Anki, the AI/robotics company behind Anki Drive, is shutting down. Now what for the cars? CC-licensed photo by Jason Kneen on Flickr.

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

An algorithm wipes clean the criminal pasts of thousands • BBC News

Dave Lee:

»

This month, a judge in California cleared thousands of criminal records with one stroke of his pen. He did it thanks to a ground-breaking new algorithm that reduces a process that took months to mere minutes. The programmers behind it say: we’re just getting started solving America’s urgent problems…

…It’s estimated there are a million people in California with a cannabis-related charge in their past, an invisible shackle that blocks opportunities to get housing, jobs and thousands of other things most of us would regard as necessities.

Yet fewer than 3% of people thought to qualify have sought to have their records cleared since the passing of the new law. It’s thought many are overwhelmed or intimidated by the complex expungement process. The clinic may only come to town once every few months, if at all. Others simply don’t know expungement is possible.

But now, work to automate this entire ordeal has begun – with remarkable results.

“I formed the opinion that this is really our responsibility,” said George Gascon, San Francisco’s district attorney. Though almost 10,000 people in the city were predicted to be eligible for expungement, just 23 had come forward.

So in January 2018, Mr Gascon pledged to proactively review past marijuana cases – but there was a snag.
San Francisco’s District Attorney George Gascon quickly realised doing the task manually would take too long.

“When we started to do this by hand, we recognised very rapidly that this was going to take a long time.”
He enlisted Code For America, a non-profit organisation that works on creating Silicon Valley-esque solutions to problems within the many antiquated systems powering the US government.

«

Tech for good! It can happen.
unique link to this extract

The once-hot robotics startup Anki is shutting down after raising more than $200 million • Recode

:

»

Anki, the robotics company that has raised over $200m in venture capital, is laying off its entire staff and the startup is shuttering, Recode has learned.

In a teary all-hands meeting on Monday morning, CEO Boris Sofman told his staff they would be terminated on Wednesday and that close to 200 employees would be paid a week of severance, according to people familiar with the matter. Sofman had told employees a few days earlier that the company was scrambling to find more money after a new round of financing fell through at the last minute, imperiling the company’s future.

The startup is frequently called “cute” for the little robots it produces like Cozmo, but it has raised serious money from investors like Index Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, whose co-founder, Marc Andreessen, at one point sat on the company’s board.

Anki said last fall that it “approached” $100m in revenue in 2017 and expected to exceed that figure in 2018. So this isn’t some small lemonade stand closing down.

Leadership had previously told employees that it was fielding acquisition interest from companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Comcast.

The company said in a statement to Recode that it was left “without significant funding to support a hardware and software business and bridge to our long-term product roadmap.”

«

Damn. Anki did the self-driving cars that were demonstrated at Apple’s WWDC in 2013, but after that struggled to find a hit. Sofman has vision, though; I hope his next fares better. Again: the hardest thing to make in hardware is a profit.
unique link to this extract

The facts about parental control apps • Apple

»

We recently removed several parental control apps from the App Store, and we did it for a simple reason: they put users’ privacy and security at risk. It’s important to understand why and how this happened.

Over the last year, we became aware that several of these parental control apps were using a highly invasive technology called Mobile Device Management, or MDM. MDM gives a third party control and access over a device and its most sensitive information including user location, app use, email accounts, camera permissions, and browsing history. We started exploring this use of MDM by non-enterprise developers back in early 2017 and updated our guidelines based on that work in mid-2017.

MDM does have legitimate uses. Businesses will sometimes install MDM on enterprise devices to keep better control over proprietary data and hardware. But it is incredibly risky—and a clear violation of App Store policies—for a private, consumer-focused app business to install MDM control over a customer’s device. Beyond the control that the app itself can exert over the user’s device, research has shown that MDM profiles could be used by hackers to gain access for malicious purposes.

«

It’s very unusual for Apple to make a public statement like this. It removed 11 of 17 of the most-downloaded screen time/parental control apps, which the NY Times suggested was anti-competitive. Apple’s saying: not at all.
unique link to this extract

Global 5G wireless networks threaten weather forecasts • Nature

Alexandra Witze:

»

The US government has begun auctioning off blocks of wireless radio frequencies to be used for the next-generation mobile communications network known as 5G. But some of these frequencies lie close to those that satellites use for crucial Earth observations — and meteorologists are worried that 5G transmissions from cellphones and other equipment could interfere with their data collection.

Unless regulators or telecommunications companies take steps to reduce the risk of interference, Earth-observing satellites flying over areas of the United States with 5G wireless coverage won’t be able to detect concentrations of water vapour in the atmosphere accurately. Meteorologists in the United States and other countries rely on those data to feed into their models; without that information, weather forecasts worldwide are likely to suffer.

“This is a global problem,” says Jordan Gerth, a meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

«

But the US, as often happens, isn’t listening.
unique link to this extract

Why pleasure always trumps possessions • Financial Times

Janan Ganesh:

»

The savings rate among millennials is already dire. In 2017, the property magnate Tim Gurner said they had no right to bewail their asset-poverty while they subsisted on “smashed avocado at $19”. It was what the novelist Joyce Cary once called a “tumbril remark”: a Marie Antoinette-ish incitement to revolution.

Gurner was duly routed on social media for his lavish idea of the millennial lifestyle. No one thought to defend that lifestyle on its own terms. And it is eminently defensible. Is it really intelligent to spend the prime years of your life living below your means? Is the far-off prospect of an asset worth more than a consistent flow of sensory treats in the present?

Shakiest of all is the premise that an asset lasts and an experience does not. Once a pleasure has been consumed — a holiday taken, a concert attended — that is not the end of the matter. The memory becomes itself a kind of asset, and an inflation-proof one at that. It can sustain you later in life. And by later in life, I mean much earlier than I expected. I am already mawkishly wistful about my twenties, which were spent in rented flats that were better than anywhere I could have afforded to buy. The idea that I have “nothing to show for it” is eccentric. I have the best years of my life to show for it. A financial adviser would have had me in a Zone 6 grotto, saving up much cash, storing up no memories.

«

Because economists can’t value what they can’t price.
unique link to this extract

Making sense of Huawei • Balding’s World

Christopher Balding, a co-author of the “Who owns Huawei?” paper that I linked to last week, which Huawei sorta-kinda tried to rebut with a 90-minute press conference which ended up mostly confirming what the paper said:

»

There are a few remaining issues I would like to cover here given that there is some confusion or dispute on these points.

• All unions in China are under the umbrella of the All China Federation of Trade Unions and all companies with more than 25 employees are required by law to have unions. Each union, at any level is responsible to the union organization above it. This upward relationship exists all the way so that every union in China is technically a member of the All China Federation of Trade Unions and responsible to its head. This is not an interpretation, this is clear Chinese law in the law on trade unions. Huawei even acknowledges this stating that “Huawei pays a portion of its compensation package to Shenzhen’s Federation of Trade Unions via Huawei’s own Union. Huawei’s Union is registered under Shenzhen’s Federation of Trade Unions.”

• Huawei has argued that this is a non-story because other companies have at times used similar structures. We never claimed this was an entirely unique structure. Our primary claim is that Huawei is not telling the truth by saying they are employee owned private company.

«

unique link to this extract

Made in China, exported to the world: the surveillance state • The New York Times

Paul Mozur, Jonah M. Kessel and Melissa Chan:

»

Ecuador’s system, which was installed beginning in 2011, is a basic version of a program of computerized controls that Beijing has spent billions to build out over a decade of technological progress. According to Ecuador’s government, these cameras feed footage to the police for manual review.

But a New York Times investigation found that the footage also goes to the country’s feared domestic intelligence agency, which under the previous president, Rafael Correa, had a lengthy track record of following, intimidating and attacking political opponents. Even as a new administration under President Lenín Moreno investigates the agency’s abuses, the group still gets the videos.

Under President Xi Jinping, the Chinese government has vastly expanded domestic surveillance, fueling a new generation of companies that make sophisticated technology at ever lower prices. A global infrastructure initiative is spreading that technology even further.

Ecuador shows how technology built for China’s political system is now being applied — and sometimes abused — by other governments. Today, 18 countries — including Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kenya, the United Arab Emirates and Germany — are using Chinese-made intelligent monitoring systems, and 36 have received training in topics like “public opinion guidance,” which is typically a euphemism for censorship, according to an October report from Freedom House, a pro-democracy research group.

«

Want to know what it isn’t good at? Stopping crimes such as assault.
unique link to this extract

A bitter turf war is raging on the Brexit Wikipedia page • WIRED UK

Matt Reynolds:

»

Originally posted in January 2014, what began life as “Proposed referendum on United Kingdom membership of the European Union” has bloated into a 11,757-word behemoth.

But the article’s vast size is the least of its problems. In private, and on discussion pages, editors tell tales of turf wars, sock puppet accounts, and anonymous figures hellbent on stuffing the article with information that supports their point of view.

“I was heavily involved with the Brexit page, but gave up more than a year ago because the level of bias on it proved impossible to address and the aggravation of trying to deal with that was not worthwhile,” says EddieHugh, a Wikipedia editor who has made 186 edits on the Brexit page – making them one of its most prolific contributors. Since leaving the page behind, EddieHugh now specialises in editing entries about obscure mid-century jazz musicians.

For the dedicated cabal of Wikipedians who are still editing the page, the battle against bias is never-ending. “Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view,” reads the second of the Wikipedia “five pillars”, the fundamental principles that guide editing on the website. But who gets to decide what counts as neutrality?

“Brexiteer-types frequently complain that the page has an anti-Brexit bias because the page simply covers what credible economic research indicates about the likely impact of Brexit,” says Snoogans Snoogans, who has made 12% of all the edits on the page. As with all of the editors I spoke to for this piece, Snoogans asked to be referred to by their Wikipedia moniker.

“I edit a lot of controversial politics pages and have experienced death threats and attempts to doxx me as a result,” they say. On the Brexit page, Snoogans mainly adds information to the section that details the potential impact of Brexit on the UK and Europe, one of the most controversial aspects of the page.

«

Predictable, I suppose. But at least Wikipedia has checks and balances, of sorts.
unique link to this extract

Uber’s IPO and local network effects • Tech-Thoughts

Sameer Singh on Uber’s IPO prospectus, and the problems he sees ahead:

»

Unlike Airbnb and Amazon, Uber’s network effects exist purely within a tight geographical radius (within a few miles). Both Amazon and Airbnb could scale up a supply network in one location, leverage that to grow demand in another which would then attract more supply in that location and so on. However, Uber needs to scale up a supply network in one location and then start from scratch all over again at the next one. In other words, when Uber expands into a new market, its only advantage is capital. This is especially troublesome when first movers in local markets (e.g. Grab in Southeast Asia, Didi in China, Yandex in Russia, Ola in India etc.), have already established local supply networks, which makes competition even more of an uphill climb. 

Notably, the pattern of local network effects isn’t limited to the ridesharing business. It also affects food delivery, grocery delivery, classifieds, C2C marketplaces or any service that needs to be delivered locally (and in-person). One common theme among these industries is that tend to be regionally fragmented. Apart from Uber, can you think of a single, standalone and global player in ridesharing, food delivery or classifieds? The very nature of local network effects makes it nearly impossible (or in Uber’s case, prohibitively expensive) for these businesses to expand to multiple markets.

Uber has been attempting to divest local units and find other avenues of growth to make up for their network effect handicap. Micromobility is one that Uber seems particularly bullish about. The fact that nearly 50% of vehicle trips are under three miles clearly shows that there is latent demand for scooter and bike rental services. But the complete lack of network effects strains pricing power and unit economics even further.

«

Singh hasn’t been writing much lately, which is a loss to us all. He always has a smart take. There’s a remark in here about “asymptotic network effects” – when a network gets “good enough” – which can probably be broadened to social networks too.
unique link to this extract

Winter is here • The Ecologist

Nathan Thanki considers how well Game Of Thrones works as an allegory about our own attitude to climate change:

»

Everybody knows winter is coming. The Starks have been beating their drum about it forever. It’s literally their motto. Yet nobody seems to care. Sound familiar? 

The challenge in both our world and Game of Thrones is that existential threats don’t automatically unite the realms behind a common cause. Especially when said threats are seen to be far-off, either temporally or geographically.

Naive notions that logic would prevail doomed both Jon Snow’s and liberalism’s approach to communicating the problem. 

For some, seeing is believing and it is enough. But not for everybody, and certainly not for the likes of Cersei. Jon and friends go to extraordinary lengths to secure proof that the threat is real in the hope that this will convince Cersei to abandon her agenda and call a truce. In a better world it would. But neither we nor Jon live in that world. 

For Cersei, it doesn’t really matter that winter is coming to the north. All that matters is maintaining the power of her house and the pursuit of a narrow self-interest. If she can use the fact that winter is coming to her advantage, all the better. That should definitely sound familiar…

…Those in the centres of power in both worlds are as unmoved by faraway destruction as they are by the suffering of the people at their feet – be that in Fleabottom or the left-behind places of the industrialised world.

We would do well to remember that there’s no point appealing to the better natures of the Cersei Lannisters of this world.

«

unique link to this extract

The feature Apple needs to change in AirDrop • Yahoo Finance

Rob Pegoraro:

»

AirDrop’s default setting, which only lets people already in your contacts list send you files, isn’t the problem. But if you spend enough time with other people who use iPhones, you’ll probably find somebody not in your contacts list offering to share a file via AirDrop.

For example, Donald Glover used AirDrop to give away shoes at Coachella. And after my daughter’s Brownie troop had an event at our neighborhood’s Apple Store two weeks ago, the staff offered to AirDrop pictures of the kids to the parents on hand.

My wife was unable to take them up on this offer, since she uses an Android phone. But anybody with an iPhone would have only had to switch AirDrop to accepting files from “Contacts Only” to “Everyone,” either via the iOS Control Center or in the Settings app under the General heading…

The predictable result: creepy guys exploiting this to send photos of a particular body part to iPhones, especially those whose names suggest they’re used by women. It seems to happen most often on crowded trains, but in 2017, a friend had this happen on an airplane. Unfortunately, the flight attendants she summoned for help were unable to locate the offender and transfer him to the cargo hold.

Apple’s response every time has been to remind iPhone users that they can switch AirDrop back to “Contacts Only” or to “Receiving Off.” That’s not good enough. AirDrop’s architecture enables this abuse, and telling targets of it to change how they use this feature is a lame response.

The simplest fix would be to have AirDrop’s “Everyone” setting expire after a few minutes—the suggestion cybersecurity consultant Ken Munro offered to the BBC in 2015 after what appears to be the first reported case of “cyber flashing.”

«

I was ready to ignore this – 90% of people never shift from defaults – but for that “expire after time” suggestion, which is fair. Perhaps in iOS 13?
unique 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: none notified

Swine fever has led to the slaughter of millions of pigs in China; expect pork prices to rise. CC-licensed photo by angieandsteve on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. No spoilers! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The terrifying potential of the 5G network • The New Yorker

Sue Halpern:

»

A totally connected world will also be especially susceptible to cyberattacks. Even before the introduction of 5G networks, hackers have breached the control center of a municipal dam system, stopped an Internet-connected car as it travelled down an interstate, and sabotaged home appliances. Ransomware, malware, crypto-jacking, identity theft, and data breaches have become so common that more Americans are afraid of cybercrime than they are of becoming a victim of violent crime. Adding more devices to the online universe is destined to create more opportunities for disruption. “5G is not just for refrigerators,” Spalding said. “It’s farm implements, it’s airplanes, it’s all kinds of different things that can actually kill people or that allow someone to reach into the network and direct those things to do what they want them to do. It’s a completely different threat that we’ve never experienced before.”

Spalding’s solution, he told me, was to build the 5G network from scratch, incorporating cyber defenses into its design. Because this would be a massive undertaking, he initially suggested that one option would be for the federal government to pay for it and, essentially, rent it out to the telecom companies. But he had scrapped that idea. A later draft, he said, proposed that the major telecom companies—Verizon, AT+T, Sprint, and T-Mobile—form a separate company to build the network together and share it. “It was meant to be a nationwide network,” Spalding told me, not a nationalized one. “They could build this network and then sell bandwidth to their retail customers. That was one idea, but it was never that the government would own the network. It was always about, How do we get industry to actually secure the system?”

«

unique link to this extract

P2P weakness exposes millions of IoT devices • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

»

The security flaws involve iLnkP2P, software developed by China-based Shenzhen Yunni Technology. iLnkP2p is bundled with millions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including security cameras and Webcams, baby monitors, smart doorbells, and digital video recorders.

iLnkP2P is designed to allow users of these devices to quickly and easily access them remotely from anywhere in the world, without having to tinker with one’s firewall: Users simply download a mobile app, scan a barcode or enter the six-digit ID stamped onto the bottom of the device, and the P2P software handles the rest.

But according to an in-depth analysis shared with KrebsOnSecurity by security researcher Paul Marrapese, iLnkP2P devices offer no authentication or encryption and can be easily enumerated, allowing potential attackers to establish a direct connection to these devices while bypassing any firewall restrictions.

Marrapese said a proof-of-concept script he built identified more than two million vulnerable devices around the globe (see map above). He found that 39% of the vulnerable IoT things were in China; another 19% are located in Europe; 7% of them are in use in the United States.

