If you use Slack at work, maybe consider that everything in it can be saved.. and might prove embarrassing or even expensive. CC-licensed photo by Gustavo da Cunha Pimenta 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. Don’t worry, nearly October. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google draws House antitrust scrutiny of internet protocol • WSJ

John D. McKinnon and Robert McMillan:

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The Justice Department is aware of concerns over the protocol change and has recently received complaints, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The new standard would encrypt internet traffic to improve security, which could help prevent hackers from spoofing or snooping on websites.

But the new standard could alter the internet’s competitive landscape, cable and wireless companies say. They fear being shut out from much of user data if browser users move wholesale to this new standard, which many internet service providers don’t currently support. Service providers also worry that Google may compel its Chrome browser users to switch to Google services that support the protocol, something Google says it has no intention of doing.

“Right now, each internet service provider has insight into the traffic of their users, and that’s going to shift” as a result of the change, said Andy Ellis, chief security officer at Akamai Technologies Inc., which provides internet services to corporations, but doesn’t support the new standard.

Google, which has vast troves of consumer data thanks to its domination of search, plans to begin testing the navigation protocol with about 1% of its Chrome browser users next month, a first step toward more widespread adoption of the new technology.

Google says that it is supporting the new technology to improve users’ security and privacy and that its browser changes will leave consumers in charge of who shares their internet surfing data.

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As the story explains, this is DNS-over-HTTPS, and the ISPs are furious about it because it will mean they can’t peek at peoples’ web traffic to insert “targeted” ads.
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NPD forecasts growth in consumer tech through 2021 • NPD

Stephen Baker (who has been predicting consumer tech trends for ages):

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Key trends to watch:
Big segments continue to dominate
• Core growth areas, including wireless headphones, smart home products, smart speakers, smartwatches, and gaming accessories and hardware (e.g., desktop and notebook PCs and monitors), are expected to triple in revenue from 2016 to 2021, while tech’s top three categories, notebooks (not including gaming), TVs, and tablets, will grow approximately 5 percent. That said, the revenue total for the top three sellers is $10B more than core growth areas — so the success of these big segments is especially critical to the industry.

Niches can drive growth in the biggest and the smallest categories
• In a mature market, unit growth is unlikely, since there aren’t a lot of new customers to sell to. The biggest opportunity is to find underserved niches.

New tech starts to impact growth in 2021
• New and emerging technologies we are starting to see in limited availability today will begin to have an impact by the end of 2021. Products like next-generation foldable screens, 5G, AR and others will have an impact in the not-so-distant future.

Post-2021, the technology industry will undergo radical change
• What trends drive the inflection points?
1: The screen: whether foldable or transparent screens will be everywhere
2: The intelligent assistant: software that knows me and can help me with everyday tasks will drive tech purchases
3: Do-it-for-me devices: products that are intelligent and can do things for me will interest consumers
4: The connection: Inside the home, everything will be connected
5: Connectivity: connectivity to devices, to the cloud, and to the edge will be key.

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Transparent screens I could just about go for; foldable still feels like a stretch.
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The anxiety-inducing peril of old Slack posts • NY Mag

Brian Feldman:

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A lesser known fact about Slack is that its name is, according to the company’s founder Stewart Butterfield, an acronym. It stands for “Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge.” Not menacing at all.

The software lives up to its name. If you’re a certain type of masochist, you can drop into your new employer’s Slack and search your name (from NYMag’s Slack chat on August 19, 2014: “who’s brian feldman”). In 2016, my colleague Max Read had his innocuous Slack joke about Hulk Hogan read out in court during the lawsuit that eventually bankrupted Gawker Media. The communication logs were included in the discovery process, a good demonstration of why lawyers would always rather talk on the phone.

Writing for New York’s nascent tech vertical at the time, Read assessed, “There’s a bible’s worth of casual (or joking) shit-talking I’ve done in Gawker’s chat archives, some of which would make me very uncomfortable (if not unemployable) if it got out — a wealth of gossip and prattle I should have just conducted in person.” Unfortunately, the lessons of Hogan were soon forgotten.

Shortly after word got out that Bankoff had pledged to merge Vox’s and New York’s Slack channels, the staff of New York’s defunct tech vertical, Select All, agreed that we would request that chief product officer Daniel Hallac, our Slack admin, wipe the #select-all chatroom. (Slack has a function that auto-wipes messages on a regular interval, but in a workplace context, I think most have the understandable instinct to retain as much data as possible.) “I don’t think I can nuke it entirely but definitely make it hard to access,” he said. I’ll take it.

I will not say what was contained within, nor, honestly, can I even recall specific comments. But there were certainly ungenerous through lines in our insular chat bubble. There were comments aimed at competitors that were legitimate critiques. I’m not too proud to admit that others were remarks borne of petty jealousy. Most were probably a bit of both. Some comments were probably extremely funny, incredible, solid-gold quips. The thought of those targets combing through our Slack archives is so remote a possibility that it’s easy to put it out of mind. What fools we were.

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Study proves the FCC’s core justification for killing net neutrality was false • VICE

Karl Bode:

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For years, big ISPs and Trump FCC boss Ajit Pai have told anyone who’d listen that the FCC’s net neutrality rules, passed in 2015 and repealed last year in a flurry of controversy and alleged fraud, dramatically stifled broadband investment across the United States. Repeal the rules, Pai declared, and US broadband investment would explode.

“Under the heavy-handed regulations adopted by the prior Commission in 2015, network investment declined for two straight years, the first time that had happened outside of a recession in the broadband era,” Pai told Congress last year at an oversight hearing.

“We now have a regulatory framework in place that is encouraging the private sector to make the investments necessary to bring better, faster, and cheaper broadband to more Americans,” Pai proclaimed.

But a new study from George Washington University indicates that Pai’s claims were patently false. The study took a closer look at the earnings reports and SEC filings of 8,577 unique companies from Q1 2009 through Q3 2018 to conclude that the passage and repeal of the rules had no meaningful impact on broadband investment. Several hundred of these were telecom companies.

“The results of the paper are clear and should be both unsurprising and uncontroversial,” The researchers said. “The key finding is there were no impacts on telecommunication industry investment from the net neutrality policy changes. Neither the 2010 or 2015 US net neutrality rule changes had any causal impact on telecommunications investment.”

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Shocked, shocked I tell you.
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The internet is overrun with images of child sexual abuse. What went wrong? • The New York Times

Michael Keller and Gabriel Dance:

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More than a decade ago, when the reported number was less than a million, the proliferation of the explicit imagery had already reached a crisis point. Tech companies, law enforcement agencies and legislators in Washington responded, committing to new measures meant to rein in the scourge. Landmark legislation passed in 2008.

Yet the explosion in detected content kept growing — exponentially.

An investigation by The New York Times found an insatiable criminal underworld that had exploited the flawed and insufficient efforts to contain it. As with hate speech and terrorist propaganda, many tech companies failed to adequately police sexual abuse imagery on their platforms, or failed to cooperate sufficiently with the authorities when they found it.

Law enforcement agencies devoted to the problem were left understaffed and underfunded, even as they were asked to handle far larger caseloads.

The Justice Department, given a major role by Congress, neglected even to write mandatory monitoring reports, nor did it appoint a senior executive-level official to lead a crackdown. And the group tasked with serving as a federal clearinghouse for the imagery — the go-between for the tech companies and the authorities — was ill equipped for the expanding demands.

A paper recently published in conjunction with that group, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, described a system at “a breaking point,” with reports of abusive images “exceeding the capabilities of independent clearinghouses and law enforcement to take action.” It suggested that future advancements in machine learning might be the only way to catch up with the criminals.

«

US tech companies copy the blame: “The companies have known for years that their platforms were being co-opted by predators, but many of them essentially looked the other way, according to interviews and emails detailing the companies’ activities.” Tumblr is also indicated as a big source of trouble.

(To the obvious question: is it more people, or just more images? “I think that people were always there, but the access is so easy,” said Lt. John Pizzuro, a task force commander in New Jersey. “You got nine million people in the state of New Jersey. Based upon statistics, we can probably arrest 400,000 people.”)
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The failed political promise of Silicon Valley • The New Republic

Kim Phillips-Fein reviews Margaret O’Mara’s book “The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America”:

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In 1952, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote an essay titled “The Machine Breakers” for the journal Past and Present, in which he sought to present Luddism and the wrecking of industrial machinery as a reasonable tactic at a certain point in the development of the British labor movement, rather than an irrational and futile gesture. Workers, he argued, were hardly possessed by a passionate and unthinking fury that led them to destroy the mechanical looms and ricks. Instead, they did so in particular and targeted ways in order to augment their bargaining power at specific moments.

One is hard-pressed to find machine-breakers today; the writers chronicling their agonized efforts to quit the iPhone and the tech moguls panicking about the effects of screen time on their kids’ brains are the closest we’ve come so far. Still, The Code brings to mind Hobsbawm’s arguments about the politics of technology. For it suggests that the widespread discomfort with the technological regime is not only about the machines themselves. We live in a moment when the political consensus of the ’80s and ’90s is being called into question.

Faith in unregulated free markets has led to the dominion of the rich; the disinvestment in the public sector has led to the hollowing out of the institutions upon which democratic society rests. The tech industry seemed at one point to make material many dreams of the free market. It provided an image of a highly competitive economy that rewarded intelligence and daring, funded by venture capitalists with an ownership stake in the companies they built. As people challenge the social certitudes that rose in the ’80s, the slicker, brighter future that machines promised looks shakier too. This deepening unease about technology—and the spaces that have nurtured it, like Silicon Valley—is testament to the shifting politics of our time.

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The new productivity • Benedict Evans

Evans on how everything’s becoming workflowed now:

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a few years ago a consultant told me that for half of their jobs they told people using Excel to use a database, and for the other half they told people using a database to use Excel. There’s clearly a point in the life of any company where you should move from the list you made in a spreadsheet to the richer tools you can make in coolproductivityapp.io. But when that tool is managing a thousand people, you might want to move it into a dedicated service. After all, even Craigslist started as an actual email list and ended up moving to a database. But then, at a certain point, if that task is specific to your company and central to what you do, you might well end up unbundling Salesforce or SAP or whatever that vertical is and go back to the beginning. 

Of course, this is the cycle of life of enterprise software. IBM mainframes bundled the adding machines [from offices of the 1950s], and also bundled up filing cabinets and telephones. SAP unbundled IBM. But I’d suggest there are two specific sets of things that are happening now. 

First, every application category is getting rebuilt as a web application, allowing continuous development, deployment, version tracking and collaboration. As Frame.io (video!) and OnShape (3D CAD!) show, there’s almost no native PC application that can’t be rebuilt as a web app. In parallel, everything now has to be native to collaboration, and so the model of a binary file saved to a file share will generally go away over time (this could be done with a native PC app, but in practice generally won’t be). So, we have some generational changes, and that also tends to create new companies.

But second, and much more important – everyone is online now. The reason we’re looking at nursing or truck drivers or oil workers is that an entire generation now grew up after the web, and grew up with smartphones, and assumes without question that every part of their life can be done with a smartphone. In 1999 hiring ‘roughnecks’ in a mobile app would have sounded absurd – now it sounds absurd if you’re not.

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Will the Ukraine scandal be Trump’s downfall? • NY Mag

Jonathan Chait:

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Giuliani’s original goal was to prod Ukraine to turn over evidence that would exonerate Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign manager. Manafort had worked in Ukraine for a pro-Russian party, then gone on to manage Trump’s campaign while maintaining secret contacts with a Russian intelligence officer, and he was helping Trump in 2018 by withholding cooperation from special counsel Robert Mueller. Giuliani was attempting to prove that Manafort had been set up by Ukrainians working with the Clinton campaign and that — even more bizarrely — Ukrainians had stolen Clinton’s emails.

If these theories sound fantastical, they are. But just as Watergate demystified the White House staff as bumblers, the Ukraine scandal has revealed Trump and his allies are suffering from Fox News poisoning. The bizarre conspiracy theories that the rest of us took to be devious propaganda had a profound impact on the president and his inner circle. They are not-very-bright guys who also happen to be genuinely nuts.

But the mission followed a coherent strategic goal. Trump thrives on cynicism, excusing his misconduct with the assumption everybody does it — simultaneously condoning his own failings while dragging his antagonists down to his level. His election required many Americans to believe his opponent had engaged in criminal behavior. He has instinctively replicated those conditions in his quasi-campaign against Mueller as well as against the Democrats in 2020.

In the course of his work, Giuliani made contact with Ukrainian prosecutors and hit upon yet another conspiracy theory. The story held that, during the Obama administration, Joe Biden had called for the firing of a prosecutor who was on the tail of a Ukrainian firm that had hired his son Hunter. This theory, too, was wrong. Hunter Biden had gone to work for a Ukrainian energy firm as part of a generally sleazy practice of trading on his father’s name. And it was true that Joe Biden spearheaded demands to fire a prosecutor. But the prosecutor was not investigating Hunter Biden’s firm at that time. And the vice-president’s call to fire the prosecutor, who was notoriously ineffectual at rooting out corruption, placed him squarely on the side of human-rights activists, democratic countries, the IMF, the World Bank, and other international do-gooders.

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It’s amazing what nonsense Guiliani, and Trump, are willing to believe. It’s as if their grasp on reality long ago became unmoored. But as the writeup also makes clear, the vice-president Mike Pence almost surely knew about the illegal actions too. Can they both be impeached?
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iOS 13 hidden features: mute Mail threads, silence unknown callers, reading goals, low data mode and more • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

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Apple this week debuted iOS 13 with a ton of updates, including a new dark mode option, major performance improvements, faster Face ID, simpler photo editing tools and a new Photos interface, a Sign In With Apple Privacy feature, a swipe-based keyboard, and tons more.

In addition to these features that made it into Apple’s keynote event, there are dozens if not hundreds of smaller new changes and tweaks that are included in iOS 13. Below, we’ve rounded up a comprehensive list of new and notable “hidden” features in iOS 13.

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These are quite fun (obviously only really useful if you run iOS..), though some seem to be device-specific: using an iPhone X, I don’t get the “Facetime Attention Correction” which would make you seem to be looking at the caller even though you aren’t.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Publicity still of the Hornsea One offshore wind farm, via Ørsted. One third the output of a nuclear power plant, but cheaper and on time.

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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

AI equal with human experts in medical diagnosis, study finds • The Guardian

Nicola Davis:

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Artificial intelligence is on a par with human experts when it comes to making medical diagnoses based on images, a review has found.

The potential for artificial intelligence in healthcare has caused excitement, with advocates saying it will ease the strain on resources, free up time for doctor-patient interactions and even aid the development of tailored treatment. Last month the government announced £250m of funding for a new NHS artificial intelligence laboratory.

However, experts have warned the latest findings are based on a small number of studies, since the field is littered with poor-quality research.

One burgeoning application is the use of AI in interpreting medical images – a field that relies on deep learning, a sophisticated form of machine learning in which a series of labelled images are fed into algorithms that pick out features within them and learn how to classify similar images. This approach has shown promise in diagnosis of diseases from cancers to eye conditions.

However questions remain about how such deep learning systems measure up to human skills. Now researchers say they have conducted the first comprehensive review of published studies on the issue, and found humans and machines are on a par.

Prof Alastair Denniston, at the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS foundation trust and a co-author of the study, said the results were encouraging but the study was a reality check for some of the hype about AI.

Dr Xiaoxuan Liu, the lead author of the study and from the same NHS trust, agreed. “There are a lot of headlines about AI outperforming humans, but our message is that it can at best be equivalent,” she said.

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“Can at best be equivalent” isn’t quite the message that those pushing the Singularity were hoping for, one feels. Then again, this is after only seven years. The problem is always one of trust: how do you query the process by which a decision was reached?
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The world’s largest offshore wind farm is nearly complete • CNN

Hanna Ziady:

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The world’s largest offshore wind farm is taking shape off the east coast of Britain, a landmark project that demonstrates one way to combat climate change at scale.

Located 120 kilometers (75 miles) off England’s Yorkshire coast, Hornsea One will produce enough energy [1.2 gigawatts, twice as large as the next-biggest which is in the Irish Sea] to supply 1 million UK homes with clean electricity when it is completed in 2020.

