to this extract

I was a senior VP of technology at Starwood – here’s my take on the guest data breach • PhocusWire

Israel del Rio:

»

Marriott seems to suggest the breach was made in the reservation system. However, it is unlikely this system would have had 500 million records, given the practice to remove booking records a number of days after checkout.

Even assuming half a million rooms in Starwood’s inventory at 90% occupancy, with average lengths of stay of two days, and up to two years of advance booking, such a database would not exceed 200 million records.

As for the SPG database, it would contain one record from each SPG member, but not even under the most optimistic scenarios would Starwood have had 500 million registered SPG guests.

This leaves the Data Warehouse. The Data Warehouse would contain the booking records for several prior years, and it clearly could contain 500 million records. This is most likely the area from which the data was stolen.

However, given that some of that data had already been migrated to Marriott, it is hard to say for certain whether the breach occurred in the Starwood system, the Marriott system, or in transit as a result of exposure during the Extract‐Transform‐Load process used during the migration.

The second point appears to indicate Marriott first detected the issue back in September of this year (presumably by using a traffic detection tool).

We do not know when such a tool was first used, but what’s most confounding is Marriott’s assurance that the breach first occurred in 2014. If the detection tool was used prior to this September, why hadn’t the breach been detected earlier? And if the tool was not used earlier, how can they be so sure the breach occurred in 2014?

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The more this story goes on, the stranger it gets.

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Special effects: can they be special again? • Vulture

Bilge Ebiri:

»

[Visual effects – VFX – guru Paul] Franklin points to the work he’s done with [Interstellar/Inception/Dunkirk/Dark Knight series director Christopher] Nolan as an example of a filmmaker who gives his collaborators room to explore while staying committed to an overall vision. The director famously prefers practical effects and tries to avoid heavy CGI whenever he can. “He doesn’t like using green screens and blue screens, for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that it slows down the shoot,” Franklin says. “And from the point of view of the cast, there’s nothing for them to look at and react to.”

Even on Interstellar — a space-travel epic that might have been a prime candidate for loads of green screen — Franklin and his team [at his VFX company Double Negative] used front projection methods, taking massive screens and used digital projectors to throw images on them, “to create the views of what was outside the windows of the aircraft.” This is not a new method: “It’s a technique that goes back to old Roy Rogers movies, or to Cary Grant in his car driving across the Amalfi coast in To Catch a Thief, even though he’s actually on a soundstage in Burbank. But Chris realized that the advances in digital projection meant that he could do it at a much higher level of quality than had been possible in the past.”

Franklin and [the Oscar-winning VFX supervisor on Blade Runner 2049, Paul] Lambert furthered that process on Damien Chazelle’s Neil Armstrong biopic First Man, which also mostly avoided using green screens. This time, instead of using projectors to throw images on a screen, they built a massive wraparound high-definition LED screen outside of the set, so that performers could act against images that otherwise would have been added months later in post. The intensely beautiful X-15 experimental flight sequence that opens the film was shot this way, and the realism achieved also meant that the camera captured little offhand details that would have taken VFX artists weeks to do with computers. “Because you had the content on the screen, when you see Ryan [Gosling] bursting through the atmosphere, you can then see the beautiful chromatic shift on the horizon,” recalls Lambert. “That shot is in camera; Ryan is actually looking at the horizon. It’s reflected in his visor, and it’s reflected in his eye. I used to do that work myself. I used to be a compositor. I know how tricky it is to do that in post.”

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Absorbing read; when the VFX take over from the story, everyone loses. When they’re subsidiary, good story wins.
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Verizon admits defeat with $4.6bn AOL-Yahoo writedown • Bloomberg

Scott Moritz:

»

The wireless carrier slashed the value of its AOL and Yahoo acquisitions by $4.6bn, an acknowledgment that tough competition for digital advertising is leading to shortfalls in revenue and profit.

The move will erase almost half the value of the division it had been calling Oath, which houses AOL, Yahoo and other businesses like the Huffington Post.

“The hype of Oath has been over for some time,” Wells Fargo analyst Jennifer Fritzsche said in a note Tuesday. She likened the writedown to “ripping off the Oath band-aid.”

The episode offered a silver lining for investors. Rather than attempt a megadeal like AT&T Inc.’s $85bn acquisition of Time Warner Inc., Verizon only spent about $9.5bn in the past three years buying fading web giants. Though the bet hasn’t paid off, it at least stumbled on a smaller scale.

The revision of the Oath division’s accounting leaves its goodwill balance – a measure of the intangible value of an acquisition – at about $200m, Verizon said in a filing Tuesday.

«

Astonishing to think of the inflated value there. And people were wondering if we were in a tech bubble?
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Apple has dozens of doctors on staff • CNBC

Christina Farr:

»

Apple has dozens of medical doctors working across its various teams, say two people familiar with the company’s hiring, showing how serious it is about health tech.

The hires could help Apple win over doctors — potentially its harshest critics — as it seeks to develop and integrate health technologies into the Apple Watch, iPad and iPhone. It also suggests that Apple will build applications that can help people with serious medical problems, and not just cater to the “worried well,” as many have speculated.

These hires are not just for show, according to people familiar with the doctors and their roles. Many haven’t disclosed their role at Apple at all, which is commonplace at a company that prides itself on secrecy. One example is Stanford pediatrician Rajiv Kumar, who has worked there for several years. CNBC was able to locate 20 physicians at Apple via LinkedIn searches and sources familiar, and other people said as many as 50 doctors work there. Apple has more than 130,000 employees globally.

«

Clever way to increase the stickiness of its devices: if they’re better informed about your health, why are you going to give them up just for something cheaper?
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Lenovo tells Asia-Pacific staff: Work lappy with your unencrypted data on it has been nicked • The Register

Paul Kunert:

»

A corporate-issued laptop lifted from a Lenovo employee in Singapore contained a cornucopia of unencrypted payroll data on staff based in the Asia Pacific region, The Register can exclusively reveal.

Details of the massive screw-up reached us from Lenovo staffers, who are simply bewildered at the monumental mistake. Lenovo has sent letters of shame to its employees confessing the security snafu.

“We are writing to notify you that Lenovo has learned that one of our Singapore employees recently had the work laptop stolen on 10 September 2018,” the letter from Lenovo HR and IT Security, dated 21 November, stated.

“Unfortunately, this laptop contained payroll information, including employee name, monthly salary amounts and bank account numbers for Asia Pacific employees and was not encrypted.”

Lenovo employs more than 54,000 staff worldwide, the bulk of whom are in China.

