Showing off foldable phones like Samsung’s is difficult in the UK retail environment, where security to thwart theft prevents proper handling. CC-licensed photo by HS You on Flickr.
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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about user revolts.
A selection of 9 links for you. Will it bend? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu • The Register
Lindsay Clark:
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In 2020, six former Post Office subpostmasters caught up in the Horizon scandal became the first to have their names formally cleared after the Court of Appeal quashed their wrongful criminal convictions. The court quashed 39 more convictions in 2021. A statutory inquiry was launched in 2021.
While politicians and commentators call for convictions to be overturned and compensation claims to be expedited, media outlets have also been adding up how much government work Fujitsu has won during the sorry saga.
The Financial Times calculated that the Japanese vendor had won £4.9bn ($6.25bn) — jointly and as sole bidder — since the courts ruled the Horizon system was not robust in December 2019. It reckons the figure is £3.6bn ($4.6bn) since British prime minister Rishi Sunak entered front-line politics, according to the analysis of data compiled by public procurement research firm Tussell.
Broadcaster ITV said Fujitsu had won more than 150 government contracts since the Post Office stopped prosecuting its staff over financial discrepancies. Meanwhile, Sky News announced Fujitsu had won £6.8bn ($8.68bn) in public contracts since 2012, also working with Tussell.
While the public and the mainstream media may be shocked at the figures Fujitsu has been winning, Register readers may not be. After all, El Reg has covered many of these deals as the ink dried, as well as questioning why a proper inquiry was not launched sooner. The question is why a supplier of the system behind the Post Office scandal — the inquiry is yet to determine whether it is culpable for the system’s failures — has been rewarded with a small fortune in work.
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A good article that does explain what it sets out to explain. Worthwhile.
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Insights from a mystery shopping trip (part 2) • CCS Insight
Ben Wood:
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Foldable smartphones pose a tricky challenge for manufacturers and retailers. They’re difficult to display securely and getting people to interact with them is problematic. This is often down to a fear of interacting with unfamiliar technology, combined with concerns that the devices are very different to their current smartphone.
In the relatively secure retail environment of Samsung’s London flagship store in King’s Cross, customers are free to pick up the phones, open and shut them and get a full feel of what the devices can offer. However, even with that freedom, Samsung has had to work hard to overcome people’s reticence. Samsung’s answer came with its £500K Selfie campaign in the second half of 2023. This gave consumers a chance to become a “selfie-made half-millionaire” by using one of Samsung’s foldable phones in a retail store to take a selfie. It saw interactions with devices go up over 10% year-on-year — an impressive achievement.
But at Westfield, it immediately became clear that frequent thefts have compelled retailers to take dramatic steps to secure the foldable smartphones on display. And this is where the problems start.
Passing from one shop to another I was shocked to see how the security fixings severely limited the ability of a customer to interact with a folding phone.
Here are a few examples.
At EE, the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip5 was displayed fully open with all sides secured. At a glance, this meant it looked like yet another monobloc smartphone. Without being able to pick the device up, or at least open and close the screen, it was hard for anyone to appreciate any of the benefits of a foldable phone. To make matters worse, it wasn’t even charged, although this appeared to be a rare oversight rather than a permanent state of affairs.
In Currys, the Samsung Z Fold5 had been stolen, underlining the importance of securing these devices effectively, but the Z Flip5 remained in place. Currys has hit upon a clever way to display the device. A metal plate behind the top half meant the phone wouldn’t fully open, so it was displayed with a slight tilt in the screen, making it immediately obvious that the device could be folded. However, the brackets securing the phone prevented it from fully closing, which meant the external display didn’t activate (see below). This is unfortunate, as the external display is arguably one of the key selling points of the Galaxy Z Flip5.
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Theft is a recurring theme of Wood’s experience: in the previous example, the Samsung watches had all been stolen from their displays. Who’d work in technology retail?
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Apple Vision Pro will have limited availability at launch • UploadVR
David Heaney:
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Apple won’t have a huge number of Vision Pro headsets produced by launch.
Supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has been reporting on Apple’s suppliers for more than 10 years, claims Apple will have somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 units of Vision Pro manufactured in time for its US release, which Apple announced this week as February 2.
For comparison, in October Kuo claimed Meta would produce 2.5 million Quest 3 headsets by the end of 2023.
The limited production capacity of Apple Vision Pro, and the reasons for it, have been widely reported by multiple reliable sources in the past. It may be the reason Vision Pro is only launching in the US at first.
A week before Vision Pro was unveiled The Information’s Wayne Ma reported it would be Apple’s “most complicated” device ever, with many components tightly packed under a curved three-dimensionally formed glass frontplate reportedly proving challenging for production workers “because they have little room to maneuver tools and have to install components at awkward angles.” These challenges reportedly led the originally planned manufacturer to hand over the project in 2022 after more than four years of preparations.
The main constraint for Vision Pro’s production though, Ma reported, was that its near-4K OLED microdisplays from Sony are even more difficult and expensive to manufacture, with low yield.