The project spans an area that’s bigger than the Maldives or Malta, and is located farther out to sea than any other wind farm. It consists of 174 seven-megawatt wind turbines that are each 100 metres tall. The blades have a circumference of 75 meters, and cover an area bigger than the London Eye observation wheel as they turn.

Just a single rotation of one of the turbines can power the average home for an entire day, according to Stefan Hoonings, senior project manager at Orsted (DOGEF), the Danish energy company that built the farm.

The project will take the United Kingdom closer to hitting its target of deriving a third of the country’s electricity from offshore wind by 2030.

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Meanwhile the new 3.2GW nuclear plant at Hinkley Point C looks likely to cost an extra £2.9bn (to £22bn) and be late: had been promised online in 2017, now looks like 2025. Hornsea One, cost about £4.2bn, and which has delivered on time, is part of four such which could generate a total of 6GW.
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Global smartwatch shipments projected to reach 80.55m units in 2020 • TrendForce

Jason Tsai:

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The global shipments of smartwatches in 2019 are estimated to total around 62.63 million units, according to the latest tracking analysis from the research firm TrendForce. Looking ahead to 2020, smartwatch sales will benefit from the lower prices of the earlier versions of the Apple Watch devices and the releases of new smartwatch models from other branded device manufacturers. TrendForce forecasts that the global smartphone shipments in 2020 will grow by 28.6% YoY to around 80.55 million units. The total shipments of the Apple Watch devices for the same year are also forecasted to grow by 21.8% YoY to around 34 million units.

“The strong demand for the Apple Watch has been the chief growth driver of the whole smartwatch market,” said Jason Tsai, TrendForce analyst for wearable devices. Tsai pointed out that Apple adjusted the prices of the Series 1 models in conjunction with the launch of the Series 2 models. The move helped galvanize the overall sales of the Apple Watch devices.

“Apple’s success in the smartwatch market is based on an effective pricing strategy and a proactive approach to the development of new products,” Tsai added. “The price cut for the Series 1 models, in particular, has been a significant help in boosting shipments.”

The upcoming release of the Series 5 models will again accompany by a price reduction for the Series 3 models. Furthermore, new products and perhaps new brands will soon be entering the market.

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“Perhaps new brands”. Well, maybe. But it’s not one where they’re making much, if any, money. Same as tablets.
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Ring Fetch will track your dog using Amazon’s new low-energy IoT protocol • Android Police

Manuel Vonau:

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while protocols such as 5G, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi exist for IoT devices, they can become complicated and expensive pretty fast and only go so far. A specific network for low-cost, low-bandwidth connections is missing for devices that would measure their battery life in years, not days if they could use low-energy standards. By transmitting data on the 900MHz spectrum, Amazon Sidewalk aims to be the answer to this problem.

Amazon envisions to use this protocol for water sensors in your garden, even if they’re far removed from your Wi-Fi’s range, or for your mailbox, letting you know when your important letter has been delivered. Since the devices establish a peer-to-peer network and offer great range, cities should quickly be blanketed with coverage once Amazon starts offering products.

The first reference design is going to be the Ring Fetch. It’s a dog tracker that uses Sidewalk and sends you notifications when your dog leaves a geofenced perimeter. There is no word on exact hardware specifications, battery life, or size yet, but more details will be available next year.

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Sidewalk is a mesh network technology; Amazon says in its tests it sent 700 Sidewalk-enabled devices to Ring employees, family and friends and “in just three weeks had the sprawling, densely populated L.A. Basin fully covered”.

Hmm. I’d like to see a bit more detail on what “fully covered” means, and what geographical area they really covered. The LA Basin can mean 3.8m people (Greater LA), or 12.8m (LA metropolitan) or 18.1 (larger metropolitan region). But low-power IoT with range is always welcome. Probably more welcome than Google’s Sidewalk, which hasn’t won many friends.
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The heat death of 5G • DIGITS to DOLLARS

Jonathan Goldberg:

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Yes, 5G is coming and data rates will improve, but we, the mobile industry, still have a lot of work to do. We could regale you with litanies of woe about roaming and hand-offs, or belabor the small cell backhaul density logjam. But perhaps the best example of roadblocks to 5G is much easier to grasp: heat.

5G phones get hot. Really hot. Probably not hot enough to ignite your battery (probably), but enough to generate a definite burning sensation in your pants pockets. At Mobile World Congress in February, we spoke with an engineer from Sony who was demo’ing a phone (behind glass) that was clocking 1 Gbps speeds. Wow, fast. We asked the engineer why it was not going faster and he said “It overheats.” A good solid answer, from a nuts-and-bolts-and-antenna person. We will wage any amount that at next year’s show, no one on the floor will be as open about this problem.

The big improvement in data rates for 5G will only come with mmWave radios. This is a whole new spectrum band that allows for really high data rates (again, let’s set aside the whole densification issue for now). The trouble is that mmWave radios generate a lot of heat. To greatly oversimplify, mmWave frequencies are pretty close to microwave frequencies, as in the thing we use to reheat our lunches.

From some of our very recent industry conversations we know that the handset industry is using a tried-and-tested method for dealing with this problem – ignoring it and hoping it goes away. The whole issue strikes us as one of those issues where middle management really does not want to raise the subject with senior management who have wrapped themselves so tightly around the 5G flagpole. “Uh boss, your pants are literally on fire.”

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Don’t know about you, but I honestly don’t see the point in 5G. Like, at all. Improve coverage everywhere first, perhaps? Who actually needs 1Gbps when mobile at the moment? Isn’t whatever that application is a thing that we’ll only have the terminals for in five to ten years? At present, the biggest use of 5G appears to be demonstrating that you have 5G speeds. I’ve seen nobody who has been able to do anything better with it.
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Basic apps are using Play Store loophole to overcharge users • Android Authority

Hadlee Simons:

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You don’t have to pay to get basic apps such as calculators and QR code scanners on the Play Store, but Google has pulled some basic apps for exploiting its trial period system.

Sophos discovered over a dozen apps that provide very rudimentary functionality, such as QR code scanning, photo editing, and GIF creation. But the security firm found that their sole purpose was actually to over-charge users.

According to the security firm, these so-called fleeceware apps take advantage of the Play Store’s trial period functionality in order to charge unsuspecting users. Sophos notes that once the app’s trial period ends, users are often charged an exorbitant subscription fee, ranging from €105 to €220 ($115 to $241).

The company says these developers routinely charge users, even if you’ve uninstalled the app before the end of the trial period.

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So the subscription scammers are there on Google Play as well as the App Store. “Fleeceware” is a lovely portmanteau. Kudos to Google for removing them. (I would have linked to the ZDNet original, but it was too wordy.)
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Inside the campaign that tried to compromise Tibetans’ iOS and Android phones • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

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Attackers from a group dubbed Poison Carp used one-click exploits and convincing social engineering to target iOS and Android phones belonging to Tibetan groups in a six-month campaign, researchers said. The attacks used mobile platforms to achieve a major escalation of the decade-long espionage hacks threatening the embattled religious community, researchers said.

The report was published on Tuesday by Citizen Lab, a group at the University of Toronto’s Munk School that researches hacks on activists, ethnic groups, and others. The report said the attackers posed as New York Times journalists, Amnesty International researchers, and others to engage in conversations over the WhatsApp messenger with individuals from the Private Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the Central Tibetan Administration, the Tibetan Parliament, and Tibetan human rights groups. In the course of the conversation, the attackers would include links to websites that hosted “one-click” exploits—meaning they required only a single click to infect vulnerable phones.

None of the attacks Citizen Lab observed was successful, because the vulnerabilities exploited had already been patched on the iOS and Android devices that were attacked. Still, the attackers succeeded in getting eight of the 15 people they targeted to open malicious links, and bit.ly-shortened attack pages targeting iPhone users were clicked on 140 times. The research and coordination that went into bringing so many targeted people to the brink of exploitation suggest that the attackers behind the campaign—which ran from November 2018 to last May—were skilled and well-organized.

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This is separate from the attack reported by Google Project Zero to target Uighyur Muslims, also by China, but has lots of the same malware families. Citizen Lab says the Android malware used “hadn’t previously been documented” (bit failed nonetheless). Read Goodin’s writeup (or the CL original): this was very sophisticated.
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WeWork puts three businesses up for sale • The Information

Cory Weinberg:

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The three business WeWork will look to sell are Managed by Q, which WeWork bought in May; Conductor, which WeWork bought last spring; and Meetup, which WeWork bought in late 2017. WeWork spent nearly $500m combined in cash and stock for the three firms, according to its IPO filing. But that price reflected what the value then put on WeWork’s stock, which is likely to have come down since then. WeWork in recent weeks had reportedly slashed its proposed IPO valuation to as low as $15bn, from its last private fundraising valuation of $47bn.

The three companies have revenue in the “hundreds of millions” annually, one of the people said, but lose money. The total expenses of the three companies—along with another acquired firm, Flatiron School—was $81m in the first half of the year, according to WeWork’s IPO filing. That only includes a portion of Managed by Q’s expenses because the deal was completed in May.

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And so the great unwinding begins.
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A battery with a twist • ETH Zurich

»

Following the design of commercial batteries, this new type of battery is built in layers like a sandwich. However, it marks the first time that researchers have used flexible components to keep the whole battery bendable and stretchable. “To date, no one has employed exclusively flexible components as systematically as we have in creating a lithium-ion battery,” Markus Niederberger [professor for multifunctional materials at ETH Zurich] says.

The two current collectors for the anode and the cathode consist of bendable polymer composite that contains electrically conductive carbon and that also serves as the outer shell. On the interior surface of the composite, the researchers applied a thin layer of micronsized silver flakes. Due to the way the flakes overlap like roof tiles, they don’t lose contact with one another when the elastomer is stretched. This guarantees the conductivity of the current collector even if it is subjected to extensive stretching. And in the event that the silver flakes do in fact lose contact with each other, the electrical current can still flow through the carbon-containing composite, albeit more weakly…

…More and more applications for a battery like this are emerging every day. Well-known manufacturers of mobile phones are vying with each other to produce devices with foldable screens. Other possibilities include rollable displays for computers, smartwatches and tablets, or functional textiles that contain bendable electronics – and all of these require a flexible power supply. “For instance, you could sew our battery right into the clothing,” Niederberger says. What’s important is, in the event of battery leakage, to ensure that the liquids that come out cause no damage. This is where the team’s electrolyte offers a considerable advantage.

However, Niederberger stresses that more research is necessary to optimise the flexible battery before they consider commercialising it.

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Of course gadget sites are saying “ooh, foldable phones more foldable!” but I’d say the application is much more in clothing, or devices that have to be shaped or flexible. Smartphones, even foldable ones, are a solved problem, relatively.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

OK, iOS 13 won’t ask for permission over this sort of Bluetooth. CC-licensed photo by Carlos Merigo 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Revealed: how TikTok censors videos that do not please Beijing • The Guardian

Another great scoop by Alex Hern:

»

The guidelines divide banned material into two categories: some content is marked as a “violation”, which sees it deleted from the site entirely, and can lead to a user being banned from the service. But lesser infringements are marked as “visible to self”, which leaves the content up but limits its distribution through TikTok’s algorithmically-curated feed.

This latter enforcement technique means that it can be unclear to users whether they have posted infringing content, or if their post simply has not been deemed compelling enough to be shared widely by the notoriously unpredictable algorithm.

The bulk of the guidelines covering China are contained in a section governing “hate speech and religion”.

In every case, they are placed in a context designed to make the rules seem general purpose, rather than specific exceptions. A ban on criticism of China’s socialist system, for instance, comes under a general ban of “criticism/attack towards policies, social rules of any country, such as constitutional monarchy, monarchy, parliamentary system, separation of powers, socialism system, etc”.

Another ban covers “demonisation or distortion of local or other countries’ history such as May 1998 riots of Indonesia, Cambodian genocide, Tiananmen Square incidents”.

A more general purpose rule bans “highly controversial topics, such as separatism, religion sects conflicts, conflicts between ethnic groups, for instance exaggerating the Islamic sects conflicts, inciting the independence of Northern Ireland, Republic of Chechnya, Tibet and Taiwan and exaggerating the ethnic conflict between black and white”.

«

The spread of Chinese apps has concomitant risks to what we are shown about the world around us. Is it “censorship” or “moderation”?
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Everything Amazon announced: Echo Buds, Echo Frames, Echo Loop • WIRED

Boone Ashworth and Michael Calore:

»

If cramming Alexa into your ears isn’t enough, how about putting Alexa directly onto your face? Echo Frames are Amazon’s new Alexa-enabled smart glasses that let you talk to Alexa without having to whip out your phone. This means you can talk to Alexa in all the places you previously could not without being a rude phone person, like at the movies, in the gym locker room, or at your favorite brunch spot. OK, maybe barking at Alexa in those situations would still be rude—which is likely why Amazon is releasing these glasses in limited quantities to start. If they’re a hit, then we’ll see production ramp up. These smart glasses—which have microphones but, critically, no camera—go on sale to beta testers this fall for $180 a pair. You can add a prescription if you want as well.

[Which brings us to the Echo Loop.] At this point, do you have any limbs that aren’t Alexa-enabled? The new Echo Loop is a smart ring, because of course it is. (The company really missed the opportunity to call it the Ring Ring.) Two microphones, a tiny speaker, and haptic alerts let you talk to the hand (your own) to respond to notifications or ask Alexa a question.

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Not sure what the point of the Echo Frames is, honestly. And the Ring looks weird. I could see the point of a smart ring which tells you things, but not one you just talk to. (The Echo Buds are wireless earbuds.)
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Apple is evaluating new keyboard mechanisms to make thinner MacBooks • Apple Insider

Malcolm Owen:

»

The butterfly keyboard mechanism used in the current generation of MacBook Pro models has gone through a number of revisions to fix issues with how it functions, including occasions where debris could interfere with the mechanism’s operation. The issues have led to the creation of a repair program to fix the problem, but complaints about the component continue to be made.

The keyboard is also a space-occupying component of a notebook’s design, with the switch mechanism providing an actuation, namely the physical movement of the key to register a press and to reset. In order to allow this to happen, a mechanism has to sit between the key and the circuit board, taking up valuable space that could be used to make the notebook design even thinner, or to provide more battery capacity.

In a patent published by the US Patent and Trademark Office on Tuesday titled “Keyboard assemblies having reduced thickness and method of forming keyboard assemblies,” Apple seeks to do just that.

An illustration of the PCB at the bottom of the stack, with layers for the membrane, switching mechanism, and keycap.

In Apple’s filing, the company suggests the use of a single membrane sheet adhered directly to the printed circuit board (PCB). A switch housing can optionally be affixed directly to the membrane layer or to the PCB, sandwiched between the two, and a dome switch coupled directly on top to the membrane layer.

«

This had better be tested to death. Also: won’t that be incredibly difficult to replace in the event of a single key failure?
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Regulating Big Tech makes them stronger, so they need competition instead • Open Voices

Cory Doctorow:

»

Over the past 12 months there has been a radical shift in the balance of power on the internet. In the name of taming the platforms, regulators have inadvertently issued them a “Perpetual Internet Domination Licence”, albeit one that requires that they take advice from an aristocracy of elite regulators. With only the biggest tech companies able to perform the regulatory roles they have been assigned because of complexity and cost, they officially become too big to fail, and can only be nudged a little in one direction or another by regulators drawn from their own ranks.

As has been the case so often in the internet’s brief life, humanity has entered uncharted territory. People (sort of) know how to break up a railway or an oil company and America once barely managed to break up a phone company. No one is sure how to break up a tech monopolist. Depending on how this moment plays out, that option may be lost altogether.

But competition is too important to give up on.

One exciting possibility is to create an absolute legal defence for companies that make “interoperable” products that plug into the dominant companies’ offerings, from third-party printer ink to unauthorised Facebook readers that slurp up all the messages waiting for you there and filter them to your specifications, not Mark Zuckerberg’s. This interoperability defence would have to shield digital toolsmiths from all manner of claims: tortious interference, bypassing copyright locks, patent infringement and, of course, violating terms of service.

«

All well and good; but what if they just don’t want to compete? Did companies compete with Microsoft once the SMB protocol was more open? (I don’t know the answer to this.) Interop sounds attractive. But competition only arises if there are willing competitors.
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Google’s knowledge panels are magnifying disinformation • The Atlantic

Lora Kelley:

»

Over the years, the [UK national who works in tech consultancy called Martin John] Bryant I spoke with has gotten messages calling him a psycho; been taunted by Australian teens on WhatsApp; received an email from schoolchildren saying how evil he was (their teacher wrote an hour later to apologize); and even had a note sent to his then-employer informing them that they’d hired a killer.