The letter stated there is currently “no indication” that the sensitive employee data has been “used or compromised”, and Lenovo said it is working with local police to “recover the stolen device”.

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link to this extract

In China, your car could be talking to the government • Associated PREss

Erika Kinetz:

»

When Shan Junhua bought his white Tesla Model X, he knew it was a fast, beautiful car. What he didn’t know is that Tesla constantly sends information about the precise location of his car to the Chinese government.

Tesla is not alone. China has called upon all electric vehicle manufacturers in China to make the same kind of reports — potentially adding to the rich kit of surveillance tools available to the Chinese government as President Xi Jinping steps up the use of technology to track Chinese citizens.

“I didn’t know this,” said Shan. “Tesla could have it, but why do they transmit it to the government? Because this is about privacy.”

More than 200 manufacturers, including Tesla, Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler, Ford, General Motors, Nissan, Mitsubishi and U.S.-listed electric vehicle start-up NIO, transmit position information and dozens of other data points to government-backed monitoring centers, The Associated Press has found. Generally, it happens without car owners’ knowledge.

The automakers say they are merely complying with local laws, which apply only to alternative energy vehicles. Chinese officials say the data is used for analytics to improve public safety, facilitate industrial development and infrastructure planning, and to prevent fraud in subsidy programs.

«

Have a look at the website if you like. That’s quite a thing.
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Facebook’s hidden battle against ad-blockers • BBC News

»

The methods Facebook uses to thwart ad-blocking technology have been criticised by web developers.

The social network injects dozens of lines of code in every page to make it harder for ad blockers to detect and hide sponsored posts. But that makes the website less efficient and stops software such as screen readers used by visually impaired users from working properly. The BBC has contacted Facebook for comment.

In order to block advertising, developers look for patterns in a website’s code that can be consistently identified and hidden. It would be easy for a plug-in to spot the word “sponsored” or to find a container labelled “ad” inside the webpage code, so companies, including Facebook, use coding tricks to obfuscate their ads.

The tricks Facebook uses to fool ad-blocking plug-ins include:
• breaking up the word “sponsored” into small chunks only one or two letters long
• inserting extra letters, as in “SpSonSsoSredS”, hidden to the viewer
• adding the word to all regular posts on the news feed, even ones that are not ads, and then using another piece of code to hide it on the non-ads.

«

The convenience of the disabled is always the collateral damage in such wars; this one is ongoing, though the adblocking developers are doing their work in the open by posting what they’re looking for and finding on GitHub.
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The end of IBM/Lotus Notes • Web Informant

David Strom, pointing out that Notes (and Domino, the server side) was sold to India’s HCL last week, and nobody noticed:

»

Until Notes came along, PCs were personal productivity tools, with the majority of uses being spreadsheets, word processing and presentations. Notes created a social use for personal computers and enabled teams of people, spread across geographies, to communicate, collaborate and share information in a way which was not possible previously. It was the tool that moved PCs and networks onto every desk in every office of PW around the world.”

This is an important point, and one that I didn’t think much about until I started corresponding recently with Laube. If you credit Notes as being the first social software tool, it actually predates Facebook by more than a decade. Even MySpace, which was the largest social network for a few years (and had more traffic than Google too), was created in the early 2000s.

Notes was also ahead of its time in another area. “Notes was a precursor to both the web and social media,” says Laube. “It was all about easily publishing and sharing information in a managed way suited to business use. It is the ease of management and the ability to control information access within Notes securely which allowed its rapid adoption by business.” Laube reminded me that back then, information security was barely recognized as necessary by IT departments.

This isn’t completely an accurate picture, mainly because Notes was focused on the enterprise, not the consumer. Notes “mixed email with databases with insanely secure data replication and custom apps,” said David Gewirtz in his column this week for ZDnet. He was an early advocate of Notes and wrote numerous books and edited many newsletters about its enterprise use.

«

I used Notes in two newspapers, and knew of people in other newspapers who used it. We only ever got the email part, which was calamitously bad. A piece I wrote in 2006 bemoaning this fact drew a huge response: users agreed, while administrators said it was wonderful because it was so secure and easy to administer.

History shows the users won. Yay.
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Google Chat is the worst desktop chat program I have ever used • Tech Nexus

»

Google Chat is the worst desktop chat program that I have ever used.

How bad is it exactly? Let’s just say if I had to choose between using Google Chat and signing up for Comcast I’d choose Comcast every time.

Details? Okay.

Google Chat for Desktop login opens your default browser to login

Sounds reasonable right? Wrong.

A self contained application should need no browser at all to login.

I am required to use Google Chat for work. I use Google Chrome for work and Firefox for my personal stuff. I do not ever mix the two. I do not want my personal Gmail cookies anywhere near my work Gmail cookies. Mixing the two is a recipe for my work having access to my personal logins or accidentally syncing contacts. Do I really want to accidentally pocket dial one of my coworkers? Not really.

Guess what Google Chat does?

Clicking that goes to my default browser of course. Because you’re not allowed to login to your work account on a secondary browser apparently. I literally have to copy/paste its OAuth login URL to Chrome myself.

Even more ludicrous: since this is all using OAuth, Google Chat literally hosts its own web server on your localhost so that it can redirect to itself upon success.

And this is just the login.

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Things, as you guess, go downhill from there.
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Why was “911” chosen as the emergency phone number? • HowStuffWorks

»

Prior to 1968, there was no standard emergency number. So how did 911 become one of the most recognizable numbers in the United States? Choosing 911 as the universal emergency number was not an arbitrary selection, but it wasn’t a difficult one either. In 1967, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) met with AT&T to establish such an emergency number. They wanted a number that was short and easy to remember. More importantly, they needed a unique number, and since 911 had never been designated for an office code, area code or service code, that was the number they chose.

Soon after, the U.S. Congress agreed to support 911 as the emergency number standard for the nation and passed legislation making 911 the exclusive number for any emergency calling service.

«

Thanks to those who provided links explaining this.
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Yes, but why is this the emergency phone number in the UK? CC-licensed photo by Joe Shlabotnik on Flickr.

Charity time: ahead of Christmas, I’m encouraging readers to make a donation to charity; a different one each day.
Today’s is
National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). (Neglect is the most common form of child abuse.)

A selection of 10 links for you. Not for sale in North Dakota. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The record for high-temperature superconductivity has been smashed again • MIT Technology Review

»

The history of superconductivity is littered with dubious claims of high-temperature activity that later turn out to be impossible to reproduce. Indeed, physicists have a name for this: USOs, or unidentified superconducting objects.

So new claims of high-temperature superconductivity have to be treated with caution. Having said that, the news today that the record for high-temperature superconductivity has been smashed is worth looking at in more detail.

