Guess which is the latest app to be used for hate speech inciting violence. CC-licensed photo by Christoph Scholz on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Back for Labo(u)r Day: read at your leis(u)re. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.
Exclusive: Apple’s Tile competitor will include ‘Items’ tab in iOS 13’s Find My App and much more • MacRumors
Joe Rossignol and Steve Moser:
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Apple is developing a Tile-like accessory that will help users keep track of their personal belongings, such as their keys, wallets, and backpacks, according to an internal build of iOS 13 seen by MacRumors.
The internal build contains an image of the accessory that suggests it will be a small, circular tag with an Apple logo in the center, similar to many other Bluetooth trackers. The image could be a mockup or placeholder, however, so the final design of the tag may vary at least slightly.
This image looks similar to one shared by 9to5Mac’s Guilherme Rambo, who was first to reveal Apple’s plans for this product in April.
MacRumors can confirm the tags are codenamed “B389” within Apple, and there are many strings that are a dead giveaway as to what this product’s purpose will be, such as “tag your everyday items with B389 and never lose them again.”
The tags will be closely integrated with the new Find My app in iOS 13, which merged Apple’s previous Find My iPhone and Find My Friends apps into one.
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I’ve had a couple of Tile-style things, and I’ve never been able to choose a thing I wanted to tag. Suitcase? It’s on a plane, or it’s coming. Bicycle? Maybe. (Would you put it under the saddle to stop it being spotted?) Really can’t think of other things to tag. Any suggestions?
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Kiwibots win fans at UC Berkeley as they deliver fast food at slow speeds • SFChronicle.com
Carloyn Said:
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Version 1 was a small shopping basket perched on a remote-control car with training wheels; the “face” was simply printed on a sticker. A low-slung pizza delivery bot didn’t make the cut — the current Kiwibot can handle only personal-size pizzas but the next version will accommodate bigger pies. A hulking trash can-size model designed to enter restaurants to pick up food also didn’t work out.
Kiwi strives to make the robots endearing, like little R2-D2s.
“The concept is ‘kawaii,’” a Japanese word for cute, said CEO Felipe Chavez, citing examples like Pokémon’s Pikachu character. “You create an authentic connection when people feel characters are very cute.”
No matter how adorable, a robot that hogs the sidewalk won’t win fans. “The sidewalks are sacred; we need to make sure the robot will interact in the easiest way with citizens,” Chavez said.
The Kiwibots do not figure out their own routes. Instead, people in Colombia, the home country of Chavez and his two co-founders, plot “waypoints” for the bots to follow, sending them instructions every five to 10 seconds on where to go.
As with other offshoring arrangements, the labor savings are huge. The Colombia workers, who can each handle up to three robots, make less than $2 an hour, which is above the local minimum wage.
Another cost saving is that human assistance means the robots don’t need pricey equipment such as lidar sensors to “see” around them. Manufactured in China and assembled in the U.S., Kiwibots cost only about $2,500 each, Iatsenia said.
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A real Wizard of Oz moment.
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Talk to Transformer • OpenAI code
Adam King:
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See how a modern neural network completes your text. Type a custom snippet or try one of the examples. Built by Adam King (@AdamDanielKing) as an easier way to play with OpenAI’s new machine learning model. In February, OpenAI unveiled a language model called GPT-2 that generates coherent paragraphs of text one word at a time.
For now OpenAI has decided only to release three smaller versions of it which aren’t as coherent but still produce interesting results. This site runs the largest released model, 774M, which is half the size of the full model.
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I tried “It was a dark and stormy night.” and got back a Hemingway-esque murder mystery. Trying the first two lines of Jabberwocky – “Twas brilling, and the slithey toves/ Did gyre and gimbal in the wabe” produced what looked like Olde English. Have fun!
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The truth about faster internet: it’s not worth it • WSJ
Shalini Ramachandran,Thomas Gryta,Kara Dapena,Patrick Thomas:
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Americans are spending ever more for blazing internet speeds, on the promise that faster is better. Is that really the case?
For most people, the answer is no.
The Wall Street Journal studied the internet use of 53 of our journalists across the country, over a period of months, in coordination with researchers at Princeton University and the University of Chicago.
Our panelists used only a fraction of their available bandwidth to watch streaming services including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube, even simultaneously. Quality didn’t improve much with higher speeds. Picture clarity was about the same. Videos didn’t launch quicker.