But the biggest issue? When people Google him, an authoritative-looking box pops up on the right side of the results page, informing them that “Martin John Bryant is an Australian man who is known for murdering 35 people and injuring 23 others in the Port Arthur massacre.” He fears that he’s missed out on professional opportunities because when people search his name, “they just find this guy with a very distinct stare in his eyes in the photos and all this talk about murder.”

That box is what Google calls a “knowledge panel,” a collection of definitive-seeming information (dates, names, biographical details, net worths) that appears when you Google someone or something famous. Seven years after their introduction, in 2012, knowledge panels are essential internet infrastructure: 62% of mobile searches in June 2019 were no-click, according to the research firm Jumpshot, meaning that many people are in the habit of searching; looking at the knowledge panel, related featured snippets, or top links; and then exiting the search. A 2019 survey conducted by the search marketing agency Path Interactive found that people ages 13 to 21 were twice as likely as respondents over 50 to consider their search complete once they’d viewed a knowledge panel.

This is all part of an effort to “build the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do,” as Amit Singhal, then the senior vice president in charge of search at Google, wrote in a 2012 blog post.

But people do not populate knowledge panels. Algorithms do.

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WeWork and counterfeit capitalism • Matt Stoller’s BIG

Matt Stoller has a newsletter, and this is from the latest:

»

Amazon has spawned a host of imitators, including WeWork. It has also reshaped venture investing. The goal of Son, and increasingly most large financiers in private equity and venture capital, is to find big markets and then dump capital into one player in such a market who can underprice until he becomes the dominant remaining actor. In this manner, financiers can help kill all competition, with the idea of profiting later on via the surviving monopoly.

Engaging in such a strategy used to be illegal, and was known as predatory pricing. There are laws, like Robinson-Patman and the Clayton Act, which, if read properly and enforced, prohibit such conduct. The reason is very basic to capitalism. Capitalism works because companies that thrive take a bunch of inputs and create a product that is more valuable than the sum of its parts. That creates additional value, and in such a model companies have to compete by making better goods and services.

What predatory pricing does is to enable competition purely based on access to capital. Someone like Neumann, and Son’s entire model with his Vision Fund, is to take inputs, combine them into products worth less than their cost, and plug up the deficit through the capital markets in hopes of acquiring market power later or of just self-dealing so the losses are placed onto someone else. This model has spread. Bird, the scooter company, is not making money. Uber and Lyft are similarly and systemically unprofitable. This model is catastrophic not just for individual companies, but for their competitors who have to *make* money. I’ve written about this problem before. Amazon has created a much less competitive and brittle retail sector. Netflix’s money-losing business is ruining Hollywood.

«

This part at least isn’t libellous, but Stoller isn’t restrained in his criticism of many of the key players. A must-read. (Thanks John Naughton for the link.)
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Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 review: master entertainer, amateur worker • The Verge

Dan Seifert:

»

Using DeX on such a small screen is also frustrating due to the amount of scrolling and flipping between windows that’s required to multitask. Virtual desktops would help with this, but DeX doesn’t support them. There is also no window snapping features that I could find; resizing the windows requires tapping and dragging on the screen or using the fiddly trackpad on the keyboard. DeX on the Tab S6 is nice to have in a pinch to knock out an email while on the go, but it’s not something I’d like to use as my primary computer or for any extended length of time.

There are other bugs in Samsung’s software that I’ve found frustrating to deal with. The night mode, which flips the interface to a dark shade in the evening, constantly forgets its settings; the screen brightness will aggressively dim itself to unreadable levels when I hold the tablet in landscape because my hand blocks the light sensor; search in DeX doesn’t work on the first keystroke, requiring me to type “OOutlook” if I want to launch my email app; and I’ll have to frequently reboot the tablet to get the Wi-Fi to work.

Basically, the Tab S6 is a very good tablet to use to watch video, provided you don’t block the light sensor with your palm. If all you want from a tablet is to lean back and watch video on your couch, the Tab S6 is excellent for that.

The problem is that “good for watching video” is about the lowest bar to hit for a tablet in 2019. The iPad was great for watching video almost 10 years ago, and Amazon’s Fire HD 10 will do the job for about a third of the cost of the Tab S6 if that’s all you need.

«

Amazing that at this point Samsung isn’t just cutting its prices to push everyone else on Android out of the market. Instead it sticks with its high-end products, which can’t be selling well enough to justify it.
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Here’s why so many apps are asking to use Bluetooth on iOS 13 • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

A beacon is very easily able to detect your device’s Bluetooth chip and log that with a retailer or some other app on your phone. So getting more strict about Bluetooth is a good move by Apple to prevent unwanted tracking of its customers.

Similarly, the company is also getting even more transparent about location, showing you on a map how often and where apps have recorded your position. This prompt is much easier to understand, and will probably startle people into slimming down the list of apps that can monitor where they are. As it should!

But there’s more room for confusion around the Bluetooth prompt.

At the most basic level, I think some iPhone owners are going to wonder and maybe even assume that they must grant Bluetooth permission for music and other media apps to continue working with their Bluetooth earbuds, headphones, or speakers. It’s a reasonable question when you see that an app “would like to use Bluetooth.” (To be clear, you don’t have to. Bluetooth audio is handled through system settings, is separate from apps, and will continue working for apps that you deny permission for.)

«

Most people probably won’t know that about the audio. That generic “would like to use” could probably be improve. Might be fun to deny all these and see how things change.
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Mysterious Mac Pro shutdowns likely caused by Google Chrome update • Variety

Janko Roettgers:

»

A serious data corruption issue that resulted in Mac Pro workstations being rendered unusable at a number of Hollywood studios Monday was likely caused by a browser update gone haywire: Google told Mac Pro users Tuesday evening that an update to its Chrome browser is likely to fault for the issue, which particularly impacted video editors across Hollywood and beyond.

“We recently discovered that a Chrome update may have shipped with a bug that damages the file system on MacOS machines,” the company wrote in a forum post. “We’ve paused the release while we finalize a new update that addresses the problem.”

Reports of Mac Pro workstations refusing to reboot started to circulate among video editors late Monday. At the time, the common denominator among impacted machines seemed to be the presence of Avid’s Media Composer software.

The issue apparently knocked out dozens of machines at multiple studios, with one “Modern Family” reporting that the show’s entire editing team was affected. Avid’s leadership updated users of its software throughout the day, advising them to back up their work and not to reboot their machines.

«

Thanks Nic for the pointer.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You can delete the messaging app Kik: its founders are closing it to defend a cryptocurrency case. CC-licensed photo by Salman Aslam 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. Not available in Ukraine. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The loophole that turns your apps into spies • The New York Times

Charlie Warzel:

»

By now you probably know that your apps ask for permission to tap into loads of data. They request device information, like advertiser IDs, which companies use to build marketing profiles. There’s data the companies explicitly ask for via a pop-up window, like access to contacts or your camera roll. And then there’s tracking that is especially invasive, like access to your microphone or your phone’s gyroscope or location tracking data.

What you probably didn’t know is that by downloading those apps and entering into those contracts, you’re also exposing your sensitive information to dozens of other technology companies, ad networks, data brokers and aggregators. Sometimes the information is shared with global tech giants; other times it’s with small companies you’ve never heard of.

The data is transmitted — or in some cases leaked — via software development kits (SDKs). They are essentially developer shortcuts, a set of tools or a library of code that developers can import from a third party so that they don’t have to build them from scratch.

Because they’re so useful to app developers, SDKs are embedded into thousands of apps, ranging from mundane weather services to mobile games and even in some health apps. Facebook, Google and Amazon, for example, have extremely popular SDKs that allow smaller apps to connect to bigger companies’ ad platforms or help provide web traffic analytics or payment infrastructure. In exchange, the SDK makers receive user data from that app. Just how much data is often unclear. And once the companies have it, there are no restrictions on what they can do with it. Theoretically, they could turn around and sell that data for profit.

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Argh, everything is broken.
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Nancy Pelosi announces formal impeachment inquiry of Trump • The New York Times

Nicholas Fandos:

»

Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday that the House would begin a formal impeachment inquiry of President Trump, opening a fresh chapter of confrontation in response to startling allegations that the president sought to enlist a foreign power for his own political gain.

“The actions taken to date by the president have seriously violated the Constitution,” she said after emerging from a meeting of House Democrats in the basement of the Capitol. Mr. Trump, she said, “must be held accountable. No one is above the law.”

The announcement was a stunning development that unfolded after months of caution by House Democrats, who have been divided over using the ultimate remedy to address what they have called flagrant misconduct by the president.

In this case, with an avalanche of Democrats — including many who had resisted the move — now demanding it, Ms. Pelosi said that Mr. Trump’s reported actions, and his administration’s refusal to share details about the matter with Congress, have left the House no alternative outside of impeachment. The inquiry has the potential to reshape Mr. Trump’s presidency and to cleave an already divided nation only a year before he plans to stand for re-election.

«

And there we were thinking that the UK Supreme Court ruling 11-0 that the prime minister acted unlawfully in suspending Parliament was the international story of the day. OK, neither is tech, but they seemed worth marking.
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Facebook, elections and political speech • Facebook Newsroom

The former leader of the UK Liberal Democrat party and once-deputy prime minister of the UK, Nick Clegg, now VP of Global Affairs and Comms at Facebook:

»

Facebook has had a newsworthiness exemption since 2016. This means that if someone makes a statement or shares a post which breaks our community standards we will still allow it on our platform if we believe the public interest in seeing it outweighs the risk of harm. Today, I announced that from now on we will treat speech from politicians as newsworthy content that should, as a general rule, be seen and heard. However, in keeping with the principle that we apply different standards to content for which we receive payment, this will not apply to ads – if someone chooses to post an ad on Facebook, they must still fall within our Community Standards and our advertising policies.

«

Huh. Become a politician and you can say whatever you like. How do we define politician? Do you have to be officially in office? Running for office? Saying you’ll run for office? Can I declare myself a politician in order to say anything on Facebook without fear of being zapped?
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Facebook acquires startup developing AI finger tracking armband • UploadVR

David Heaney:

»

Facebook is in the final stages of acquiring a New York based startup called CTRL Labs which was developing an armband which tracks the user’s fingers by reading electrical signals inside their arm.

It works by detecting electrical signals passing through the user’s wrist to the fingers. Based on how the signal changes passing through the tendons and muscles of the arm their position can be determined. Machine learning is used to convert these position changes into finger poses.

The technology is very similar to what’s described in a patent application filed by Facebook back in February. It’s possible that the CTRL Labs team were able to solve problems that Facebook’s team wasn’t, or that Facebook wanted to combine their efforts. It’s also possible that the startup held intellectual property that Facebook would need to commercialize this technology.

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Seven good and three bad things in iPadOS • The Verge

Dieter Bohn:

»

Anybody who has felt like the iPad was a little too limiting because of how it handled windows or webpages should be excited to install this update. And although it really does feel like a “power user”-focused set of features this year, people who use their iPads for the basics will find things to like, too.

Here are the things we like best and hate the most about iPadOS so far.

«

Precis: new desktop-equivalent Safari good, new managing windows method good, learning how to manage windows bad, new home screen good, floating keyboard good, text selection bad, new Files app good, Dark Mode good, Photos app good, bugs bad.

It’s putting some distance between the iPad and the iPhone OS. Though the Files app can’t preview AVI video, which is slightly annoying if that’s what you’ve got on an SD card.
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About an issue that impacts third-party keyboard apps in iOS 13 and iPadOS • Apple Support

»

An upcoming software update will fix an issue that impacts third-party keyboard apps. This issue applies only if you’ve installed third-party keyboards on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

Third-party keyboard extensions in iOS can be designed to run entirely standalone, without access to external services, or they can request “full access” to provide additional features through network access. Apple has discovered a bug in iOS 13 and iPadOS that can result in keyboard extensions being granted full access even if you haven’t approved this access.
This issue does not impact Apple’s built-in keyboards. It also doesn’t impact third-party keyboards that don’t make use of full access. The issue will be fixed soon in an upcoming software update.

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Bugs. So it’s going to be 13.1.1.
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WeWork’s Adam Neumann to step down as chief executive • Financial Times

Eric Platt and James Fontanella-Khan:

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WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann has agreed to step down as chief executive of the lossmaking property company after some of its biggest backers lost faith in the 40-year-old executive.

Mr Neumann has been named non-executive chairman. Sebastian Gunningham, the company’s vice-chair, and finance chief Artie Minson will take over as co-chief executives.

The fall from grace of Mr Neumann is a stunning reversal at a young, hyped venture-backed firm where the cult of the founder was once especially strong. It compares in recent years only to the toppling of Uber’s chief executive Travis Kalanick…

…Mr Neumann, who earlier told employees he had been “humbled” by the aborted IPO, said in a statement: “While our business has never been stronger, in recent weeks, the scrutiny directed toward me has become a significant distraction, and I have decided that it is in the best interest of the company to step down as chief executive.”

«

Damn right there’s been scrutiny of his self-dealing practices; unsurprising the IPO stalled and that he’s out. The S-1 filing was the brightest sunlight on a really badly supervised company. And according to The Information, its current spend could burn through $1.5bn over the next six months and leave it with just $400m early next year if it doesn’t raise more funds. Neumann was toxic to that, so had to go.

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WeWTF, Part Deux • No Mercy / No Malice

Scott Galloway, writing a few days before Neumann’s ouster when the IPO had been pulled:

»

So, as a distressed asset, the playbook is fairly clear:

• Bring in new management. What got We here, isn’t going to get it where it needs to go. Each layer that comes off the We onion stinks more and more. The media has turned its attention to the Neumanns, and it’s as if the lights have been turned on at a cocaine-fueled party that ended several hours too late. Everyone and everything suddenly looks bad, scary even.

• The firm needs to bust a move to break even pronto. The new CEO should be from a REIT, ideally a hospitality or commercial real estate REIT. My vote is Adam Markman, CFO of Equity Commonwealth — Sam Zell’s firm.

• Shed/close all non-core businesses. WeGrow and WeLive are vanity projects. As someone close to the firm told me yesterday, they distract Mr. Neumann from the core business, where he was wreaking havoc. A $13 million investment in a firm that makes wave pools to indulge Adam’s passion for surfing. Really? Really?

• Raise money after an adult conversation with SoftBank (“You f*cked up, you trusted us. Do you want to participate in the next round or get washed out?”)

• Focus on margin expansion vs. growth. We has a differentiated product in the marketplace, and should command a premium.

• Lay off all employees not directly tied to managing the core business. Reprice options for remaining employees, as the current options are now worthless and most execs will begin looking for other jobs. The most talented (the ones with the most options) will be the first to leave if they aren’t given substantial economics for staying in Saigon as the North Vietnamese roll into town.

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Xiaomi’s Mi Mix Alpha is almost entirely made of screen • The Verge

Sam Byford:

»

The “surround screen” on the Alpha wraps entirely around the device to the point where it meets the camera module on the other side. The effect is of a phone that’s almost completely made of screen, with status icons like network signal and battery charge level displayed on the side. Pressure-sensitive volume buttons are also shown on the side of the phone. Xiaomi is claiming more than 180% screen-to-body ratio, a stat that no longer makes any sense to cite at all…

…Xiaomi describes the Mix Alpha as a “concept smartphone” and isn’t going to be mass-producing it any time soon. The phone will go into small-scale production this year and go on sale in December for 19,999 yuan, or about $2,800. The original Mi Mix was also given the “concept” label and released in small quantities, with the Mi Mix 2 following a year later as a more mainstream device.

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Twice the chance to break the screen, and a real puzzler for where you put the phone case. Perfect bragging rights for Xiaomi – “we were the first with a total screen phone!” – but I don’t think it makes any sense. We can’t look around corners, which is what you’d need to use this to the full.
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Google wins landmark right to be forgotten case • BBC News

Leo Kelion:

»

The EU’s top court has ruled that Google does not have to apply the right to be forgotten globally.

It means the firm only needs to remove links from its search results in Europe – and not elsewhere – after receiving an appropriate request.