«

You might say “why would you trust Chinese P2P software?” but the problem is that it’s often embedded in the device, and you don’t really get a chance to query it. And Chinese software is notoriously bad. There’ll be a botnet using these within a few days, at a guess.
unique link to this extract

If a $5bn fine is chump change, how do you punish Facebook? • The New York Times

Charlie Warzel:

»

That the FTC is negotiating what appears to be a trivial fine, suggests that the organization isn’t just deferential to Facebook, but that it doesn’t truly understand the company’s power.

“We don’t have a good regulatory framework [for Facebook] because this kind of scale and impact is unprecedented. And our ideas for remedies, things like fines, are based on an outdated view of how markets work,” the Glitch CEO and longtime developer, Anil Dash, told me.

“The FTC is based on the premise of markets where consumers have choice,” Mr. Dash continued. “As long as their remedies are conceived of within that outdated framework, it will remain structurally impossible for them to hold any major platform accountable in any meaningful way.”

Don’t believe the critics? Then just ask the market. As BuzzFeed News pointed out on Wednesday, in just one hour of after-hours trading after signaling its impending $3bn to $5bn fine, Facebook’s market capitalization increased by $40bn.

Which means that most fines likely to be considered by the FTC might amount to what Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute, described to me as “a parking ticket and a news release.”

Some with insider experience disagree. A former FTC consumer protection official told me Thursday that if the numbers they’d heard around the fine are real, “they might not be transformative to the bottom line” but would be “symbolic of the gravity.” Similarly, they believed the organization could add requirements that “change the way Facebook handles and shares data. I’d be very surprised if Facebook didn’t continue in the same general lines of business, but operating with more restrictions,” they said.

«

Nope, that’s not going to be what they do. They’ll just plough on.
unique link to this extract

Chinese hog farms ‘panic’ as swine virus continues roiling herds • Bloomberg

:

»

China, which produces about half the world’s pork, has seen its biggest ever drop in the number of hogs over the past few months, said Wang. The country’s productive sow herds slumped 21% on year in March after a 19% drop in February, ministry data showed. As well as leading to a surge in pork prices, the epidemic could also cut demand for soybeans, an animal feed ingredient, where China is the world’s largest importer.

Lack of bio-security measures at many of small farms, coupled with a large number of live hogs being transported long distances, are to blame for the spread of the disease, said Wang. The outbreak in Hainan on Sunday follows the occurrence at two farms confirmed Friday by the Ministry of Agriculture.

China’s soybean imports in the year to September may fall to 85-86 million tons, said Chen Gang, vice chairman of the China Vegetable Oil Industry Association, below the US Department of Agriculture’s 88 million ton forecast.

The decline in the pig herd will reduce demand for soymeal, a product of soy crushing, for the first time in years, said Chen, whose association overseas the major crushers including those run by state-owned Cofco.

«

Expect the price of pork to go up. It’s also going to wallop soy farmers when demand goes down.
unique link to this extract

The one number you need to know about climate change • MIT Technology Review

David Rotman:

»

It’s the social cost of carbon… For most of us, it’s a way to grasp how much our carbon emissions will affect the world’s health, agriculture, and economy for the next several hundred years. Maximilian Auffhammer, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, describes it this way: it’s approximately the damage done by driving from San Francisco to Chicago, assuming that about a ton of carbon dioxide spits out of the tailpipe over those 2,000 miles.

Common estimates of the social cost of that ton are $40 to $50. The cost of the fuel for the journey in an average car is currently around $225. In other words, you’d pay roughly 20% more to take the social cost of the trip into account.

The number is contentious, however. A US federal working group in 2016, convened by President Barack Obama, calculated it at around $40, while the Trump administration has recently put it at $1 to $7. Some academic researchers cite numbers as high as $400 or more…

…the researchers have found that climate change will kill far more people than once thought. Michael Greenstone, a University of Chicago economist who co-directs the Climate Impact Lab with Hsiang, says that previous mortality estimates had looked at seven wealthy cities, most in relatively cool climates. His group looked at data gleaned from 56% of the world’s population. It found that the social cost of carbon due to increased mortality alone is $30, nearly as high as the Obama administration’s estimate for the social cost of all climate impacts. An additional 9.1 million people will die every year by 2100, the group estimates, if climate change is left unchecked (assuming a global population of 12.7 billion people).

«

I’d have gone for the $400 figure. Straight off, you need to get people to realise the gravity of what’s ahead. It’s so ironic that the Avengers: Endgame film is pulling in more than $1bn at the box office, and its baddie basically does what climate change does. But faster.
unique link to this extract

Google is banning a Play Store developer with more than half a billion app installs and ties to Baidu • Buzzfeed News

Craig Silverman:

»

As of today, 46 apps from DO Global, which is partly owned by internet giant Baidu, are gone from the Play store. BuzzFeed News also found that DO Global apps no longer offer ad inventory for purchase via Google’s AdMob network, suggesting the ban has also been extended to the internet giant’s ad products.

Google would not comment specifically on the removals, but a source with knowledge of the action said the company was moving to ban DO Global overall, and that more app removals would follow.

“We actively investigate malicious behavior, and when we find violations, we take action, including the removal of a developer’s ability to monetize their app with AdMob or publish on Play,” a Google spokesperson said.

Prior to the app removals, DO Global had roughly 100 apps in the Play store with over 600 million installs. Their removal from the Play store marks one of the biggest bans, if not the biggest, Google has ever instituted against an app developer. DO Global was a subsidiary of Baidu until it was spun out last summer; Baidu retains a 34% stake.

After this story was published. DO Global issued a statement to BuzzFeed News that acknowledged and apologized for “irregularities” in its apps, and said it accepts Google’s decision.

«

Hooray for curated app stores, I guess, and users (and journalists) who keep a close eye on them.
unique link to this extract

Facebook admits it ran hundreds of Trump campaign ads that violate Facebook rules • Popular

Judd Legum:

»

Melania Trump’s birthday is April 26. For weeks, the Trump campaign has used the First Lady’s big day — she’ll be 49 — to build their email list. They’ve run thousands of ads urging Facebook users to sign a “card to wish Melania a Happy Birthday!”

But today the Trump campaign is doing something different. It has produced hundreds of ads targeting women in practically every city in Texas.

These ads, accessible through the Facebook political ad library, go on and on and on. The campaign appears to be leaning on Melania to bolster Trump’s low support with women. Focusing on Texas, which some Democrats believe is the next swing state, is also an interesting choice.

But these ads also explicitly violate Facebook’s ad guidelines because they include “prohibited content.” Facebook’s rules prohibit ads that reference the “personal attributes” of the people being targeted.

“Ads must not contain content that asserts or implies personal attributes” Facebook’s rules state, including “direct or indirect assertions or implications about a person’s… gender identity.” The phrase “Attention Ladies” at the beginning of each of these ads violates the guidelines…

…Asked what Facebook is doing to prevent political ads that violate its policies from running in the first place, a spokesperson said, “we’re always looking to improve our enforcement, which is never perfect.” The company acknowledges that the ads were “subject to Facebook’s ad review system, which relies primarily on automated tools to check ads against these policies.”

«

So basically nothing at all, especially if it misses “Attention Ladies”.
unique link to this extract

Glitz, glamour, now guilty: spectacular fall of New York’s socialite scammer • The Guardian

Edward Helmore:

»

[Anna] Sorokin, a would-be art collector with plans to open a members-only arts club, carried out a lengthy and elaborate fraud on New York’s glitziest social strata under the name of Anna Delvey.

On Thursday, the Russian-born 28-year-old dubbed the “Soho grifter” was found guilty of swindling hotels, restaurants, a private jet operator and banks out of more than $200,000. She faces up to 15 years in prison.

But some of the charges in a case that has transfixed Manhattan society didn’t hold, including an alleged attempt to fraudulently obtain a $22m (£17m) loan, and an accusation that she had swindled $60,000 from a friend who had paid for a lavish trip to Morocco.

But for the most part, a jury agreed that Sorokin had fraudulently manoeuvred herself into “the best position to take money” from a social milieu that exists in a twilight of openings and events on the periphery of a tight-knit world of wealthy art collectors, dealers and auctioneers…

“‘Fake it until you make it,’” lawyer Todd Spodek said during opening statements in her trial last month. Spodek conceded that his client’s practice was unethical but, he claimed, not illegal because she planned to pay everyone back. “Any millennial will tell you,” he said, “it is not uncommon to have delusions of grandeur.”

«

I thought I had linked to The Cut’s coverage of this from May 2018, but apparently not. It’s fascinating.
unique link to this extract

Things got weird for the stablecoin Tether – Bloomberg

Matt Levine:

»

A month later, according to Bitfinex’s and Tether’s lawyers, they started to worry that the money at Crypto Capital had maybe already been stolen, and that the $625 million that Bitfinex transferred to Tether in their Crypto Capital accounts might be worthless. A month later! As I put it on Twitter, “Bitfinex took $625m in real money at a real bank from Tether, and in exchange gave Tether back $625m in fake money at a fake bank.” Or as the attorney general’s office put it:

»

That “credit” was illusory, though, since Bitfinex knew at the time that Crypto Capital was refusing or unable to process withdrawals or return funds. In effect, in November 2018 Respondents fraudulently shifted most or all of Bitfinex’s risk of loss of several hundred million dollars onto Tether’s balance sheet, but continued to represent to the market that tethers were fully “backed” by US dollars sitting safely in a bank account. They were not.

«

Now, to be fair, Bitfinex and Tether deny that the money at Crypto Capital was stolen. Bitfinex put out a statement this morning saying that “the New York Attorney General’s court filings were written in bad faith and are riddled with false assertions, including as to a purported $850m ‘loss’ at Crypto Capital”:

»

On the contrary, we have been informed that these Crypto Capital amounts are not lost but have been, in fact, seized and safeguarded. We are and have been actively working to exercise our rights and remedies and get those funds released.

«

Also, to be fair, after they “grew concerned” about Crypto Capital in December, Bitfinex and Tether re-papered this transaction, reversing the $625m Crypto Capital transfer and instead characterizing the money that Bitfinex took from Tether as a loan (that Bitfinex will have to pay back with real money rather than with a ledger entry at Crypto Capital). On the other hand they also expanded the size of the loan to let Bitfinex take even more money from Tether.

«

This is absolutely stunning, though completely expected. Tether has looked to me either like a money-laundering scheme or a scam or both for months. Seems like it might be the latter.
unique link to this extract

Managing editor, news • Amazon Jobs

:

»

The Managing Editor, News will work on an exciting new opportunity within Ring to manage a team of news editors who deliver breaking crime news alerts to our neighbors. This position is best suited for a candidate with experience and passion for journalism, crime reporting, and people management.

«

The suitable candidate, besides having around five years’ experience in a breaking news environment, will have a “deep and nuanced knowledge of American crime trends”.

I’m guessing, since they’ll be working in Amazon’s Ring (video doorbell) business, that they’re not going to be delivering the latest about impeachment or Paul Manafort getting banged up; it’ll be about Prowlers Reported In Your Area. News to scare people into buying (or loving) your product. What a world.
unique link to this extract

Apple held talks with Intel about buying its smartphone-modem chip business • WSJ

Tripp Mickle, Cara Lombardo and Dana Cimilluca:

»

The talks started around last summer and continued for months before halting recently, around the time Apple reached a multiyear supply agreement for modems from Intel rival Qualcomm Inc., QCOM +1.85% some of the people said.

Intel is now exploring strategic alternatives for its modem chip business, including a possible sale—to Apple or another acquirer, the people said. It has already received expressions of interest from a number of parties and has hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to manage the process, which is in an early stage. Should there be a deal, it could yield as much as a few billion dollars for Intel, some of the people said.

The Intel-Apple talks, which haven’t been previously reported, reflect growing openness by the iPhone maker toward the idea of big acquisitions, people familiar with the company’s operations said. The talks also are part of broader tumult in the smartphone sector as sales growth has stalled, squeezing the iPhone business that has long driven Apple’s profits…

…Selling the modem business would allow Intel to unload a costly operation that was losing about $1bn annually, according to another person familiar with its performance. Any sale would likely include staff, a portfolio of patents and modem designs related to multiple generations of wireless technology, said Patrick Moorhead, principal at Moor Insights & Strategy, a technology firm.

«

Entirely predictable that Apple would look at buying this. It probably decided just to hire all the useful staff instead. (Interesting that the story has a cast-of-thousands byline. Most stories like this have a single writer.)
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Greta Thunberg stopped using airplanes years ago – and is dismissive of politicians’ efforts so far on climate change. CC-licensed photo by World Economic Forum on Flickr.

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

A selection of 12 links for you. Getting warmer. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The uncanny power of Greta Thunberg’s climate-change rhetoric • The New Yorker

Sam Knight:

»

In 2015, the year Thunberg turned twelve, she gave up flying. She travelled to London by train, which took two days. Her voice, which is young and Scandinavian, has a discordant, analytical clarity. Since 2006, when David Cameron, as a reforming Conservative Party-leadership contender, visited the Arctic Circle, Britain’s political establishment has congratulated itself on its commitment to combatting climate change. Thunberg challenged this record, pointing out that, while the United Kingdom’s carbon-dioxide emissions have fallen by 37% since 1990, this figure does not include the effects of aviation, shipping, or trade. “If these numbers are included, the reduction is around ten% since 1990—or an average of 0.4% a year,” she said.

She described Britain’s eagerness to frack for shale gas, to expand its airports, and to search for dwindling oil and gas reserves in the North Sea as absurd. “You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before,” she said. “Like now. And those answers don’t exist anymore. Because you did not act in time.”

The climate-change movement feels powerful today because it is politicians—not the people gluing themselves to trucks—who seem deluded about reality. Thunberg says that all she wants is for adults to behave like adults, and to act on the terrifying information that is all around us. But the impact of her message does not come only from her regard for the facts. Thunberg is an uncanny, gifted orator. Last week, the day after the fire at Notre-Dame, she told the European Parliament that “cathedral thinking” would be necessary to confront climate change.

Yesterday, Thunberg repeated the phrase. “Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking,” she said. “We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.”

«

The failure in politics laid bare. (I didn’t know that detail about her taking the train. Nor, I think, did a lot of those sneering on social media.)
unique link to this extract

The crowdsourced social media swarm betting Tesla will crash and burn • Los Angeles Times

Russ Mitchell:

»

Machine Planet [their Twitter handle] belongs to a large and growing network of Tesla skeptics who connect on Twitter through $TslaQ — Tesla’s stock symbol, followed by Q, a stock exchange notation for a company in bankruptcy. Which Tesla, to be clear, is not. What Tesla is, relatively speaking, is heavily shorted: About 32.7 million of its shares, or 27.7% of those available for trade, have been borrowed by short sellers and then sold. They must be paid back at some point — at a lower price, the shorts hope.

Pronounced Tesla-Q, the channel has emerged as a crowd-sourced stock research platform. Contributors divide up research duties according to personal interest and ability, with no one in charge.

Some use commercial databases to track Tesla-loaded ships from San Francisco to Europe and China. Some are experts at automotive leasing or convertible bonds. Some repost customer complaints about Tesla quality and service. One contributor, whose Twitter handle is TeslaCharts, assembles collected data to offer graphical representations of Tesla’s own reports and $TslaQ’s findings.

And some do reconnaissance, posting photos and videos of Tesla storage lots, distribution centers, even the company’s Fremont assembly plant as seen from above.

A major aim is to change the mind of Tesla stock bulls and the media. The research helps individual short sellers decide when to move in and out of the stock. But it’s clear from the posts that $TslaQ can be just as vitriolic as Tesla fans are adoring.

«

unique link to this extract

Why won’t Twitter treat white supremacy like ISIS? Because it would mean banning some Republican politicians too • Motherboard

Joseph Cox and Jason Koebler:

»

At a Twitter all-hands meeting on March 22, an employee asked a blunt question: Twitter has largely eradicated Islamic State propaganda off its platform. Why can’t it do the same for white supremacist content?

An executive responded by explaining that Twitter follows the law, and a technical employee who works on machine learning and artificial intelligence issues went up to the mic to add some context. (As Motherboard has previously reported, algorithms are the next great hope for platforms trying to moderate the posts of their hundreds of millions, or billions, of users.)

With every sort of content filter, there is a tradeoff, he explained. When a platform aggressively enforces against ISIS content, for instance, it can also flag innocent accounts as well, such as Arabic language broadcasters. Society, in general, accepts the benefit of banning ISIS for inconveniencing some others, he said.

In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.

«

Twitter insists this is “completely untrue”. But it’s peculiar that David Duke and similar can blather on without any action.
unique link to this extract

API updates and important changes • Facebook Developer News blog

Eddie O’Neil:

»

as of today, previously approved user permissions that your app has not used or accessed in the past 90 days may be considered expired. Access to expired permissions will be revoked. Going forward, we will periodically review, audit, and remove permissions that your app has not used. Developers can submit for App Review to re-gain access to expired permissions.

«

Good idea – and it would be great if other platforms did this too. Why not make it the default on Twitter, iOS, Android? 90 days is a long time not to use an app or its permissions.
unique link to this extract

Facebook racism? Black users say racism convos blocked as hate speech • USA Today

Jessica Guynn:

»

For Wysinger, an activist whose podcast The C-Dubb Show frequently explores anti-black racism, the troubling episode [of Liam Neeson’s talking about wanting when young to kill someone black in retaliation for an attack on a friend] recalled the nation’s dark history of lynching, when charges of sexual violence against a white woman were used to justify mob murders of black men.