South Korean tech news outlet The Elec reported that Sony can’t manufacture more than 900,000 of the microdisplays per year at most, limiting Vision Pro production to less than half a million units since Apple needs two per headset.
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Not surprising that supply is limited. Apple’s going to sell every one it makes, and production will grow from there. It’s the iPhone, iPad, Watch, AirPods all over again: big noise, lots of excitement, bit too pricey for most people at first, limited supply, not the perfect incarnation to begin with, and then just keeps improving.
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Hertz is selling its fleet of rental Tesla Model 3s for cheap • Jalopnik
Logan Carter:
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After Hertz’s full-scale EV adoption plan resulted in its fleet of new Tesla Model 3s getting abused by rideshare drivers and renters alike, Hertz is selling off a portion of its fleet for wildly cheap prices. Before you go snatch up these electrified bargains, keep in mind that Hertz is jettisoning these Model 3s due to their frequency of faults and high repair costs when damaged. Aside from that warning, if you’re looking for an affordable and usable preowned EV, check out Hertz because these admittedly high-mileage Model 3s are listed for sale between $20,000 and $25,000.
There are currently more than 100 Tesla Model 3s listed for sale on the Hertz website for under $25,000, all of which have between 50,000 and 100,000 miles on their odometers. These Model 3s are located in several regions across the United States, so bargain hunters across the country should be able to find a cheap Model 3 in their price range. According to Recurrent Auto, these used EVs should qualify for the IRS used EV tax rebate of $4,000, so the real price of the cheapest Model 3 on the Hertz website can potentially be $16,500.
Questionable reliability aside, a used 2021 Tesla Model 3 Standard Range Plus with about 87,000 miles is a steal at $16,500. Additional value adds for these Model 3s include access to Tesla’s ubiquitous Supercharger network, and the manufacturer powertrain warranty which is still in effect for another 13,000 miles.
Elsewhere on the internet, the cheapest Model 3 for sale from CarMax is nearly $29,000 and has 52,000 miles on its odometer.
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“No plan survives contact with the enemy”. The enemy in this case being the customers. Buying 10,000 electric cars to hire out is a wonderful idea in principle. In practice? Tricky.
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Why are American drivers so deadly? • The New York Times
Matthew Shaer:
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In 1966, at least, politicians were faced with an issue that could be comprehensively addressed by legislation: Vehicles were death traps because manufacturers had little incentive to make them otherwise. Our current predicament is considerably more complex. New cars are stronger and less prone to spontaneously exploding, but they’re also taller and heavier — pickup trucks have added an average of 1,300 pounds [590kg] of curb weight since 1990, while the average full-size SUV now weighs around 5,000 pounds [2,270kg], at least a thousand pounds more than the midcentury sedan. (Angie Schmitt, a transportation writer and planner, has called this the “truckification of the family car.”)
In 1967, Chevrolet made headlines with its sleek new Corvette Stingray, which leaped to 60 miles per hour in 4.7 seconds; in 2023, dozens of midmarket sports cars and sedans can match or beat that time, and the Tesla Model S Plaid, with its stock “drag strip” mode, trounces it by a full 2.6 seconds.
The relationship between car size and injury rates is still being studied, but early research on the American appetite for horizon-blotting machinery points in precisely the direction you’d expect: The bigger the vehicle, the less visibility it affords, and the more destruction it can wreak. In a report published in November, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit, concluded that SUVs or vans with a hood height greater than 40 inches [101cm] — standard-issue specs for an American truck in 2023 — are 45% more likely to kill pedestrians than smaller cars.
Meanwhile, 43% of our 4.2 million miles of road are in poor or mediocre condition, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. And they’re unlikely to be repaired soon, given the $786bn construction backlog.
Above all, though, the problem seems to be us — the American public, the American driver.
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Attack of the week: Airdrop tracing – a few thoughts • Cryptographic Engineering
Matthew Green on reports that Chinese hackers have figured out what identifier belongs to which iPhone for the AirDrop protocol:
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While AirDrop is not explicitly advertised as an “anonymous” communication protocol, any system that has your phone talking to strangers has implicit privacy concerns baked into it. This drives many choices around how AirDrop works.
Let’s start with the most important one: do AirDrop senders provide their ID to potential recipients? The answer, at some level, must be “yes.”
The reason for this is straightforward. In order for AirDrop recipients in “Contacts only” mode to check that a sender is in their Contacts list, there must be a way for them to check the sender’s ID. This implies that the sender must somehow reveal their identity to the recipient. And since AirDrop presents a list of possible recipients any time a sending user pops up the AirDrop window, this will happen at “discovery” time — typically before you’ve even decided if you really want to send a file.
But this poses a conundrum: the sender’s phone doesn’t actually know which nearby AirDrop users are willing to receive files from it — i.e., which AirDrop users have the sender in their Contacts — and it won’t know this until it actually talks to them.
…If you’re worried about leaking your identifier, an immediate solution is to turn off AirDrop, assuming such a thing is possible. (I haven’t tried it, so I don’t know if turning this off will really stop your phone from talking to other people!) Alternatively you can unregister your Apple ID, or use a bizarre high-entropy Apple ID that nobody will possibly guess. Apple could also reduce their use of logging.