The work comes from the lab of Mikhail Eremets and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. Eremets and his colleagues say they have observed lanthanum hydride (LaH10) superconducting at the sweltering temperature of 250 K, or –23 °C. That’s warmer than the current temperature at the North Pole. “Our study makes a leap forward on the road to the room-temperature superconductivity,” say the team.

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Woo-hoo!

»

(The caveat is that the sample has to be under huge pressure: 170 gigapascals, or about half the pressure at the center of the Earth.)

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Oh. But they do have two of three key pieces of evidence that they’ve really found superconductivity. It seems that the cosmic joke about room-temperature superconductivity will be that you have it, but only if you have centre-of-the-planet pressures.
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Scathing House Oversight report: Equifax data breach was “entirely preventable” • Fast Company

Melissa Locker:

»

after a 14-month investigation, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has issued a scathing 96-page report saying the consumer credit reporting agency aggressively collected consumer data without taking the necessary steps to protect the trove of information. “Equifax… failed to implement an adequate security program to protect this sensitive data. As a result, Equifax allowed one of the largest data breaches in US history. Such a breach was entirely preventable,” the report says.

The report blames the breach on a series of failures, including “a culture of cybersecurity complacency,” outdated technology systems, and Equifax’s failure to patch a “known critical vulnerability.” The committee also noted the company’s failure to take appropriate measures to inform consumers about the breach and their options for protecting their data. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tried to warn Equifax that this wouldn’t end well for them. The report comes as the company still faces a variety of class-action lawsuits over the breach and the FTC is still side-eyeing the company after publicly confirming it is investigating the data breach.

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Reached for a quote, Equifax said it wasn’t fair that it didn’t get time to review the report. But you know that this won’t make the tiniest difference. They’ll still keep grabbing more data.
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Why call 999 for an emergency? • BBC

Gary Holland:

»

The General Post Office, which ran the telephone network, proposed a three digit number that could trigger a special signal and flashing light at the exchange. The operators could then divert their attention to these priority calls.

In order to find the new emergency number in the dark or thick smoke it was suggested an end number was used so it could be found easily by touch.

111 was rejected because it could be triggered by faulty equipment or lines rubbing together. 222 would have connected to the Abbey local telephone exchange as numbers in the early telephone network represented the first three letters (ABBey = 222, 1 was not used due to the accidental triggering). 000 could not be used as the first 0 would have dialled the operator.

999 was deemed the sensible choice.

The system came into place on 1 July 1937 covering a 12 mile radius from London’s Oxford Circus. Several people have claimed to have made the first 999 call on the 2nd or 3rd July.

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OK, this is from 2010, but it caught my eye. Looking forward to any American readers explaining why their emergency number is 911.
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GoPro to move US-bound camera production out of China • Reuters

Arjun Panchadar:

»

GoPro on Monday took the first steps to move most of its US-bound camera production out of China by the summer of 2019 to counter the potential impact from any new tariffs.

The company had previously said it was being “very proactive” about the situation regarding tariffs as US and China ramped up its bitter trade war, in which both nations have imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of each other’s imports.

GoPro said international-bound camera production will remain in China.

“It’s important to note that we own our own production equipment while our manufacturing partner provides the facilities, so we expect to make this move at a relatively low cost,” said chief financial officer Brian McGee.

«

Costs imposed by tariffs. And then tariffs on the end product. Not really going to help GoPro, which is struggling to find profitability.
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Opinion: Microsoft browser shift has major implications for software and devices • TechSpot

Bob O’Donnell:

»

From traditional enterprise software vendors like SAP, Oracle, and IBM through modern cloud-based players like Salesforce, Slack, and Workday, the ability to focus more of their efforts on a single target platform should open up a wealth of innovation and reduce difficult cross-platform testing efforts.

But it’s not just the software world that’s going to be impacted by this decision. Semiconductors and the types of devices that we may start to use could be affected as well. For example, Microsoft is leveraging this shift to Chromium as part of an effort to bring broader software compatibility to Arm-based CPUs, particularly the Windows on Snapdragon offerings from Qualcomm, like the brand-new Snapdragon 8cx. By working on bringing the underlying compatibility of Chromium to Windows-focused Arm64 processors, Microsoft is going to make it significantly easier for software developers to create applications that run on these devices. This would remove the last significant hurdle that has kept these devices from reaching mainstream buyers in the consumer and enterprise world, and it could turn them into serious contenders versus traditional X86-based CPUs from Intel and AMD.

On the device side, this move also opens up the possibility for a wider variety of form factors and for more ambient computing types of services. By essentially enabling a single, consistent target platform that could leverage the essential input characteristics of desktop devices (mice and keyboards), mobile devices (touch), and voice-based interfaces, Microsoft is laying the groundwork for a potentially fascinating computing future. Imagine, for example, a foldable multi-screen device that offers something like a traditional Android front screen, then unfolds to a larger Windows (or Android)-based device that can leverage the exact same applications and data, but with subtle UI enhancements optimized for each environment.

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Well sure, but that’s been the promise of web apps for absolutely years, and they’re never as good as the native UI, because the native UI is tuned to the device and its OS. It’s not a single, consistent target platform. That’s always the hope, and that hope is always dashed.
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If you invented the headphone jack in 2019, you’d be a billionaire • NY Mag

»

Rumors are now surfacing that the Samsung Galaxy S10 will be the last phone it puts out to have a 3.5-mm. headphone jack. It already pulled out the headphone jack on its Galaxy A8S. Samsung had been the lone holdout among major manufacturers when it comes to the 3.5-mm. headphone jack — when it debuted the Note 8 a year ago, the announcement that the device would retain a 3.5-mm. headphone jack got the most raucous applause out of any feature announced onstage. But it appears those days will soon draw to a close.

So here’s some free advice to any upstart smartphone manufacturer planning to roll out a phone in 2019: keep the headphone jack, and just pretend you invented it. Call it the something like the PureSound Port.

Have a video with a schlumpy dude in ill-fitting clothes trying to get his wireless headphones to pair, holding up traffic on the sidewalk. (Casting agents: I am available!). Pan slightly over to someone who looks like a Cooper Union grad clicking their artfully retro headphones intothe PureSound Port, and walking blissfully down the street, listening to their music. “No more charging, no more pairing, no lost signals. Just PureSound.”

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Looks like I’ll have to write a “Benjamin Button goes from” for “wireless headphones to a wired port”, doesn’t it. (It’s a genre.)
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Dell to return to the stock market five years after buyout • Bloomberg

Nico Grant:

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Dell Technologies Inc. won a shareholder vote to return to public markets, putting founder Michael Dell on the winning side of a transformative transaction that polarized investors for the second time in five years.