The ruling stems from a dispute between Google and a French privacy regulator. In 2015, CNIL ordered the firm to globally remove search result listings to pages containing damaging or false information about a person. The following year, Google introduced a geoblocking feature that prevents European users from being able to see delisted links.

But it resisted censoring search results for people in other parts of the world. And the firm challenged a 100,000 ($109,901; £88,376) euro fine that CNIL had tried to impose.

“Currently, there is no obligation under EU law, for a search engine operator who grants a request for de-referencing made by a data subject… to carry out such a de-referencing on all the versions of its search engine,” the European Court of Justice ruling said.

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This seems a good, proportional decision: if the EU could demand Google remove stuff everywhere, why wouldn’t China allow Google in and then demand the same? Next question: should Google block access to non-EU versions by EU citizens? I suspect that’s going to be “no” as well, if anyone raises it.
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Exclusive: Fitbit considers whether it should explore a sale – sources • Reuters

Greg Roumeliotis:

»

Wearable device maker Fitbit has been in talks with an investment bank about the possibility of exploring a sale amid challenges in successfully pivoting from fitness trackers to smartwatches, people familiar with the matter said on Friday.

Fitbit has struggled to gain a foothold in the smartwatch category, as Apple and Samsung Electronics have cornered a bigger share of the market with more sophisticated devices.

At the same time, Fitbit’s dominant share of the fitness tracking sector continues to be chipped away by cheaper offerings from companies such as China’s Huawei Technologies and Xiaomi Corp.

Fitbit has held discussions with investment bank Qatalyst Partners about whether it should engage with potential acquirers, the sources said.

«

The way this is written seems to imply that Fitbit has already had some approaches about acquisition, and is trying to decide whether to go with them. Who would want a struggling fitness tracker company, though? It’s been essentially unprofitable since the end of 2016.
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Kik chat app shuts down as company goes all-in on Kin cryptocurrency • BetaKit

Meagan Simpson:

»

The Kik app is officially shutting down. The company will reduce its headcount to 19 people, and will focus solely on converting Kin users into Kin buyers, according to a company blog post by Kik founder Ted Livingston.

Livingston said although the Kik app will shut down, Kin is “here to stay.” The remaining team will focus on “moving the Kin blockchain forward,” he added. It appears the company is shedding its operational costs so it can fight the United States Securities Commission (SEC) in court, with Livingston saying the changes will “drop our burn rate by 85%, putting us in position to get through the SEC trial with the resources we have.”

He said that instead of selling some of Kik’s Kin cryptocurrency, the company made the decision to focus its “current resources on the few things that matter most.”

“These are hard decisions. Kik is one of the largest apps in the US. It has industry-leading engagement and is growing again,” wrote Livingston. “Over 100 employees and their families will be impacted. People who have poured their hearts and souls into Kik and Kin for over a decade.”

«

Kik was a huge social messaging app popular with teens; but cryptocurrency looked like a way to make much quicker millions, so its founders chased that. Then the SEC pointed out that selling tokens which can change in value and be paid for in money is essentially dealing in a security. Which came as a surprise to Kik/Kin, who thought it was just a way to get rich.

Sad end for Kik, which had some momentum at one point.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

This photo was taken in Holland, but some in Switzerland are saying the same: they don’t want 5G. CC-licensed photo by Mike Gifford 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. Unprorogued. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How TikTok holds our attention • The New Yorker

Jia Tolentino:

»

Connie Chan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, told me that investors normally look for “organic growth” in social apps; ByteDance has been innovative, she said, in its ability and willingness to spend its way to big numbers. One former TikTok employee I spoke to was troubled by the company’s methods: “On Instagram, they’d run ads with clickbaity images—an open, gashed wound, or an overtly sexy image of a young teen girl—and it wouldn’t matter if Instagram users flagged the images as long as the ad got a lot of engagement first.”

In April, the Indian government briefly banned new downloads of the app, citing concerns that it was exposing minors to pornography and sexual predation. (At least three people in India have died from injuries sustained while creating TikToks: posing with a pistol, hanging out on train tracks, trying to fit three people on a moving bike.) In court, ByteDance insisted that it was losing $500,000 a day from the ban. The company announced plans to hire more local content moderators and to invest a billion dollars in India during the next three years. The ban was lifted, and the company launched a campaign: every day, three randomly selected users who promoted TikTok on other platforms with the hashtag #ReturnOfTikTok would receive the equivalent of $1,400.

TikTok is a social network that has nothing to do with one’s social network. It doesn’t ask you to tell it who you know—in the future according to ByteDance, “large-scale AI models” will determine our “personalized information flows,” as the Web site for the company’s research lab declares. The app provides a “Discover” page, with an index of trending hashtags, and a “For You” feed, which is personalized—if that’s the right word—by a machine-learning system that analyzes each video and tracks user behavior so that it can serve up a continually refined, never-ending stream of TikToks optimized to hold your attention. In the teleology of TikTok, humans were put on Earth to make good content, and “good content” is anything that is shared, replicated, and built upon. In essence, the platform is an enormous meme factory, compressing the world into pellets of virality and dispensing those pellets until you get full or fall asleep.

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Returning rogue weather app continues mobile ad fraud • Upstream

»

First discovered in January 2019 by mobile technology company Upstream to be triggering false premium transactions and, at the time, secretly harvesting consumer data, the app – called Weather Forecast: World Weather Accurate Radar – is preinstalled on specific Alcatel phones and also available on Google Play Store.  Following the revelation by Upstream the app immediately ceased its background activity and was withdrawn from the Play Store. [It subsequently returned to the Google Play Store.]

However, after an idle two-month period and despite the earlier exposure, Upstream says its Secure-D mobile security platform combating advertising fraud detected and blocked some 34 million fresh suspicious transaction attempts from Weather Forecast. The version of the weather app preinstalled on Alcatel Pixi4 devices attempted to subscribe nearly 700,000 mobile consumers to premium digital services without their knowledge in just six months.

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Health fears prompt Swiss 5G revolt • Yahoo News

»

Switzerland was among the first countries to begin deploying 5G, but health fears over radiation from the antennas that carry the next-generation mobile technology have sparked a nationwide revolt.

Demonstrators against the technology are due to fill the streets of Bern later this month, but already a number of cantons have been pressured to put planned constructions of 5G-compatible antennae on ice.

The technology has been swept up in the deepening trade war between China and the United States, which has tried to rein in Chinese giant Huawei – the world’s leader in superfast 5G equipment – over fears it will allow Beijing to spy on communications from countries that use its products and services.

But far from the clash of the titans, a growing number of Swiss are voicing alarm at possible health effects from exposure to the electromagnetic rays radiating from the new antennae, and are threatening to put the issue to a referendum in the country famous for its direct democratic system.

«

This rolls around with pretty much every new version of wireless tech. I’ve seen it with the original mobile phones, with 3G, with Wi-Fi, but oddly not 4G. It never comes to anything, because it’s based on a misunderstanding of what “radiation” can be. (We worry far too much about ionising radiation too, but that’s separate.)
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Programmers complain that Huawei’s Ark Compiler is ‘not even half-finished’ • Abacus

Josh Ye:

»

A scam. A publicity stunt. Premature. These are just a few of the things Chinese developers are saying about the release of Huawei’s supposed secret weapon: the Ark Compiler.

Developers are even claiming the program feels incomplete. The reception has been so bad that one programmer told Abacus that he wondered whether it was released just for publicity.

“Maybe they’re doing it to help in the PR and trade war, adding leverage against the US,” said Max Zhou, co-founder of app-enhancement company MetaApp and former head of engineering at Mobike.

The Ark Compiler is a key component of Huawei’s new operating system, HarmonyOS. The tool is meant to allow developers to quickly port their Android apps to the new OS, ideally helping to quickly bridge the gap of app availability. It is also said to be able to improve the efficiency of Android apps, making them as smooth as apps on iOS.

As of right now, though, developers say the promises are too good to be true.

“The ad says it’s a Michelin 3-star. But when it’s served, it turns out to be a pack of Tingyi cup noodles and it doesn’t even come with hot water. Do you think it has met expectations?” one programmer wrote on Q&A site Zhihu under the question “Did the open source code of the Ark Compiler meet everyone’s expectations?

Huawei declined to comment for this article, but the company has said before that the Ark Compiler would be rolled out in phases, with the source code for the complete toolchain not being available until 2020.

«

This does not seem to be going well. Without the toolchain, without the apps, there’s pretty much nothing.
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Massive wave of account hijacks hits YouTube creators • ZDNet

Catalin Cimpanu:

»

Over the past few days, a massive wave of account hijacks has hit YouTube users, and especially creators in the auto-tuning and car review community, a ZDNet investigation discovered following a tip from one of our readers.

Several high-profile accounts from the YouTube creators car community have fallen victim to these attacks already. The list includes channels such as Built, Troy Sowers, MaxtChekVids, PURE Function, and Musafir.

But the YouTube car community wasn’t the only one targeted. Other YouTube creatorss also reported having their accounts hijacked last week, and especially over the weekend, with tens of complaints flooding Twitter and the YouTube support forum .

The account hacks are the result of a coordinated campaign that consisted of messages luring users to phishing sites, where hackers logged account credentials.

According to a channel owner who managed to recover their account before this article’s publication and received additional information from YouTube’s staff, we got some insight into how the full attack chain might have gone down.

• Hackers use phishing emails to lure victims on fake Google login pages, where they collect users’ account credentials
• Hackers break into Google accounts
• Hackers re-assign popular channels to new owners
• Hackers change the channel’s vanity URL, giving the original account owner and his followers the impression that their account had been deleted.

«

Possibly made easier because YouTube has been messing around with user verification recently, which maybe made some more vulnerable to phishing.

The hackers also managed to break into some two-factor-protected accounts, most likely by using a toolkit that can intercept codes sent by SMS. Moral: don’t use SMS for two-factor. Use an app. (I’ll once more recommend Authy.)
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Samsung’s Galaxy Fold will finally be released in the US on Friday • BGR

Zach Epstein:

»

The Galaxy Fold will be sold by AT+T, which has proven over the years that it will sell literally any cell phone made by any company regardless of how good or bad it may be. No other US wireless carriers will offer the handset at launch, but an unlocked version will be available in Samsung stores and on Samsung’s website. As far as pricing goes, it’ll cost $1,980 despite a recent rumor that the relaunched Galaxy Fold might end up being a bit cheaper than Samsung had initially announced.

Our advice: save yourself $2,000 and skip it. Word on the street is the redesigned Galaxy Fold can still break if dust or dirt works its way into certain parts of the phone, which is pretty much inevitable despite how careful you might be. And even if that weren’t the case, the Galaxy Fold still has an awful design with massive bezels and a huge notch chomped out of the corner of the main display. The company is working on much better designs for its second-generation foldable smartphone that will be released next year, and several other folding phones are also expected in 2020.

«

It’s going to be fun seeing the reviews, and then the scratched screens after, oh, let’s give it two weeks’ use.
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Excavating AI

Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen:

»

Images do not describe themselves. This is a feature that artists have explored for centuries. Agnes Martin creates a grid-like painting and dubs it “White Flower,” Magritte paints a picture of an apple with the words “This is not an apple.” We see those images differently when we see how they’re labeled. The circuit between image, label, and referent is flexible and can be reconstructed in any number of ways to do different kinds of work. What’s more, those circuits can change over time as the cultural context of an image shifts, and can mean different things depending on who looks, and where they are located. Images are open to interpretation and reinterpretation.

This is part of the reason why the tasks of object recognition and classification are more complex than Minksy—and many of those who have come since—initially imagined.

Despite the common mythos that AI and the data it draws on are objectively and scientifically classifying the world, everywhere there is politics, ideology, prejudices, and all of the subjective stuff of history. When we survey the most widely used training sets, we find that this is the rule rather than the exception.

«

Great essay.
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Google Play Pass on Android: $5/mo for 350+ games, apps sans microtransactions • Ars Technica

Sam Machkovech:

»

Google has opened the door on Google Play Pass, a $5/mo subscription service for Android phones that unlocks access to a whopping 350 games and apps. The move follows Apple’s much ballyhooed dive into its own mobile gaming subscription service, Apple Arcade, which launched last week at the same monthly price point.

Google’s service will go live exclusively on Android phones in the United States on a rolling basis “this week.” In order to access Google Play Pass, you’ll have to wait for your Android device’s Play Store app to update with a new “Play Pass” toggle in its hamburger menu. Once you have access, your account can claim a free 10-day trial and then begin paying only $2/mo for the service’s first 12 months, so long as you start paying by October 10.

Google has yet to release a formal list of compatible Play Pass software, but its “games and apps” designation already confirms an effort to step outside the “games only” reputation that its rival Apple Arcade currently enjoys…

Once Play Pass is available, participating games and apps will include a multi-colored ticket icon in their store listings. By paying for Play Pass, these apps become wholly free to download and use—and they will have all ads and microtransactions disabled, so any extra tidbits in a game or app can simply be downloaded and accessed without fears of auto-playing videos or $1-a-pop charges after the fact.

«

The fact that both Apple and Google have gone for the $5 (£5? €5?) price point is interesting in itself: one guesses that the proportion of Android users for whom this is a good deal (they spend more on games per month, so this represents a saving) is lower than for Apple users. But the absolute number of Android users should be higher. So Google ought to do better out of this.
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Apple to keep building Mac Pro in US after securing tariff relief • WSJ

Tripp Mickle and Sarah E. Needleman:

»

Apple said it is keeping production of its new Mac Pro computer in Texas, reversing earlier plans to shift manufacturing of the device to China.

The decision follows the Trump administration’s granting Apple exemptions last week from tariffs on 10 items it imported from China. The exclusions for components, including a power supply and a logic board, cover a period from September of last year to August 2020, and the US will refund tariffs already paid.

The tech giant had earlier tapped Taiwanese contractor Quanta Computer Inc. to manufacture the nearly $6,000 desktop computer outside Shanghai. The previous version of the high-end computer, which was introduced in 2013, had been assembled in Austin, Texas, by contractor Flex Ltd. and was touted as Apple’s only Made in USA product.

Escalating trade tensions over the summer challenged Apple’s plans to make the product in China, where labor and logistics costs are lower than in the US. In August, President Trump said he planned to extend tariffs of 10% to essentially all Chinese imports in December and raise tariffs on items already subject to duties. The tariffs could have cut into Apple’s profits or forced it to increase the cost of its $5,999 Mac Pro made in China.

«

I don’t think the margins on the Mac Pro are exactly wafer-thin, but also the number being produced will be comparatively small – perhaps 300,000 in the first quarter, when demand is high, and then 100k afterward? – so this sounds more like a PR coup for those concerned.
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Is hi-res audio coming of age? • Futuresource Consulting

Alexandre Jornod:

»

Amazon has just launched Amazon Music HD in the US, UK, Germany and Japan, becoming the first mainstream streaming service to offer Hi-Res. This new plan, which provides CD quality (16bit/44.1 kHz) and Hi-Res streaming of up to 24bit/192 kHz (when available) is priced at $14.99/month and $12.99/month for Prime members; compared to a minimum $19.99/month for Tidal and Qobuz, the other high-audio quality streaming services. Additionally, thanks to the growth of wireless speakers, notably driven by Amazon, the components required to fully benefit from Hi-Res have been significantly simplified, now incorporating all the required audio components into a single device. To successfully establish its service, Amazon will need to launch a new speaker, which offers an enhanced audio experience to justify the extra investment. This new device is rumoured to launch imminently and is likely to have a significant impact on bringing Hi-Res to the mass market by leveraging Amazon’s wider ecosystem.

Similarly, the audio manufacturer Devialet and streaming service Qobuz have recently partnered in France to offer for a fixed monthly price (from €39.90 per month, depending on the length of the contract) and a one-off initial payment, a high-end wireless speaker with a CD quality streaming subscription. This partnership might help in reducing the barrier of adoption for high-quality streaming by providing both the device and its content under a unique subscription. It also introduces long-term contractual commitment to a streaming plan, which so far was a specificity of telcos and TV cable providers.

While these two initiatives are mainly focussing on CD quality streaming (Hi-Res being anything above CD quality), they are expected to create awareness about higher audio quality streaming on top of incentivising users to invest in better quality speakers.