“White men are so fragile,” she fired off, sharing William’s post with her friends, “and the mere presence of a black person challenges every single thing in them.”

It took just 15 minutes for Facebook to delete her post for violating its community standards for hate speech. And she was warned if she posted it again, she’d be banned for 72 hours.

Wysinger glared at her phone, but wasn’t surprised. She says black people can’t talk about racism on Facebook without risking having their posts removed and being locked out of their accounts in a punishment commonly referred to as “Facebook jail.” For Wysinger, the Neeson post was just another example of Facebook arbitrarily deciding that talking about racism is racist.

“It is exhausting,” she says, “and it drains you emotionally.”

Black activists say hate speech policies and content moderation systems formulated by a company built by and dominated by white men fail the very people Facebook claims it’s trying to protect.

«

unique link to this extract

Apple power adapters recalled because they risk shocking people • CNBC

Todd Haselton:

»

Apple on Thursday announced a recall of some AC wall adapters that were sold in Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Kingdom because they may “break and create a risk of electrical shock,” the company said. Customers who own them are asked to stop using them immediately, following six “incidents” Apple knows about.

Apple included the wall plugs with some of its iOS and Mac products in the aforementioned locations and sold them between 2003 and 2010. The plug was also included in Apple’s World Travel Adapter Kit, which was sold worldwide. Customers can identify if their device is among those recalled by looking at the inside of the white adapter. Just unplug it first.

Apple said that affected devices have “no letters on the inside slot where it attaches to the main power adapter.”

«

Looks like a shonky batch got through the QA process.
unique link to this extract

Pirated streaming devices are filled with malware, researchers find • CNET

Alfred Ng:

»

While you may have bought a bona fide Apple TV or Roku to watch shows on Netflix or Hulu, there’s an entire market online for jailbroken and modified devices that are tuned to watch this same content for free. They come at a much cheaper price and offer free, unlimited access to shows that you’d normally have to pay a subscription fee for.

These devices work just like a Roku or a Fire TV Stick – you plug it into your TV and connect it to your Wi-Fi network. In some cases, they’re loaded with apps.

If the hardware isn’t laced with malware, the apps are, Timber Wolfe, a principal at Dark Wolfe Consulting, found in his research. He said 40% of apps for these devices were infected with malware that can take over a camera or microphone on the network within the first hour.

As viewers move to streaming devices to watch shows, like Apple TVs, Rokus, Chromecasts and Fire TVs, black market sellers have capitalized on cordcutters by offering pirated alternatives. Cybercriminals have taken notice, by targeting these bootleg boxes with malware, researchers found.

«

Not just the camera: these “Kodi boxes” grab usernames and passwords by probing the user network; people who buy them are seven times more likely to report problems with malware.
unique link to this extract

‘It’s not play if you’re making money’: how Instagram and YouTube disrupted child labour laws • The Guardian

Julia Carrie Wong:

»

Somewhere along the spectrum between garden variety stage-parenting and straight-up abuse are situations such as the headline-grabbing April Fool’s Day “prank” pulled by YouTube stars Cole and Savannah LaBrant on their daughter, six-year-old Everleigh Rose.

Earlier this month, the couple published a video showing Everleigh in distress. “You haven’t even told the vlog yet, do you want to tell the vlog?” Cole LaBrant prompted the child, as she cried and hid her face under a blanket in the opening moments of the video. The tears were the result of the LaBrants telling Everleigh they were going to give her dog away but they didn’t mean it; the dog giveaway was an April Fool’s Day prank gone too far…

…The LaBrants did not respond to questions about whether they pay Everleigh a percentage of their YouTube revenues or have a savings account for her.

To Paul Petersen, legal protections like those in California should apply equally to Everleigh, who lives in the state, and the Hobson kids in Arizona or the McClures in New Jersey.

“It’s shameful” said Petersen, who founded a support and advocacy group for former child performers, A Minor Consideration, in 1991.

“YouTube is in San Bruno, California, which is under the authority of California law,” he added. “If you’re going to broadcast the images of minor children and pay them, the provisions of California law must apply. That is the position of A Minor Consideration. That’s why we changed the law.”

«

Rather like Uber, it seems as though geographical law is going to catch up with YouTube and those who exploit it.
unique link to this extract

China exploits fleet of US satellites to strengthen police and military power • WSJ

Brian Spegele and Kate O’Keeffe:

»

US law effectively prohibits American companies from exporting satellites to China, where domestic technology lags well behind America’s. But the US doesn’t regulate how a satellite’s bandwidth is used once the device is in space. That has allowed China to essentially rent the capacity of US-built satellites it wouldn’t be allowed to buy, a Wall Street Journal investigation found.

Tangled webs of satellite ownership and offshore firms have helped China’s government achieve its goals. Some of America’s biggest companies, including private-equity firm Carlyle Group in addition to Boeing, have indirectly facilitated China’s efforts, the Journal found.

All this appears to run counter to the US’s stance of confronting China’s military buildup and condemning what international watchdog groups describe as widespread human-rights abuses by China’s police. That includes in far-flung territories, where the satellites help the government beam communications. Current and former US officials who reviewed the Journal’s findings called the satellite deals worrisome examples of China using U.S. commercial technology for strategic gain.

“It’s a serious ethical and moral problem as well as a national-security issue,” said Larry Wortzel, a former chairman of the bipartisan US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a group that advises Congress.

Boeing, in response to questions, said it has put on hold its latest satellite deal involving China, the one that would bolster the Chinese rival to GPS.

«

unique link to this extract

The promises and perils of the AI-powered airport of the future • Fast Company

Devin Liddell:

»

Imagine even an early version—informed by cameras, sensors, and an airport network in which every passenger and every bag is a node—that simply develops a basic understanding of a few interrelated data sets. A computer vision system with a dynamic comprehension of who’s at the gate and who’s not, the bags they have and the other people they’re traveling with, and even how these people physically move, can then bring those disparate data sets together to answer the question that matters most: How can we board everyone in the fastest way that never creates a line? The system would also coordinate communications with you and your fellow passengers in ways that are far more personalized than the class- and zone-based boarding routines used today. This future could liberate flyers—and the gate itself—in ways that are difficult to predict. At the very least, airport gates would feature fewer crowded waiting rooms, and passengers would spend more leisure time at airport restaurants and stores—or, even better, less time in the airport overall.

There is a more pessimistic side to this narrative, though. If AI can be used to optimize airport and airline processes, it can be used to re-architect those processes in ways that don’t necessarily benefit passengers, and instead benefit commercial interests. Put simply, AI’s strength at seeing what’s happening could be used to manipulate passengers. That fatigued family with three bored and hungry kids? AI could help ensure they’re funneled through a security checkpoint that’s adjacent to a toy shop or fast-food restaurant where they are more likely to make impulsive purchases.

«

Plenty more ideas too. Though it doesn’t have to be AI, does it? And the facial recognition element worries people.
unique link to this extract

It’s 2019 and USB-C is still a mess • Android Authority

Robert Triggs lets rip. I think that all you need to know is contained in the following:

»

Editor’s note: This is an updated version of an article first published in 2018. 

«

That’s not to say that Triggs hasn’t done some good work here to show what a mess things are. Definitely worth your time, if only for the teeth-grinding nodding frustration. (And to show how messed up things are, I have two tags for this topic: “usbc” and “usb-c”. Can’t even standardise on that.)
unique link to this extract

The truth about dentistry • The Atlantic

Ferris Jabr:

»

Studies that explicitly focus on overtreatment [unnecessary procedures for financial gain] in dentistry are rare, but a recent field experiment provides some clues about its pervasiveness. A team of researchers at ETH Zurich, a Swiss university, asked a volunteer patient with three tiny, shallow cavities to visit 180 randomly selected dentists in Zurich. The Swiss Dental Guidelines state that such minor cavities do not require fillings; rather, the dentist should monitor the decay and encourage the patient to brush regularly, which can reverse the damage. Despite this, 50 of the 180 dentists suggested unnecessary treatment. Their recommendations were incongruous: Collectively, the overzealous dentists singled out 13 different teeth for drilling; each advised one to six fillings. Similarly, in an investigation for Reader’s Digest, the writer William Ecenbarger visited 50 dentists in 28 states in the U.S. and received prescriptions ranging from a single crown to a full-mouth reconstruction, with the price tag starting at about $500 and going up to nearly $30,000.

A multitude of factors has conspired to create both the opportunity and the motive for widespread overtreatment in dentistry. In addition to dentistry’s seclusion from the greater medical community, its traditional emphasis on procedure rather than prevention, and its lack of rigorous self-evaluation, there are economic explanations. The financial burden of entering the profession is high and rising. In the U.S., the average debt of a dental-school graduate is more than $200,000. And then there’s the expense of finding an office, buying new equipment, and hiring staff to set up a private practice. A dentist’s income is entirely dependent on the number and type of procedures he or she performs; a routine cleaning and examination earns only a baseline fee of about $200.

In parallel with the rising cost of dental school, the amount of tooth decay in many countries’ populations has declined dramatically over the past four decades, mostly thanks to the introduction of mass-produced fluoridated toothpaste in the 1950s and ’60s.

«

unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Huawei says its P30 can spruce up a smartphone shot of the moon. Others don’t think so. CC-licensed photo by Christopher Dart on Flickr.

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

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

Facebook sets aside billions of dollars for a potential FTC fine • The Washington Post

Elizabeth Dwoskin and Tony Romm:

»

Facebook on Wednesday said it would set aside $3bn to cover costs in its ongoing investigation with the US Federal Trade Commission over the social media company’s privacy practices, as its recent scandals take a toll on its balance sheet in a big way.

That number, which the company said could ultimately range between $3bn and $5bn, correlates with the size of the fine the agency is expected to levy against the tech giant and would be represent the largest the FTC has ever imposed.

Facebook’s decision to set aside billions of dollars comes as the company continues negotiating with the FTC on a settlement that would end its investigation. As part of those talks, federal officials have sought to force Facebook to pay a fine into the billions of dollars, sources previously told the Post. That would set a new record for the largest fine imposed by the FTC for a repeat privacy violation, after Google had to pay $22.5m a few years ago.

The FTC came to determine that violations could result in a multi-billion dollar fine after computing the number of times Facebook breached a 2011 order with the government to improve its privacy practices.

«

This is going to be quite a thing to watch. Will Facebook, like Google, be able to shrug it off and move on? If the FTC hands down that size of fine it’s going to lead a lot of news bulletins. That will get a lot of peoples’ attention.
unique link to this extract

Laundroid company folds before its giant robot does • Engadget

Nick Summers:

»

A small part of us always knew the Laundroid was too good to be true. The black obelisk, developed by Japanese company Seven Dreamers, was supposed to be a washing machine, dryer, ironing and laundry-folding robot rolled into one. It was the perfect appliance, in short, for chore-dodging so-and-sos who hate dealing with grimy clothes. But that dream has come to a predictable end. Today, Seven Dreamers filed for bankruptcy in Japan, all but ensuring its halo product will never reach store shelves. According to Teikoku Databank, a private credit research agency, the company owes 2.25 billion yen ($20.1 million USD) to 200 creditors.

Clearly, the product was too ambitious.

«

Ya think? But, good headline.
unique link to this extract

Huawei: why UK is at odds with its cyber-allies • BBC News

Leo Kelion:

»

Australia concluded in August that it was impossible to “mitigate” the national security risks involved in allowing Huawei to form any part of its 5G network, because next-generation networks would operate in a different way to their predecessors.

The reason for this, it added, was that the relationship between two distinct bits of the network would change.

The first part – “the core” – it said was where the “most sensitive functions occur”, including device authentication, voice and data-routing and billing.

The second – “the edge” – referred to equipment including antennae and base stations that is used to capture the radio signals emitted by wireless devices and send them into the core.

The key phrase in a ministerial statement then explained: “The distinction between the core and the edge will disappear over time.”

One of the country’s spy chiefs, Mike Burgess, later expanded on this, saying that as 5G technologies matured, the expectation was that the distinction between the edge and core “collapses” because “sensitive functions” would begin to move outside of the protected part.

Part of the reason for this, he explained, would be to take advantage of the lower latencies 5G offers – the lag between issuing a command and getting a response. This, for example, could help make it safe to direct surgical robots or remote-controlled vehicles from afar.

«

However Theresa May thinks this doesn’t matter – against the advice of her defence secretary and home secretary (the latter is advised by the security services), she has apparently ruled that Huawei can be used in non-core 5G systems.
unique link to this extract

Huawei P30 Pro ‘Moon Mode’ is mired in new controversy • Android Authority

:

»

new testing of this Moon Mode feature suggests Huawei’s method of getting shots like the one above is shady at best and unethical at worst, if the testing results are legitimate. (Android Authority Ed: This sentence has been slightly altered from the original to reflect the ambiguity of the test results).

The official user’s guide for the Huawei P30 Pro describes Moon Mode as such: “Moon Mode helps to adequately capture the beauty of the moon along with fine details like moonbeams and shadows.”

Supposedly, this is how the system works:
• A user holds the Huawei P30 Pro towards the moon and zooms in a bit using pinch-to-zoom on the camera.
• The P30 Pro identifies (using AI) that the user is trying to take a photo of the moon, and thus suggests Moon Mode.
• The user selects Moon Mode and the camera system then “helps you get a clear shot” using the aforementioned algorithms.

Huawei doesn’t go into any specific detail on how the Moon Mode algorithm actually works. From the language in the user’s guide and marketing materials, Huawei seems to suggest that the algorithm takes the information in your specific photo and then enhances that specific image by using known information about the face of the moon to clarify, stabilize, and otherwise “fix” the image.

According to anecdotal research by some industrious photographers though, this is potentially not completely true. According to tests performed by Wang Yue at Zhihu, the Huawei P30 Pro isn’t just enhancing the image information the user captures but actually placing pre-existing imagery of the moon into the photo.

«

There’s a more detailed examination of this (in Chinese) at Zhihu. It sure feels like Huawei is streeeeeetching the truth here, which it has done a number of times in its claims. (In its response to AA, it says that it “recognises and optimizes details within an image” but doesn’t replace them.) Guess it needs someone in the west to try a picture in a few weeks’ time at the full moon.
unique link to this extract

LG Electronics to suspend mobile phones production in South Korea this year: Yonhap • Reuters

Heekyong Yang and Ju-min Park:

»

South Korea’s LG Electronics plans to suspend manufacturing of its loss-making mobile phones in the country this year and shift the production to its existing plant in Vietnam, Yonhap News Agency said on Wednesday.

Citing an unidentified source, Yonhap reported that LG decided to move its local handset production to Vietnam to help turn around the money-losing smartphones division.

LG’s mobile business, in the red for seven quarters, and intensifying price competition in the global TV market likely weighed on its first quarter earnings, analysts have said.

«

Can’t see it making a difference. And the mobile business has been losing money for 14 quarters, not seven. The South Korean factory does high-end phones, which is 10%-20% of its output. The mobile is circling the drain; or, if you prefer, the event horizon.
unique link to this extract

AirPods 3 said to be launched by year-end 2019 • Digitimes

Aaron Lee and Willis Ke:

»

Apple is reportedly set to release its third-generation AirPods for sales by the end of 2019, with the new wireless earphones to incorporate a noise cancellation function. And Taiwan’s Inventec reportedly will be the major assembler of AirPods 3, while China’s Luxshare Precision will also grab part of the orders for the new device, according to industry sources.

Apple has dominated the global market for true wireless headsets. Statistics show that the company delivered 35 million pairs of AirPods in 2018, commanding a 75% global market share. Sales boom of AirPods is expected to linger on, with annual shipments likely to surge to 50 million sets in 2019.

Inspired by the booming sales of AirPods, many consumer brands such as Huawei and Xiaomi and web giants including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are also moving to roll out their own true wireless earphones to cash in on the growing demand, the sources said.

To meet challenges from rivals, Apple and its supply chain partners are looking to raise the bar by adding new features to AirPods 3, including the noise cancellation function.

«

That would probably fit into a September launch; noise cancellation would be a reason to bump up the price, and leave the price of the current AirPods where it is. Clever.
unique link to this extract

Here’s why we think Galaxy Folds are failing • iFixit

Kevin Purdy:

»

Knowing how OLEDs react to prying, moisture, oxygen, or nearly anything, it’s plain to see—from reviewers’ photos alone—that the Fold is literally inviting trouble into its fragile innards.

In pictures posted in The Verge’s hands-on impressions (before their Fold review unit broke), you can clearly see gaps at the top and bottom of the hinge when the full screen is open. A close-up of the hinge on its side, with accumulated pocket detritus, makes it even clearer. And the back of the Fold, even with the hinge closed or partially open, doesn’t look airtight.

“These are some of the biggest ingress points I’ve seen on a modern phone,” [iFixit lead teardown engineer Sam] Lionheart said. “Unless there’s some kind of magic membrane in there, dust will absolutely get in the back.” It’s important to note, too, that Samsung has offered no IP rating for the Fold. [IP rating indicates protection against dust and/or water ingress.]

Bohn finds it baffling the way his Fold unit broke. Especially because the first time he saw a “bump” under the Fold screen was late one night. After consulting with Samsung, he closed the phone and put it aside until the morning. The next day, examining the phone, Bohn saw two bumps under the screen.