But those solutions are all terrible.
The proper technical solution is for Apple to replace their hashing-based protocol with a proper PSI protocol, which will — as previously discussed — reveal only one bit of information: whether the receiver has the sender’s address(es) in their Contacts list.
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Apple was apparently warned that this was possible in 2019; Green thinks that the fact it’s being exploited now, five years later, suggests fixing it wasn’t easy.
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Incentives and the cobra effect • Boz.
Andrew Bosworth (who is chief technology officer at Meta):
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When Delhi was under colonial rule it suffered from an excess of venomous cobras. To curb the population the government paid a bounty for dead cobras. This triggered entrepreneurs to start breeding cobras to collect the bounty. When the government figured out what was happening, they discontinued the bounty which meant all the cobras being bred were worthless and were thus set free, increasing the cobra population significantly.
The Cobra effect is when the solution for a problem unintentionally makes the problem worse. And it happens more often than you might think. There are similar stories about incentives to kill rats in Hanoi, incentives to reduce greenhouse gasses, incentives to reduce narcotic production, and more.
I am also struck by the idea that incentives that sound terrible might actually produce good outcomes. I heard a story from a friend in South Africa that their town had legalized the hunting of endangered rhinoceroses. This sounds like a shockingly bad idea. But they instituted a very large fee that a hunter would have to pay that would be split with the farmer whose land the rhino was on. Farmers who used to tip off poachers to get rhinos off their land would now aggressively defend the rhino against poachers. I don’t know how widespread the program was but my friend suggested that at least in the first few years the population increased meaningfully.
There are more examples like this. The unsavory practice of keeping animals captive in zoos and aquariums has increased enthusiasm for protecting animals in the wild. Safe injection sites reduce negative externalities of illegal drug use. Sex education reduces incidences of teen pregnancy.
We get caught in these traps all the time as consumers. My favorite example is unlimited data cell phone plans. Everyone thinks they want an unlimited data plan. But at the incentive level the goal for the carrier there is to give you the minimum level of service required just so you won’t switch carriers.
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But it also applies to companies, and the incentives you give people there, as he points out.
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Water surprise: microdroplets have potential to produce hydrogen peroxide • Chemistry World
Rebecca Trager:
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Chemists at Stanford University in the US have made the surprise discovery that microscopic droplets of pure water will spontaneously produce hydrogen peroxide without any other reagents or external stimuli. The unexpected observation could lead to more environmentally-friendly and cheaper production of hydrogen peroxide, and greener chemical synthesis.
The team, led by Richard Zare, made its discovery while trying to synthesise gold nanostructures in microdroplets. The researchers found that water molecules were oxidising to form hydrogen peroxide at concentrations of around 1ppm in the micron-sized drops.
They suggest that the microdroplet environment itself promotes redox chemistry at the surface of the droplet, where water ionises to form H+ and hydroxyl ions. ‘What seems to be happening is that at the interface between air and water … you have a big charge separation between the OH– and the H+,’ Zare tells Chemistry World. ‘The OH– tends to want to stick to the air more than the H+, which likes water, and this leads to a very large electric field being set up at the interface.’ That electric field is roughly 10 million volts%imetre – much larger than one could generate in the lab, Zare notes.
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Water is very, very weird stuff. This is reminiscent of black holes producing particles at the event horizon.
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The entrepreneur who bet his company on a fight with Apple • WSJ
Aaron Tilley:
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Apple might be [Masimo chief executive Joe] Kiani’s biggest war yet, one that likely won’t be settled for years.
The US International Trade Commission in October ruled that Apple violated Masimo’s patents and ordered a ban on some Apple Watches shipped to the US, which went into effect Dec. 26. Apple on Wednesday won a reprieve to resume sales. In addition to Apple’s appeal, there are several related lawsuits working their way through the court system.
…He founded Masimo in 1989, when he was 24, after the startup he had joined opted not to pursue his design for an improved pulse oximeter that didn’t produce erroneous false alarms when patients moved.
He next took on Nellcor, the leading pulse oximeter provider. In 1994, Nellcor offered to license Masimo’s technology. The money would have been enough for Kiani to retire at a young age, said Steve Jensen, Masimo’s longtime lawyer. Kiani walked away from the deal when Nellcor wouldn’t promise to quickly introduce his technology to patients, Kiani and Jensen said.
Later, Nellcor announced it had technology that allowed blood oxygen to be measured while the user was in motion. In 1999, Masimo sued over patent infringement. In 2006, Nellcor settled and began paying out for damages and royalties that eventually amounted to nearly $800m. A spokeswoman for the company that now owns Nellcor said the company disagrees with Masimo’s characterizations of the early licensing discussions as well as the later patent battle, but declined to share more, citing confidential discussions.
In 2009, Masimo sued Royal Philips over a patent-infringement issue and eventually settled in 2016, with Philips paying out $300m and agreeing to incorporate Masimo’s technology into its product that Kiani said ended up generating more than $1bn for Masimo.
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Clearly not the sort of person who quails at a court battle. Apple might have quite a challenge on its hands here.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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