«

Getting people to buy new kit when their old stuff is perfectly capable is a hell of a trick. Most people will never hear the difference: you need super-top-end kit and an acoustically excellent room. (I’ve been in those rooms with that kit.) Save your money. AAC is fine.
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ImageNet Roulette

:

»

ImageNet Roulette is a provocation designed to help us see into the ways that humans are classified in machine learning systems. It uses a neural network trained on the “Person” categories from the ImageNet dataset which has over 2,500 labels used to classify images of people.

Warning: ImageNet Roulette regularly returns racist, misogynistic and cruel results. That is because of the underlying data set it is drawing on, which is ImageNet’s ‘Person’ categories. ImageNet is one of the most influential training sets in AI. This is a tool designed to show some of the underlying problems with how AI is classifying people.

UPDATE: IMAGENET ROULETTE HAS ACHIEVED ITS GOALS.

Starting Friday, September 27th this application will no longer be available online.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Recognise it? The hot summer meant English people consumed more of it. CC-licensed photo by Uwe Hermann 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. Begin again. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook’s suspension of ‘tens of thousands’ of apps reveals wider privacy issues • The New York Times

Kate Conger, Gabriel J.X. Dance and Mike Isaac:

»

Facebook said on Friday that it had suspended tens of thousands of apps for improperly sucking up users’ personal information and other transgressions, a tacit admission that the scale of its data privacy issues was far larger than it had previously acknowledged.

The social network said in a blog post that an investigation it began in March 2018 — following revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a British consultancy, had retrieved and used people’s Facebook information without their permission — had resulted in the suspension of “tens of thousands” of apps that were associated with about 400 developers. That was far bigger than the last number that Facebook had disclosed of 400 app suspensions in August 2018.

The extent of how many apps Facebook had cut off was revealed in court filings that were unsealed later on Friday by a state court in Boston, as part of an investigation by the Massachusetts attorney general into the technology company. The documents showed that Facebook had suspended 69,000 apps. Of those, the majority were terminated because the developers did not cooperate with Facebook’s investigation; 10,000 were flagged for potentially misappropriating personal data from Facebook users.

The disclosures about app suspensions renew questions about whether people’s personal information on Facebook is secure, even after the company has been under fire for more than a year for its privacy practices.

«

I had to use Facebook a lot over the past two weeks, and realised that I really don’t like using it. The interface is noisy, it’s confusing, and working out whether what you’ve written is private, semi-private, public, or what – always with the knowledge that it could be screenshotted anyway – makes it a viper’s nest if you’re saying anything that you might not want made totally public. By contrast, Twitter’s a doddle: flat, and what you say is public. Couldn’t be simpler.
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English consuming more sugar despite tax and anti-obesity drive • The Guardian

Denis Campbell:

»

Experts are warning that the nation’s increasingly sweet tooth will worsen the damage already being done to public health by sugar, such as through diabetes and tooth decay.

The alarming trend of rising overall consumption of what critics call the “pure, white and deadly” substance is revealed in a report by Public Health England (PHE). It shows that the sugar tax on soft drinks introduced in 2017 has proved unexpectedly successful and has led to a 28.8% fall in the amount of sugar contained in such beverages.

In addition, the sugar content of yoghurt and fromage frais has fallen by 10.3%In breakfast cereals it has fallen 8.5%, in cakes 4.8% and in sweet spreads and sauces 4.6%.

However, many manufacturers are defying the government’s plea to cut sugar by 20% by next year – which is a key element of its campaign to tackle the epidemic of childhood obesity. Firms have done the opposite of what ministers asked them to do in 2016 and increased the amount of sugar they put in sweets and confectionery by 0.6% and in puddings by 0.5%.

«

Seems a big part of the increased consumption was from ice creams during the hot summer. The UK government tried to suppress this report; it demonstrates the opposite of what Boris Johnson had wanted to suggest, that “sin taxes” make no difference. By the way, much of his run for PM was funded by companies making money from sugar.
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Google chief Sundar Pichai warns against rushing into AI regulation • Financial Times

Tim Bradshaw:

»

In an interview, Mr Pichai suggested looking to existing laws to govern how AI is used “rather than assuming that everything you have to do is new”.

When new regulations are required, they should be applied to particular sectors and industries, such as healthcare and energy, he said, rather than through a blanket vetting of algorithms, as some politicians have suggested.

“It is such a broad cross-cutting technology, so it’s important to look at [regulation] more in certain vertical situations,” Mr Pichai said.

“There are areas where we need to do the research before we know what are the right kinds of approaches we need to take,” he said, citing aspects of AI that have caught politicians’ attention, including bias, safety and explainability.

“Rather than rushing into it in a way that prevents innovation and research, you actually need to solve some of the difficult problems.”

Mr Pichai spoke after meeting European politicians including Finnish prime minister, Antti Rinne. The Google chief unveiled a series of announcements, including 18 new clean energy deals, a €3bn investment to expand its data centres across Europe and a $2m grant to train European workers in digital skills.

After attacks from regulators across Europe and around the world over allegations of anti-competitive behaviour and privacy infringement, Mr Pichai hopes to get ahead of any crackdown on AI.

“We are for sure definitely approaching things more deliberately than before,” he said. “Over the past few years, all of us have learnt that technology can have unintended consequences.” After publishing a set of AI principles last year, Mr Pichai said he would be “happy to evolve them over time as we gain more insights both internally and from externally”.

«

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Global premium market declines 6% YoY in Q2 2019 • Counterpoint Research

Varun Mishra:

»

Apple held its market share but declined 6% YoY in the segment during the quarter. The OEM grew 9% YoY in NAM (North America), but China remains a challenge as it declined 33% YoY in the region. Competitive pressure continues to increase in China with the rise of local players, especially, Huawei. Apple’s buyback programs and other marketing activities are working in reversing the trend of growing holding periods.

However, the lack of a 5G model in the newly launched iPhone 11 series is likely to increase holding periods again. As a result, we expect Apple to regain momentum in H2 2020, after the launch of a 5G device, while in the short-term demand will be sluggish. Looking at the market in terms of price bands, Apple grew the fastest within the US$600-$800 price band as the iPhone XR continues to do well.

«

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Google claims to have reached quantum supremacy • Financial Times

Madhumita Murgia and Richard Waters:

»

A paper by Google’s researchers seen by the FT, that was briefly posted earlier this week on a Nasa website before being removed, claimed that their processor was able to perform a calculation in three minutes and 20 seconds that would take today’s most advanced classical computer, known as Summit, approximately 10,000 years.

The researchers said this meant the “quantum supremacy”, when quantum computers carry out calculations that had previously been impossible, had been achieved.

“This dramatic speed-up relative to all known classical algorithms provides an experimental realisation of quantum supremacy on a computational task and heralds the advent of a much-anticipated computing paradigm,” the authors wrote.

“To our knowledge, this experiment marks the first computation that can only be performed on a quantum processor.”

The system can only perform a single, highly technical calculation, according to the researchers, and the use of quantum machines to solve practical problems is still years away.

But the Google researchers called it “a milestone towards full-scale quantum computing”. They also predicted that the power of quantum machines would expand at a “double exponential rate”, compared to the exponential rate of Moore’s Law, which has driven advances in silicon chips in the first era of computing.

«

Probably going to be another decade before its applications are really clear. But a decade can pass quickly.
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Op ed: Hear me out … in a post-Area 51 world, bitcoin could be our best hope for alien interaction • Bitcoin Magazine

Brandon Green:

»

Bitcoin will be the obvious way for us to unify our world under a common value system. Bitcoin will be how we transact with aliens.

There’s an added boost for Bitcoin too: it’s based on those 1s and 0s that would be the most basic way to communicate in the first place. Bitcoin is effectively math money and, therefore, would be the first choice for aliens to transact with as well.

Thanks to SegWit and the Lightning Network (or at least what the Lightning Network could eventually become), it would be possible not only for aliens to transact in bitcoin locally (local to Earth anyway), but also take it with them back to their own planets and create mesh Lightning Networks to trade there.

«

Greene works for BTC Inc, which is based in Tennessee. My research suggests marijuana isn’t legal there yet, but I can’t really think of any better explanation.
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How to regulate Big Tech without breaking it up • MIT Technology Review

Angela Chen:

»

Hal Singer, a senior fellow at the George Washington Institute of Public Policy, agrees that breakups could be inefficient, but unlike Mayer-Schönberger, he doesn’t care about data inequality. So what if Google dominates because all their data makes their products the best? “If they win these ancillary markets on the merits, that’s a good thing,” he says.

So, says Singer, the problem isn’t that Google might get too good. Nor is it—as others, including Warren, have argued—that Google both hosts restaurant reviews as a platform and has its own reviews. That could be making things more efficient and lead to benefits. The problem, he says, is that Google edges out competitors like Yelp by giving its own reviews special treatment on its platform, even when they’re not as good.

Singer proposes a nondiscrimination principle that would prevent this. This is how cable channels are already regulated. Other companies worried about favoritism when Comcast started making content, but Congress didn’t break up the conglomerate. “They said, ‘We’re going to let you have a foot in the content space, but you can’t use your platform to artificially give a leg up to your own affiliated properties,’” Singer says. Now, independent networks can bring complaints to a neutral arbitrator that is responsible for making sure everyone is treated fairly.

Singer thinks this idea can apply to companies like Google and Amazon, too. The biggest concern is that tiny businesses won’t have power to take on the likes of Google, but he’s hopeful that if larger businesses sue—as in the case of the National Football League’s suit against Comcast, which was settled—norms will change to favor complaints from smaller brands.

«

Favouritism of own services is the biggest problem in big companies.
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SoftBank turns against WeWork’s parent CEO Neumann: sources • Reuters

Anirban Sen and Joshua Franklin:

»

Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp, the biggest investor in WeWork owner The We Company, is exploring ways to replace Adam Neumann as chief executive of the US office-sharing start-up, four people familiar with the matter said on Sunday.

The rare showdown between SoftBank and one of its biggest investments comes after We Company postponed its initial public offering (IPO) last week, following pushback from perspective investors, not just over its widening losses, but also over Neumann’s unusually firm grip on the company.

This was a blow for SoftBank, which was hoping for We Company’s IPO to bolster its profits as it seeks to woo investors for its second $108bn Vision Fund. It invested in We Company at a $47bn valuation in January, yet stock market investor skepticism led to the startup considering a potential valuation in the IPO earlier this month of as low as $10bn, Reuters reported.

«

Sweepstake on the number of days Neumann lasts. I’ll give it until the end of next week, ie the end of September.
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TiVo rolling out skippable pre-roll ads for retail DVRs • Light Reading

Jeff Baumgartner:

»

Opening up a new source of revenue and perhaps a can of customer ire, TiVo confirmed that it is rolling out a new product that inserts pre-roll ads in DVR recordings.

TiVo is testing it now, but it won’t be long before it becomes part of its retail platform. In addition to creating a new revenue stream, the new advertising inventory could help to subsidize the cost of TiVo’s retail hardware.

“DVR advertising is going to be a permanent part of the service,” a TiVo spokesperson said in an emailed statement to Light Reading. “We expect to be fully rolled-out to all eligible retail devices within 90 days.”

TiVo also confirmed that customers will be able to skip those pre-roll ads in much the same way they can skip commercials inserted in TV shows and movies recorded to the DVR. The change appears to be largely focused on retail devices running TiVo Experience 4, the company’s current-gen software and services platform.

“We’re dedicated to innovation that helps our customers stay in control of how, when, and what they watch,” the spokesperson said. “Advertising is an important part of every media business and TiVo is investing in new advertising experiences. We have designed our new DVR advertising units with the ability to ‘skip’ ads anytime a customer hits ‘skip.’ This is part of our ongoing commitment to bring our users the best media discovery experience possible.”

«

Well done – straight out of the Department of Bad Ideas. You know that “skippable” will turn into “unskippable” and then “inserted where the ad breaks are, and now unskippable”. A shame that TiVo couldn’t make its business model work; ever since I tried it in 2001, I’ve had a soft spot for it. (But it’s long since stopped being on sale in the UK; the Sky+ box deleted it from the market.)
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Apple Arcade is mobile gaming without all the bullshit • Kotaku

Michael Fahey and Stephen Totilo:

»

The Apple Arcade service is an all-you-can-play offering of more than 70 new games that is available starting today for $5 a month, with a one-month free trial.. It runs on iPhones and iPads now and will soon also work on iMacs and other devices including Apple TV.

Because of the way the games are being offered, there’s no need for the developers to include any of the aggravations typical of modern gaming. There are no timers designed to stop you from playing the game you’re enjoying unless you pay extra. There are no ads. There are no energy meters, and no microtransactions.

There are, simply, none of the manipulative systems that have contaminated nearly all of mobile gaming. Just imagine playing a puzzle game and not having to wait an hour for a timer to tick down before you can play the next level. Imagine playing a strategy game where you aren’t offered the chance to pay more to speed up the suspiciously slow building times. Imagine not being screwed with while you play mobile games. What a concept!

Freed of that, there is instead what will possibly prove to be one of the best gaming launch lineups in history. We say probably, because the biggest problem of covering Apple Arcade’s launch is the sheer amount of games, that all hit at once. The roster included about 50 new games when we started digging into a beta of the service earlier this week. It has grown to 70 today, and Apple says it will soon expand past 100. We therefore haven’t even had time to play all the games, let alone get very far into many of them.

«

What they forgot to mention: PlayStation and XBox controllers will work with them – you don’t have to use touch. Pair the controller with your iPhone/iPad/Apple TV/iMac and you can play the game with those. (They also show a number of the games below.)
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iPhone 11, 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max review: a Game Of Cameras • WSJ

»

From night shooting mode to ultra-wide lenses, Apple’s latest iPhones have a bunch of new camera tricks. WSJ’s Joanna Stern, with the help from the queen and some jousters, put all the new phones to the test at the New York Renaissance Faire.

«

I rarely link to videos (OK there’s another one below) or to smartphone reviews, but Stern’s fabulous creativity in how to test and demonstrate devices is unmatched. Of course you’d take your phones to a faux-medieval jousting tournament where they don’t have any power outlets and refer to phones as “pixie boxes”. Of course. It’s just she mentioned it first.
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The Galaxy Fold is still extremely fragile, and Samsung knows it • The Verge

Chaim Gartenberg:

»

Samsung’s video exhorts owners to handle their $1,000-plus phones with kid gloves. Some of Samsung’s requests are more logical: the company advises against adding any additional screen protectors (which could interfere with the folding display). Others, though, like not applying “excessive pressure” to the touchscreen when tapping it, are a bit more unusual for a phone. Samsung also cautions that the Fold isn’t water or dustproof and that the magnets that hold it shut can interfere with other magnetic products, like credit credits, hotel room keys, or medical devices.

Unfortunately, despite all those warnings, it looks like the new Fold is still almost absurdly easy to break. As JerryRigEverything shows off in a comprehensive durability test, many of the issues that plagued the first attempt at the Fold are still here: the screen is still extremely soft and easy to scratch; even fingernails are capable of damaging the display. (Samsung’s warning about tapping it too hard makes more sense now.)

JerryRigEverything’s tests also found that it was far too easy for debris to make it inside the display, which is troubling. Other parts of the test were more encouraging. The Fold does hold up admirably against attempts to fold it backward, which is a testament to the level of engineering that Samsung has put into the physical hardware.

«

“The Galaxy Fold [internal screen] has a hardness comparable to Play-doh, soggy bread or a $2,000 stick of chewing gum,” says JerryRigEverything calmly. It’s somewhere around 2 on the 10-denominated Mohs scale. The outside screen (and most smartphone screens) is about 7.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Sim cards – all vulnerable to hacking due to their inbuilt browser. CC-licensed photo by mroach 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. And just like that, it’s Friday! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

New Sim card flaw lets hackers hijack any phone just by sending SMS • The Hacker News

Mohit Kumar:

»

Cybersecurity researchers today revealed the existence of a new and previously undetected critical vulnerability in Sim cards that could allow remote attackers to compromise targeted mobile phones and spy on victims just by sending an SMS.

Dubbed “SimJacker,” the vulnerability resides in a particular piece of software, called the S@T Browser (a dynamic Sim toolkit), embedded on most Sim cards that is widely being used by mobile operators in at least 30 countries and can be exploited regardless of which handsets victims are using.

What’s worrisome? A specific private company that works with governments is actively exploiting the SimJacker vulnerability from at least the last two years to conduct targeted surveillance on mobile phone users across several countries.