“It seems odd to me that it appeared where it did,” Bohn said. “It’s hard to believe that I would not have noticed a piece of debris inching its way up from the bottom.” To us, this suggests the debris, both pieces, may have gotten in from the back hinge. Backing this up is Swiss reviewer Lorenz Keller, who tweeted at Bohn that his Fold also developed a bump, at a point that was the mirror opposite of Bohn’s defects. Keller’s bump eventually went away, which may be the result of the hinge being open enough to allow debris back out.

«

Maybe test it outside the lab next time before setting a release date. Though Samsung is presently suggesting it will go ahead with the launch, in June. Sounds hopelessly optimistic: these are fundamental design faults.
unique link to this extract

Innovate? Big tech would rather throw us a broken Samsung Galaxy Fold • The Guardian

I wrote a thing:

»

are there no new boundaries to explore in technology other than phone-tablets? (And why is nobody calling the Fold a “phablet”, a word coined when phones started to grow to the size of bread slices?) Again and again, technology companies show a peculiar deafness to users’ desires. Facebook has the rare distinction of having been cited in a United Nations report on genocide, and was used by Russia to try to steer the US presidential election. So what’s it doing about that? Good news: political ads will in future have teeny-tiny labels you can click to find out who funded them. That’s going to fix it all!

It doesn’t end there, unfortunately. Anyone who has visited San Francisco, at the upper end of Silicon Valley, knows it desperately needs a solution to homelessness: which is why millions of dollars are being poured into scooter startups so that moneyed people can get away from them faster. Similarly, America’s health system is absurdly expensive, so tech companies have invented systems that let you scan a cheque and email the image rather than posting the thing, thus saving you the cost of a stamp.

Somewhere, it’s all gone a bit off-kilter.

«

unique link to this extract

How Nest, designed to keep intruders out of people’s homes, effectively allowed hackers to get in • Washington Post

Reed Albergotti:

»

Nest, which is part of Google, has been featured on local news stations throughout the country for hacks similar to what the Thomases experienced [where hackers accessed a webcam in a child’s room]. And Nest’s recognizable brand name may have made it a bigger target. While Nest’s thermostats are dominant in the market, its connected security cameras trail the market leader, Arlo, according to Jack Narcotta, an analyst at the market research firm Strategy Analytics. Arlo, which spun out of Netgear, has around 30% of the market, he said. Nest is in the top five, he said.

Nik Sathe, vice president of software engineering for Google Home and Nest, said Nest has tried to weigh protecting its less security-savvy customers while taking care not to unduly inconvenience legitimate users to keep out the bad ones. “It’s a balance,” he said. Whatever security Nest uses, Sathe said, needs to avoid “bad outcomes in terms of user experience.”

Google spokeswoman Nicol Addison said Thomas could have avoided being hacked by implementing two-factor authentication, where in addition to a password, the user must enter a six-digit code sent via text message. Thomas said she had activated two-factor authentication; Addison said it had never been activated on the account.

«

That last bit is worth noting: Thomas probably thought her Nest was protected because it’s a Google device and she has 2FA on her Gmail account. That’s not the same as her Nest account – but understanding that requires a lot of compartmentalisation.

But 2FA v password isn’t “a balance”. It’s an on-off switch, a Rubicon. 2FA is robust; a password isn’t.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The French Scrabble champion can’t speak French. Process that. CC-licensed photo by Hubert Figuière on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. But how do you prove a machine didn’t pick them? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

A ‘blockchain bandit’ is guessing private keys and scoring millions • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

»

Last summer, Adrian Bednarek was mulling over ways to steal the cryptocurrency Ethereum. He’s a security consultant; at the time, he was working for a client in the theft-plagued cryptocurrency industry. Bednarek had been drawn to Ethereum, in particular, because of its notorious complexity and the potential security vulnerabilities those moving parts might create. But he started instead with the simplest of questions: What if an Ethereum owner stored their digital money with a private key—the unguessable, 78-digit string of numbers that protects the currency stashed at a certain address—that had a value of 1?

To Bednarek’s surprise, he found that dead-simple key had in fact once held currency, according to the blockchain that records all Ethereum transactions. But the cash had already been taken out of the Ethereum wallet that used it—almost certainly by a thief who had thought to guess a private key of 1 long before Bednarek had. After all, as with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, if anyone knows an Ethereum private key, they can use it to derive the associated public address that the key unlocks. The private key then allows them to transfer the money at that address as though they were its rightful owner.

That initial discovery piqued Bednarek’s curiosity. So he tried a few more consecutive keys: 2, 3, 4, and then a couple dozen more, all of which had been similarly emptied. So he and his colleagues at the security consultancy Independent Security Evaluators wrote some code, fired up some cloud servers, and tried a few dozen billion more.

«

This is an amazing, amazing story; it’s a mixture of detective story and thriller, though the script needs work.
unique link to this extract

How Fortnite’s success led to months of intense crunch at Epic Games • Polygon

Colin Campbell:

»

Polygon interviewed current and former employees of Epic, including full-time staff, managers, and contractors working in development, QA, and customer service departments. They all requested that their identities be protected, for fear of retribution from Epic or other employers in the game industry. Epic requires that current and former staff sign nondisclosure agreements limiting their ability to speak about the company’s operations.

“I work an average 70 hours a week,” said one employee. “There’s probably at least 50 or even 100 other people at Epic working those hours. I know people who pull 100-hour weeks. The company gives us unlimited time off, but it’s almost impossible to take the time. If I take time off, the workload falls on other people, and no one wants to be that guy.

“The biggest problem is that we’re patching all the time. The executives are focused on keeping Fortnite popular for as long as possible, especially with all the new competition that’s coming in.”

A representative for Epic conceded that workers had endured extreme working hours. “People are working very hard on Fortnite and other Epic efforts,” said a spokesperson in an email interview. “Extreme situations such as 100-hour work weeks are incredibly rare, and in those instances, we seek to immediately remedy them to avoid recurrence.”

But meeting player demand and maintaining the game’s momentum has forced some to endure ongoing crunch.

“The executives keep reacting and changing things,” said the source. “Everything has to be done immediately. We’re not allowed to spend time on anything. If something breaks — a weapon, say — then we can’t just turn it off and fix it with the next patch. It has to be fixed immediately, and all the while, we’re still working on next week’s patch. It’s brutal.

«

The price of success: success, like failure, requires hard work, but the bar for what’s acceptable is higher.
unique link to this extract

Majority of US homes will have smart speaker next year • Strategy Analytics

»

There will be more US homes with smart speakers than without by the end of next year, according to the latest projections from Strategy Analytics. The report predicts that the 50% threshold will be reached in late 2020, and the US will be the first country in the world to reach this level of smart speaker ownership. The report predicts that by the end of 2023 eight countries will have a majority of smart-speaker owning households. The research also predicts global sales of more than 134 million smart speakers and screens in 2019, rising to 280 million by 2024.

The other countries reaching the 50% threshold in the next four years will be the UK, Ireland, Canada, South Korea, Australia, Germany and France. Widespread availability of apps and services in major languages is a key factor behind the success of smart speakers in these countries. Other markets, where less familiar languages are used, will tend to track behind the leading nations in smart speaker adoption.

«

That’s a lot of timers being set and music being played.
unique link to this extract

Samsung’s reputation founders on rush for lead in folding phones • Bloomberg

Sam King, Mark Gurman and Min Jeong Lee:

»

Initial prototypes would crack like a dried sheet of paper if folded about 10,000 times, people familiar with the matter said. Still, Samsung recognized its potential. It started to recruit mechanical engineers who could devote themselves to building a hinge the size of a finger, after the company realized the key to preventing cracks was to evenly distribute pressure. Engineers were encouraged to file as many patents as possible to prevent competition from creeping into a market that didn’t exist at the time, the people said, asking not to be identified as they aren’t authorized to speak publicly.

All seemed on track till last week, when reports of damage to review models started to surface, from a malfunctioning screen after a thin film was peeled off to a display that flickered wildly. Samsung retrieved the units but initially maintained the product would launch as planned on April 26. On Monday, executives convened at their headquarters and debated for hours before finally pulling the plug, the people said.

In initial investigations, Samsung engineers determined that removing the top layer of film — something they hadn’t anticipated users would do – damaged the product, people familiar with the matter said. Its designers had been preoccupied with perfecting the so-called crease where the device folded, they said.

«

John Gruber’s article about this screwup points out that someone in QC must have noticed. So did marketing override them? Or did they not notice, which would be worse?
unique link to this extract

Japan has a new emperor. Now it needs a software update • The New York Times

Ben Dooley, Makiko Inoue and Hisako Ueno on how Japan is having to get ready for May 1, when its new emperor means it’s day 1 of year 1 of the new emperor Reiwa:

»

The headaches have prompted a national conversation over whether it is finally time for Japan to move entirely over to the Gregorian calendar. The country uses the Gregorian calendar when dealing with other countries and to coordinate global events, such as the 2020 Olympics. Most people here have also already adopted it in their personal lives.

One lawyer, Jiro Yamane, has even sued the government over the change, arguing that forcing people to measure time by the life of the emperor violates their constitutional right to individual dignity.

“Only Japan exists in this different space and dimension of time,” said Mr. Yamane, who is scheduled to argue his case in front of a Tokyo district court at the end of May. “It’s incompatible with international society.”

“Why are the Japanese so hung up on it?” he added.

It may just be that Japan has a hard time letting go. The country still depends on fax machines. It is one of the last places in the world where Tower Records, the once iconic music store, has stayed open, still selling CDs.

The new era, to many, is symbolic of a fresh start. Government offices expect couples will rush to register their marriages on the first day of the new era.

«

unique link to this extract

The US measles outbreak is a reminder of the power of viral information • Financial Times

Marietje Schaake:

»

A tweet that has 500 likes looks more popular than a post that harvests three thumbs up. People have come to trust the wisdom of the crowd, or the top results in a search, whether on the subject of heart disease or crimes committed by immigrants. On platforms like YouTube and Google search, whether information is sent up or down the rankings is, at least in part, determined by how many people click on and share it.

Knowing whether such reactions come from real people or are auto-generated is crucial. Bots can be distinguished from people through pattern recognition: an account that sends a message exactly every 30 seconds during 72 hours is unlikely to be from a person typing and swiping.

Transparency rules should require platforms to make clear when bots are involved and the sources of advertising. Knowing who is paying to amplify and spread medical hoax messages is as important as knowing the sources of political ads. With more information, we may better understand the links between the anti-vaccination movement and politicians including Marine Le Pen in France, Beppe Grillo in Italy and Donald Trump in the US, who have all questioned the medical, as well as political, establishments.

The recent measles outbreaks remind us that our understanding of the toxic impact of algorithms on people’s actions is proven, and that ad hoc protection measures are not enough.

«

Schaake is an MEP – so this is the sort of thing that could become law. What if it’s law in Europe and not in the US?
unique link to this extract

Apple now prioritizing MacBook keyboard repairs with quoted next-day turnaround time • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

Apple’s memo, titled “How to support Mac customers with keyboard-related repairs in store,” advises Genius Bar technicians that these keyboard repairs should be “prioritized to provide next-day turnaround time”:

»

Most keyboard-related repairs will be required to be completed in store until further notice. Additional service parts have been shipped to stores to support the increased volume.

These repairs should be prioritized to provide next-day turnaround time. When completing the repair, have the appropriate service guide open and carefully follow all repair steps.

«

Apple did not provide a reason for this change, but the company is known for customer satisfaction, so it could be trying to speed up the process a bit to alleviate frustration.

The turnaround time for MacBook and MacBook Pro repairs shipped to Apple’s off-site facilities has typically ranged between three to five business days, and sometimes longer, so next-day turnaround would be much more convenient for customers if Genius Bars can actually fulfill that ambitious timeframe.

«

The clock must be ticking for the butterfly keyboard. There isn’t a commentator who will defend it; quite a few won’t buy a model with one. (If you want an Apple laptop with the scissor key mechanism, the low-end MacBook Air with non-retina screen is still available.) Apple executives, up to Phil Schiller and probably above, know what influencers say about it. It is costing Apple money, every day, both in the repair it has to do, and the lost sales to influencers and those who listen to them. It’s also costing in brand equity every moment it clings onto this calamitous design.

Sure, it would need a redesign of the body for every model that uses it. Guess what? Apple has resources for design. It could even just dust off the old ones – the tooling would be in place.
unique link to this extract

My search for a boyhood friend led to a dark discovery • WIRED

Douglas Preston:

»

One fall day [when he was eight years old], my mother gave me an empty cookie tin with a picture of a great ship plowing through waves, surrounded by gulls. Petey came over, and I said, “Let’s fill this with treasure and bury it.” We decided to leave it in the ground for 10 years and dig it up when we were 18. The year was 1964.

Petey and I spent hours debating what to put in the tin. The treasure had to be something valuable enough that our grown-up selves would be glad to have it back. We gathered our best things and laid them out on my bed for inspection. Most of them struck us as childish junk, but a few stood out as objects with adult gravitas. I chose a Morgan silver dollar, a coiled-up trilobite fossil, and my finest arrowhead—an ancient beauty flaked out of petrified wood in which you could still see the tree rings. Among Petey’s treasures were a squirrel skull, a miniature brass cannon from the USS Constitution’s gift shop, and an intricate blob of lead he had made by melting fishing sinkers on the stove and pouring the molten metal into water. It was a method of telling the future, he said. The blob predicted that his life would be one of wealth, success, and happiness.

As we looked over our carefully assembled treasures, they still didn’t seem adequate for a great journey into the future. I had an idea: Why not each write the story of our lives? Whatever else we put in the tin, we knew this would make for good reading, especially if we’d forgotten our childhoods, like most adults we knew.

«

Preston later returned to where he thought the capsule was buried, but couldn’t find it. Then he tried to find his friend. (This isn’t a technology story, unless using Google makes it so. In which case, fine.)
unique link to this extract

Here’s how TurboTax just tricked you into paying to file your taxes • ProPublica

Justin Elliott and Lucas Waldron:

»

Did you know that if you make less than $66,000 a year, you can prepare and file your taxes for free?

No? That’s no accident. Companies that make tax preparation software, like Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, would rather you didn’t know.

Intuit and other tax software companies have spent millions lobbying to make sure that the IRS doesn’t offer its own tax preparation and filing service. In exchange, the companies have entered into an agreement with the IRS to offer a “Free File” product to most Americans — but good luck finding it.

Here’s what happened when we went looking.

Our first stop was Google. We searched for “irs free file taxes.”

And we thought we found what we were looking for: Ads from TurboTax and others directing us to free products.

«

Of course the ads weren’t going to show where you can do it for free, but the lengths to which Intuit goes to make sure that people can’t find the really free service is astonishing. There must have been web designers who went home at the end of a day having completed the task of obfuscation. How did they feel, I wonder?
unique link to this extract

Winner of French Scrabble title does not speak French • NPR

Bill Chappell:

»

The Scrabble career of Nigel Richards went from great to astounding this week, after he won the French-language Scrabble World Championships. A New Zealand native, Richards has won several English-language titles; his new victory follows weeks of studying a French dictionary.

“He doesn’t speak French at all, he just learnt the words,” his friend (and former president of the New Zealand Scrabble Association) Liz Fagerlund tells the New Zealand Herald. “He won’t know what they mean, wouldn’t be able to carry out a conversation in French I wouldn’t think.”

It was only in late May that Richards began his quest to win the French world title, according to the French Scrabble Federation. That’s when he set about memorizing the French Scrabble dictionary.

«

What’s fascinating about this is that it’s an example of machine learning, done by a human. Scrabble ability isn’t about linguistic skill, it’s about pattern matching: seeing what letter combinations are permitted. What Richards does is essentially no different from what DeepMind’s Go program, or a self-driving car system, does. None of them speaks French, or understands Go, or understands driving. (Well, Richards might.)
unique link to this extract

The Mueller Report shows cheap automation fueled the Russia mess • Gizmodo

Brian Merchant:

»

According to RBC Magazine, the IRA [St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, a Russian disinformation outlet] employed fewer than 100 employees in the “American Department” of its so-called “troll farm.” The department’s budget for two years of operations was $2m. If your goal is to sow nationwide political discord and get that nation’s media to pay attention, that’s a lot cheaper than buying TV ads.

It also reportedly spent just $100,000 on Facebook ads, which is kind of a hilariously paltry sum if you’re hoping to swing elections, though experts regard it as likely just an experiment, a small part of the IRA’s posting regimen. And Twitter botnets are even cheaper. Dapper cyberlord Joseph Cox wrote about assembling his own Russian botnets for less than $100 in 2017, and security researchers have determined that they’ve only gotten more sophisticated since the 2016 election.

Twitter identified some 50,000 automated accounts that were affiliated with the IRA and were retweeting pro-Trump messages leading up to the election. Cox bought 1,000 accounts for $45. You don’t have to be an experienced coder to set these botnets up, either; you just need a little cash, the ability to Google ‘botnet services’ (or better yet, poke around on the dark web for them), and an openness to getting scammed here and there. It’s really easy to do.

“Overseas it’s a pretty cheap service,” Russell tells me. “They even advertise ON Twitter for it. Lots of Arabic bots I have ran into actually advertised for botting using Twitter.”