The world’s largest private technology company on Tuesday secured more than 61% of tracking stock DVMT’s unaffiliated shareholders. Of those who cast a ballot, 89% voted in favor. DVMT acts as a proxy for Dell’s stake in software maker VMware Inc. Round Rock, Texas-based Dell will buy out DVMT in a cash and share-swap deal that values DVMT’s market capitalization at $23.9bn. The computer giant said it will list on the New York Stock Exchange as soon as Dec. 28 under the ticker DELL.

After going private in one of the biggest leveraged buyouts ever, Dell will relist as a financially stronger and more diverse leader in computer equipment and software, though more burdened by debt. The move will help simplify a tangled corporate structure that holds together a tech empire ranging from servers to security software and give the company greater flexibility to raise capital, boost its value and pursue stock-based acquisitions.

It will also allow key investor Silver Lake, which helped take Dell private in 2013 in a deal worth about $24bn, to make its stake more liquid.

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So public markets were bad five years ago but now they’re great? And just as with the buyout, there have had to be sweeteners to get it to happen.

Anyhow, on the plus side, we might get an indication of how the PC business is doing.
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Super Micro finds no malicious hardware in motherboards • WSJ

Allison Prang:

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Super Micro Computer told its customers in a letter Tuesday that a third-party firm didn’t find malicious hardware on its equipment, as the supplier of motherboards continued to dispute a report that its products had been sabotaged.

“After thorough examination and a range of functional tests, the investigations firm found absolutely no evidence of malicious hardware on our motherboards,” said a letter from Super Micro executives, including CEO Charles Liang. The letter was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Super Micro reiterated that neither its customers nor government agencies had ever told the company they had found malicious hardware on its products.

The company’s letter follows a report from Bloomberg News in October that said Super Micro’s motherboards contained a rogue chip not part of the original design. The article said a “supply chain attack” was carried out by Chinese spies.

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You’re wondering: where’s the Bloomberg report on this? Answer: here. They reported it.
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Cryptocurrencies are like lottery tickets that might pay off in future • The Guardian

Kenneth Rogoff (a former chief economist at the IMF):

»

For the moment, the real question is if and when global regulation will stamp out privately constructed systems that are expensive for governments to trace and monitor. Any single large advanced economy foolish enough to try to embrace cryptocurrencies, as Japan did last year, risks becoming a global destination for money-laundering. (Japan’s subsequent moves to distance itself from cryptocurrencies were perhaps one cause of this year’s gyrations.) In the end, advanced economies will surely coordinate on cryptocurrency regulation, as they have on other measures to prevent money laundering and tax evasion.

But that leaves out a lot of disgruntled players. After all, many today – including Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, and Russia – are labouring under US financial sanctions. Their governments will not necessarily care about global externalities if they encourage cryptocurrencies that might have value as long as they are used somewhere.

So, while we shouldn’t be surprised by this year’s cryptocurrency price bust, the price of these coins is not necessarily zero. Like lottery tickets, there is a high probability that they are worthless. There is also an extremely small outside chance that they will be worth a great deal someday, for reasons that currently are difficult to anticipate.

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Notice: Google Fusion Tables turndown • Google Support

Where by “turndown” what they mean is “death”:

»

Google Fusion Tables and the Fusion Tables API will be turned down December 3, 2019. Embedded Fusion Tables visualizations — maps, charts, tables and cards — will also stop working that day. Maps using the Fusion Tables Layer in the Maps JavaScript API v3.37 will start to see errors in August 2019.

Fusion Tables was launched almost nine years ago as a research project in Google Labs, later evolving into an experimental product. For a long time, it was one of the few free tools for easily visualizing large datasets, especially on a map.

Since then, several Google alternatives have been developed, providing deeper experiences in more specialized domains.

Google BigQuery – Fast, highly scalable, cost-effective, and fully managed cloud data warehouse for analytics, with built-in machine learning…

Google Cloud SQL (…Fully-managed database service)

Google Sheets (…Fusion Tables can be imported into Google Sheets.)

Google Data Studio (…Data Studio is Google’s free-to-use business intelligence tool.)

Coming soon – Teams at Google have developed internal tools that can create powerful map visualizations. We are working to make some of these tools publicly available and will have more to share in the coming months—sign up to stay in touch.

«

OK, so there are paths forward; but this will break a lot of embedded older content. There’s always a hidden price in “free”; the difficulty is always figuring out where it is before you commit yourself beyond the point where it costs more than paying.
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.

Peppa Pig: big, in tattoo form, in China. CC-licensed photo by Cidade do Saber Camaçari on Flickr.

Charity time: ahead of Christmas, I’m encouraging readers to make a donation to charity; a different one each day.
Today’s is
Samaritans, the charity which offers the gift of listening. The organisation receives the most calls during December.

A selection of 10 links for you. Don’t ask for a vote on it. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Your apps know where you were last night, and they’re not keeping it secret • The New York Times

Jennifer Valentino-Devries, Natasha Singer, Michael Keller and Aaron Krolik:

»

More than 1,000 popular apps contain location-sharing code from such companies, according to 2018 data from MightySignal, a mobile analysis firm. Google’s Android system was found to have about 1,200 apps with such code, compared with about 200 on Apple’s iOS.

The most prolific company was Reveal Mobile, based in North Carolina, which had location-gathering code in more than 500 apps, including many that provide local news. A Reveal spokesman said that the popularity of its code showed that it helped app developers make ad money and consumers get free services.

To evaluate location-sharing practices, The Times tested 20 apps, most of which had been flagged by researchers and industry insiders as potentially sharing the data. Together, 17 of the apps sent exact latitude and longitude to about 70 businesses. Precise location data from one app, WeatherBug on iOS, was received by 40 companies. When contacted by The Times, some of the companies that received that data described it as “unsolicited” or “inappropriate.”

WeatherBug, owned by GroundTruth, asks users’ permission to collect their location and tells them the information will be used to personalize ads. GroundTruth said that it typically sent the data to ad companies it worked with, but that if they didn’t want the information they could ask to stop receiving it.

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Is it just me, or does it feel like this story comes around every couple of years? (That’s 2011 in case you don’t want to follow the link, and the first time this was big.)
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Google+ to shut down in April after new security flaw found • Financial Times

Richard Waters:

»

Google said it has discovered a new vulnerability in its Google+ social network that could have revealed private data on 52.5m users, just a month after it disclosed an earlier security flaw and announced plans to close down the service.