Broadband providers such as Comcast Corp., Charter Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. are marketing speeds in the range of 250, 500 or even 1,000 megabits a second, often promising that streaming-video bingers will benefit. “Fast speeds for all of your shows,” declares one online ad from Comcast.
But for a typical household, the benefits of paying for more than 100 megabits a second are marginal at best, according to the researchers. That means many households are paying a premium for services they don’t need.
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Terrific investigation. Of course, 100Mbps – which is what you need – is only feasible with fibre; and that also enables symmetric connectivity (upload and download speeds equal). Another WSJ investigation, about the same time, found that ISPs were providing “free” upgrades – say, from 75Mbps to 150Mbps – and then charging people more after the “free promotional period” expired. So evil.
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Deconstructing Google’s excuses on tracking protection • Freedom To Tinker
Jonathan Mayer and Arvind Narayanan:
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Blocking cookies is bad for privacy. That’s the new disingenuous argument from Google, trying to justify why Chrome is so far behind Safari and Firefox in offering privacy protections. As researchers who have spent over a decade studying web tracking and online advertising, we want to set the record straight.
Our high-level points are:1) Cookie blocking does not undermine web privacy. Google’s claim to the contrary is privacy gaslighting.
2) There is little trustworthy evidence on the comparative value of tracking-based advertising.
3) Google has not devised an innovative way to balance privacy and advertising; it is latching onto prior approaches that it previously disclaimed as impractical.
4) Google is attempting a punt to the web standardization process, which will at best result in years of delay.
What follows is a reproduction of excerpts from yesterday’s announcement, annotated with our comments.
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This is quite a takedown of Google’s claims that it would really love to do what Safari and Firefox are doing in terms of cooking blocking, but, uh, it’s complicated.
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iPhone hackers caught by Google also targeted Android and Microsoft Windows, say sources • Forbes
Thomas Brewster:
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The unprecedented attack on Apple iPhones revealed by Google this week was broader than first thought. Multiple sources with knowledge of the situation said that Google’s own Android operating system and Microsoft Windows PCs were also targeted in a campaign that sought to infect the computers and smartphones of the Uighur ethnic group in China. That community has long been targeted by the Chinese government, in particular in the Xinjiang region, where surveillance is pervasive.
Google’s and Microsoft’s operating systems were targeted via the same websites that launched the iPhone hacks, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
That Android and Windows were targeted is a sign that the hacks were part of a broad, two-year effort that went beyond Apple phones and infected many more than first suspected. One source suggested that the attacks were updated over time for different operating systems as the tech usage of the Uighur community changed. Android and Windows are still the most widely used operating systems in the world. They both remain hugely attractive targets for hackers, be they government-sponsored or criminal.
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This puts something of a different cast onto the Google Project Zero blogpost, which gives the strong impression that only iOS was targeted. If Google knew about attacks on Android and Windows, why didn’t it blog those? If it didn’t, how did it miss them, since they must have been on the same sites, at the same time?
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TikTok is fuelling India’s deadly hate speech epidemic • WIRED UK
Nilesh Christopher:
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Vijay’s death went largely unnoticed. It took place in a remote part of India that most of the country’s 1.3 billion people wouldn’t be aware of. However, it demonstrates the rising tide of hate speech filled videos circulating on TikTok and the massive problems the company faces in the country.
During June and July, WIRED identified more than 500 examples of caste-based hate, threats, violence and ridicule attacking different communities within the Tamil language on TikiTok. Users extol the virtues of specific castes and verbally attack local caste-leaders, which can trigger hate crimes.
India’s caste structure is a feudal system of social division stratifying people into hierarchical groups based on their background and work. These include: priests, warriors, farmers/traders, labourers and outcasts. Dalits, formerly the ‘untouchables,’ fall outside the system and are widely persecuted.
Videos found on TikTok include casteist-hate speech posted by users identifying themselves from high castes while celebrating and singing the praises of their communities. These quickly spill into threats of physical violence with members of some communities claiming dominance over other castes.
“We must sever, not the fingers, but the heads of those who dare to lay their hands on us (our community),” one user says in a video, identifying himself as part of the Nadar community.
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Unmediated uploading allows people who really pose a risk to the public to, well, pose a threat. What’s the solution? Yesterday it was WhatsApp, today it’s TikTok.