«

Merchant does point out that we don’t know how much influence this had. But every drop of water is part of the lake.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

This is as much as you’ll see of it for a few weeks – perhaps longer. CC-licensed photo by Twitter Trends 2019 on Flickr.

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

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

Samsung’s Galaxy Fold smartphone release delayed • WSJ

Timothy W. Martin:

»

Samsung Electronics is delaying the rollout of its Galaxy Fold smartphone until at least next month after some tech reviewers said their test devices had malfunctioned.

The Galaxy Fold, the industry’s first mainstream foldable-screen device, was slated to start selling in the US on Friday, with a price tag of nearly $2,000. But Samsung, citing the problems reported by reviewers, said Monday it plans to announce a new release date for the phone in the coming weeks.

“Initial findings from the inspection of reported issues on the display showed that they could be associated with impact on the top and bottom exposed areas of the hinge,” the company said. “There was also an instance where substances found inside the device affected the display performance.”

The Wall Street Journal earlier reported Samsung’s plans to delay the phone’s release, with people familiar with the matter pointing to problems affecting the handset’s hinge and its main screen.

«

Huawei’s isn’t due until the autumn. I don’t think it’s going to make a lot of noise about it. I highly recommend Joanna Stern’s video non-review of the Fold.
unique link to this extract

How eleven people try to stop fake news in the world’s largest election • Bloomberg

Saritha Raj:

»

“In a country largely driven by local and community news, we knew it was critical to have fact-checking partners who could review content across regions and languages,” Ajit Mohan, Facebook’s managing director and vice president in India, wrote in a recent company blog post.

Facebook’s third-party fact-checkers in India analyze news in 10 of India’s 23 official languages, more than any other country, according to a spokesperson.

“Fact-checking is part of a broader strategy to fight false news that includes extensive work to remove fake accounts; cut off incentives to the financially-motivated actors that spread misinformation; promote news literacy; and give more context about the posts they see,” the company said in a statement.

Facebook has said that fighting misinformation is a top priority, and that it hands such critical responsibilities over to contractors to help it keep a better-informed watch around the world at all hours. Contractors also work for much less than the typical Facebook employee, can appear more objective than the company’s own employees, and can make for easier scapegoats if needed.

A visit to Boom’s offices makes clear that the scale of Facebook’s response in India so far isn’t enough. The small team appears capable and hardworking almost to a fault, but given the scale of the problem, they might as well be sifting grains of sand from a toxic beach. “What can eleven people do,” says Boom Deputy Editor Karen Rebelo, “when hundreds of millions of first-time smartphone-internet users avidly share every suspect video and fake tidbit that comes their way?”

«

You can start to wonder now whether it wouldn’t be better just to turn this stuff off. Speaking of which…
unique link to this extract

Sri Lanka shut down social media. My first thought was ‘good’ • The New York Times

Kara Swisher:

»

when the Sri Lankan government temporarily shut down access to American social media services like Facebook and Google’s YouTube after the bombings there on Easter morning, my first thought was “good.”

Good, because it could save lives. Good, because the companies that run these platforms seem incapable of controlling the powerful global tools they have built. Good, because the toxic digital waste of misinformation that floods these platforms has overwhelmed what was once so very good about them. And indeed, by Sunday morning so many false reports about the carnage were already circulating online that the Sri Lankan government worried more violence would follow.

It pains me as a journalist, and someone who once believed that a worldwide communications medium would herald more tolerance, to admit this — to say that my first instinct was to turn it all off. But it has become clear to me with every incident that the greatest experiment in human interaction in the history of the world continues to fail in ever more dangerous ways.

In short: Stop the Facebook/YouTube/Twitter world — we want to get off.

«

I feel there’s a strengthening undercurrent that agrees this is true: social media isn’t actually helping us solve our problems.
unique link to this extract

2018: “We had to stop Facebook”: when anti-Muslim violence goes viral • Buzzfeed News

Aisha Nazim, in mid-2018:

»

Government officials, researchers, and local NGOs say they have pleaded with Facebook representatives from as far back as 2013 to better enforce the company’s own rules against using the platform to call for violence or to target people for their ethnicity or religious affiliation. They repeatedly raised the issue with Facebook representatives in private meetings, by sharing in-depth research, and in public forums. The company, they say, did next to nothing in response.

Ethnic tensions run deep in Sri Lanka, particularly between the majority Sinhala Buddhists and minority groups, and the country has seen a troubling rise in anti-Muslim hate groups and violence since the end of its decades-long civil war in 2009. Many of those hate groups spread their messages on Facebook. The problem came to a head in March when Buddhist mobs in central Sri Lanka burned down dozens of Muslim shops, homes, and places of worship. In response, the government blocked social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, in a decision it says was made to prevent the violence from spiraling further out of control. Facebook, officials said, couldn’t be relied on to respond to posts and videos inciting violence quickly enough.

“[Facebook] would go three or four months before making a response,” Harin Fernando, minister of telecommunications and digital infrastructure, told BuzzFeed News. “We were upset. In this incident, we had no alternative — we had to stop Facebook.”

«

And at Easter weekend there was a wave of attacks on churches and hotels; extremist Muslim groups are blamed. Again and again it feels as though Facebook really isn’t helping things, even if it isn’t directly involved in them.
unique link to this extract

Chinese hacking steals billions; US businesses turn a blind eye • PBS

Laura Sullivan and Cat Schuknecht:

»

for its part, the Chinese government officially denied to NPR and FRONTLINE that it has been involved in such practices.

But that’s not what former U.S. Attorney David Hickton found. When he took over in the Western District of Pennsylvania in 2010, he says, he was inundated with calls from companies saying they suspected China might be inside their computer systems.

“I literally received an avalanche of concern and complaints from companies and organizations who said, ‘We are losing our technology — drip, drip, drip,’ ” he says.

Hickton opened an investigation and quickly set his sights on a special unit of the Chinese military — a secretive group known as Unit 61398. Investigators were able to watch as the unit’s officers, sitting in an office building in Shanghai, broke into the computer systems of American companies at night, stopped for an hour break at China’s lunchtime and then continued in the Chinese afternoon.

“They were really using a large rake — think of a rake [like] you rake leaves in the fall,” he says. “They were taking everything … personal information, strategic plans, organizational charts. Then they just figured out later how they were going to use it.”

But when Hickton went to the companies, eager for them to become plaintiffs, he ran into a problem. None of the companies wanted any part of it. Hickton says they had too much money on the line in China.

«

Greed, or fear. But it’s been going on for absolutely years. Now it seems companies might feel it’s time to act, or at least speak up.
unique link to this extract

A cartoon intro to DNS over HTTPS • Mozilla Hacks

Lin Clark:

»

On-path routers can track and spoof DNS because they can see the contents of the DNS requests and responses. But the Internet already has technology for ensuring that on-path routers can’t eavesdrop like this. It’s the encryption that I talked about before.

By using HTTPS to exchange the DNS packets, we ensure that no one can spy on the DNS requests that our users are making.

In addition to providing a trusted resolver which communicates using the DoH protocol, Cloudflare is working with us to make this even more secure… Cloudflare will make the request from one of their own IP addresses near the user. This provides geolocation without tying it to a particular user. In addition to this, we’re looking into how we can enable even better, very fine-grained load balancing in a privacy-sensitive way.

Doing this — removing the irrelevant parts of the domain name and not including your IP address — means that DNS servers have much less data that they can collect about you.

«

Thanks to Seth Finkelstein, we have the answer to the puzzle of what yesterday’s Sunday Times link was about: DNS over HTTPS. It’s not clear what Google’s timetable is for making this the default in Chrome, but BT is worried enough about it to have highlighted it in a discussion paper written earlier in April, which explains it pretty well.

Would have been nice if the Times writeup had explained this. But the journalists didn’t seem to understand it themselves.
unique link to this extract

How the Boeing 737 Max disaster looks to a software developer • IEEE Spectrum

Gregory Travis:

»

Long ago there was a joke that in the future planes would fly themselves, and the only thing in the cockpit would be a pilot and a dog. The pilot’s job was to make the passengers comfortable that someone was up front. The dog’s job was to bite the pilot if he tried to touch anything.

On the 737, Boeing not only included the requisite redundancy in instrumentation and sensors, it also included redundant flight computers—one on the pilot’s side, the other on the copilot’s side. The flight computers do a lot of things, but their main job is to fly the plane when commanded to do so and to make sure the human pilots don’t do anything wrong when they’re flying it. The latter is called “envelope protection.”

Let’s just call it what it is: the bitey dog.

Let’s review what the MCAS does: It pushes the nose of the plane down when the system thinks the plane might exceed its angle-of-attack limits; it does so to avoid an aerodynamic stall. Boeing put MCAS into the 737 Max because the larger engines and their placement make a stall more likely in a 737 Max than in previous 737 models.

When MCAS senses that the angle of attack is too high, it commands the aircraft’s trim system (the system that makes the plane go up or down) to lower the nose. It also does something else: Indirectly, via something Boeing calls the “Elevator Feel Computer,” it pushes the pilot’s control columns (the things the pilots pull or push on to raise or lower the aircraft’s nose) downward.

«

Related to yesterday’s link about Boeing, I received this email from Drew, one of our readers:

My cousin is a long term Boeing employee in Seattle and I wanted to share his insight: Boeing moved the Dreamliner production out of Seattle after a failed attempt to completely break the Washington Machinists Union contract in 2016 (even though most employees lost their pensions and other long-term benefits anyway). As part of the move Boeing eliminated the previously standard two-mechanic or two-machinist QA inspections. Now only one set of human eyes examines the work of robots. Increasingly automation is checking the work of automation.

This is the big failure on the Dreamliner- the robotic QA will verify a wire is soldered and carries a current, but is not programmed to notice metallic debris dangerously close to the solder joint. It’s the kind of issue any 19 year old would notice, but QA AI doesn’t include in their model or training data. Boeing has humans spot checking automated QA but doesn’t share those results with the team. But hey, they’re saving so much money!

unique link to this extract

A hotspot finder app exposed two million Wi-Fi network passwords • TechCrunch

:

»

A popular hotspot finder app for Android exposed the Wi-Fi network passwords for more than two million networks.

The app, downloaded by thousands of users, allowed anyone to search for Wi-Fi networks in their nearby area. The app allows the user to upload Wi-Fi network passwords from their devices to its database for others to use.

That database of more than two million network passwords, however, was left exposed and unprotected, allowing anyone to access and download the contents in bulk.

Sanyam Jain, a security researcher and a member of the GDI Foundation, found the database and reported the findings to TechCrunch.

We spent more than two weeks trying to contact the developer, believed to be based in China, to no avail. Eventually we contacted the host, DigitalOcean, which took down the database within a day of reaching out.

«

Crazy app: you can upload the SSID and password for any Wi-Fi network. And then it’s sitting there on its database, which turns out to be not that secure (predictably enough). Why would you trust some random app from the Play Store, except that it says “free Wi-Fi!!!!” It’s greed blinding people to security.
unique link to this extract

Another warning sign • National Review

Yuval Levin:

»

On January 15 of 2017, a few days before Trump’s inauguration, the President-Elect was interviewed by the Washington Post, and when asked about health care he said his team would soon propose its own health-care reform—that it was worked out, and that it would not reduce coverage numbers but would cost less than Obamacare. The statement sent the little conservative health policy world into a frenzy: What was this plan? Who was working on it? What kinds of ideas was it based on? The barrage of group emails was soon ended, however, by a note from a member of Trump’s little policy circle, who would soon become a senior administration official. The message was simple: Trump had no idea what he was talking about, the proposal he mentioned was a figment of his imagination, and don’t worry about it—everything was under control.

This was simultaneously reassuring and alarming in the way that Mueller’s window into the administration is. It was evidence that there were people around the president who were doing the work required to govern and make decisions, but it was also evidence that the president was not at the center of that process, and that a significant amount of their work involved deciding when to ignore him. That pattern has of course repeated over and over in the two years that have followed.

As Mueller’s report demonstrates, the willingness of his subordinates to be insubordinate has generally served Trump well, because his own judgement is often so shockingly bad that almost anyone else’s judgment (including that of some very shady characters) would be better.

«

Levin’s concern is that Trump has been lucky so far: there hasn’t been an emergency that has required coordinated time-sensitive action by the administration, directed from the top. (Although: Puerto Rico?)
unique link to this extract

Who Owns Huawei? • SSRN

Christopher Balding and Donald C. Clarke in an open-access paper:

»

A number of pertinent facts about Huawei’s structure and ownership are in fact well known and have been outlined many times in the Chinese media, but the myth of Huawei’s employee ownership seems to persist outside of China. This article, drawing on publicly available sources such as media reports, corporate databases, and court cases, aims to refute this myth once and for all.

In summary, we find the following:

• The Huawei operating company is 100% owned by a holding company, which is in turn approximately 1% owned by Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei and 99% owned by an entity called a “trade union committee” for the holding company.

• We know nothing about the internal governance procedures of the trade union committee. We do not know who the committee members or other trade union leaders are, or how they are selected.

• Trade union members have no right to assets held by a trade union.

• What have been called “employee shares” in “Huawei” are in fact at most contractual interests in a profit-sharing scheme.

• Given the public nature of trade unions in China, if the ownership stake of the trade union committee is genuine, and if the trade union and its committee function as trade unions generally function in China, then Huawei may be deemed effectively state-owned.

• Regardless of who, in a practical sense, owns and controls Huawei, it is clear that the employees do not.

«

The spotlight is really being turned on Huawei now that its global ambitions are so widely known (and the west has fallen behind in 5G). The next year or two could be crucial as more comes out.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Puzzled? You will be too when you read a story about Chrome getting “encrypted”. CC-licensed photo by Chris Potter on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Bonus episode, director’s cut. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The smart gun doesn’t exist because of New Jersey and the NRA • Bloomberg

Polly Mosendz , Austin Carr , and Neil Weinberg:

»

The 2002 bill stipulated that once smart guns went on sale anywhere in the US, New Jersey’s gun dealers would have three years to take all other weapons off their shelves. If anyone sold a smart gun, in other words, all guns sold in New Jersey would have to be smart.

The NRA feared the New Jersey legislation could spread to other states and quickly urged its millions of members to protest. The group said in a statement that it doesn’t oppose research but “opposes any law prohibiting Americans from acquiring or possessing firearms that don’t possess ‘smart’ gun technology.”

The New Jersey law did just that. Which made it the perfect tool for mobilizing bitter opposition to any attempt to sell smart guns, even hundreds of miles away from New Jersey. When a gun-store owner in Rockville, Md., named Andy Raymond decided to become one of America’s first smart-gun retailers in 2014, he had to import the merchandise from overseas. The burly, tattooed owner of Engage Armament found a German-made Armatix iP1 pistol that could only be fired when a watch with an embedded RFID chip was within 15 inches of the firearm.

Protesters attacked his store on social media, making national headlines. Their fear was that the first retail sale of a smart gun could start New Jersey’s clock ticking toward the ban on sales of conventional guns enacted by the Childproof Handgun Law. Raymond reported death threats, and he posted a video online in which he sipped whiskey and explained that selling smart guns would draw “fence-sitters” to the pro-gun camp. He slammed the NRA’s hypocrisy on the issue.

The NRA tested the Armatix iP1 and found it “disappointing at best, and alarming at worst,” in a scathing review distributed to members. Others have found issues with the same gun. Armatix at the time said the gun passed all tests by the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Poor reviews meant that, thanks to the New Jersey law, the NRA could argue that a firearm it deemed unreliable could be the only gun available to purchase in the future. The smart gun went from being viewed as politically toxic by gun-rights supporters to outright dangerous.

«

Related, in a roundabout way: an in-depth piece in the New Yorker about the NRA’s extremely dubious accounting and interrelationship with its own PR agency. I remember writing about smart guns when I was at New Scientist around 1994. Always promised, never arrived.
unique link to this extract

Sri Lanka blocks social media after attacks • CNN

Donie O’Sullivan:

»

Sri Lanka placed a nationwide block on social media sites after more than 200 people died in multiple attacks on Sunday. The government, in taking the drastic step, cited “false news reports” it said were circulating online.

The shutdown, which the government said would be temporary, highlights the challenges the world’s most powerful tech companies face in curbing the spread of misinformation and propaganda in the aftermath of terrorist attacks. It also raises questions of censorship and a government’s ability to turn off the world’s most popular websites.

In announcing the ban on its official news portal, Sri Lanka named Facebook and Instagram among the sites it had blocked.

YouTube, Snapchat and the messaging apps WhatsApp and Viber were also blocked, according to the internet monitoring group NetBlocks. Twitter did not appear to be blocked. Twitter is not as widely used in Sri Lanka as are Facebook and WhatsApp, according to Sanjana Hattotuwa, senior researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

«

Remember 2011, when the UK government considered shutting down BlackBerry Messenger during the riots? But it didn’t. Times are changing.
unique link to this extract

Warning over Google Chrome browser’s new threat to children • The Sunday Times

Nicholas Hellen and Richard Kerbaj:

»

Internet safety watchdogs and intelligence agencies are holding crisis talks about a new version of Britain’s most popular web browser, which they fear will endanger children.

They say Google’s plans to encrypt Chrome will make it harder to block harmful material, including child-abuse images and terrorist propaganda. The new version will bypass most parental control systems and undermine the government’s attempts to stop under-18s viewing pornography…

…Broadband companies block millions of dangerous sites by installing filters that can read the internet’s “address book”, known as domain name servers.