The new problem was disclosed on Monday, prompting the internet giant to say it will bring forward the date for ending the consumer Google+ service by four months, to April next year.

The company said it had identified the new flaw less than a week after it was introduced, and that it been fixed. There was “no evidence” that any third-party app developers had misused user data as a result of the flaw, it said.

The latest disclosure marks an embarrassing stumble by Google as it tried to plug previous gaps in its privacy protections. It could also hamper its attempts to give Google+ a second life as a collaboration and communication service for workers, after closing down the free consumer version.

«

link to this extract

Investor frenzy for scooter startups cools • WSJ

Eliot Brown, Greg Bensinger and Katie Roof:

»

Scooters barely existed as a business a year ago. But Bird, Lime and others rapidly deployed thousands of them last spring in cities around the U.S. The rides generally rent for $1 to start and 15 cents a minute; customers unlock them with a smartphone and leave the scooters on the sidewalk when they are done.

Investors rushed in after seeing rapid adoption in several California cities. Some companies reported revenue of more than $20 a day for each scooter, suggesting significant profit potential given they cost about $500 apiece.

The economics, though, have proved tougher than expected, people familiar with the companies said.

One issue is scooters not designed for heavy use are breaking down quickly. In some markets, scooters last about two months, investors said, often less time than it takes to recoup the purchase cost. Another is vandalism, glorified on social media through video clips of people knocking over rows of scooters or throwing them off parking garages.

Scoot Networks, a small San Francisco operator of electric Vespa-like scooters, this summer won the right to launch a fleet of as many as 650 scooters there. It hoped to capitalize on the launch of Bird and Lime in the city months earlier. But within two weeks of its October launch, more than 200 scooters had been stolen or vandalized beyond repair, Chief Executive Michael Keating said. That was far more than he had estimated when he got into the business.

“Part of our assumption was that if the theft rate is really, really high and the vandalism rate is really, really high, there is no way these other companies would be in the business,” he said. “That ended up being an underestimate.”

«

link to this extract

I replaced all the computer monitors in my office with ultrawide ones • NY Mag

Mark Cho:

»

I don’t know why more people don’t use ultrawide computer monitors. Maybe they just don’t know about them. Most computer monitors and screens have a width-height ratio of 16:9 (or in the case of MacBooks, 16:10), but ultrawides are 21:9 and sometimes even wider, giving you significantly more real estate on the sides. I’ve been using them almost exclusively since 2015 and am impressed every day by their utility.

Say you had to write a report and needed to reference a website at the same time. Have you ever tried doing that on a regular monitor? How much time do you waste toggling between two windows — or cutting off a third of each to fit both within the screen? An ultrawide lets you use half the screen for a web browser and and the other half for a document with enough space for both.

«

It happens to have recommendations for five ultrawide monitors, but the argument in favour is hard to discount.
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Four days trapped at sea with crypto’s nouveau riche • Beakermag

Laurie Penny knows nothing about cryptocurrency, which is why she’s the perfect person to go on an awful cruise in the Mediterranean:

»

My editor tells me Ver is a notorious hulking ego-monster, but my first impression of him is that he is actually very shy. I don’t see him on the dance floors or partying in the poker room. Correlation does not equal causation, and for all I know the guy has been hip-deep in Ukrainian models somewhere offstage the whole time, but I suspect not. I suspect he has been doing what he normally does: having arguments on the internet.

Later on, he takes part in a heated, well-attended showdown debate with star bitcoin maximalist Jimmy Song on the relative merits of bitcoin vs. Bitcoin Cash—the Hatfield-McCoy feud of this self-contained culture. It’s billed as a genteel Lincoln-Douglas style exchange of views. It takes about 10 minutes to become a raging, cringeworthy shitshow. On stage, Ver gets angry and then flustered and petty, demanding to know whether his opponent has ever read Adam Smith cover to cover. It is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a live-action Twitter flamewar.

Ver loses the debate by any measure, partly because his brain is permanently set to spreadsheet mode, but mostly because he seems to have forgotten the iron law of performative debate, which also happens to apply to dating: The person who cares most always loses.

Eventually, Song storms off the stage, refusing to participate in what he calls “TMZ-style gotcha politics.” He is replaced by shirtless bitcoin analyst Tone Vays, who waves a water bottle and gamely tries to save the day. All of this is distressing. I get to ask a question.

“I came here to find out about the politics and vision of cryptocurrency,” I say, testing the mic, “so I’m wondering if you can both tell me why I should believe in it having seen what I’ve just seen.”

The question does not compute. Instead both Ver and Vays try to persuade me that their coin is the best to invest in.

«

link to this extract

The ineptitude of Donald Trump’s co-conspirators • The New Yorker

Adam Davidson:

»

Friday night, the office of the special counsel, Robert Mueller, and a separate group of federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, laid out evidence that, taken together, leaves little doubt that Donald Trump sought to use his candidacy to enrich himself by approving a plan to curry political favor from Vladimir Putin in exchange for a lucrative real-estate opportunity.

It may be only part of the full story, but what we now know is a powerful tale that combines elements that are familiar from other Trumpworld scandals. It is at once shockingly corrupt, blatantly unethical, probably illegal, and yet, at the same time, shabby, small, and ineptly executed.

Combined with another memo released on Friday—a more sparsely informative sentencing memo for Paul Manafort—we are seeing the inner workings of a coördinated conspiracy conducted by people who are very, very bad at conspiracy.

Consider Manafort. In October, 2017, Manafort was indicted, and it was clear to him and anybody who read the news that his communications would be carefully monitored by the F.B.I. Yet this week’s sentencing memo reveals that Manafort was sending text messages and e-mails through May, 2018, that prove he was in contact with “a senior Administration official” and had “additional contacts with Administration officials.” It is surprising that Manafort decided to use text and e-mail for these contacts, since both are easily traced, and it is even more surprising that anybody in the Administration would communicate with Manafort so openly at a time when he was, quite famously, the most toxic political operative in the world. Recklessly, Manafort chose to lie about these contacts to investigators who had already demonstrated their ability to search his e-mail and text history.

«

And that’s before he gets on to Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer. This may all be things you’ve read before, or heard elsewhere, but seeing it crystallised like this reminds you how amazingly corrupt these people were, and are.
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SoftBank slams the door on Chinese 5G investment • Nikkei Asian Review

Minoru Satake:

»

SoftBank Group has decided not to use Chinese equipment in its 5G business. The decision comes after the Japanese government compiled a procurement guideline for telecommunications equipment that effectively bans purchases from Huawei Technologies and other Chinese companies.