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A walk in Hong Kong • Idle Words
Maciej Cieglowski went to the Hong Kong protesters as an observer, having come to the US as a child from communist-era Poland:
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coming in to the Hong Kong protests from a less developed country like the United States is disorienting. If you have never visited one of the Zeroth World cities of Asia, like Taipei or Singapore, it can be hard to convey their mix of high density, mazelike design, utterly reliable public services, and high social cohesion, any more than it was possible for me or my parents to imagine a real American city, no matter how many movies we saw. And then to have to write about protests on top of it!
It’s hard to write articulately about the Five Demands when one keeps getting brought up short by basic things, like the existence of clean public bathrooms.
The time and location of protests are set via social media alchemy; once you get notified about one, you descend through a spotless mall onto a bright and clean train platform, get whisked away by a train that arrives almost immediately, step out into another mall, then finally walk outside into overwhelming heat and a gathering group of demonstrators.
When it’s over, whether the demonstrators have dispersed of their own will, or are running from rubber bullets and tear gas, you duck into another mall, and another train, and within minutes are back in a land of infinite hypercommerce, tiny alleys and posh hotels with their lobby on the 40th floor of a skyscraper.
Not everyone lives in a luxury hotel, man! I get it. But my eyes are like saucers. I ask forgiveness of Hong Kongers if at times I am still that six year old kid, dazzled by what to you is ordinary. You live in a kind of city we Americans can only aspire to, and it’s no wonder you love your home so much you will take any risk to save it.
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And then there’s the protests, which Zeynep Tufekci also attended. (Also: which is the most advanced American city? I’ve been to a few, but none has struck me as ahead of any major one in Europe.)
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[Cryptography] Bitcoin Royale: peer-to-peer no-theft electronic gold • Cryptography mailing list
Philip Hallam-Baker, commenting on a new “no this time it’s safe” cryptocurrency:
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I have been tracing crypto-currency payment schemes since I wrote the survey paper while I was at MIT 24 years ago and the field hasn’t moved since. Proof of work is an application of the peppercoin scheme Adi Shamir developed with Ron Rivest. Blockchain is the Haber-Stornetta hash chain notary.
The only thing that has changed in all that time is that we have moved fromthe store of value moving from the promise that someone has chunks of gold in escrow to the promise that if we all clap our hands and say we believe in tinkerbell, we all become rich.
Ten years on, BitCoin still defends itself from all criticism with the bald statement that it is early days and nobody can know how the system will adapt to meet the challenges. That is total hogwash. We know how the system will adapt because we have been watching for ten years – it won’t adapt at all.
Ten years after the financial crash, BitCoiners still splutter about the corruption of the global financial system while the BitCoin float is stolen over and over again. Fraud accounts for much less than 1% of actual value transfers in real world payment systems. Actual value transfers account for much less than 1% of the fraud in the BitCoin system.
Ten years ago, the largest online retailer of note to accept BitCoin for payments was Overstock.com. Ten years later the largest online retailer of note that accepts BitCoin for payments is Overstock.com. And they will be dropping BitCoin in the coming months as the CEO has had to resign after having an affair with a woman now in jail for being a Russian spy and then posting bizarre rants about the deep state.
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The 2018 MacBook Pro keyboard drives me crazy • Ryan Bigg
Over to you, Ryan:
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Apple is all about the thinness of their laptops. I do not particularly care about the thinness of this device. For the most part, it sits on one of two desks that I use or it sits on my lap on the train. Maybe I use it on the couch from time-to-time. I do not care about the thinness of this device while I am using it. I only care about it when I store it away, in my backpack.
This keyboard has a key travel distance that, I am sure, is measured in microns or perhaps nanometers. It feels like I am typing on a concrete slab. Key presses inexplicably duplicate. Or don’t register at all. All for thinness.
This keyboard is a catastrophic engineering failure, designed by a company that should know better. A company with more money in the bank than several countries combined. This keyboard would be, by far, the part of the MacBook Pro that is used the most by everybody who owns one, and it is so poorly engineered for the pursuit of thinness.
Apple must fix this problem in their upcoming MacBook Pro releases. I want a fat MacBook pro keyboard, one that has a travel distance of the older wireless keyboards and doesn’t have that “concrete slab” feel.
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As I said: if design isn’t how it looks but how it works, this is poor design.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 