However, the planned encryption will allow users to bypass the filters and connect instead to Google’s servers. Supporters argue it will boost privacy and security and prevent governments from snooping on people.

But a government official said its ability to investigate paedophiles and terror cells would be hampered. And intelligence and law enforcement officials fear Google could use it to amass unprecedented detail on people’s browsing habits, to be held by Google under Californian law.

“Google will have a lot more than their searches — it will have their entire browser history. That’s an incredible amount of data,” he said. It will also be able to track devices rather than just household accounts.

«

Does anyone know what they’re on about? It sounds like they’re talking about DNS query encryption, but I can’t find anything suggesting Google is going to do that. (Thanks Charles Knight, who is as confused as us all, for the link.)
unique link to this extract

Popular apps in Google’s Play Store are abusing permissions and committing ad fraud • Buzzfeed News

Craig Silverman and Jeremy Singer-Vine:

»

A host of popular Android apps from a major Chinese developer, including a selfie app with more than 50 million downloads, have been committing large-scale ad fraud and abusing user permissions, a BuzzFeed News investigation of popular Android apps has found. In several cases, the apps took steps that concealed their connections to the developer, DO Global, to users and failed to clearly disclose they were collecting and sending data to China. The investigation also raises questions about Google’s policing of apps in the Play store for fraud and data collection practices.

DO Global is a Chinese app developer that claims more than 800 million monthly active users on its platforms, and was spun off from Baidu, one of China’s largest tech companies, last year. At least six of DO Global’s apps, which together have more than 90 million downloads from the Google Play store, have been fraudulently clicking on ads to generate revenue, and at least two of them contain code that could be used to engage in a different form of ad fraud, according to findings from security and ad fraud researchers Check Point and Method Media Intelligence.

The DO Global apps were identified after BuzzFeed News gathered a list of close to 5,000 popular apps from the Google Play store, along with associated information, such as the developer’s name, number of installs, and requested permissions.

«

Checkpoint Software has written a blogpost about it. This is some malicious stuff. That it’s Chinese probably isn’t a big part of it, but it makes going after them much harder. But the really painful part is that all of these apps are useless: “Selfie Camera” (you have one), AIO Flashlight, and so on. Utter crap. That’s what makes app stores such a pain to use.
unique link to this extract

Claims of shoddy production draw scrutiny to a second Boeing jet • The New York Times

Natalie Kitroeff and David Gelles:

»

Facing long manufacturing delays, Boeing pushed its work force to quickly turn out Dreamliners, at times ignoring issues raised by employees.

Complaints about the frenzied pace echo broader concerns about the company in the wake of two deadly crashes involving another jet, the 737 Max. Boeing is now facing questions about whether the race to get the Max done, and catch up to its rival Airbus, led it to miss safety risks in the design, like an anti-stall system that played a role in both crashes.

Safety lapses at the North Charleston plant have drawn the scrutiny of airlines and regulators. Qatar Airways stopped accepting planes from the factory after manufacturing mishaps damaged jets and delayed deliveries. Workers have filed nearly a dozen whistle-blower claims and safety complaints with federal regulators, describing issues like defective manufacturing, debris left on planes and pressure to not report violations. Others have sued Boeing, saying they were retaliated against for flagging manufacturing mistakes.

Joseph Clayton, a technician at the North Charleston plant, one of two facilities where the Dreamliner is built, said he routinely found debris dangerously close to wiring beneath cockpits.

“I’ve told my wife that I never plan to fly on it,” he said. “It’s just a safety issue.”

In an industry where safety is paramount, the collective concerns involving two crucial Boeing planes — the company’s workhorse, the 737 Max, and another crown jewel, the 787 Dreamliner — point to potentially systemic problems.

«

Hell of a story, which gets to the question of distributed manufacturing systems, and how people can raise objections within them.
unique link to this extract

Samsung Galaxy Fold review: broken dream • The Verge

Dieter Bohn:

»

On an objective basis, using the same standards we apply to any smartphone, the screen on the Galaxy Fold is bad. And that is wild to say because, again, subjectively, I deeply enjoy using it.

The biggest issue everybody wants to know about is the crease. There’s just no pretending that it isn’t there or that you don’t see it or feel it when you run your finger across it. Especially when you’re looking at it from an angle, it’s just a really obvious line through the middle of the screen. What’s worse, it’s a really obvious line that has two different color temperatures on either side of it when you look at it from an angle.

But when you start using the Fold, it tends to disappear. I stopped seeing it; it is actually difficult to spot when you’re looking at the Fold straight-on, which means that my subjective experience is just that it’s a great little 7-inch tablet. The screen is just slightly smaller than the iPad mini’s, but the Galaxy Fold has radically smaller bezels.

If that were the whole story, I’d tell you that the crease is a sort of modern version of the notch: a thing that is annoying but ultimately something you can get used to. I could tell you that it’s one of the things that is just going to happen on a folding phone, then move on to say that the colors are super vivid, the text is sharp, and it gets plenty bright.

But I can’t tell you that because the crease is just the start of this screen’s issues.

«

Bohn basically assumes that Samsung is going to figure out why multiple review screens failed before it starts selling them to consumers but even so essentially says it’s not worth buying. Samsung has postponed its launch events in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Over to you, Huawei.
unique link to this extract

Mueller report: Sarah Sanders makes tortured effort to explain her lies • Vox

Aaron Rupar:

»

On Thursday evening and Friday morning, Sanders repeatedly downplayed that lie as a mere “slip of the tongue” [the excuse she used in testifying under oath to the FBI; lying to them can lead to a prison sentence]. But as ABC’s George Stephanopoulos pointed out to her in an interview on Friday morning, she used the line about “countless members of the FBI” multiple times in the days following Comey’s firing — a revelation undercutting her claim that she merely misspoke.

“You said it was a ‘slip of the tongue’ when you talked about ‘countless FBI members,’ [contacting her to say they were glad Comey had been fired] yet you repeated it twice the very next day,” Stephanopoulos said. “That’s not a slip of the tongue, Sarah, that’s a deliberate false statement.”

Sanders, however, refused to own it, and bizarrely blamed her lie on Democrats.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t a robot like the Democratic Party that went out for two-and-a-half years and stated time and time again that there was definitely Russian collusion between the president and his campaign, that they had evidence to show it, and that the president and his team deserved to be in jail,” she said.

«

A reminder of what Michelle Wolf said at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2018:

»

»

“I actually really like Sarah. I think she’s very resourceful. But she burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smokey eye. Like maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies.”

«

«

Over which lots of conservatives got upset. But Sanders is confirmed as a liar. In which sense, she fits in perfectly to Trump’s administration. However, nobody should believe a word she says ever again.
unique link to this extract

CIA warning over Huawei • The Times

Lucy Fisher and Michael Evans:

»

American intelligence shown to Britain says that Huawei has taken money from the People’s Liberation Army, China’s National Security Commission and a third branch of the Chinese state intelligence network, according to a UK source.

The US shared the claims with Britain and its other partners in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance — Australia, New Zealand and Canada — earlier this year, with the UK entering the final stages of a wider review into its next generation mobile network rollout.

The funding allegation is the most serious claim linking the world’s largest telecoms equipment manufacturer to the Chinese state. Huawei insists that it is a private company that is independent of influence from the government and has repeatedly denied posing any security risks. Critics, however, warn that China’s laws oblige companies to co-operate with its security branches, and that “backdoors” could be built into software allowing it to spy on or disrupt British communications.

The Whitehall review into plans for Britain’s introduction of 5G will be discussed by Theresa May, cabinet ministers and security chiefs at the National Security Council, expected to be held next week. A Whitehall source said of the review: “I don’t think it’s massively supportive [towards Huawei].”

«

Obliging cooperation with security branches and building in backdoors is something that the UK’s Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) forces too. It’s also instructive to notice the sources here: Lucy Fisher is the defence correspondent. This is careful leaking by UK security sources to push a narrative. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s untrue; only that this is intended to be aired.
unique link to this extract

Canada group sues government over Google’s Sidewalk Labs • BBC News

»

“Canada is not Google’s lab rat,” said the association’s executive director and general counsel MJ Bryant. “We can do better. Our freedom from unlawful public surveillance is worth fighting for.”
The association is suing Waterfront Toronto, municipal, provincial and federal governments. Although Waterfront Toronto is funded through federal, provincial and municipal purses, it does not report to the city or the province.

Sidewalk Labs – a firm owned by Google’s parent Alphabet – won a bid with Waterfront Toronto in October 2017 to develop a 12-acre patch of industrial landscape in Toronto, Ontario into a “smart city”.

But the deal struck between the government-funded organisation and Sidewalk Labs has been mired in controversy and shrouded in secrecy.

Ontario’s auditor general said oversight of the project was a concern in her report last December.

In February, the Toronto Star reported that Sidewalk Labs intends to expand onto 300 adjacent acres and build a light-rail line – in exchange for a cut of development fees and property taxes.
The land is potentially worth billions, according to the Star.

Jim Balsillie, the former co-CEO of BlackBerry, called the project a “colonizing experiment in surveillance capitalism attempting to bulldoze important urban, civic and political issues.
“Of all the misguided innovation strategies Canada has launched over the past three decades, this purported smart city is not only the dumbest but also the most dangerous”.

«

unique link to this extract

Apple paid $5 billion to $6 billion to settle with Qualcomm: UBS

Kif Leswing:

»

Apple probably paid Qualcomm between $5 billion and $6 billion to settle the litigation between the two companies, UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri estimated in a note distributed on Thursday.

Apple probably also agreed to pay between $8 and $9 in patent royalties per iPhone, estimated UBS, based on Qualcomm’s guidance that it expects earnings per share to increase by $2 as a result of the settlement.

The UBS estimate suggests that Apple paid a high price to end a bitter legal battle that spanned multiple continents and threatened Apple’s ability to release a 5G iPhone and put pressure on Qualcomm’s licensing business model that contributes over half of the company’s profit…

…Arcuri wrote that the one-time payment was likely for royalty payments that Apple had stopped paying when the two companies were embroiled in litigation, and that is how it was calculated.

The settlement is “a solid outcome for Qualcomm and certainly better than the [roughly] $5 [royalty payment] assumption we had been making,” Arcuri wrote.

If Apple does pay between $8 and $9 in royalties per iPhone it would be a significant increase over the $7.50 in royalties that it previously paid Qualcomm per phone, according to Apple COO Jeff Williams’ testimony in an FTC trial.

«

unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Like them? A killer disease could make them extinct unless scientists can get ahead of it. CC-licensed photo by Marvee-sama on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Unredacted. (Easter eggs optional.) I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Unmasked: an analysis of 10 million passwords • WP Engine

:

»

We already knew a few fairly high-profile people were in the Gmail dump. For instance, Mashable noted a month after the list was released that one of its reporters was included (the password listed for him was his Gmail password, but several years old and no longer in use). But we didn’t think Full Contact would turn up so many more.

Within the 78,000 matches we found, there were hundreds of very high-profile people. We’ve selected about 40 of the most notable below. A few very important points:

1. We’ve deliberately not identified anyone by name.
2. The company logos represent those organizations the individuals work for now and not necessarily when they were using the password listed for them.
3. There’s no way of knowing where the passwords were originally used. They may have been personal Gmail passwords, but it’s more likely that they were used on other sites like File Dropper. It’s therefore possible that many of the weak passwords are not representative of the passwords the individuals currently use at work, or anywhere else for that matter.
4. Google confirmed that when the list was published, less than 2% (100,000) of the passwords might have worked with the Gmail addresses they were paired with. And all affected account holders were required to reset their passwords. In other words, the passwords below—while still educational—are no longer in use. Instead, they’ve been replaced by other, hopefully more secure, combinations.

If the passwords hadn’t been reset, however, the situation would be more of a concern. Several studies have shown that a number of us use the same passwords for multiple services. And given that the list below includes a few CEOs, many journalists, and someone very high up at the talent management company of Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, this dump could have caused a lot of chaos. Thankfully it didn’t, and now can’t.

«

It’s really shocking how short the “crack time” is for some of these passwords: well under a second.
unique link to this extract

Amazon and Google settle feud, bring YouTube back to Fire TV devices • Ars Technica

Valentina Palladino:

»

After over a year of absence, the official YouTube app will return to Amazon Fire TV devices and Fire TV Edition smart TVs. Google pulled the video streaming app in early 2018 after it could not strike a deal with the online retail giant surrounding the availability of its products and services.

According to reports at the time, Google was unhappy with Amazon because the retailer didn’t sell a number of its products, including Chromecast and Google Home devices. The two companies couldn’t strike a business deal that pleased both parties, so Google removed the official YouTube app from Fire TV devices at the start of 2018. This came after Google also revoked YouTube access on Amazon’s Echo Show devices, citing a “broken user experience.”

In the time since YouTube left Fire TVs, users have been able to access the site using browsers. But that experience isn’t the most user-friendly, so the real losers in this situation were YouTube lovers that owned Fire TV devices.

Now, those users will soon have an official YouTube app sanctioned by Google on their streaming devices again. The new app will allow users to sign into their personal accounts and play 4K content at up to 60fps on supported devices. Coming later in the year will be dedicated apps for YouTube Kids and YouTube TV, the company’s live, TV-streaming subscription service. Users will also be able to use Alexa to search for content in the YouTube app.

«

It’s been quite the week for kissing and making up.
unique link to this extract

Presenting search app and browser options to Android users in Europe

Paul Gennai, product management director at Google:

»

Following the changes we made to comply with the European Commission’s ruling last year, we’ll start presenting new screens to Android users in Europe with an option to download search apps and browsers.  

These new screens will be displayed the first time a user opens Google Play after receiving an upcoming update. Two screens will surface: one for search apps and another for browsers, each containing a total of five apps, including any that are already installed. Apps that are not already installed on the device will be included based on their popularity and shown in a random order.

An illustration of how the screens will look. The apps shown will vary by country.

Users can tap to install as many apps as they want. If an additional search app or browser is installed, the user will be shown an additional screen with instructions on how to set up the new app (e.g., placing app icons and widgets or setting defaults). Where a user downloads a search app from the screen, we’ll also ask them whether they want to change Chrome’s default search engine the next time they open Chrome.

«

Do we really think this is going to make any difference? I suspect it will be about as (in)effective as the Microsoft Browser Choice screen was.
unique link to this extract

Amazon Music launches free streaming tier, through Alexa only (for now) • Variety

Jem Aswad:

»

Amazon Music today basically soft-launched its free streaming tier, in which U.S. customers of its Alexa voice assistant will have access to top Amazon Music playlists and thousands of stations, at no cost. The limited access that the new free service provides — it’s only available through Alexa, and when the listener requests a song, it leads to an Amazon playlist or station, rather than an album — is presumably the first phase of a full ad-supported (i.e. free, with ads) streaming tier that will launch at some point in the future…

…Over the past few years, Amazon has quietly become the third-largest streaming service in the world, behind Spotify and Apple Music — a fact that is obscured by its relatively small place in Amazon’s gargantuan business. However, led by VP of Music Steve Boom, over the past couple of years the company has been pushing harder into the music space, with exclusive features on big artists with new releases — such as its one-time-only “SoundBoard” specials with U2, Elton John and Justin Timberlake — and generally making more noise about its offerings.

«

Basically commercial radio, sans DJ. Everything old is new again.
unique link to this extract

The quest to save the banana from extinction • The Conversation

Stuart Thompson:

»

Panama disease, an infection that ravages banana plants, has been sweeping across Asia, Australia, the Middle East and Africa. The impact has been devastating. In the Philippines alone, losses have totalled US$400m. And the disease threatens not only the livelihoods of everyone in this US$44 billion industry but also the 400m people in developing countries who depend on bananas for a substantial proportion of their calorie intake.

However, there may be hope. In an attempt to save the banana and the industry that produces it, scientists are in a race to create a new plant resistant to Panama disease. But perhaps this crisis is a warning that we are growing our food in an unsustainable way and we will need to look to more radical changes for a permanent solution.

«

Long article, and you will end up knowing a lot more about bananas, and how they reproduce (or don’t) than you ever expected to.
unique link to this extract

Why did Intel kill off their modem program? • SemiAccurate

Charlie Demerjian:

»

[Intel] quite literally never delivered a modem that worked right. The most glaring example of this was the iPhone 7 which had both Intel and Qualcomm variants. On paper it was a 1Gb LTE device but Apple only delivered a 600Mbps iPhone.

That same 600Mbps Qualcomm modem in the iPhone ran at 1Gbps in Android devices. The Intel modem ran at 600Mbps max and there were no other customers to make a comparison to. Apple crippled their Qualcomm parts to match the delivered Intel specs. Worse yet those Intel parts were only 600Mbps on paper; in practice they had 30% lower throughput. On top of this the Intel modems consumed vastly more energy to do their slower work than Qualcomm, a trend that SemiAccurate has personally measured in the labs across multiple generations of Intel modems but is not at liberty to disclose exact figures on, sorry.

This is significant for several reasons. First, phones operate on batteries, and 30% lower throughput at 30% higher energy use means the Intel modem was about half as efficient as the Qualcomm one. Not only do customers with Intel iPhones get a second rate user experience, they get worse battery life as well.