The Japanese technology conglomerate is the only major telecom in the country that uses Huawei and ZTE equipment in its 4G systems, and will determine whether it has to find other makers.

SoftBank’s decision comes amid rising security concerns about Chinese-made equipment. Washington has already banned Huawei and ZTE from the US 5G market, and has imposed sanctions on Chinese companies for their dealings with Iran.

Australia and New Zealand have already banned Chinese makers from building their 5G networks.

Although not citing specific companies, Japan has shut the door on Chinese telecom purchases by central government ministries and its Self-Defense Forces.

Japanese telecoms plan to start testing 5G services next year with the goal of full-scale rollout of commercialized 5G services in 2020.

SoftBank had been partnering with Huawei in 5G trials.

«

OK, so Japan has been carefully cosying up to the US, and wants to keep China at arm’s length; this fits into that. Possibly SoftBank received some visits from Japanese government sources.
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UK government spent most on Facebook political advertising • POLITICO

Annabelle Dickson:

»

The UK government was the highest spending political advertiser last week shelling out almost £97,000 on Facebook advertisements seeking support for its deal taking Britain out of the European Union.

The figures published by Facebook on Monday in a new weekly political advertising report also reveal that the ruling Conservative Party spent £40,000 between December 2 and December 8, and UK Prime Minister Theresa May spent £1,659 in the same period.

The People’s Vote — an anti-Brexit campaign group pushing for a fresh referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union — spent more than £47,000.

Pro-Brexit campaign group Britain’s Future, which is opposed to May’s deal, spent almost £21,800.

«

All the government’s spending was wasted money, because the deal wasn’t to be voted on by ordinary voters; it was for the 600-odd MPs in Parliament. Unless there’s some suggestion that only MPs were targeted. (I guess you could, using Facebook’s tools, but I wouldn’t have thought they’d be that expensive – or that the ads would be worthwhile.)

Arguably, this is misspending.
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52 things I learned in 2018: Fluxx Studio Notes • Medium

The annually excellent (and surely excellent in between times too) Tom Whitwell; I’ll just pick a few at random:

»

4. 35% of Rwanda’s national blood supply outside the capital city is now delivered by drone. [Techmoran]
5. Advertisers place a single brown pixel on a bright background in a mobile ad. It looks like dust, so users try to wipe it off. That registers as a click, and the user is taken to the homepage. [Lauren Johnson]
6. In Uganda, half the population is under the age of 15. [Tom Jackson]
7. Peppa Pig tattoos are big in China. [Kenrick Davis]
8. AgriProtein is a British company that operates two fly farms in South Africa. Each farm contains 8.4 billion flies, which consume 276 tonnes of food waste and lay 340 million eggs each day. Those eggs (maggots) are dehydrated, flattened and used as animal feed. The company is worth $200m, and they’re planning to open 100 more factories around the world by 2024. [Andrea Lo]
9. Those weirdly expensive books on Amazon could be part of a money laundering scheme. [Brian Krebs]

«

And you can probably figure out how many more there are where those came from.
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Blippar on the brink • Sunday Times

Oliver Shah says that the London-based augmented reality company is out of funding:

»

Blippar’s failure would put 75 jobs at risk just before Christmas. It would be the latest blow for the British tech industry, following the high-profile unravellings of Powa Technologies and Ve Interactive.

Blippar once claimed to have turned down a $1.5bn takeover bid, putting it in the elite breed of start-ups valued at more than $1bn.

The development comes despite an ongoing rush of money into European tech start-ups, which attracted a total of $23bn (£18bn) this year, according to the investment firm Atomico. In 2013, the figure was $5bn.

Blippar was devised in a pub eight years ago, when Ambarish Mitra joked to co-founder Omar Tayeb that it would be “cool” if the picture on a banknote could come to life. They developed an app allowing users to scan physical objects such as supermarket promotions to produce responses on their smartphones.

Mitra, dubbed the real-life Slumdog Millionaire for his colourful — and sometimes exaggerated — backstory, has raised almost $150m from investors. Candy owns 49%, the hedge fund Lansdowne Partners holds 14%, Khazanah 12% and US tech giant Qualcomm 12%.

Blippar has burnt through money and been forced to close offices around the world to cut costs. The latest accounts, for the 12 months to March last year, showed pre-tax losses of £34.5m on sales of £5.7m.

«

AR: still a zero-billion-dollar industry.
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.

There are more than 8,000 of these still in use by the NHS. Is that definitely bad? CC-licensed photo by Mikhail Noel on Flickr.

It’s charity time. Today’s suggested charities are for those who are both deaf and blind. (I’ve linked in the past to Molly Watt’s descriptions of her experiences.)
In the UK there is Deafblind UK.
In the US, there are many charities and organisations supporting the deafblind. Pick one near you.

Please give as you feel able.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Because why not. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

My befuddling dinner with Facebook empress Sheryl Sandberg • WIRED

Virginia Heffernan:

»

What I decided is that what middle-class women mean by “work” (cubicles) and “life” (childcare) is not what Sheryl Sandberg means by those words. The axes of existence for her might be closer to what I’d call “glamour” (scallops) and “deluxe domesticity” (her kids have a house with a private waterfall). So this night of book promotion, though there were no desks in sight, somehow counted toward the “work” in the “work-life balance” she was aiming to embody in her life of glamour and luxe.

In other words, I idolized Sheryl Sandberg the woman—good for any sister who finds a way to amass $1.6 billion for being at parties and steering clear of some boring ops job—but from the first minute I saw her in person in 2013 I was very, very concerned about Facebook. It dawned on me that Sandberg was human—a small, vain, bright, self-absorbed, convivial everywoman with a talent for money and fame—and that no one human, even Sandberg, could discipline the galactic, epochal spiritual wildfire that Mark Zuckerberg had inflicted on the Internet.

The Facebook of 2013 is now a distant memory. As 2018 comes to a close—a “low dishonest” time, as Auden said of the 1930s—that high-flying, hardly working, nap-besotted, righteous Facebook has given way to one known for secrecy and collaboration with disinformation campaigns and computational propaganda. The purpose of these campaigns at Facebook, in the words of the Oxford Internet Institute at Balliol College, is to “hack people.”

Hacking us. Not connecting us. I deactivated my Facebook account a year and a half ago, and at the same time sold the few shares of Facebook stock I’d bought to be a good sport on the day of the IPO.