S@T Browser, short for SIMalliance Toolbox Browser, is an application that comes installed on a variety of Sim cards, including eSim, as part of Sim Tool Kit (STK) and has been designed to let mobile carriers provide some basic services, subscriptions, and value-added services over-the-air to their customers.

Since S@T Browser contains a series of STK instructions—such as send short message, setup call, launch browser, provide local data, run at command, and send data—that can be triggered just by sending an SMS to a device, the software offers an execution environment to run malicious commands on mobile phones as well.

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Not worrying at all. Nothing to see here. Move along.
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Huawei confirms the new Mate 30 Pro won’t come with Google’s Android apps • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Richard Yu, the CEO of Huawei’s consumer products division, revealed onstage at a press event in Germany this morning that the company has been forced to drop Google’s Mobile Services (GMS) license on the Mate 30 series of devices.

“We cannot use the Google Mobile Services core, we can use the Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) core,” explained Yu very briefly. “Today that’s because of a US ban that these phones cannot preinstall the GMS core, it has forced us to use the HMS Core running the Huawei app gallery on the Mate 30 series phones.”

Google’s Play Store is an essential part of the company’s Google Mobile Services license, and it’s how the majority of Android-powered handsets outside of China get access to apps. Huawei can’t really work around this very easily, so instead, it’s simply building its own alternative to Google’s Play Store and associated services. Huawei is using $1bn to fund development, user growth, and marketing of its own Huawei Mobile Services.

There are 45,000 apps already integrated with Huawei Mobile Services, but there will be many thousands more that will need to be tweaked and made available in Huawei’s App Gallery. It’s a big task to get developers to support its own app store, but the company has no other real alternative.

Huawei spent less than a minute talking about the Android ban onstage, during a presentation that lasted nearly two hours. It’s clear the company has some big work ahead of it to convince consumers and developers that its version of Android, based on Android Open Source Project, will be viable.

«

Huawei’s $1bn to try to create a virtuous circle – developers bring users who buy phones which brings developers – is just like Microsoft’s effort with Windows Phone 7 ($100 per app, up to 10 apps, per developer), and as doomed outside China. (And inside China, why would you write for Huawei rather than just to be on top of WeChat?) There are 2.7m apps on Google Play.

European carriers won’t want the Mate 30: too much hassle doing customer support for people trying to get Netflix and not understanding why it isn’t there. And “Android” is a Google trademark – so Huawei can’t market it as an Android handset.
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Crash course: how Boeing’s managerial revolution created the 737 Max disaster • The New Republic

Maureen Tkacik:

»

Under the sway of all the naysayers who had called out the folly of the McDonnell deal, the board had adopted a hard-line “never again” posture toward ambitious new planes. Boeing’s leaders began crying “crocodile tears,” Sorscher claimed, about the development costs of 1995’s 777, even though some industry insiders estimate that it became the most profitable plane of all time. The premise behind this complaining was silly, Sorscher contended in PowerPoint presentations and a Harvard Business School-style case study on the topic. A return to the “problem-solving” culture and managerial structure of yore, he explained over and over again to anyone who would listen, was the only sensible way to generate shareholder value. But when he brought that message on the road, he rarely elicited much more than an eye roll. “I’m not buying it,” was a common response. Occasionally, though, someone in the audience was outright mean, like the Wall Street analyst who cut him off mid-sentence:


“Look, I get it. What you’re telling me is that your business is different. That you’re special. Well, listen: Everybody thinks his business is different, because everybody is the same. Nobody. Is. Different.”


And indeed, that would appear to be the real moral of this story: Airplane manufacturing is no different from mortgage lending or insulin distribution or make-believe blood analyzing software—another cash cow for the one percent, bound inexorably for the slaughterhouse. In the now infamous debacle of the Boeing 737 MAX, the company produced a plane outfitted with a half-assed bit of software programmed to override all pilot input and nosedive when a little vane on the side of the fuselage told it the nose was pitching up. The vane was also not terribly reliable, possibly due to assembly line lapses reported by a whistle-blower, and when the plane processed the bad data it received, it promptly dove into the sea.


«

A long read, but a terrific one.
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Facebook working on smart glasses with Ray-Ban, code-named Orion • CNBC

Salvador Rodriguez:

»

Facebook has been working to develop augmented reality glasses out of its Facebook Reality Labs in Redmond, Washington, for the past couple of years, but struggles with the development of the project have led the company to seek help. Now, Facebook is hoping a partnership with Ray-Ban parent company Luxottica will get them completed and ready for consumers between 2023 and 2025, according to people familiar.

The glasses are internally codenamed Orion, and they are designed to replace smartphones, the people said. The glasses would allow users to take calls, show information to users in a small display and live-stream their vantage point to their social media friends and followers.

Facebook is also developing an artificial intelligence voice assistant that would serve as a user input for the glasses, CNBC previously reported. In addition, the company has experimented with a ring device that would allow users to input information via motion sensor. That device is code-named Agios.

«

Problem for Facebook doing hardware is always that its platform is so limited. You’re doing Facebook; you’re not doing Google, not doing Netflix, not doing Twitter, not doing a million other things that any platform company can offer.
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Apple AR/VR patent details plans for eye, gesture, facial tracking • Variety

Janko Roettgers:

»

Apple’s upcoming mixed reality headset could include a number of sensors to track the eyes, gestures and even facial expressions of its users. The company applied for a patent to track these kinds of inputs, and combine them with information gathered from outward-facing sensors for mixed reality experiences.

The patent application in question, simply titled “Display System Having Sensors,” was first filed in March of this year, and published last week. It describes in detail plans to use a range of sensors to gather data from the wearer of a mixed reality headset.

Such sensors would make it possible for Apple to more realistically reproduce a user’s facial expression in mixed reality. Apple has already developed facial tracking software for Animoji, the company’s animated AR emoji. Animoji make use of an iPhone’s selfie camera to track facial expressions, and then translate those movements to animation.

The challenge with that approach is that you can’t simply film a user’s face if they’re wearing a headset. That’s why Apple is looking to combine data from separate sensors, including some used for eyebrow and jaw tracking, as well as eye tracking cameras.

«

The real challenge is to stop the wearer looking like an absolute dork.
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How China unleashed Twitter trolls to discredit Hong Kong’s protesters • The New York Times

Raymond Zhong, Steven Lee Myers and Jin Wu:

»

For fans of pro tennis, European soccer and British tabloids, the mysterious Twitter account had a lot to offer.

Beginning last year, it retweeted news, most of it in English, about Roger Federer and the Premier League, and it shared juicy clickbait on Zsa Zsa, an English bulldog that won the 2018 World’s Ugliest Dog contest.

Then, suddenly, the account began posting, in Chinese, about a different obsession: politics in Hong Kong and mainland China. By this summer, it had become a foot soldier in a covert campaign to shape people’s views about one of the world’s biggest political crises.

The account, @HKpoliticalnew, and more than 200,000 other Twitter accounts were part of a sprawling Russian-style disinformation offensive from China, Twitter now says, the first time an American technology giant has attributed such a campaign to the Chinese government.

China has long deployed propaganda and censorship to subject its citizens to government-approved narratives. As the nation’s place in the world grows, Beijing has increasingly turned to internet platforms that it blocks within the country — including Twitter and Facebook — to advance its agenda across the rest of the planet.

It has done so in part by setting up accounts on the platforms for its state-run news outlets, such as China Daily, to make a public case for its views. But that is quite different from using fake accounts to manipulate opinions surreptitiously or simply to sow confusion.

“The end goal is to control the conversation,” said Matt Schrader, a China analyst with the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund in Washington.

Twitter last month took down nearly 1,000 accounts that it said were part of a state-directed effort to undermine the antigovernment protests in Hong Kong. It also suspended 200,000 other accounts that it said were connected to the Chinese operation but not yet very active. Facebook and YouTube quickly followed suit. All three platforms are blocked in mainland China but not in Hong Kong.

«

The obvious question, which this article seems to answer, is that the accounts are hijacked after years of being used by normal people, rather than being long-planned schemes to subvert Twitter.
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Why prescription drugs cost so much more in America • Financial Times

Hannah Kuchler:

»

All over the world, drugmakers are granted time-limited monopolies — in the form of patents — to encourage innovation. But America is one of the only countries that does not combine this carrot with the stick of price controls. 

The US government’s refusal to negotiate prices has contributed to spiralling healthcare costs which, said billionaire investor Warren Buffett last year, act “as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy”. Medical bills are the primary reason why Americans go bankrupt. Employers foot much of the bill for the majority of health-insurance plans for working-age adults, creating a huge cost for business.

In February, Congress called in executives from seven of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies and asked them: why do drugs here cost so much? The drugmakers’ answer is that America is carrying the cost of research and development for the rest of the world. They argue that if Americans stopped paying such high prices for drugs, investment in innovative treatments would fall. President Trump agrees with this argument, in line with his “America first” narrative, which sees other countries as guilty of freeloading.

For the patients on the trip, the notion is galling: insulin was discovered 100 years ago, by scientists in Canada who sold the patent to the University of Toronto for just $1. The medication has been improved since then but there seems to have been no major innovation to justify tripling the list price for insulin, as happened in the US between 2002 and 2013.

«

Insulin is just one of the many, many cases where Americans are being ripped off by drugs companies.
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An exclusive look inside Apple’s A13 Bionic chip • WIRED

Om Malik:

»

So what happens inside the A13 Bionic when it goes to work? The general concept involves assignments, delegation, and hand-offs. For low-energy tasks—say opening and reading email—the iPhone will use the more efficient cores. But for more intense tasks like loading complex web pages, the high-performance cores take charge. For some routine and well established machine-learning work, the neural engine can hum along by itself. But for newer, more cutting-edge machine-learning models, the CPU and its specialized machine-learning accelerators lend a helping hand.

Apple’s secret, though, lies in the way all of these various parts of the chip work together in a way that conserves battery power. In a typical smartphone chip, parts of the chip are turned on to do particular tasks. Think of it as turning on the power for an entire neighborhood for them to eat dinner and watch Game of Thrones, then turning the power off, then switching on the power for another neighborhood that wants to play videogames.

With the A13, think of doing the same on-and-off approach, but on a single home basis. Fewer electrons go to waste.

“Machine learning is running during all of that, whether it’s managing your battery life or optimizing performance,” [marketing chief Phil] Schiller said. “There wasn’t machine learning running 10 years ago. Now, it’s always running, doing stuff.”

In the end, the progression of this technology is dictated by simple things we humans want from our phones—intense games that run as smoothly on a mobile handset as a console, or a camera that takes beautiful and clean photos in the middle of the dimly lit night. As we tap and swipe, Apple’s engineers are paying attention, retooling their designs, and working on a chip for next year that will entice us to upgrade all over again.

«

This article is a bit all over the place; I think the problem is you really need someone who understands chips very deeply, and gets deep details, to make sense out of it. Schiller and a member of the chip team drop some little tidbits, but I think Malik would have done better just to print the transcript of the interview. Someone would have been able to decode it.
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Here’s how to avoid iOS 13 — if you want to • The Verge

Barbara Krasnoff:

»

If you’re an adventurous iPhone user who doesn’t mind dealing with possible issues, then enjoy your new operating system. But if you depend heavily on your phone for day-to-day tasks and don’t want to deal with what may be a buggy upgrade, caution may be the order of the day. Apple has promised that version 13.1, which will contain a number of bug fixes and new features, will be following shortly; in fact, the upgrade should be available on September 24th, just days after iOS 13 launches.

If you’d rather be safe than sorry, then it’s easy to avoid the iOS 13 update. All you have to do is turn off Automatic Updates.

• Go to Settings > General > Software Update
• If the Automatic Updates setting is on (which it probably is), tap on it
• Move the toggle to the left (so that it’s no longer green)

Your Automatic Updates setting is now off. In 11 days (or whenever you hear from us that most of the bugs that came with iOS 13 have been swatted), you can just follow the same directions to turn Automatic Updates back on.

«

Probably a good idea if you can bear it. The iOS 13.1 update has been moved forward by six days, which I think – though I would, wouldn’t I? – lends even more credence to the idea that 13.0 was frozen early in order to avoid tariffs that never came. New iPhones are in stores today, so we can find out precisely what version of iOS 13 they’re running. Exciting! (Ish.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A HomePod with Siri operating: would you like it more if you chatted to it more? Or vice-versa? CC-licensed photo by Joe Wilcox 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. Free at point of sale. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The viral selfie app ImageNet Roulette seemed fun – until it called me a racist slur • The Guardian

Julia Carrie Wong:

»

ImageNet Roulette, a project developed by the artificial intelligence researcher Kate Crawford and the artist Trevor Paglen…[aims] not to use technology to help us see ourselves, but to use ourselves to see technology for what it actually is.

The site’s algorithm was trained on photos of humans contained in ImageNet, a dataset described by Crawford as “one of the most significant training sets in the history of AI”. Created in 2007 by researchers at Stanford and Princeton, ImageNet includes more than 14m photographs, mostly of objects but also of humans, that have been classified and labeled by legions of workers on Amazon’s crowdsourcing labor site, Mechanical Turk.

If you upload your photo, ImageNet Roulette will use AI to identify any faces, then label them with one of the 2,833 subcategories of people that exist within ImageNet’s taxonomy. For many people, the exercise is fun. For me, it was disconcerting.

As a technology reporter, I’m regularly tasked with writing those scolding articles about why you should be careful which apps you trust, so I usually eschew viral face apps. But after a day of watching my fellow journalists upload their ImageNet Roulette selfies to Twitter with varying degrees of humor and chagrin about their labels (“weatherman”, “widower”, “pilot”, “adult male”), I decided to give it a whirl. That most of my fellow tech reporters are white didn’t strike me as relevant until later.

I don’t know exactly what I was expecting the machine to tell me about myself, but I wasn’t expecting what I got: a new version of my official Guardian headshot, labeled in neon green print: “gook, slant-eye”. Below the photo, my label was helpfully defined as “a disparaging term for an Asian person (especially for North Vietnamese soldiers in the Vietnam War)”.

«

Which is also part of why diversity among journalists matters: because they can make a noise about it. If Wong had been just another user, her justifiable outrage would have been lost in the noise.
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‘This is not the way everybody behaves’: how Adam Neumann’s over-the-top style built WeWork • WSJ

Eliot Brown:

»

Mr. Neumann moved to the US when he was 22, where he attended Baruch College and tried to start businesses. One was a collapsible heel on women’s shoes that didn’t get off the ground. Working out of his Tribeca apartment, he started Krawlers, which sought to make baby clothes with knee pads to make crawling more comfortable. The slogan, he has said: “Just because they don’t tell you, doesn’t mean they don’t hurt.” It never gained traction.

He and Mr. McKelvey started a small co-working space on the side during the recession that followed the financial crisis and were amazed by the demand… [and that became WeWork…]

…Alcohol has been a big part of the culture, particularly in We’s first half-decade. Mr. Neumann has told people he likes how it brings people together, and tequila, his favorite, flows freely. Executive retreats sport numerous cases of Don Julio 1942, with a retail price of more than $110 a bottle, and pours sometimes start in the morning.

A few weeks after Mr. Neumann fired 7% of the staff in 2016, he somberly addressed the issue at an evening all-hands meeting at headquarters, telling attendees the move was tough but necessary to cut costs, and the company would be better because of it.

Then employees carrying trays of plastic shot glasses filled with tequila came into the room, followed by toasts and drinks.

Soon after, Darryl McDaniels of hip-hop group Run-DMC entered the room, embraced Mr. Neumann and played a set for the staff. Workers danced to the 1980s hit “It’s Tricky” as the tequila trays made more rounds; some others, still focused on the firings, say they were stunned and confused.

«

At this point everyone knows that WeWork is going to implode – it’s a house of cards that will be vulnerable to the slightest economic downturn, or change in leasing conditions – and is just enjoying the absurd stories that come out of it.
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California promises to fight EPA plan on car standards • Scientific American

Anne C. Mulkern:

»

The Trump administration’s plan to revoke California’s ability to set its own clean car standards promises to ignite a monumental legal fight between a dozen states and the federal government.

“We’ll see you in court,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D) said yesterday.

His comments came after news broke that Trump EPA officials will announce a formal effort as soon as today to repeal California’s ability to set vehicle standards that exceed federal requirements. Two sources familiar with the plans confirmed the event to E&E News after Bloomberg News first reported it.