And then there are the carriers whose product is effectively finite air time on a specific frequency. If a phone is 30% slower due to retries and packet failures it means it ties up 30% more of that time and costs carriers much more to support. They are keenly aware of this and hate Intel modems.

«

Just as well Intel isn’t going to be doing modems much longer.
unique link to this extract

Facebook building voice assistant to rival Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri • CNBC

Salvador Rodriguez:

»

The tech company has been working on this new initiative since early 2018. The effort is coming out of the company’s augmented reality and virtual reality group, a division that works on hardware, including the company’s virtual reality Oculus headsets.

A team based out of Redmond, Washington, has been spearheading the effort to build the new AI assistant, according to two former Facebook employees who left the company in recent months. The effort is being lead by Ira Snyder, director of AR/VR and Facebook Assistant. That team has been contacting vendors in the smart speaker supply chain, according to two people familiar.

It’s unclear how exactly Facebook envisions people using the assistant, but it could potentially be used on the company’s Portal video chat smart speakers, the Oculus headsets or other future projects.

The Facebook assistant faces stiff competition. Amazon and Google are far ahead in the smart speaker market with 67% and 30% shares in the U.S. in 2018, respectively, according to eMarketer.

«

Odd that the headline mentions Siri when it’s bringing up the rear with the 3%, then. But Google’s assistant doesn’t have a name, I suppose.

What’s the betting that in a year or two it’ll turn out that Facebook is accidentally recording everything you say and using it to target ads? Like people suspect happens already?
unique link to this extract

Facebook stored millions of passwords in plaintext—change yours now • WIRED

Lily Hay Newman:

»

By now, it’s difficult to summarize all of Facebook’s privacy, misuse, and security missteps in one neat description. It just got even harder: On Thursday, following a report by Krebs on Security, Facebook acknowledged a bug in its password management systems that caused hundreds of millions of user passwords for Facebook, Facebook Lite, and Instagram to be stored as plaintext in an internal platform. This means that thousands of Facebook employees could have searched for and found them. Krebs reports that the passwords stretched back to those created in 2012.

«

Brian Krebs’s report was on 21 March. This acknowledgement has come nearly a month later, at the end of the day before Easter Friday, after the release of the Mueller report which of course sucked up huge amounts of media attention.

Did it really take four weeks to acknowledge this?
unique link to this extract

Facebook bans far-right groups including BNP, EDL and Britain First • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

»

In a statement, the far-right group Knights Templar International said it was “horrified” by the ban, and that it was exploring legal options. “Facebook has deemed our Christian organisation as dangerous and de-platformed us despite never being charged, let alone found guilty of any crime whatsoever,” a spokesman said. “This is a development that would have made the Soviets blush.”

The company’s decision to ban five of Britain’s most prominent far-right organisations shows it has moved a long way from its previous position on the groups.

As early as 2016, concerns were raised about the scale of the far right’s activities on social media. Britain First, then a registered political party, had used a combination of canny tactics and sponsored posts on the social network to push anti-Islam posts to millions of users, drawing one of the largest social media followings of any British political party. When queried on whether this was desirable, Facebook told reporters the site “is used by parties and supporters of many political persuasions to campaign for issues they feel passionately about.

“Like individuals and all other organisations on Facebook, they must adhere to our community and advertising standards, which set out the limits for acceptable behaviour and content.” It would be another two years before Facebook banned Britain First from the site.

When Facebook initially banned the organisation in early 2018 it was for repeated breaches of the site’s posting policies, and did not reach the level of designating it as a dangerous organisation. That ban came a few months after the group had ceased to be a political party.

«

So basically Facebook is starting to follow the UK government’s classifications of “proscribed groups”. Start out as a private company, get big enough and effectively you’re a regulated utility.
unique link to this extract

Facebook uploaded 1.5 million users’ email contacts without permission • Business Insider

Rob Price:

»

Facebook harvested the email contacts of 1.5 million users without their knowledge or consent when they opened their accounts.

Business Insider has learned that since May 2016, the social networking company has collected the contact lists of 1.5 million users new to the social network. The Silicon Valley company says they were “unintentionally uploaded to Facebook,” and it is now deleting them. You can read Facebook’s full statement below.

The revelation comes after a security researcher noticed that Facebook was asking some users to enter their email passwords when they signed up for new accounts to verify their identities, in a move widely condemned by security experts. Business Insider then discovered that if you did enter your email password, a message popped up saying it was “importing” your contacts, without asking for permission first.

At the time, it wasn’t clear what was actually happening — but a Facebook spokesperson has now confirmed that 1.5 million people’s contacts were collected this way, and fed into Facebook’s systems, where they were used to build Facebook’s web of social connections and recommend friends to add. It’s not immediately clear if these contacts were also used for ad-targeting purposes. [Later: it did.]

Facebook says that prior to May 2016, it offered an option to verify a user’s account and voluntarily upload their contacts at the same time. However, Facebook says, it changed the feature, and the text informing users that their contacts would be uploaded was deleted — but the underlying functionality was not. Facebook didn’t access the content of users’ emails, the spokesperson added.

«

Notice how Facebook’s errors always fall in favour of it getting more information, and using it to target ads? Never getting less information and reducing ad loads? Though at this point it looks sociopathic.
unique link to this extract

Samsung Galaxy Fold is the Homer Simpson car • UX Collective

Patrick Thornton:

»

[Entering data] is becoming more and more common for healthcare, architecture, and some other professions. Having a small, foldable tablet might be more convenient than other existing small tablets. The quarter-assed phone on [the Galaxy Fold] might be good enough just for fielding work calls and other work activities.

If Samsung wanted to first start by targeting specific professional markets with this, they might get great feedback and begin to be able to refine this for consumer use. That does not appear to be their strategy here.

Also, with 79% of smartphone users using a protective case. How is that going to work for a device like this? It seems to me that either a mobile product like this needs to be very durable and impact resistant, or it needs to allow for use a case.

The last part of the Design Critique Rubric is to determine whether or not a user-centered design process was followed when building a product. A user-centered design process focuses product design and development on figuring out users’ problems and designing solutions to those.

At first glance, this does not appear a user-centered design process was followed (it’s hard to imagine the phone part of this being well received by users). I’m willing to put it through the full rubric once this device ships, but until then, I don’t see strong evidence of a user-centered design process.

«

Foldables already start to look like a technology solution in search of a problem. But that’s Samsung’s approach. It pioneered big screens because it made screens; that turned out to be a good idea. It pioneered foldables because it could make foldable screens. Well.. (Watch this if you’re not familiar with “Homer Simpson’s Car”.)
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Guess who the big winner is in the 5G modem fight? CC-licensed photo by Kārlis Dambrāns on Flickr.

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

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

Don’t count on 23andMe to detect most breast cancer risks, study warns • The New York Times

Heather Murphy:

»

In 2010, Dr. Pamela Munster mailed her saliva to 23andMe, a relatively new DNA testing company, and later opted in for a BRCA test. As an oncologist, she knew a mutation of this gene would put her at high risk for breast and ovarian cancer. She was relieved by the negative result.

Two years later, after she learned she had breast cancer, she took a more complete genetic test from a different lab. This time it was positive.

A study of 100,000 people released earlier this month suggested that this experience could be widespread. Nearly 90% of participants who carried a BRCA mutation would have been missed by 23andMe’s test, geneticists found.

23andMe’s testing formula for this risk is built around just three genetic variants, most prevalent among Ashkenazi Jews. The new study demonstrated that most people carry other mutations of the gene, something many doctors have long suspected.

“It’s as if you offered a pregnancy test, but only the Jewish women would turn positive,” said Dr. Munster, who is the co-leader of the Center for BRCA Research at the University of California, San Francisco. She was not involved in the new study, which was conducted by Invitae, a diagnostic company.

23andMe said response to the study by its potential competitor had been overblown because the site makes it clear that it is testing only for three of the mutations.

«

The explanation of this demonstrates how complex gene testing is: mutations multiply, and it’s hard to be sure you’re covering everything.
unique link to this extract

Cracking the code: a toddler, an iPad, and a tweet • The New Yorker

Evan Osnos:

»

I’d left the iPad in its usual home––an overflowing basket, on a low table, of mail, stamps, power cords, and partially broken earphones. The low table, it turns out, was a mistake. Our son Ollie, age three, gets to use the iPad on airplanes, but rarely at home, a rule he regards as unspeakably cruel. Now and then, when he finds it in his grasp, he’ll enter random numbers into the passcode screen, until a parent lifts the device up and out of his tiny hands, at which point he rendeth his garments and lieth on the earth.

The iPad was not in the basket. Ollie, it turns out, had got hold of it and gone to town on the passcode, trying one idea after another, with the fury and focus of Alan Turing trying to beat the Nazis. It’s not clear how many codes Ollie tried, but, by the time he gave up, the screen said “iPad is disabled, try again in 25,536,442 minutes.” That works out to about 48 years. I took a picture of it with my phone, wrote a tweet asking if anyone knew how to fix it, and went downstairs to dinner.

«

What happens is rather lovely, though also an indication of what modern media life is like.
unique link to this extract

Apple puts need for 5G ahead of legal fight in Qualcomm deal • Bloomberg

Ian King and Mark Gurman:

»

Apple needs chips that will connect the iPhone to the new, fifth-generation wireless networks being introduced now or risk falling behind its rivals. The company had bet on Intel Corp., but recently decided its would-be 5G supplier wasn’t up to the task.

That led Apple back to Qualcomm – and spurred a sudden end to a long-running court fight over patents, component costs and royalties for one of the most critical parts of an iPhone. Modems, or baseband processors, are what connects all iPhones and some iPads and Apple Watches to cellular networks and the internet on the go.

Throughout the fight, which centered on Apple’s accusations that Qualcomm overcharges for patents on its technology, the iPhone maker played down the importance of the modem and Qualcomm’s inventions. Just before the settlement was announced on Tuesday, Apple’s lawyers were in a San Diego courtroom saying the component was just another method of connecting to the internet. In reality, Qualcomm’s modems are leading a potential revolution in mobile internet — and Apple could have been forced to play catchup without them.

Intel, which dominates the market in personal computer chips, has struggled for decades in mobile. The company pledged that its 5G part was coming in phones next year. But within hours of Apple’s deal with Qualcomm, and with it the loss of its prime mobile customer, Intel announced it would end its effort to produce a 5G modem for smartphones.

«

The deal was dated April 1 – so Apple had realised Intel’s 5G efforts wouldn’t bear fruit some time ago, and had probably been negotiating since February. Its only leverage was the possibility that the court case would go in its favour, but that wouldn’t get the 5G part, and the clock was ticking. Apple needs the part this year for its design and testing work. So it hit a fairly hard deadline.
unique link to this extract

Qualcomm just beat Apple into submission • Semiaccurate

Charlie Demerjian:

»

Apple was trying to cut Qualcomm down to size and marginalize them to another supplier of commodity parts. They did this by trying to build up Intel modems and even allegedly handing Intel Qualcomm’s trade secrets when the Santa Clara company could not figure out how to make a working product. For the billions Apple dumped into this enterprise, they failed because Intel, the best of the non-Qualcomm modem makers, quite literally never made a single device that met their promised specs. No we are not joking, Intel’s modem business was a mess.

How bad was it? By the end they were showing multiple versions of the same fake chip photoshopped to ‘be’ a 5G modem. Really, you can’t make this stuff up. Intel claimed release dates, specs, and all sorts of numbers but never showed actual 5G silicon, functional or not. Worse yet they never got LTE modems even close to what they promised Apple. This is Intel’s problem not Apple’s, right?

Actually it was Apple’s problem more than Intel’s. Sure Intel was ‘selling’ Apple modems with a $10 bill wrapped around each one as SemiAccurate exclusively told you last year, but finances only go so far. Remember the iPhones with 600Mbps LTE modems? You know the ones where if you put that same Qualcomm part in any other device it was a 1Gb LTE modem? Then again if you put the same Intel modem in any other device it was a 600Mbps modem, not that there were any other customers dumb enough to use that device despite the contra-revenue pricing. Apple literally crippled their Qualcomm modem to match Intel’s so the finance set would put pressure on Qualcomm.

Although both devices were the same spec on paper, the Qualcomm iPhone had 30% more throughput at than the Intel one under the same conditions. What they didn’t say and that SemiAccurate has tested in the lab is that the Intel modems used about 30% more energy to be 30% slower, something that was pretty similar to previous generations.

«

So the implication seems to be that this year’s iPhones (and mobile-capable iPads?) will also use Intel modems, but after that it’s going to be Qualcomm parts. Sounds like that’s good for everyone apart from Intel.
unique link to this extract

Global 5G smartphone shipments will reach 5m units in 2019 • Strategy Analytics

»

According to the latest research from Strategy Analytics, global smartphone shipments will reach a modest 5 million units in 2019. Early 5G smartphone models will be expensive and available in limited volumes. Samsung, LG and Huawei will be the early 5G smartphone leaders this year, followed by Apple next year.

Ken Hyers, Director at Strategy Analytics, said, “We forecast global 5G smartphone shipments will reach a modest 5 million units in 2019. Less than 1% of all smartphones shipped worldwide will be 5G-enabled this year. Global 5G smartphone shipments are tiny for now, due to expensive device pricing, component bottlenecks, and restricted availability of active 5G networks.”

Ville Petteri-Ukonaho, Senior Analyst at Strategy Analytics, added, “Samsung will be the early 5G smartphone leader in the first half of 2019, due to initial launches across South Korea and the United States. We predict LG, Huawei, Xiaomi, Motorola and others will follow later in the year, followed by Apple iPhone with its first 5G model during the second half of 2020. The iPhone looks set to be at least a year behind Samsung in the 5G smartphone race and Apple must be careful not to fall too far behind.”

«

Obviously, it will ramp up next year, but Apple dumping Intel for Qualcomm may mean it’s not really losing out. It wasn’t first with 4G either, but that was at a time when growth was guaranteed. Also worth reading: Ron Amadeo’s article on why you shouldn’t buy a 5G smartphone (at least this year).
unique link to this extract

Revealed: Brexit group covered up its targeting of right-wing extremists • Channel 4 News

Channel 4 Investigations Team:

»

Leave.EU paid for Facebook adverts targeted at supporters of the National Front, the BNP [British National Party], Britain First and the EDL [English Defence League]. [All are extreme right-wing groups.]

But when the BBC asked for a response to a story they planned to run, Mr Banks sent a barrage of emails in an attempt to get the story dropped. Leaked emails, seen by Channel 4 News, show Mr Banks insisted the BBC’s accusation were “wholly wrong” – despite his own staff telling him the story was true.

One Leave.EU employee told him: “Those are our ads, we have targeted those groups since the beginning of the campaign as they gain most traction.” Another Leave.EU staffer proposed telling the BBC: “We pay for target ads for all political parties, not just right wing.”

But Mr Banks replied: “Not the right answer.” Instead, Mr Banks told the BBC: “It’s wholly wrong to say we have targeted extreme right parties… your report needs to reflect this or it will be biased and if we have to we will take whatever legal action we need.”

Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s Head of Communications, even appealed to the head of BBC Westminster, Robbie Gibb, in a further attempt to prevent the story from being run.

Mr Gibb is now Theresa May’s head of communications.

«

Gibb’s role in this isn’t necessarily about his attitude to Brexit; the BBC has become incredibly worried about libel and lawsuits after a number of high-profile errors. Wigmore’s response to Channel 4 was to accuse it of using “stolen and hacked emails”, which isn’t in any way a denial. Wigmore seemed upset when I pointed this out on Twitter.
unique link to this extract

Samsung Galaxy Fold screen breaking and flickering for some reviewers • CNBC

Todd Haselton:

»

Samsung’s $1,980 Galaxy Fold phone is breaking for some users after a day or two of use. A review unit given to CNBC by Samsung is also completely unusable after just two days of use.

The phone has only been given to gadget reviewers, but some of the screens appear to be disconnecting and permanently flashing on or off.

The Verge’s Dieter Bohn posted earlier on Wednesday that his phone appears to have a defective hinge with a “small bulge” that he can feel that’s causing the screen to “slightly distort.” Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says his “review unit is completely broken just two days in,” but noted he accidentally removed a protective film on the screen.

YouTube tech reviewer Marques Brownlee also removed the film and experienced a broken display. A Samsung spokesperson had warned on Wednesday not to remove the protective layer.

However, CNBC didn’t remove that layer, and our screen is now also failing to work properly.

«

It seems to have a really high failure rate among reviewers. A $2,000 phone that doesn’t last a week? This is going to be a Note 7 fiasco if this is repeated among buyers.
unique link to this extract

Why is everybody getting into wireless earbuds? • Tech.pinions

Carolina Milanesi:

»

There is no question about Apple’s success with AirPods. Apple managed to get AirPods across gender, age, and even income level despite their price point not putting them in the “most affordable” category. The experience is described by many as magical. In a study, we, at Creative Strategies, conducted with Experian when AirPods first came out, customer satisfaction was the highest for a new product from Apple. 98% of AirPods owners said they were very satisfied or satisfied. Remarkably, 82% said they were very satisfied. By comparison, when the iPhone came out in 2007, it held a 92% customer satisfaction level, iPad in 2010 had 92%, and Apple Watch in 2015 had 97%.

Assuming Microsoft and Amazon are just after the revenue that a good set of wireless earbuds could generate is a little shortsighted.