«

I listened to Sandberg’s appearance in August 2017 on Desert Island Discs, a UK radio programme which interviews people about their lives and loves, and usually manages to extract some insight. Sandberg was pure Teflon; somehow both flawless and utterly uninteresting. (You might disagree; the BBC managed to extract “10 things we learned from her guest slot”.)
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From 2013: Exclusive: Huawei CFO linked to firm that offered HP gear to Iran • Reuters

Steve Stecklow, writing in January 2013:

»

Cathy Meng, Huawei’s chief financial officer and the daughter of company founder Ren Zhengfei, served on the board of Hong Kong-based Skycom Tech Co Ltd between February 2008 and April 2009, according to Skycom records filed with Hong Kong’s Companies Registry.

Reuters reported last month that in late 2010, Skycom’s office in Tehran offered to sell at least 1.3 million euros worth of HP gear to Mobile Telecommunication Co of Iran, despite US trade sanctions. At least 13 pages of the proposal were marked “Huawei confidential” and carried Huawei’s logo. Huawei said neither it nor Skycom ultimately provided the HP equipment; HP said it prohibits the sale of its products to Iran.

Huawei has described Skycom as one of its “major local partners.”

«

And guess what? The arraignment of Meng Wanzhou last week included the allegation that Huawei operated SkyCom specifically in order to do business with Iran. From the latest story:

»

The US authorities allege Meng committed fraud by telling an HSBC executive her company was in compliance with US sanctions against Iran limiting communication technology. The meeting took place in 2013, but the location was not revealed.

«

The US case looks strong. This isn’t a bargaining chip.
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The seductive diversion of ‘solving’ bias in artificial intelligence • Medium

Julia Powles and Helen Nissenbaum:

»

What has been remarkably underappreciated is the key interdependence of the twin stories of A.I. inevitability and A.I. bias. Against the corporate projection of an otherwise sunny horizon of unstoppable A.I. integration, recognizing and acknowledging bias can be seen as a strategic concession — one that subdues the scale of the challenge. Bias, like job losses and safety hazards, becomes part of the grand bargain of innovation.

The reality that bias is primarily a social problem and cannot be fully solved technically becomes a strength, rather than a weakness, for the inevitability narrative. It flips the script. It absorbs and regularizes the classification practices and underlying systems of inequality perpetuated by automation, allowing relative increases in “fairness” to be claimed as victories — even if all that is being done is to slice, dice, and redistribute the makeup of those negatively affected by actuarial decision-making.

In short, the preoccupation with narrow computational puzzles distracts us from the far more important issue of the colossal asymmetry between societal cost and private gain in the rollout of automated systems. It also denies us the possibility of asking: Should we be building these systems at all?

The endgame is always to “fix” A.I. systems, never to use a different system or no system at all.
In accepting the existing narratives about A.I., vast zones of contest and imagination are relinquished. What is achieved is resignation — the normalization of massive data capture, a one-way transfer to technology companies, and the application of automated, predictive solutions to each and every societal problem.

Given this broader political and economic context, it should not surprise us that many prominent voices sounding the alarm on bias do so with blessing and support from the likes of Facebook, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Apple. These convenient critics spotlight important questions, but they also suck attention from longer-term challenges. The endgame is always to “fix” A.I. systems, never to use a different system or no system at all.

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link to this extract

Heading to a cardiologist….. : AppleWatch • Reddit

»

If you have the Apple Watch 4 please please update to the new firmware released yesterday and take your ECG.

I did last night and tried it out. Weird. Abnormal heat rate notifications. Ran the ECG app and came back afib. Well…glitchy firmware. Let’s try again. Afib. Again and again and again. Piece of crap watch.

My wife wakes up and I put it on her. Normal. Normal. Me afib. Try the other wrist, try the underside of the wrist. Every time afib warning.

Ok. So go to Patient First. Parking lot full and I’m going to blow it off and head home. Look at the watch again, afib again.

Fine walk in and sign in. They ask what’s wrong and I’m embarrassed. ‘Ok so there is a new watch feature….hahaha….I’m silly but can we check this?”

I did not know that this comment was a quick queue pass for Patient First. I’m taken right back and hooked up. The technician looks at the screen and says “I’m going to get the doctor”

«

Yup, he had atrial fibrillation. Discovering these from day one is pretty impressive.
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How y’all, youse and you guys talk • The New York Times

»

The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from August to October 2013 by Josh Katz, a graphics editor for the New York Times who developed this quiz and has since written “Speaking American,” a visual exploration of American regional dialects.

Most of the questions used in this quiz are based on those in the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project begun in 2002 by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. The original questions and results for that survey can be found on Dr. Vaux’s current website.

The colors on the large heat map correspond to the probability that a randomly selected person in that location would respond to a randomly selected survey question the same way that you did. The three smaller maps show which answer most contributed to those cities being named the most (or least) similar to you.

«

Apparently I’m from Providence, Yonkers or New York. Fun for anyone to try, whether or not you’re American.
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Cafe in Japan hires paralyzed people to control robot servers • Nextshark

Carl Samson:

»

A cafe with an all-robot staff controlled by paralyzed people has opened in Tokyo.

The cafe, called Dawn ver.β, held its ribbon cutting ceremony on Nov. 26.

Ten people with conditions like ALS [muscular dystrophy] and other spinal cord injuries are currently employed at Dawn, according to Sankei.

From home, they operate the OriHime-D, a 120-centimeter (4-foot) robot that communicates, moves around and handles objects.

Behind the OriHime-D is Ory, a startup that develops robotics for disabled people. In a video, a paralyzed man is seen “typing” commands through his eyes. The OriHime-D can also be used by people involved in childcare, nursing care or other activities that prevent them from leaving home or a certain location.

“Even those who can’t go out can work through this alter ego and have a role in society,” Ory noted.

Dawn (Diverse Avatar Working Network), based on the same cafe in the 2008 anime “Time of Eve,” imagines a coffee shop where humans and robots interact as equals, SoraNews24 noted.

The cafe, located in the Japanese capital’s Akasaka District, is a joint effort between Ory, All Nippon Airways (ANA), the Nippon Foundation, and the Avatar Robotic Consultative Association (ARCA).

«

The “workers” do get paid, though the cafe has ended the experiment as of Friday. I truly cannot decide if this is wonderful, or weirdly exploitative, or both, or neither.
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Axe the Fax campaign leads to government ban on new fax machines in NHS by April 2020 • Silver Buck

»

An NHS campaign to remove fax machines across the health sector has led to the government announcing a ban of fax machines by April 2020.

The Axe the Fax campaign, which was launched in September, has been encouraging NHS organisations to pledge to remove their fax machines and share information, challenges and best practices with each other, largely through social media, to speed up the process.

Up until the launch of the campaign, which also features a dedicated Axe the Fax toolkit, there has been no guidance, advice or funding to support health and care organisations to improve stakeholder engagement or to change their processes to enable them to switch off the machines.