California’s special oversight of tailpipe pollution dates back to the 1960s when the state was grappling with high levels of smog. The 1970 Clean Air Act folded in California’s authority to set its own standards, because the state’s law predated the federal act. The Obama administration in 2009 extended California’s authority to include greenhouse gas emissions from cars. Thirteen other states now follow California’s rules.

“The evidence is irrefutable: today’s clean car standards are achievable, science-based, and a boon for hardworking American families and public health,” Becerra said in a statement. “It’s time to remove your blinders, President Trump, and acknowledge that the only person standing in the way of progress is you. You have no basis and no authority to pull this waiver. We’re ready to fight for a future that you seem unable to comprehend.”

…EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said yesterday at the National Automobile Dealers Association that “we embrace federalism and the role of the states, but federalism does not mean that one state can dictate standards for the nation.”

…States that use California’s car standards include Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. Together they represent nearly 40% of the U.S. car market, said Dan Sperling, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis.

«

Of those 14 states (including California), only Pennsylvania voted for Trump. It makes sense to have a federal standard, but if you’re going to allow states to have the power to set their own standards in anything (which Republicans insist on, calling it “states’ rights”), you can’t do it piecemeal. I predict the Trump admin’s position won’t stand up in court.
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Apple Watch Series 5 review: always on time • WIRED

Lauren Goode:

»

This year’s Apple Watch doesn’t look different from last year’s Watch. I wouldn’t say the Apple Watch is unilaterally attractive, but it is distinctive. It lacks the overtly masculine aesthetic some sporty smartwatches have, and it’s more sophisticated than most Fitbits. (Then again, Fitbits are less expensive than Apple Watches, and work with Android phones instead of just with iOS devices.)

This year’s base model of Apple Watch has an aluminum case, just like in past years. It costs $399, unless you want one with a cellular modem (for when you’re swept out to sea!), in which case it costs $499. You can upgrade to a stainless steel model ($699), a titanium version ($799), or a model with a ceramic case ($1,299). You can even buy a Hermès-branded version for the low, low price of $1,399. I’ve been wearing the aluminum Series 5 with cellular connectivity.

The Watch comes with easy-to-swap watch bands, and this year the buying flow for a new watch is more customizable: You can go to the Apple website and pick your size, casing, and band all at the same time. Some of the pricier bands cost an extra $100 or more.

If those prices are all too steep, you can now buy the Apple Watch Series 3 for a discounted $199. It has GPS and the water expulsion feature first introduced in the Series 2, so you can take it in the pool.

«

So the S3 isn’t more expensive than a Fitbit Versa 2 – it’s exactly the same price, and almost all the same features. Though the Versa does have a longer battery life.

Goode gives the S5 a score of 8/10. Seems that not being compatible with Android is its “con” to set against its “pros”.
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New iPhone pre-orders in China are triple last year’s, but lack of 5G may damp sales • Yicai Global

»

First day pre-orders of Apple’s much-anticipated new iPhone 11 were more than triple the first day of sales of last year’s iPhone XR, according to Alibaba Group Holding’s Tmall online shopping website.

But turnover is expected to slump 15% this year due to the iPhones’ lack of fifth-generation network capability, industry analyst IDC said. 

Within the first minute of pre-orders starting on Sept. 13, CNY100 million (USD14m) worth of the smartphones had been purchased on Tmall, data obtained by Yicai Global showed. The iPhone 11 Pro series sold out within five minutes, according to e-commerce platform JD.com.

Android handset makers are ahead of Apple in 5G technologies with some 5G smartphones already on the market, IDC said.

«

Guessing that it’s a thing to have the multi-camera “looks new” shape – and the new green colour. China seems to be that shallow in some ways.
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How the Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation • Financial Times

Camilla Hodgson:

»

Since the 2016 US election, as fears about the power of fake news have intensified, the archive has stepped up its efforts to combat misinformation. At a time when false and ultra-partisan content is rapidly created and spread, and social media pages are constantly updated, the importance of having an unalterable record of who said what, when has been magnified.

“We’re trying to put in a layer of accountability,” said founder Brewster Kahle.

Mr Kahle founded the archive, which now employs more than 100 staff and costs $18m a year to run, because he feared that what was appearing on the internet was not being saved and catalogued in the same way as newspapers and books. The organisation is funded through donations, grants and the fees it charges third parties that request specific digitisation services.

So far, the archive has catalogued 330bn web pages, 20m books and texts, 8.5m audio and video recordings, 3m images and 200,000 software programs. The most popular, public websites are prioritised, as are those that are commonly linked to. Some information is free to access, some is loaned out (if copyright laws apply) and some is only available to researchers.

Curled up in a chair in his office after lunch, Mr Kahle lamented the combined impact of misinformation and how difficult it can be for ordinary people to access reliable sources of facts.

“We’re bringing up a generation that turns to their screens, without a library of information accessible via screens,” said Mr Kahle. Some have taken advantage of this “new information system”, he argued — and the result is “Trump and Brexit”.

Having a free online library is crucial, said Mr Kahle, since “[the public is] just learning from whatever . . . is easily available”.

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Apple study suggests chattier users prefer chattier AI assistants • VentureBeat

Kyle Wiggers:

»

How might you characterize the conversational style of a digital assistant like Siri? No matter your impression, it stands to reason that striking the wrong tone could dissuade users from engaging with it in the future.

Perhaps that’s why in a paper (“Mirroring to Build Trust in Digital Assistants“) accepted to the Interspeech 2019 conference in Graz, Austria, researchers at Apple investigated a conversational assistant that considered users’ preferred tones and mannerisms in its responses. They found that people’s opinions of the assistant’s likability and trustworthiness improved when it mirrored their degree of chattiness, and that the features necessary to perform the mirroring could be extracted from those people’s speech patterns.

“Long-term reliance on digital assistants requires a sense of trust in the assistant and its abilities. Therefore, strategies for building and maintaining this trust are required, especially as digital assistants become more advanced and operate in more aspects of people’s lives,” wrote the paper’s coauthors. “We hypothesize that an effective method for enhancing trust in digital assistants is for the assistant to mirror the conversational style of a user’s query, specifically the degree of ‘chattiness,’ [which] we loosely define chattiness to be the degree to which a query is concise (high information density) versus talkative (low information density).”

«

In the paper, they describe their putative assistant as “an interactive Wizard-of-Oz (WOZ)”. Nicely played, people.
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A veterans for Trump Facebook page was hijacked by a North Macedonian businessman for months • The Washington Post

Craig Timberg:

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The takeover of Vets for Trump, which has not previously been reported, underscores how money, politics and online misinformation remain deeply and often invisibly entangled ahead of the 2020 presidential election, despite years of promises by government officials and technology companies to combat such problems.

Foreign actors — some seeking profit, some seeking influence and some seeking both — haven’t flagged in their efforts to reach U.S. voters through online information sources such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Veterans and active-duty military personnel are especially valuable targets for manipulation because they vote at high rates and can influence others who admire their records of service.

“Veterans as a cohort are more likely than others to participate in democracy. That includes not only voting but running for office and getting others to vote,” said Kristofer Goldsmith, chief investigator for Vietnam Veterans of America. He was the first to discover the takeover of Vets for Trump during research for a report to be released Wednesday that documents widespread, persistent efforts by foreign actors to scam and manipulate veterans over Facebook and other social media.

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Doesn’t say many good things about veterans though does it?
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Amazon deforestation is driven by criminal networks, report finds • The Guardian

Dom Phillips:

»

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is a lucrative business largely driven by criminal networks that threaten and attack government officials, forest defenders and indigenous people who try to stop them, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch.

Rainforest Mafias concludes that Brazil’s failure to police these gangs threatens its abilities to meet its commitments under the Paris climate deal – such as eliminating illegal deforestation by 2030. It was published a week before the UN Climate Action Summit.

Ricardo Salles, Brazil’s environment minister in the government of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, has argued that poverty drives degradation, and that development of the Amazon will help stop deforestation.

But the report’s author, Cesar Muñoz Acebes, argues that Amazon needs to be better policed.

“As long as you have this level of violence, lawlessness and impunity for the crimes committed by these criminal groups it will be impossible for Brazil to rein in deforestation,” he said. “These criminal networks will attack anyone who stands in their way.”

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

It seems like smartphone prices have peaked – and the top is coming down. CC-licensed photo by Craig Murphy 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.

IPhone 11 and 11 Pro review: thinking differently in the golden age of smartphones • The New York Times

Brian Chen:

»

I tested the new iPhones for a week, starting with the $700 entry-level iPhone 11 with a 6.1-inch display, which I used as my primary phone for three days. Then I switched to the iPhone 11 Pro, the $1,000 model with a 5.8-inch screen, for two days. And then finally, the iPhone 11 Pro Max, the $1,100 model with a jumbo 6.5-inch screen, for another two days.

Then I compared the results with my notes and photos from testing the iPhone X in 2017. What I found was that the iPhone 11 was better, but not profoundly so.

«

Also worth reading: John Gruber essentially saying the same thing, and app maker Halide essentially saying the same thing.
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Have flagship smartphone prices peaked? • CCS Insight

Ben Wood:

»

Smartphone makers have been testing the economic rule of supply and demand for the past decade, seemingly defying conventional wisdom in consumer electronics products by raising prices. Greater utility and the constant of use smartphones combined to grow the value of devices to customers. But it seems that top phone-makers are learning that no tree grows to heaven, as prices beyond the psychological threshold of $1,000 have created sticker shock among some consumers.

Apple’s announcement of the iPhone 11 at its annual product event last week largely centered on incremental improvements such as better camera and battery life, but the company’s decision to lower the price of its base flagship smartphone caught our eye (see Instant Insight: Apple Unveils New Hardware, Competitive Subscription Services). The iPhone 11 will cost $699 in the US. A year ago, Apple introduced the iPhone XR at $749. It’s a subtle, but interesting move that sees Apple shifting its “mid-range” iPhone back to a price of $699, where it previously resided with the iPhone 8.

Apple’s decision to lower pricing can be seen as an acknowledgement that it has tested the upper limits of consumer acceptance. At a time when the company wants to expand its number of customers as it builds out its ecosystem of content and services, it’s sensible that it slightly brought down the barriers for consumers to get their hands on the new device.

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I think he’s right: Apple has tested the peak for the normal factor. Sure, there are people who will pay extra for the novelty of a folding phone, but Vertu had a market for a while too.
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A Moon space elevator is actually feasible and inexpensive: study • Observer

:

»

In a paper published on the online research archive arXiv in August, Columbia astronomy students Zephyr Penoyre and Emily Sandford proposed the idea of a “lunar space elevator,” which is exactly what it sounds like—a very long elevator connecting the moon and our planet.

The concept of a moon elevator isn’t new. In the 1970s, similar ideas were floated in science fiction (Arthur C. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise, for example) and by academics like Jerome Pearson and Yuri Artsutanov.

But the Columbia study differs from previous proposal in an important way: instead of building the elevator from the Earth’s surface (which is impossible with today’s technology), it would be anchored on the moon and stretch some 200,000 miles toward Earth until hitting the geostationary orbit height (about 22,236 miles above sea level), at which objects move around Earth in lockstep with the planet’s own rotation…

…After doing the math, the researchers estimated that the simplest version of the lunar elevator would be a cable thinner than a pencil and weigh about 88,000 pounds, which is within the payload capacity of the next-generation NASA or SpaceX rocket.

The whole project may cost a few billion dollars, which is “within the whim of one particularly motivated billionaire,” said Penoyre.

«

Whimsical space elevators. It’s what the 21st century promised.
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WeWork delays IPO after frosty investor response • Reuters

Joshua Franklin, Anirban Sen:

»

WeWork owner The We Company has postponed its initial public offering (IPO), walking away from preparations to launch it this month after a lackluster response from investors to its plans.

The US office-sharing startup was getting ready to launch an investor road show for its IPO this week before making the last-minute decision on Monday to stand down, people familiar with the matter said.

The company has been under pressure to proceed with the stock market flotation to secure funding for its operations.

In the run-up to the launch of its IPO, We Company has faced concerns about its corporate governance standards, as well as the sustainability of its business model, which relies on a mix of long-term liabilities and short-term revenue, and how such a model would weather an economic downturn…

…Were We Company to have pressed on with the IPO at such a low valuation, it would have represented a major turning point in the growth over the last decade of the venture capital industry, which has led to the rise of startups such as Uber Technologies Inc (UBER.N), Snap Inc (SNAP.N) and Airbnb Inc.

It would have meant that We Company would be valued at less than the $12.8bn in equity it has raised since it was founded in 2010, according to data provider Crunchbase. And it would have been a blow to its biggest backer, Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp, at a time when it is trying to amass $108bn from investors for its second Vision Fund.

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“No plan survives contact with the enemy.”

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What the ctenophore says about the evolution of intelligence • Aeon Essays

Douglas Fox:

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The ctenophore was already known for having a relatively advanced nervous system; but these first experiments by [Leonid] Moroz showed that its nerves were constructed from a different set of molecular building blocks – different from any other animal – using ‘a different chemical language’, says Moroz: these animals are ‘aliens of the sea’.

If Moroz is right, then the ctenophore represents an evolutionary experiment of stunning proportions, one that has been running for more than half a billion years. This separate pathway of evolution – a sort of Evolution 2.0 – has invented neurons, muscles and other specialised tissues, independently from the rest of the animal kingdom, using different starting materials.

This animal, the ctenophore, provides clues to how evolution might have gone if not for the advent of vertebrates, mammals and humans, who came to dominate the ecosystems of Earth. It sheds light on a profound debate that has raged for decades: when it comes to the present-day face of life on Earth, how much of it happened by pure accident, and how much was inevitable from the start?

If evolution were re-run here on Earth, would intelligence arise a second time? And if it did, might it just as easily turn up in some other, far-flung branch of the animal tree? The ctenophore offers some tantalising hints by showing just how different from one another brains can be. Brains are the crowning case of convergent evolution – the process by which unrelated species evolve similar traits to navigate the same kind of world. Humans might have evolved an unprecedented intellect, but the ctenophore suggests that we might not be alone. The tendency of complex nervous systems to evolve is probably universal – not just on Earth, but also in other worlds.

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Them and the octopi? Seems like there’s a lot of super-intelligent alien-like species under the sea.
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Fossil fuel divestment has ‘zero’ climate impact, says Bill Gates • Financial Times

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson and Billy Nauman:

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Climate activists are wasting their time lobbying investors to ditch fossil fuel stocks, according to Bill Gates, the billionaire Microsoft co-founder who is one of the world’s most prominent philanthropists.

Those who want to change the world would do better to put their money and energy behind the disruptive technologies that slow carbon emissions and help people adapt to a warming world, Mr Gates told the Financial Times.

“Divestment, to date, probably has reduced about zero tonnes of emissions. It’s not like you’ve capital-starved [the] people making steel and gasoline,” he said. “I don’t know the mechanism of action where divestment [keeps] emissions [from] going up every year. I’m just too damn numeric.”

Pension funds, the Church of England and even a vehicle for the Rockefeller family’s oil fortune are among a growing group of investors that have divested their fossil fuel holdings in recent years, driven by a belief that finance can be a tool to combat climate change.

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You only have to think for a moment to realise Gates is right. If an organisation divests its holdings, they don’t vanish; they’re simply owned by someone else, who might try to make those fossil fuel companies extract even more. The sensible thing is to try to force the companies to divest; or, as Gates says, put money into disruptive tech. (In which case it could make sense to divest from fossil fuels, but only as a way to get capital.)
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Buster Keaton: The Art of the Gag • YouTube

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Before Edgar Wright and Wes Anderson, before Chuck Jones and Jackie Chan, there was Buster Keaton, one of the founding fathers of visual comedy. And nearly 100 years after he first appeared onscreen, we’re still learning from him.

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Just thought it would be nice to have something quite different. This is eternal.
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Almost one-fifth of Britons ‘do not use internet’ • BBC News

Mark Ward:

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Almost 20% of British people are not using the internet, a survey suggests. The detailed in-home survey of almost 2,000 Britons found that 18% described themselves as non-users.

The Oxford Internet Institute (OII), which carried out the research, said people falling into the category tended to be older and poorer than frequent net users.

The size of the group presented a “dilemma” for any government trying to reach and support them, said the OII. “Non-users are older, proportionately less well-educated and have lower incomes,” said Dr Grant Blank, survey research fellow at the OII, who oversaw the project.

Non-users, said Dr Blank, were those who did not go online via any means – either phone or computer. The proportion of those falling into this category grew as people aged, he said.

The figure of 18% is higher than other official measures of non-users, he said, because of the way the OII sampled the UK population. Figures gathered by the Office for National Statistics suggest about 7.4% of the population are non-users but this figure is drawn from data gathered for its Labour Force Survey.

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This is still a pretty big number. When I spoke to Martha Lane Fox, then the UK’s “digital champion”, ten years ago, the figure was about 10m adults and 1.6m children.
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The startup that manipulated data to get a miracle drug to market • WSJ

Denise Roland:

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The startup had something incredible: a cure for babies with a deadly neurological disease. Last year, the company was snapped up by pharmaceutical giant Novartis AG, and by this past May, its drug was the most expensive on the market.

In just a few years, the company, AveXis, morphed from a handful of hospital-based researchers into one of the pharmaceutical industry’s most stunning success stories.

But in the hurry to fulfill the drug’s promise, AveXis manipulated data that went into the drug’s approval, Novartis and the Food and Drug Administration now say.

And some former AveXis employees say there were other stumbling blocks, separate from the manipulation cited by the FDA. They say the company struggled to manage a fast ramp-up of its research and manufacturing operations. They describe a race to develop the drug that, at times, yielded mistakes, including misstated dosing figures from early-stage trials of the drug.

AveXis went through a “fundamental shift in capabilities,” a Novartis spokesman said. He said it “evolved from an academic setting to a commercial organization with leaders who had a deeper understanding of the requirements of the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA approval process.” The spokesman said new leadership established processes “in line with the needs for a company that was gearing for product approval and commercialization.”

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Not quite Theranos; there’s an actual product here. Just not as efficacious as hoped. Quite a common story in biotech, and especially in gene therapy, which has been tomorrow’s technology for about three decades now.
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Four reasons why the BBC is failing to explain the news • openDemocracy

Mark Oliver:

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People in the UK look to the BBC to explain many of the challenges facing the country today. Yet most are under informed about a raft of issues ranging from: Brexit to immigration policy. So why is the BBC failing in its “mission to explain”? In short, it has failed the necessary precursor – the mission to understand.

Our commentariat has never been better supplied with facts, and yet we have never had such a paucity of public knowledge around complex issues. To counter popular misconceptions, the BBC needs to go beyond fact checking and provide more context. The lack of depth in its coverage of crucial stories is leading to an increasingly partisan general public, and, consequently, a failure to hold those with power to account.

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It’s an interesting piece (for the reasons, you’ll have to click through; it’s worthwhile) but the question is, who’s going to listen?
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CC-licensed photo by Joe Pemberton 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.

‘A white-collar sweatshop’: Google Assistant contractors allege wage theft • The Guardian

Julia Carrie Wong:

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to some of the Google employees responsible for making the Assistant work, the tagline of the conference – “Keep making magic” – obscured a more mundane reality: the technical wizardry relies on massive data sets built by subcontracted human workers earning low wages.

“It’s smoke and mirrors if anything,” said a current Google employee who, as with the others quoted in this story, spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. “Artificial intelligence is not that artificial; it’s human beings that are doing the work.”

The Google employee works on Pygmalion, the team responsible for producing linguistic data sets that make the Assistant work. And although he is employed directly by Google, most of his Pygmalion co-workers are subcontracted temps who have for years been routinely pressured to work unpaid overtime, according to seven current and former members of the team.

These employees, some of whom spoke to the Guardian because they said efforts to raise concerns internally were ignored, alleged that the unpaid work was a symptom of the workplace culture put in place by the executive who founded Pygmalion. That executive, Linne Ha, was fired by Google in March following an internal investigation, Google said. Ha could not be reached for comment before publication. She contacted the Guardian after publication and said her departure had not been related to unpaid overtime.

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The depressing reality is how Wizard-of-Oz these assistants seem to be: ignore the temp worker behind the curtain.
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Why grandmasters like Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana lose weight playing chess • ESPN

Aishwarya Kumar:

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At 5-foot-6, [Fabiano] Caruana has a lean frame, his legs angular and toned. He also has a packed schedule for the day: a 5-mile run, an hour of tennis, half an hour of basketball and at least an hour of swimming.

As he’s jogging, it’s easy to mistake him for a soccer player. But he is not. This body he has put together is not an accident. Caruana is, in fact, an American grandmaster in chess, the No. 2 player in the world. His training partner, Chirila? A Romanian grandmaster. And they’re doing it all to prepare for the physical demands of … chess? Yes, chess.

It seems absurd. How could two humans — seated for hours, exerting themselves in no greater manner than intermittently extending their arms a foot at a time — face physical demands?

Still, the evidence overwhelms.

The 1984 World Chess Championship was called off after five months and 48 games because defending champion Anatoly Karpov had lost 22 pounds. “He looked like death,” grandmaster and commentator Maurice Ashley recalls.

In 2004, winner Rustam Kasimdzhanov walked away from the six-game world championship having lost 17 pounds. In October 2018, Polar, a U.S.-based company that tracks heart rates, monitored chess players during a tournament and found that 21-year-old Russian grandmaster Mikhail Antipov had burned 560 calories in two hours of sitting and playing chess — or roughly what Roger Federer would burn in an hour of singles tennis.

Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters’ stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience.

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Fabulous new excuse for loading your plate high with chips: you’re playing chess later.
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HP printers try to send data back to HP about your devices and what you print • Robert Heaton

He thought he was just helping his in-laws set up their new printer:

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In summary, HP wants its printer to collect all kinds of data that a reasonable person would never expect it to. This includes metadata about your devices, as well as information about all the documents that you print, including timestamps, number of pages, and the application doing the printing (HP state that they do stop short of looking at the contents of your documents). From the HP privacy policy, linked to from the setup program:

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Product Usage Data – We collect product usage data such as pages printed, print mode, media used, ink or toner brand, file type printed (.pdf, .jpg, etc.), application used for printing (Word, Excel, Adobe Photoshop, etc.), file size, time stamp, and usage and status of other printer supplies. We do not scan or collect the content of any file or information that might be displayed by an application.

Device Data – We collect information about your computer, printer and/or device such as operating system, firmware, amount of memory, region, language, time zone, model number, first start date, age of device, device manufacture date, browser version, device manufacturer, connection port, warranty status, unique device identifiers, advertising identifiers and additional technical information that varies by product.

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HP wants to use the data they collect for a wide range of purposes, the most eyebrow-raising of which is for serving advertising. Note the last column in this “Privacy Matrix”, which states that “Product Usage Data” and “Device Data” (amongst many other types of data) are collected and shared with “service providers” for purposes of advertising.

HP delicately balances short-term profits with reasonable-man-ethics by only half-obscuring the checkboxes and language in this part of the setup.

At this point everything has become clear – the job of this setup app is not only to sell expensive ink subscriptions; it’s also to collect what apparently passes for informed consent in a court of law. I clicked the boxes to indicate “Jesus Christ no, obviously not, why would anyone ever knowingly consent to that”, and then spent 5 minutes Googling how to make sure that this setting was disabled.

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Thanks to dark patterns, it can be really hard to be certain that you have disabled these things. You’re often navigating a chicane of tickboxes – just ticking all yes or all no won’t sort it.
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OnlyFans, Fancentro and Snapchat help models sell porn to fans • CNBC

Salvador Rodriguez:

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Dolly, an 18-year-old aspiring online model, was sitting in her kitchen one day in June when an exciting email arrived. Someone had just paid $10 to view her posts for a month on a social network called OnlyFans. Just like that, Dolly had her first subscriber.

Like a growing number of her counterparts in the world of online sexual content, Dolly is trying to start converting her social media following into a paid customer base. Models are using Twitter, Facebook-owned Instagram and Snapchat to promote their premium offerings on sites like OnlyFans, Fancentro and Patreon, where they can charge a recurring subscription.

In the opaque online porn industry, where billions of dollars a year flow to websites powered by ads and premium subscriptions, Dolly and others are aiming to wrest some control from the content distributors and take a bigger slice of the economic pie.

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The internet cycle: 1) internet undermines business model of Big Offline. 2) Big Offline tries to shift online, usually unsuccessfully. 3) Individuals begin exploiting online, and make it work.
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The new target that enables ransomware hackers to paralyze dozens of towns and businesses at once • ProPublica

Renee Dudley:

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On July 3, employees at Arbor Dental in Longview, Washington, noticed glitches in their computers and couldn’t view X-rays. Arbor was one of dozens of dental clinics in Oregon and Washington stymied by a ransomware attack that disrupted their business and blocked access to patients’ records.

But the hackers didn’t target the clinics directly. Instead, they infiltrated them by exploiting vulnerable cybersecurity at Portland-based PM Consultants Inc., which handled the dentists’ software updates, firewalls and data backups. Arbor’s frantic calls to PM went to voicemail, said Whitney Joy, the clinic’s office coordinator.

“The second it happened, they ghosted everybody,” she said. “They didn’t give us a heads up.”

A week later, PM sent an email to clients. “Due to the size and scale of the attack, we are not optimistic about the chances for a full or timely recovery,” it wrote. “At this time we must recommend you seek outside technical assistance with the recovery of your data.”

On July 22, PM notified clients in an email that it was shutting down, “in part due to this devastating event.” The contact phone number listed on PM’s website is disconnected, and the couple that managed the firm did not respond to messages left on their cellphones.

The attack on the dental clinics illustrates a new and worrisome frontier in ransomware — the targeting of managed service providers, or MSPs, to which local governments, medical clinics, and other small- and medium-sized businesses outsource their IT needs.

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Samsung might combine Galaxy S and Note lineups next year • Android Police

Corbin Davenport:

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Samsung’s yearly smartphone strategy has been the same for years — release a new mainstream Galaxy S device in the spring and a more premium Galaxy Note phone in the fall. Now that there are so few hardware and software differences between the two lineups, there has been plenty of speculation that they might be merged, and a new report from Evan Blass is lending more credibility towards the idea.

Evan Blass, better known as @evleaks, said on Twitter, “Samsung is said to be debating future Galaxy branding, including eliminating the distinction [between] the S and Note lines. Could manifest in different ways, possibly [with] a ‘Galaxy One’ in lieu of an S11. [..] One possibility is to simply fuse them into a single-first half handset, essentially an S-series with an S-Pen.” Blass went on to say that if the Galaxy Fold performs as well as Samsung hopes, it could replace the Note lineup as Samsung’s latter-year premium flagship.

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Or just smooooosh them all into one single release of a giant plastic blob. Smartphone launches really are for the birds now. (Sure, Dan Frommer and John Gruber have stats showing lots of people watching them. I don’t think this means excitement is mounting year by year (and there aren’t year-on-year comparison figures); more that it’s becoming easier to access the keynote.

For much the same reason, I’ll let the Google Pixel 4 actually appear rather than linking to any of the carefully crafted social media “leaks” (I imagine a marketing meeting: “let’s have your program of social media leaks, Derek”) leading up to it. It’s a smartphone, folks. We’ve been seeing them in this incarnation for 12 years.
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Illinois teen’s memory resets every two hours after head injury • BGR

Mike Wehner:

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Of all the types of injuries a person can sustain, head injuries tend to be the scariest. Scientists have learned a lot about how the human brain works, but there are still many uncertainties. That’s especially true when it comes to brain injuries, where a person can appear medically healthy but still exhibit dramatic cognitive symptoms.

16-year-old Riley Horner was a happy, healthy Illinois teen when she was struck in the head on June 11th of this year. Her injury — an accidental kick in the head from a fellow student who was crowd surfing at an event — resulted in what doctors initially believed was a concussion, but every day since, she’s woken up believing it was June 11th.

Horner’s memory never recovered, and as WQAD reports, the teen can remember things for about two hours before it all disappears. Doctors are stumped, since brain scans have revealed nothing, highlighting how incredibly difficult it can be to diagnose brain trauma.

To cope with her memory troubles, Horner carries a notebook where she jots down details of her day that she can read back when needed. She sets an alarm on her phone to remind her to read over her notes every two hours. Her parents are, understandably, struggling with the uncertainty of what lies ahead.

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A starring role in a revise of Memento? But of course it’s terribly debilitating – and must be horribly confusing in the moments when she wakes up.
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Microsoft is working on foldable Surface devices with liquid-powered hinges • The Verge

Tom Warren:

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Microsoft has been working on a dual-screen Surface device that may well resemble the company’s Courier concept. The software giant is expected to tease the device at its Surface hardware event next month, but new patents show that Microsoft’s work goes far beyond just dual-screen hardware. A new patent, spotted by WindowsUnited, has surfaced that reveals Microsoft has been working on a special hinge that uses liquid to reduce the stress on flexible and foldable displays.

The liquid can be filled inside cavities around the flexible display to help it bend and move into different positions. Microsoft’s example shows a device with two separate sides and a flexible OLED display that extends across the entire device. Microsoft has long been focused on complex and impressive hinge work with its Surface devices, and this particular hinge is described in a lot of detail in the patent filing.

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Microsoft doesn’t make phones, though. I could believe that it’s making a Surface where you never detach the keyboard. But the hinge arrangement is quite messy.
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Why more companies are going dog friendly • The Conversation

Holly Patrick:

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From the perspective of human resources, being dog friendly could form an important part of an employer brand that is used to differentiate the company to potential recruits. This can be seen in the many online lists of pet friendly workplaces like this one on business news website Fortune. There’s also evidence that it’s an important way to retain valued employees, as bringing your dog to work may be seen as by employees as part of the reward package offered by their firm, which is not easily replicated by competitors.

Most of the empirical evidence on dogs at work concerns the benefits to employee well-being – and not just for dog owners. Research has shown that dogs promote interactions between staff resulting in an improved social atmosphere. Other research finds that dogs reduce the stress of owners and of others in the same office.

Dogs can even improve customer perceptions (for example students think professors with dogs are more friendly). And there may be benefits in terms of productivity, although the evidence for this is based on experimental medical studies rather than research involving dogs in actual workplaces.

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This is crying out for a Gary Larson cartoon, perhaps set in a tennis ball factory.
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How Wi-Fi almost didn’t happen • WIRED

Jeff Abramowitz:

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[In summer 1999] HomeRF was the biggest and most visible WLAN consortium at the time. The specification was developed by the group of Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft; it targeted the consumer market, and was backed by more than 80 other companies. Unlike 802.11 products, HomeRF products communicated with each other, and were considerably cheaper. HomeRF (short for home radio frequency) also had a catchier name than IEEE 802.11, and it had lofty plans for higher speeds and expansion into the business market.

Meanwhile, the second generation of the IEEE standard, 802.11b, was expected to get final approval at the end of September. The company 3Com, then a leading networking firm (both 3Com and Compaq were acquired by HP), had developed products based on this new and faster standard that were slated to ship toward the end of 1999. With the clock ticking, 3Com brought five strong IEEE advocates together to found an independent Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance, or WECA, which aimed to ensure that products based on the pending standard would work together. The name “FlankSpeed” was proposed, but they ultimately trademarked the name “Wi-Fi”—a riff on “hi-fi,” or high-fidelity from the era of home stereos—and established the rules by which devices could become “Wi-Fi Certified.”

We all know Wi-Fi won, but there are many ways in which Wi-Fi might not have become ubiquitous, and instead HomeRF remained a competing standard. For one, IEEE 802.11b could have been delayed, which nearly occurred save for a brilliant compromise between two WLAN industry pioneers and foes, Lucent Technologies and Harris Semiconductor. Instead, let’s hypothesize a second scenario where WECA chose to focus on just business connectivity (which was also discussed), not “go-anywhere” connectivity, and “FlankSpeed” was chosen over “Wi-Fi.”

In a FlankSpeed world, workers would have used FlankSpeed at the office and HomeRF at home. It would be more difficult to bring work home with you. Which technology would you look for in a coffee shop or at the airport? Maybe neither. Wait, no public access? NoHO (not home/not office) zones might become no man’s lands for connectivity. Far worse, no FlankSpeed baked into smartphones. Mobility as we know it vanishes into thin air!

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Scary. Which makes me wonder if there are other non-standards around where we use different ones at home and in the office.
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