Ambient computing and voice-first are certainly big drivers for both Microsoft and Amazon. As computing power is spread out across devices and digital assistants are helping to bridge our experience across them, voice has grown in importance as an interface. Many consumers are, however, less comfortable shouting commands across a room or speaking to technology outside the “safety” of their own home. As voice moves into the office, the need and desire to be able to speak quietly to an assistant and hear it back is even more evident.

Wireless earbuds that can be worn comfortably throughout the day allow us to build a better relationship with our assistants and, even more so, build our reliance. Interestingly, I would argue, this is where AirPods have not been as successful as Apple might have hoped for but certainly, through no fault of their own but more due to some limitations Siri has.

For both Alexa and Cortana, who do not have a smartphone they can call their own home, wireless earbuds are a great way to be with a user in a more direct and personal way rather than being relegated into an app. As I often say, this is not about consumers having only one assistant but making the assistant they use more often more intelligent and therefore creating a vicious circle: the more I use it, the more it gets better, the more I want to use it.

«

On Wednesday I saw a street sweeper wearing a paid of AirPods. They’re the new Coca-Cola of headphones: same for everyone, just about priced for all, uniquely recognisable.
unique link to this extract

The most measured person in tech is running the most chaotic place on the internet • New York Times

Daisuke Wakabayashi:

»

On April 2, Bloomberg News published an article that painted a damning portrait of [YouTube boss Susan Wojcicki] and other YouTube brass — so focused on maximizing usage statistics that they looked the other way when employees raised concerns about the company’s recommendation system. Ms. Wojcicki seemed taken aback. In an April 7 interview, she said YouTube has not ignored its problem with hosting extreme and conspiracy-minded content. She said it was a large and complex issue and the company was starting to make a dent. She wasn’t defensive, but defiant and — most surprising for someone usually so measured — a little angry.

“It’s not like there is one lever we can pull and say, ‘Hey, let’s make all these changes,’ and everything would be solved,” Ms. Wojcicki said. “That’s not how it works.”

At one policy review meeting I observed in San Bruno, her methodical approach was on full display. In a narrow conference room lined with whiteboards and TV screens, she sat quietly with a dozen YouTube employees, watching a video called “Condom Challenge,” in which water-filled prophylactics fell onto people’s heads in extreme slow motion. Rather than bursting, the condoms inverted and engulfed their faces like a fishbowl. Ms. Wojcicki pondered whether the clip, which has nearly 15 million views, was merely juvenile or crossed the line to life-threatening. Like so much on YouTube, such “challenges” — when creators perform stunts and call out a friend to do the same — often begin as harmless memes, but morph into something more problematic.

Ms. Wojcicki and her staff considered their thicket of policies. A “dangerous” (risk of bodily harm) activity could stay on YouTube as long as no minors were involved. But “ultrahazardous” (risk of death) challenges would be removed. One staffer ventured that the condom challenge seemed to belong in the former category. Ms. Wojcicki disagreed.

«

To me, that’s classic missing-forest-for-trees oversight. The problem isn’t a few videos; it’s the whole recommendation system plus autoplay, as many have pointed out. But Wojcicki is trying to tweak at the edges, instead of considering it holistically.
unique link to this extract

Online pornography age checks to be mandatory in UK from 15 July • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

»

From that date, commercial providers of online pornography will be required to carry out “robust” age verification checks on users, in order to keep children from accessing adult content.

Websites that refuse to implement the checks face being blocked by UK internet service providers or having their access to payment services withdrawn.

The digital minister, Margot James, welcomed the introduction of the rules, saying: “Adult content is currently far too easy for children to access online. The introduction of mandatory age verification is a world first, and we’ve taken the time to balance privacy concerns with the need to protect children from inappropriate content. We want the UK to be the safest place in the world to be online, and these new laws will help us achieve this.”

Will Gardner, the chief executive of Childnet, said: “We hope that the introduction of this age verification will help in protecting children, making it harder for young people to accidentally come across online pornography, as well as bringing in the same protections that we use offline to protect children from age-restricted goods or services.”

Some campaigners have criticised the laws’ potential effectiveness. The government was forced to exempt large social media sites from the ban owing to fears that a strict implementation would result in sites including Twitter, Reddit, Imgur and Tumblr being blocked for adult content.

Additionally, concerns have been raised that the laws could result in the creation of a database of the UK’s porn viewers, which would pose a privacy problem if it were to ever leak.

«

Well this is going to cause a LOT of fun when, for all sorts of reasons, it goes wrong. Though you won’t hear from adults complaining they were blocked wrongly; only about kids wrongly allowed to access. (You can figure out why.)
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If they wanted to get there first over 26 miles, they’d do better to run. CC-licensed photo by Kaibab National Forest on Flickr

»You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email (arriving at about 0700GMT each weekday). You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.«

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

Why nearly every sport except long-distance running is fundamentally absurd • Slate

David Stipp:

»

being the absurdly self-enthralled species we are, we crowd into arenas and stadiums to marvel at our pathetic physical abilities as if they were something special. But there is one exception to our general paltriness: we’re the right honorable kings and queens of the planet when it comes to long-distance running.

The Wales marathon has helped demonstrate that. Its originator was a Welsh pub owner named Gordon Green. One day in 1979 he got into an argument with an equestrian friend about the relative strengths of men and horses as distance runners. Green insisted a human could beat a horse in a long race, and to prove his point he helped instigate the marathon in 1980. For the next 24 years, he found himself losing the argument as riders on horseback left human runners behind. But then it finally happened—in 2004 a British man named Huw Lobb won. Three years later Germany’s Florian Holzinger outran the horses, as did one other human contestant. The media loved it—a predictable farce had become a man-bites-dog story. Bookies were less enthused; they had to pay out on bets made at 16-to-1 odds favoring the horses.

The oddsmakers would have known better if they’d been following the work of Harvard anthropologist Daniel Lieberman and University of Utah biologist Dennis Bramble. They jointly proposed in a 2004 paper that we’re superlatively endowed by evolution to go long. Our long-striding legs are packed with springlike tendons, muscles, and ligaments that enable us to briefly store elastic energy as we come down on a foot and then recoil to help propel us forward. Tellingly, the most important of these springs, our big, strong Achilles tendons, aren’t found in early human precursors such as Australopithecus—it seems that the high-end tendons evolved along with other adaptations for distance running in the genus Homo when it appeared on the African savannah about two million years ago.

«

Fascinating (and still true; the article is from 2014). The reason seems to be our likely past as long-distance hunters and scavengers.
unique link to this extract

I wear fitness trackers all the time… And I still gained weight. Here’s why • CNet

Scott Stein:

»

I needed help when my weight went off track last year, and my watch wasn’t smart enough to notice, or care – even though it clearly had the data from my smart scale. That scale’s app would tell me my weight goals and ping me to keep on track, but when you’ve clearly fallen off the horse, it’s difficult to get back on. 

The fitness trackers and watches never suggested how to eat right, or pinged to try to make commitments to go to the gym. I have high blood pressure for which I take medication, but I never got pinged to take my measurements or my meds. 

Apps can do that, but there’s no easy on-boarding to help discover how the watches or trackers can keep tabs on that. The most personalized experience I had was with Omron’s blood pressure watch, which helped take measurements and provide a few insights, but it isn’t a full smartwatch or fitness tracker.

I use a CPAP at night when I sleep, but these trackers cannot show me the relationship between the hours I use it and how energetic I feel the next day. In short, I’m a mess, but the Apple Watch doesn’t see that. Neither do most watches…

…I reached out to Fitbit and Apple about this story. I haven’t heard back from Fitbit, but Apple recommended a number of fitness and coaching apps I could try. I’ve already dabbled in many of them, and it’s true, there’s stuff you could use to suit your needs.

«

Losing weight is hard; you have to exercise more and/or eat less, and it’s easy to fail. But a watch that bullied you about it would quickly get binned. This seems to be putting too much expectation on some machinery when the real motivation has to be in your head.
unique link to this extract

15 months of fresh hell inside Facebook • Wired

Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein:

»

Far from Davos, meanwhile, Facebook’s product engineers got down to the precise, algorithmic business of implementing Zuckerberg’s vision. If you want to promote trustworthy news for billions of people, you first have to specify what is trustworthy and what is news. Facebook was having a hard time with both. To define trustworthiness, the company was testing how people responded to surveys about their impressions of different publishers. To define news, the engineers pulled a classification system left over from a previous project—one that pegged the category as stories involving “politics, crime, or tragedy.”

That particular choice, which meant the algorithm would be less kind to all kinds of other news—from health and science to technology and sports—wasn’t something Facebook execs discussed with media leaders in Davos. And though it went through reviews with senior managers, not everyone at the company knew about it either. When one Facebook executive learned about it recently in a briefing with a lower-­level engineer, they say they “nearly fell on the fucking floor.”

The confusing rollout of meaningful social interactions—marked by internal dissent, blistering external criticism, genuine efforts at reform, and foolish mistakes—set the stage for Facebook’s 2018. This is the story of that annus horribilis, based on interviews with 65 current and former employees. It’s ultimately a story about the biggest shifts ever to take place inside the world’s biggest social network. But it’s also about a company trapped by its own pathologies and, perversely, by the inexorable logic of its own recipe for success.

Facebook’s powerful network effects have kept advertisers from fleeing, and overall user numbers remain healthy if you include people on Insta­gram, which Facebook owns. But the company’s original culture and mission kept creating a set of brutal debts that came due with regularity over the past 16 months. The company floundered, dissembled, and apologized. Even when it told the truth, people didn’t believe it.

«

Terrific work, assembled by talking to 65 former and current staff. But what a way to define “news”.
unique link to this extract

Samsung fights back in EU as iPhone XR tops UK charts • Kantar Worldpanel

»

The latest smartphone OS data from Kantar, for the three months ending March 2019, shows Android accounted for 79.3% of all smartphone sales across the five major European markets.  Android’s strong performance was primarily thanks to Samsung holding share steady and solid gains from Huawei and Xiaomi.  iOS saw its share fall by two percentage points to 20.1% in Europe. However, the American market proved a brighter spot for Apple, as it boosted its US share in the quarter to 45.5%, an increase of 6.5 percentage points on the year.   

Dominic Sunnebo, Global Director for Kantar, comments, “Samsung’s share of the big five European markets held firm in the latest quarter, aided by something of a renaissance in Italy and Spain.  The launch of its flagship Galaxy S10 series also helped the manufacturer to consolidate its number one position in Europe, and it should expect sales to continue well into the next quarter. 

«

The XR as bestseller, and the increase in share, somewhat puts the line that Apple’s finished to light. But note that Kantar doesn’t indicate sales volume, only share.
unique link to this extract

PSA: Unshaky is a simple Mac utility that solves most MacBook keyboard problems • 9to5 Mac

Ben Lovejoy:

»

Unshaky is a simple Mac utility that monitors keyboard input, and then blocks anything it thinks is a double-press caused by a keyboard fault.

The app works by asking you to register it as an accessibility device. It then registers each keypress and blocks any repeated press within the next 40 milliseconds. The delay is user-configurable, with the developer recommending you stick with the default unless it doesn’t solve the problem, and then try first 60ms and then 80ms.

The app allows you to either set a universal timeout, or to configure them individually for each key.

You can see Unshaky at work. If you tap the menubar icon, it shows you how many keypresses have been dismissed – and you can also open a live debugging window.

Accessibility apps are potentially very dangerous, especially ones which control keyboard usage, as they could easily be used to install a keylogger. However, Unshaky is open-source with the code available for inspection on Github.

I’ve been using it for a week now, and it has almost completely solved my issues. I’m no longer seeing any doubt-activations. As both my spacebar and CMD keys were affected, I initially found that it was blocking Spotlight (CMD-Space), but there’s a checkbox for an experimental feature to cure that, and it works for me.

«

But doesn’t work to reveal keys that you pressed but which don’t register. Hard to know what proportion of problems that is. Also, would the number of Unshaky downloads be a pointer to incidence of this trouble?
unique link to this extract

Notre Dame: YouTube’s new fact check tool attached an article about 9/11 to videos of the fire • Buzzfeed News

Ryan Broderick:

»

As the Notre Dame Cathedral went up in flames on Monday, YouTube flagged livestreams of the incident as possible sources of misinformation and then started showing people articles about the 9/11 attacks.

…Several news outlets quickly started livestreaming the fire on YouTube. However, underneath several of them was a small gray panel titled “September 11 attacks,” which contained a snippet from an Encyclopedia Britannica article about 9/11.

The feature is part of a larger rollout of tools and disclaimers to prevent users from consuming misinformation on the platform.

If a user clicked the gray box, they would be taken to the full article about the US terror attack.

BuzzFeed News found at least three livestreams of the Notre Dame fire from major news outlets with the 9/11 disclaimer. The disclaimer was then removed, one by one, after several minutes. But by then, Twitter users had taken notice.

It’s unclear how the Notre Dame livestreams triggered the panel, but a spokesperson for YouTube said the “information panels” with links to third-party sources like Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia are activated by an algorithm.

«

An algorithm, you say? In the words of Janine Gibson, former Buzzfeed News editor, “oh ffs get some editors”. Human ones, that is.
unique link to this extract

3D mapping of Notre Dame will help restoration • GPS World

Tracy Cozzens:

»

Detailed 3D maps of the iconic and historic Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris hold out hope for accurate reconstruction after it was devastated by a massive fire April 15. Both the ceiling and the spire were destroyed, as well as internal woodwork.

But the information to restore the cathedral is abundant. Besides photos, art historian Andrew Tallon used laser scanners to create an immaculately accurate model of the cathedral, as reported in this National Geographic feature:

»

Laser scans, with their exquisite precision, don’t miss a thing. Mounted on a tripod, the laser beam sweeps around the choir of a cathedral, for example, and measures the distance between the scanner and every point it hits. Each measurement is represented by a colored dot, which cumulatively create a three-dimensional image of the cathedral. “If you’ve done your job properly,” says Tallon, the scan is “accurate to within five millimeters [.5 centimeter].”…

Tallon figured out how to knit the laser scans together to make them manageable and beautiful. Each time he makes a scan, he also takes a spherical panoramic photograph from the same spot that captures the same three-dimensional space. He maps that photograph onto the laser-generated dots of the scan; each dot becomes the color of the pixel in that location in the photograph.

As a result, the stunningly realistic panoramic photographs are amazingly accurate. At Notre Dame, he took scans from more than 50 locations in and around the cathedral—collecting more than one billion points of data.

«

Another source comes from a video game company. Immaculate models of the cathedral were collected for the creation of the best-selling “Assassin’s Creed: Unity,” where the hero/player is able to climb both the outside and inside of the massive edifice.

«

File this under “unexpected benefits of video games”.
unique link to this extract

Apple planning Luna display-like desktop extension feature for macOS 10.15, codenamed ‘Sidecar’ • 9to5 Mac

Guilherme Rambo:

»

According to people familiar with the development of macOS 10.15 – the next major version of Apple’s desktop OS – the new system will have a feature that allows users to send any window of any app to an external display. The external display can be an actual external display connected to the Mac or even an iPad.

The new feature – called “Sidecar” internally – can be accessed via a simple menu. This new menu will be opened by hovering over the green “maximize” button in a Mac app window for a split second. The menu will have options for making the window fullscreen, tiling and moving to external displays, including the user’s iPads and external displays connected to the Mac. Selecting one of the display options moves the current window to the selected external display or iPad, in fullscreen.

Users with an iPad that supports Apple Pencil will also be able to draw with the Pencil on iPad when it’s being used as an external display for the Mac, effectively turning the iPad into a Wacom-like tablet. Engineers are also working on options that will allow windows to be easily snapped to one side of the screen, similar to a feature that already exists on Windows.

«

This actually sounds pretty useful. But what does it say about Apple’s view of Mac users and iPads? Is the iPad a slave here, or what?
unique link to this extract

Exclusive: what to expect from Sony’s next-gen PlayStation • Wired

Peter Rubin:

»

The AMD chip also includes a custom unit for 3D audio that Cerny thinks will redefine what sound can do in a videogame. “As a gamer,” he says, “it’s been a little bit of a frustration that audio did not change too much between PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. With the next console the dream is to show how dramatically different the audio experience can be when we apply significant amounts of hardware horsepower to it.”

The result, Cerny says, will make you feel more immersed in the game as sounds come at you from above, from behind, and from the side. While the effect will require no external hardware—it will work through TV speakers and visual surround sound—he allows that the “gold standard” will be headphone audio.

One of the words Cerny uses to describe the audio may be a familiar to those who follow virtual reality: presence, that feeling of existing inside a simulated environment. When he mentions it, I ask him about PlayStation VR, the peripheral system that has sold more than 4 million units since its 2016 release. Specifically, I ask if there will be a next-gen PSVR to go alongside this next console. “I won’t go into the details of our VR strategy today,” he says, “beyond saying that VR is very important to us and that the current PSVR headset is compatible with the new console.”

So. New CPU, new GPU, the ability to deliver unprecedented visual and audio effects in a game (and maybe a PSVR sequel at some point). That’s all great, but there’s something else that excites Cerny even more. Something that he calls “a true game changer,” something that more than anything else is “the key to the next generation.” It’s a hard drive.

«

The hard drive is an SSD (long overdue); it will also do 8K, which should future-proof it, and help sell Sony TVs. The nothing-much about VR tells a story – the dog that isn’t barking.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.