Richard Corbridge, Chief Digital Information Office at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, which initiated the campaign when it announced It would remove its 340 fax machines by the end of 2018 said: “There is a huge disjoint in the digitisation of the NHS. While some areas are looking at artificial intelligence, others are still faxing patient information from one area of the hospital to another.

“Today’s announcement that fax machines will not be purchased from next month and be banned from March 2020 is a landmark in the Axe the Fax campaign, which has been locally led and driven and received huge buy-in not only from NHS organisations across the country but as far as the US and Australia.”

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Apparently there are more than 8,000 of them in use. Yet faxes have their use: very hard to hack, point-to-point, simply sending proves it has arrived at the other end. However, they’re not entirely secure.
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This data shows that Remainers are overwhelmingly winning the Brexit war on social media • Buzzfeed News

Alex Spence:

»

Campaigners trying to keep Britain in the European Union via a second referendum are winning the war for attention on social media, according to an analysis conducted by BuzzFeed News of the most-viral Brexit-related stories of the year.

Data tracking the social distribution of media articles on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter reveals that news reports and opinion pieces portraying Brexit in a negative light are far more likely to be widely shared than those giving a positive impression of leaving the union.

Of the 100 most-viral stories about Brexit this year, 61 were negative in sentiment, according to BuzzFeed News’ review of data from BuzzSumo, a company that tracks sharing across social networks. The groundswell of anti-Brexit activity on these platforms has been a crucial factor in the campaign for a second vote, which has been gathering momentum since the summer, activists said.

In stark contrast, only eight of the 100 most-shared articles conveyed a positive view of Brexit, according to BuzzFeed News’ analysis. Two of those were columns by former UKIP leader Nigel Farage on the Telegraph website decrying the government’s “betrayal” of the Leave vote.

The rest of the articles were classified as neutral.

«

Three possibilities: (1) support for Remain has ramped up enormously (2) pro-Brexit bots (Russsssssian?) have been zapped by Facebook and Twitter, leaving the pro-Remain noise which shows up here (3) pro-Brexit folk have given up on social media.

On balance, I’d go with (2).
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Eleven researchers publish sharp critique of EPA fuel economy logic • Ars Technica

Megan Geuss:

»

The EPA’s lengthy technical analysis stated that better fuel economy rules would be costly for companies. Those costs would be passed on to consumers, and those consumers would put off buying new cars with better safety features, causing accidents that would cost more than 12,000 lives. The EPA also argued that if fuel economy standards are left in place, people will be able to spend less on gas, which means they would drive more, meaning greenhouse gas emissions and driving in general might not reduce as much as expected. This so-called “rebound effect” has been well-studied in scientific literature, but economists and public policy researchers are extremely skeptical of how the current administration has applied it…

…In their Thursday letter, the researchers explained that one of the primary and most egregious differences between the reports centered on how the EPA estimated the projected fleet size of cars and trucks out to 2025. Tighter fuel economy standards lead to more expensive cars as well as more expensive used cars, the letter says. That would mean that the total US vehicle fleet would shrink if fuel economy standards are kept in place.

On the other hand, freezing the fuel economy standards would increase the total US vehicle fleet as the US economy grows. But oddly, the EPA’s 2018 report says that freezing fuel economy standards will shrink the US vehicle fleet. [Emphasis added – CA]

“This is inconsistent with basic economic principles,” the researchers wrote, adding that the EPA’s most recent model has erased about 6 million projected vehicles with little explanation. Such a model “leads to misleading conclusions related to the overall size of the fleet, fleet composition, and the amount of scrappage; and undermines EPA and NHTSA modeling efforts to improve the understanding of the costs and benefits of fuel economy standards,” the letter says.

Correcting that underestimation of vehicles almost entirely wipes out any reduction in crash fatalities that the EPA estimated, the researchers wrote. After all, more cars on the road means more crashes.

«

How surprising that the Trump administration would try to warp the calculation to fit the conclusion it wants to reach.
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Prediction: the next ‘Friends’-style scramble at Netflix will be over ‘The Office [US]’ • BGR

Andy Meek:

»

If Comcast-owned NBCUniversal has not started thinking about what the future holds for The Office as far as its next streaming home, it likely will soon. Netflix in recent days kicked up a storm from fans of Ross, Rachel and the rest of the Friends gang when it briefly looked like the show was set to disappear from Netflix come January 1. And then some behind-the-scenes dealmaking led Netflix to win the rights to keep streaming it for another year. However, it reportedly had to pay the hefty sum of $100m for that privilege.

So if that’s how much Netflix had to pay to hang out to Friends for just a little while longer, you can bet there’s going to be a similar scramble to keep Jim, Pam and the entire Dunder Mifflin crew whose story apparently generates more viewing hours than anything else Netflix has got.

This dynamic will be fascinating to watch play out in the coming months and really throughout 2019, as a few credible streaming challengers get off the ground to potentially rival Netflix, such as Disney+. By one estimate, Netflix’s original programming at the moment makes up only 8% of its content when measured in hours. Which is why we’re going to see the streaming giant keep ramping up its slate of original offerings, things like Narcos and The Haunting of Hill House, while at the same time also doing whatever it can — such as paying massive amounts of money — to keep popular content from outside providers streaming on its platform for as long as possible.

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In my experience, Amazon Prime is full of junk I don’t want to watch; Netflix is full of stuff I do want to watch (so far). Content is king.
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Updated AlphaZero crushes Stockfish in new 1,000-game match • Chess.com

»

In news reminiscent of the initial AlphaZero shockwave last December, the artificial intelligence company DeepMind released astounding results from an updated version of the machine-learning chess project today.

The results leave no question, once again, that AlphaZero plays some of the strongest chess in the world.

The updated AlphaZero crushed Stockfish 8 in a new 1,000-game match, scoring 155 -6 =839…

AlphaZero also bested Stockfish in a series of time-odds matches, soundly beating the traditional engine even at time odds of 10 to one.

In additional matches, the new AlphaZero beat the “latest development version” of Stockfish, with virtually identical results as the match vs Stockfish 8, according to DeepMind. The pre-release copy of journal article, which is dated Dec. 7, 2018, does not specify the exact development version used. 

[Update: Today’s release of the full journal article specifies that the match was against the latest development version of Stockfish as of Jan. 13, 2018, which was Stockfish 9.]

«

“Some of the best chess in the world”? Come on – it’s by far the best chess player that has ever existed. Stockfish is used to analyse the human championships; maybe AlphaZero will start developing new tactics unthought of by humans, as it has in Go.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified