If you recognise these, you’ll already know that Ingress is an AR game where players may travel thousands of miles. CC-licensed photo by killbox 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.

How an augmented reality game escalated into real-world spy warfare • VICE

Elizabeth Ballou:

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Meng was tired. The weekend before, she’d flown from Beijing to Seattle and back in less than forty-eight hours in order to meet one of her counterparts and obtain the key required to complete the connection from Jiangsu Province to Alaska. Then she’d spent the following days coordinating with the Nanjing group. Now she was getting ready to sleep in a tent on a backwater island. She only hoped that all her effort to marshal other teams into following her lead would pay off, because her plan hinged on whether they could take and hold that island long enough to complete their mission.

At first, Meng hadn’t wanted to get involved in the Resistance. But she made an ideal agent, which is why they recruited her. She traveled a lot for work, and made enough money that she could travel extensively outside of it. Those two factors would make her a powerful player within the intensely competitive community around Ingress, an augmented reality mobile game. It uses the same geolocation functions as an app like Foursquare, but places them in the context of a sci-fi story about factional intrigue: to seize territory, players go to different physical locations in the world. Which is where Meng came in. In 2016, some friends convinced her to start doing them small favors on her travels, little side-trips that wouldn’t take her too far out of her way. Within a year, 25-year-old Meng was planning and executing some of the group’s most ambitious operations while working another job full-time.

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This is quite surreal – and it would only require another layer, in which the people behind the game are actively trying to carry out some sort of espionage, for it to be really mindbending.
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What Sony’s robot dog teaches us about biometric data privacy • CNET

Megan Wollerton:

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Because of our office pet’s face-detecting capabilities, Sony doesn’t sell Aibo in Illinois. The state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) regulates the collection of biometric data, including face scans.

So Aibo’s out in the land of Lincoln, but the story doesn’t stop with Sony’s quirky robot. Illinois also limits access to facial recognition in home security cameras, a feature that’s becoming increasingly prevalent in the consumer security market. Let’s take a closer look at BIPA, the growth of biometric tech in consumer products – and how other states in the US treat your biometric info.

The Biometric Information Privacy Act was established in 2008 to regulate “the collection, use, safeguarding, handling, storage, retention, and destruction of biometric identifiers and information.” BIPA defines “biometric identifiers” as retina scans, iris scans, fingerprints, hand scans, face scans and voiceprints.

Basically, an individual or a company needs “informed written consent” to use another individual’s biometric info. 

State senator Terry Link for Illinois’ 30th district introduced Senate Bill 2400 on Feb. 14, 2008 to protect the biometric privacy of Illinois residents. State senators Christine Radogno, Iris Y. Martinez, David Koehler and Heather Steans served as co-sponsors of the bill. It was approved as the Biometric Information Privacy Act on Oct. 3, 2008.

Senator Link filed an amendment to BIPA on May 26, 2016 to redefine “biometric identifier,” to make it easier to collect certain biometric data, but later withdrew the amendment.

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Which also prevents various other bits of kit being sold there – such as Nest’s facial recognition-enabled systems, which are disabled there. Texas and Washington states have some too.
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Millions of people uploaded photos to the Ever app. Then the company used them to develop facial recognition tools • NBC News

Olivia Solon and Cyrus Farivar:

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“Make memories”: That’s the slogan on the website for the photo storage app Ever, accompanied by a cursive logo and an example album titled “Weekend with Grandpa.”

Everything about Ever’s branding is warm and fuzzy, about sharing your “best moments” while freeing up space on your phone.

What isn’t obvious on Ever’s website or app — except for a brief reference that was added to the privacy policy after NBC News reached out to the company in April — is that the photos people share are used to train the company’s facial recognition system, and that Ever then offers to sell that technology to private companies, law enforcement and the military.

In other words, what began in 2013 as another cloud storage app has pivoted toward a far more lucrative business known as Ever AI — without telling the app’s millions of users.

“This looks like an egregious violation of people’s privacy,” said Jacob Snow, a technology and civil liberties attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. “They are taking images of people’s families, photos from a private photo app, and using it to build surveillance technology. That’s hugely concerning.”

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Wonder if this is legal in Illinois?
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Opinion: breaking up Facebook is not the answer • The New York Times

Nick Clegg, former deputy prime minister of the UK, now a PR for Facebook, in a placed op-ed at the NYT:

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In this competitive environment, it is hard to sustain the claim that Facebook is a monopoly. Almost all of our revenue comes from digital advertising, and most estimates say Facebook’s share is about 20% of the United States online ad market, which means 80% of all digital ads happen off our platforms.

The second misunderstanding is of antitrust law. These laws, developed in the 1800s, are not meant to punish a company because people disagree with its management. Their main purpose is to protect consumers by ensuring they have access to low-cost, high-quality products and services. And especially in the case of technology, rapid innovation. That is exactly where Facebook puts its attention: building the best products, free for consumers, and funded by advertisers.

What antitrust law isn’t about is size alone. In Facebook’s case, our size has not only brought innovation, it has also allowed us to make a huge investment in protecting the safety and security of our services.

Over the past two years we’ve focused heavily on blocking foreign adversaries from trying to influence democratic elections by using our platforms. We’ve done the same to protect against terrorism and hate speech and to better safeguard people’s data. And the resources that we will spend on security and safety this year alone will be more than our overall revenues at the time of our initial public offering in 2012. That would be pretty much impossible for a smaller company.

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And here’s Clegg, writing in 2017 (after he’d left government), in The Independent:

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As an old-fashioned liberal who believes in the virtues of competition, I remain perplexed at the way in which US competition law only seems to care about the effect of near monopoly market dominance by a tiny number of big players if and when it increases the prices paid by consumers.

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(H/t Olivia Solon, who spotted the latter.)
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Farmers plough through Netflix while ploughing fields • WSJ

Jacob Bunge:

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After kissing his three children goodnight this spring, Aaron Newell settled in to binge-watch the “Avengers” movies ahead of the franchise’s new theater release, “Avengers: Endgame.”

Mr. Newell’s home theatre — equipped with a stereo sound system and an ergonomically designed chair—sits inside a five-by-five foot soundproofed cab above roughly 30,000 pounds of rumbling machinery, crawling over fields on massive caterpillar tracks.

“People think I’m crazy, but I look forward to it,” Mr. Newell, 35, said of planting-season hours on his farm that can begin before dawn and stretch past midnight.

Mr. Newell, who plowed through all six seasons of Netflix’s “House of Cards” while tilling his fields near Callender, Iowa, last fall, said he would farm with or without modern conveniences. But glancing over at “The Wolf of Wall Street” or the “Star Wars” series on a cabin-mounted iPad makes long days go by faster, he said. “If it was dead silence for 12 to 13 hours, that might be a different issue.”

Thanks to GPS-enabled guidance systems and high-speed planters, US farmers can plant and harvest fields faster than ever before, often with minimal human involvement. Self-steering tractors and combines free farmers to monitor seeding rates, haggle on the phone over crop sales, watch the weather—and get bored.

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Or, as one wag on Twitter put it, “Netflix and till”. (Bet the WSJ’s subeditors are kicking themselves at missing that one.)
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“Strong opinions loosely held” might be the worst idea in tech • The Glowforge Blog

Michael Natkin:

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in the tech industry, with our motto of “strong opinions, loosely held”, we’ve glorified overconfidence. The same foolishness that would cost your money and pride in a pool hall is the stuff of legend in Silicon Valley. Stroll through an engineering office and you are likely to hear the (mostly white, mostly male) denizens making statements like:

“Only an idiot would use MongoDB.”

“We should absolutely build this using GoLang.”

“All of our users would kill for that feature.”

“Linguini’s is the worst restaurant in the world and I’d rather eat dehydrated bat vomit for the rest of my life than have lunch there again.”

The idea of strong opinions, loosely held is that you can make bombastic statements, and everyone should implicitly assume that you’ll happily change your mind in a heartbeat if new data suggests you are wrong. It is supposed to lead to a collegial, competitive environment in which ideas get a vigorous defense, the best of them survive, and no-one gets their feelings hurt in the process.

On a certain kind of team, where everyone shares that ethos, and there is very little power differential, this can work well. I’ve had the pleasure of working on teams like that, and it is all kinds of fun. When you have a handful of solid engineers that understand each other, and all of them feel free to say “you are wrong about X, that is absolutely insane, and I question your entire family structure if you believe that, clearly Y is the way to go”, and then you all happily grab lunch together (at Linguini’s), that’s a great feeling of camaraderie.

Unfortunately, that ideal is seldom achieved.

What really happens? The loudest, most bombastic engineer states their case with certainty, and that shuts down discussion.

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See also: Twitter.
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Dooce.com’s Heather Armstrong was the “queen of the mommy bloggers.” Then her life fell apart • Vox

Chavie Lieber:

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The Armstrongs’ divorce was finalized in March 2013, and Jon moved to New York a year later to be with a new girlfriend. Armstrong now has custody of her two daughters for most of the year (they spend summers with their father).

The Armstrong marriage wasn’t the only thing in the Dooce universe that had gone south. By 2012, Dooce’s audience — like that of so many blogs — had scattered to social media, so readership declined. Blogging started to fizzle out as a medium, and display advertising money dried up.

Dooce did have a somewhat diversified revenue stream; Armstrong started doing sponsored content as early as 2009. Brands would pay her for blog posts that promoted their products, but she says brand demands began to cross a line.

“It became about products in posts, manufacturing experiences I may not have had, and then including photos of my children,” Armstrong recalls. “It very quickly spiraled and I didn’t feel comfortable with it.”

The Dooce blog lived on for a bit after the divorce. Armstrong filled it with recipes, shopping guides, and tales of single parenthood. In 2015, though, she announced she was taking a break.

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Divorce apart, it’s the story of so many bloggers who found success in the mid-noughts: social media (particularly Facebook) swallowed their audience.
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Review: Shell Recharge • Terence Eden’s Blog

Terence Eden has an electric car:

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Even when I had a petrol car, I boycotted Shell – refusing to use their petrol stations. I thought that would continue once I got an electric car – no dino-juice for me!

My car has more than enough range for me, but on a recent journey I decided it would be prudent to do a splash-and-dash – shove a few kWh in the battery just in case. I fired up Zap Map and was pleasantly surprised to see that Shell had a rapid charger near me. So, here’s my review. Can a station forecourt deliver the power I need?

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Worth reading, especially in conjunction with his calculation that electric cars get the equivalent of 165mpg. (The calculation is slightly different in the US, where fuel is underpriced relative to the negative externalities that it has.)
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Google launches Portals, a new web page navigation system for Chrome • ZDNet

Catalin Cimpanu:

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At the I/O 2019 developer conference yesterday, Google launched a new technology called Portals that aims to provide a new way of loading and navigating through web pages.

According to Google, Portals will work with the help of a new HTML tag named . This tag works similarly to classic tags, allowing web developers to embed remote content in their pages.

The difference between a portal and an iframe tag is that Google’s new Portals technology is an upgrade over iframes.

Google says portals allow users to navigate inside the content they are embedding –something that iframes do not allow for security reasons…

…Google engineers hope that their new Portals technology will take over the web and become the standard way in which websites transition between links.

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Chrome dev track-only, non-standard (“it is not a W3 Standard nor is it on th W3C Standards Track”). Remember when Google was about the open web? Now it’s about the Google-defined web. When Microsoft used to do this stuff, people went mad.
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Trump’s washing machine tariffs stung consumers while lifting corporate profits • The New York Times

Jim Tankersley:

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President Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on imported washing machines has had an odd effect: It raised prices on washing machines, as expected, but also drove up the cost of clothes dryers, which rose by $92 last year.

What appears to have happened, according to new research from economists at the University of Chicago and the Federal Reserve, is a case study in how a measure meant to help domestic factory workers can rebound on American consumers, creating unexpected costs and leaving shoppers with a sky-high bill for every factory job created.

Research to be released on Monday by the economists Aaron Flaaen, of the Fed, and Ali Hortacsu and Felix Tintelnot, of Chicago, estimates that consumers bore between 125% and 225% of the costs of the washing machine tariffs. The authors calculate that the tariffs brought in $82m to the United States Treasury, while raising consumer prices by $1.5bn.

And while the tariffs did encourage foreign companies to shift more of their manufacturing to the United States and created about 1,800 new jobs, the researchers conclude that those came at a steep cost: about $817,000 per job.

Mr. Trump imposed the tariffs last year in response to a complaint by the Michigan-based manufacturer Whirlpool, which claimed foreign competitors were cornering the American washing machine market with cheaper models that threatened domestic manufacturers. The tariffs started at 20% per imported washer and rose to 50% late in the year, after total imports exceeded a quota set by the administration.

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Yet there are people who believe China is paying the tariffs and that this is a successful readjustment.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A busy restaurant: will staff have time to answer a phone call from “Google”? CC-licensed photo by Ralph Daily 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. Friday! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

It’s time to break up Facebook • The New York Times

Chris Hughes, formerly of Facebook (he worked to develop its News Feed), with a very long article about why he thinks it’s time for antitrust action, which boils down to this:

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How would a breakup work? Facebook would have a brief period to spin off the Instagram and WhatsApp businesses, and the three would become distinct companies, most likely publicly traded. Facebook shareholders would initially hold stock in the new companies, although Mark and other executives would probably be required to divest their management shares.

Until recently, WhatsApp and Instagram were administered as independent platforms inside the parent company, so that should make the process easier. But time is of the essence: Facebook is working quickly to integrate the three, which would make it harder for the F.T.C. to split them up.
Mark Zuckerberg after ringing the opening bell for the Nasdaq stock market on the day his company went public.

Some economists are skeptical that breaking up Facebook would spur that much competition, because Facebook, they say, is a “natural” monopoly. Natural monopolies have emerged in areas like water systems and the electrical grid, where the price of entering the business is very high — because you have to lay pipes or electrical lines — but it gets cheaper and cheaper to add each additional customer. In other words, the monopoly arises naturally from the circumstances of the business, rather than a company’s illegal maneuvering. In addition, defenders of natural monopolies often make the case that they benefit consumers because they are able to provide services more cheaply than anyone else.

Facebook is indeed more valuable when there are more people on it: There are more connections for a user to make and more content to be shared. But the cost of entering the social network business is not that high. And unlike with pipes and electricity, there is no good argument that the country benefits from having only one dominant social networking company.

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One year later, restaurants are still confused by Google Duplex • The Verge

Natt Garun:

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Some employees were even skeptical about whether the voice on the other line is truly a robot. Gabriel Murphy, owner and chef at Gogi’s Restaurant in Jacksonville, Oregon, said he tried the AI out on his staff as he monitored the call in private. When he later told them it was Duplex, the team didn’t believe they were truly talking to an AI. “None of the staff seemed to have any issue with it, [but] there were plenty of jokes about Skynet and machines taking over,” Murphy says.

But Google’s machines don’t seem to be taking over yet. As the US continues to deal with an onslaught of spammy robocalls, it seems that many restaurant employees are inadvertently shielding themselves from Duplex by ignoring incoming calls that do not display a person’s name. Mark Seaman, a manager at two-year-old restaurant Queens Bully, in Forest Hills, New York, says he often tries to avoid calls from businesses that look like they could be pitching the restaurant on a product or service. “Most of our growth comes from our own social media efforts and the parties we throw,” Seaman tells me. “We get calls all the time from people trying to sell us something [we don’t need].”

Although Google does not personally call businesses to convince them to buy ads, it stands to reason why many restaurant employees would shy away from answering calls that list the company in its caller ID in the first place. As Google plans to extend Duplex beyond restaurants and into other appointment-based services like hair salons, it’ll have to do more to convince businesses that its robocalls, at least from the surface, are different than the ones most Americans are accustomed to.

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The Caller ID issue is going to be a big one. Americans suffer terribly from spam calls. (Though what if Google gets its CallJoy system to answer them? AI talking to AI. Or would it block them?) Also, it’s been less than a year that Duplex has been in use. You’d have got the same reaction (generally) to the iPhone, iPad, Amazon Echo etc a year after their launch.
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Ford taps the brakes on the arrival of self-driving cars • WIRED

Aarian Marshall:

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Ford CEO Jim Hackett Tuesday joined the growing ranks of vehicle and tech execs willing to say publicly that self-driving cars won’t arrive as soon as some had hoped.

The industry “overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles,” Hackett told the Detroit Economic Club. Though Ford is not wavering from its self-imposed due date of 2021 for its first purpose-built driverless car, Hackett acknowledged that the vehicle’s “applications will be narrow, what we call geo-fenced, because the problem is so complex.” Bloomberg earlier reported the comments.

Hackett is the latest high-ranking industry insider to engage in public real talk about the prospects for self-driving cars, which back in 2016 seemed just around the corner…

…What’s so complicated about full self-driving? For one, there are no federal regulations for the tech, and states have struggled to fill the void with their own testing rules. Second, industry insiders say sensors need to get better—to “see” farther more cheaply—before the tech can be deployed widely. And developers are still hacking away at better algorithms, ones that can handle the uncertainty of new road situations without hurting their cargo.

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Who has gone where • Centre For Towns

Concom Website Design:

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Moving out of London

This map shows the number of people who have moved from London to each local authority over the last four years.

House prices where you live: This map has four options: 1. Average house price in 1997; 2. Average house price in 2017; 3. Change in house price (£), 1997-2017; 4. House price:Income ratio. The last option uses average houshold income.

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And plenty more: mental health contacts in the last 12 months, post office closures in the past three years, train station usage, access to broadband, and much more.
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Global smartwatch shipments grew 48%yoy in Q1 2019; one in three was an Apple Watch • Counterpoint Research

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Global smartwatch shipments grew a healthy rate of 48% year-on-year (YoY) in Q1 2019 driven by Apple, Samsung, Fitbit, and Huawei, according to the latest research from Counterpoint’s Global Smartwatch Tracker.

Commenting on the major shift in the market, Counterpoint Research Analyst, Satyajit Sinha, noted, “Apple Watch shipments grew a solid 49% YoY despite the weak demand for its iPhones. Apple continues to focus on the health-related features like ECG and fall detection in the Apple Watch Series 4. The ECG capability in the Apple Watch is the most desirable feature, according to our latest Consumer Lens survey. Apple has now received approval on its ECG features from healthcare authorities of Hong Kong and 19 other countries including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK.”

Sinha added: “The heart rate sensor for health monitoring, GPS and pedometer sensors for fitness, and NFC embedded for payment are some of the key integrated technologies. Related use-cases and in addition to notifications with cellular capability are driving the smartwatch adoption. However, limited battery life remains a pain point for consumer’s decision-making process, irrespective of region and price band.”

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I don’t think Apple is going to dramatically extend battery life. Surprised that after four years people haven’t figured this out. It hasn’t done on its laptops, phones, tablets or AirPods. Not going to happen on the Watch. Meanwhile, Huawei is coming up fast.
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North American smartphone market plunges to five-year low • Canalys

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Smartphone shipments in North America plummeted 18% year on year in Q1 2019 to a five-year low of 36.4m units, down from a record high of 44.4m in Q1 2018. This is the steepest fall ever recorded, due to a lacklustre performance by Apple and the absence of ZTE. But Apple remained the clear leader, despite suffering a regional decline of 19%. It shipped more than 4.5m iPhone XR handsets in the quarter, while Samsung shipped more than 2.0m each of its Galaxy S10+ and S10e models.

Samsung narrowed Apple’s lead in the first quarter, shipping 29% of North America’s smartphones, against 23% in Q1 2018. Samsung scheduled an earlier launch date for the S10 series, and more than doubled shipments over the S9 series in their respective launch quarters.

“Samsung brought real differentiation to its Galaxy S10 devices,” said Canalys Research Analyst Vincent Thielke. “Its triple camera, ultra-wide-angle lens, hole-punch display and reverse wireless charging all raised consumer interest. While these technologies are not new, Samsung is among the first to bring them to the US in a mass-market smartphone, and the appeal of such new features will be important for other launches this year.”

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Saturated market; replacement cycles lengthening. I don’t think people are honestly gagging for triple cameras or the rest. A few wanted a new phone, is all.
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What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right • The Washingtonian

“Anonymous”:

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the transfer, midyear, to a new school—after he’d been wrongly accused, unfairly treated, then unceremoniously dropped by his friends—shattered Sam. He felt totally alone. I counseled patience, naively unprepared for what came next: when he found people to talk to on Reddit and 4chan.

Those online pals were happy to explain that all girls lie—especially about rape. And they had lots more knowledge to impart. They told Sam that Islam is an inherently violent religion and that Jews run global financial networks. (We’re Jewish and don’t know anyone who runs anything, but I guess the evidence was convincing.) They insisted that the wage gap is a fallacy, that feminazis are destroying families, that people need guns to protect themselves from government incursions onto private property. They declared that women who abort their babies should be jailed.

Sam prides himself on questioning conventional wisdom and subjecting claims to intellectual scrutiny. For kids today, that means Googling stuff. One might think these searches would turn up a variety of perspectives, including at least a few compelling counterarguments. One would be wrong. The Google searches flooded his developing brain with endless bias-confirming “proof” to back up whichever specious alt-right standard was being hoisted that week. Each set of results acted like fertilizer sprinkled on weeds: A forest of distortion flourished.

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Google thought my phone number was Facebook’s and it ruined my life • VICE

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

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In the last three days, I’ve gotten more than 80 phone calls. Just today, in the span of eight minutes, I got three phone calls from people looking to talk to Facebook. I didn’t answer all of them, and some left voicemails.

Initially, I thought this was some coordinated trolling campaign. As it turns out, if you Googled “Facebook phone number” on your phone earlier this week, you would see my cellphone as the fourth result, and Google has created a “card” that pulled my number out of the article and displayed it directly on the search page in a box. The effect is that it seemed like my phone number was Facebook’s phone number, because that is how Google has trained people to think.

Considering that on average, according to Google’s own data, people search for “Facebook phone number” tens of thousands of times every month, I got a lot of calls.

“[Google is] trying to scrape for a phone number to match the intent of the search query,” Austin Kane, the director for SEO strategy for the New York-based consulting company Acknowledge Digital, told me in an email. “The first few web listings … don’t actually have a phone number available on site so it seems that Google is mistakenly crawling other content and exposing the phone number in Search Engine Results Pages, thinking that this is applicable to the query and helpful for users.” (Vice Media is a client of Acknowledge Digital.)

When I reached out to Facebook’s PR to get their thoughts, a spokesperson started his email response with: “Huh, that’s an odd one.”

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But the fault is Google’s.
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Belt and Road summit puts spotlight on Chinese coal funding • The Guardian

Jonathan Watts:

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At the opening last week of a 660MW coal power station in Tharparkar – supported by China Machinery Engineering Corporation – officials declared the new facility to be “the pride of Pakistan”, but the plant will make the country dependent on a new open-cast coalmine that will produce 3.8m tonnes of low-quality fuel each year. Climate campaigners said this was a missed opportunity because the surrounding Sindh province had rich potential for renewables, with wind corridors and abundant sunlight.

In Europe, China is financing, building or equipping 4.1GW of coal-fired plants, according to the Danish NGO VedvarendeEnergi (Sustainable Energy), including the Kostolac B3 power station in Serbia and the Tuzla 7 plant in Bosnia, which are subject to investigations, lawsuits or petitions from environmental groups.

Wawa Wang, a senior adviser to VedvarendeEnergi, said the forum should address the double standards between China’s domestic climate actions and its overseas actions. “I’d like to see China introduce binding policy and law that restrict financing of overseas coal projects,” she said.

Xi has declared that the BRI [Belt and Road Initiative] should be green. But the balance so far has been towards black energy.

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A riposte to my suggestion that China would rein back on coal. Instead it seems to be ramping it up abroad, through funding. (Thanks Robert Howarth for the link.)
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Disney put more than $400m into Vice Media. Now it says that investment is worthless • Vox

Peter Kafka:

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Disney’s accounting decision is yet another example — perhaps the most stunning one — of the turnabout we’ve seen in digital media over the past few years. Investors have decided that high-flying publishers that once confidently explained that they’d created a new media paradigm are now worth very little … or even less.

Here’s a partial roll call familiar to some of you:

• Mic, which raised more than $60m, sold for less than $5m late last year
• Mashable, which was valued at about $250m in 2016, sold for less than $50m in 2017
• The properties formerly known as Gawker Media, plus the Onion and other sites, just sold for a price that’s likely well below $50m; Univision, the TV conglomerate which sold them off, had paid $135m for the Gawker sites alone in 2016
• We don’t (yet) know the value that Comcast, which put a collective $600m into Vox Media (which owns this site) and BuzzFeed over the past few years now thinks those two publishers are worth. But it’s a reasonable bet that Comcast thinks they are worth less than it thought in 2015.

All of those companies have different stories and different particulars. The through-line is that a few years ago, all of them were confident that they were going to shoot up in value, because they knew how to reach young audiences by exploiting the big tech platforms — in particular, Facebook and Google.

Instead, Facebook and Google have hoovered up the majority of digital ad revenue — the money the new publishers expected to get, once they reached scale. And publishers that had expected Facebook and Google to rely on them for content have learned that Facebook and Google don’t really need them, after all.

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The valuations were always wild, based on starry-eyed guesses from early growth rather than realism. So it goes.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Now decommissioned, Battersea Power Station was coal-fired. But the UK has gone without burning coal for power for a week. CC-licensed photo by mendhak 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 13 links for you. So get reading! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The end of App Stores is rapidly approaching • OneZero

Owen Williams:

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t’s time to blow up the walled garden that keeps you locked into the products Apple and Google allow into their app stores. A new generation of Progressive Web Applications (PWAs), now taking root on desktop computers, may soon make the jump to your smartphone, changing how you download apps — and where they come from — forever.

An update in recent preview versions of Google Chrome, which enjoys 63% of the browser market share worldwide, hints at the potential here. Users can now install apps from sites simply by clicking a button that materializes in the URL bar, giving near-instant access to powerful, web-based versions of services like Spotify — no more app stores or finicky download pages.

These install buttons are a magic peek at the future of app development. If you navigate to a PWA, such as Spotify’s web player, you’ll see a desktop-style experience and a new option to install the app, so long as you’re using a browser that supports the feature.

Once you’ve installed it, the app will open in its own independent window outside of the browser, create desktop shortcuts, and offer a full feature set — like the ability to use your computer’s media keys to skip tracks or pause music — as if it were a “real,” native app.

Upcoming improvements will allow these apps to do even more. Hidden options in Chrome allow PWAs to launch themselves whenever relevant links are accessed — Twitter’s PWA becomes almost as good as a desktop app with this option enabled, auto-redirecting tweet URLs to the right place.

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I love how this story appears every two years. The future is web apps, and has been since Steve Jobs told the WWDC audience in 2007 he had a “sweet solution” to their desire to put apps on the iPhone – the web! – and was greeted by the stoniest of silences. PWAs aren’t even fully functional on the desktop; you can’t use any browser. On mobile, still a non-starter.
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Google tops 15 million music subscribers as it chases Spotify • Bloomberg

:

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Google’s paid music services have eclipsed 15 million subscribers, according to two people familiar with the numbers, a milestone for a company that has struggled to build subscription media businesses.

The figure includes subscribers to two services – YouTube Music and Google Play Music, an older service that is being folded into YouTube Music – said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public. The number also includes some customers who are still on promotional trials.

Google, part of Alphabet Inc., is still a long way from the market leaders: Spotify has more than 100 million subscribers, while Apple has more than 50 million. But the progress is a good sign for an ad-supported company that has rarely gotten customers to pay for its services.

YouTube declined to comment on the total number of customers for its paid music service, but said subscribers to YouTube Music and Premium grew 60% between March 2018 and March of this year. Premium subscribers pay for the music service, as well as access to the regular YouTube without ads.

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Lousy headline.It’s probably more accurate to say it’s chasing Amazon, which has somewhere over 20m, though those mix Prime and Music Unlimited subscribers.
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Fear-based social media Nextdoor, Citizen, Amazon’s Neighbors is getting more popular • Vox

:

»

These apps have become popular because of — and have aggravated — the false sense that danger is on the rise. Americans seem to think crime is getting worse, according to data from both Gallup and Pew Research Center. In fact, crime has fallen steeply in the last 25 years according to both the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Of course, unjustified fear, nosy neighbors, and the neighborhood watch are nothing new. But the proliferation of smart homes and smart devices is putting tools like cameras and sensors in doorbells, porches, and hallways across America.

And as with all things technology, the reporting and sharing of the information these devices gather is easier than it used to be and its reach is wider.

These apps foment fear around crime, which feeds into existing biases and racism and largely reinforces stereotypes around skin color, according to David Ewoldsen, professor of media and information at Michigan State University.

“There’s very deep research saying if we hear about or read a crime story, we’re much more likely to identify a black person than a white person [as the perpetrator],” Ewoldsen said, regardless of who actually committed the crime.

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China is wasting less solar and wind power • Sixth Tone (via Caixin)

David Kirton:

»

China is wasting less electricity generated by renewables thanks to rising demand, falling costs, and greater grid connectivity.

The drop in wasted electricity, which industry types call “curtailment,” suggests that the government is coming to grips with an issue that has kept cleaner energy off the grid even as policymakers try to make renewable power a greater part of the country’s energy mix. According to its latest five-year plan, the government aims to increase the mix of nonfossil power consumption to 15% by the end of the decade.

While China leads the world in solar and wind capacity, much of the power generated has gone to waste as a lack of coordinated construction led to an overabundance of capacity in regions far from centers of power demand without adequate transmission infrastructure. Around 17.1% of total wind generated power was going to waste as of 2017, according to government statistics.

Yet the rotor may have turned. In the first quarter of 2019, China wasted 2.7%, or 1.24 billion kilowatt hours (kWh), of the solar power it generated, and 4%, or 4.35 billion kWh, of wind-generated power, the National Energy Administration (NEA) said in a press conference last week. This marks major progress, with curtailment down 1.7 percentage points and 4.5 percentage points from the same figures a year earlier.

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If any country might have both the ability and the desire to seriously slow down climate change, it’s China. Its government knows that the disruption from floods would be colossal – and that threatens its power. Its coal-building will slow dramatically, if not stop completely.
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Britain passes one week without coal power for first time since 1882 • The Guardian

Jasper Jolly:

»

Britain has gone a week without using coal to generate electricity for the first time since Queen Victoria was on the throne, in a landmark moment in the transition away from the heavily polluting fuel.

The last coal generator came off the system at 1.24pm on 1 May, meaning the UK reached a week without coal at 1.24pm on Wednesday, according to the National Grid Electricity System Operator, which runs the network in England, Scotland and Wales.

Coal-fired power stations still play a major part in the UK’s energy system as a backup during high demand but the increasing use of renewable energy sources such as wind power means it is required less. High international coal prices have also made the fuel a less attractive source of energy.

The latest achievement – the first coal-free week since 1882, when a plant opened at Holborn in London – comes only two years after Britain’s first coal-free day since the Industrial Revolution…

…Reductions in coal use in the UK have been responsible for halving electricity generation emissions since 2013, according to the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), whose report last week called for the UK to pursue a target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

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You can follow the Twitter account UK_Coal to see how long the UK has gone without burning coal for electricity (176 hours at this moment) and there’s also a live dashboard of the mix of all the UK’s electricity sources.
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The mighty US consumer is struggling • Bloomberg

:

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As for what’s pushing households to tap into their rainy-day funds, Deutsche Bank recently pointed to the 15% year-on-year increase in household interest payments. Levels of payments rising at a similar pace preceded the onsets of the last two recessions.

Is it any wonder credit-card issuers are bolstering their cushions to absorb future losses? And it’s not just Capital One that caters to lower-credit quality borrowers. All seven of the largest U.S. card issuers boosted their charge-off rates in the first quarter to an average of 3.82%, an almost seven-year high.

Mortgage lenders are reporting similar strains. According to Knight Black’s latest Mortgage Monitor, a typical first quarter sees the national delinquency rate decline by 15% as borrowers use tax refund proceeds to catch up on their household finances. The first three months of 2019, however, marked the smallest drop in delinquency rates since 2009.

It’s almost as if the tax cut never happened…

…TS Lombard Chief Economist Steven Blitz notes that two-thirds of April’s new jobs were generated in lower-wage services industries such as administration and support services, health and social services, leisure and hospitality, among others. The flipside of this dynamic is that high-paying job growth has been nearly halved to 1.6% since peaking in 2015.

«

A fist on the horizon the size of a man’s hand.
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Epson’s $500 smart glasses are literally powered by your phone • Engadet

Rachel England:

»

Google has already demonstrated that it’s possible to build a pair without bottle-thick lenses and chunky frames, and yet the market’s newest arrival, Epson’s Moverio BT-30C smart glasses, boast exactly that.

Aesthetics aside, though, Epson’s latest offering comes with features that could help give smart glasses the nudge they need to take hold in the consumer market — at the moment such devices are largely the sole domain of business. The Moverio BT-30C connect with an Android smartphone of Windows PC over USB-C, a plug and play function that mitigates some of the hassle seen in previous iterations with custom controller boxes.

The glasses project up to three apps on three different screens against a transparent background and come with an OLED display for sharp, bright imagery. The glasses also come with a dark lens shade, for a movie-theater experience when streaming videos. Of course, none of these features alone will have consumers lining up for a pair, but their reasonable price tag of $499 will certainly make them a little more enticing, given previous models hit the market at $699.

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Why why why would you want this, at whatever price? They’d be in the cupboard under the stairs in a day.
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Rainforest in Ghana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Brazil, Colombia rapidly depleting • Quartz Africa

Kwasi Gyamfi Asiedu:

»

Ghana’s rainforest is being lost at an alarming rate, according to a new report about the state of forests worldwide.

Global Forest Watch (GFW) used updated remote sensing and satellite data from the University of Maryland and estimates that there was a 60% increase in Ghana’s primary rainforest loss in 2018 compared to 2017, the highest in the world. The second highest was neighboring Côte d’Ivoire with a 28% increase. Together, these two countries produce nearly 60% of the world’s cocoa.

However, the Democratic Republic of Congo lost the largest size of tropical primary rainforest in Africa and collectively, the world lost 3.6 million hectares of primary rainforest last year—an area the size of Belgium in 2018 alone.

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Peak Copper is back, thanks to Teslas and smart tech • TreeHugger

Lloyd Alter:

»

Remember Peak Copper? Back when TreeHugger was young, we worried about Peak Everything – oil, corn, natural gas, water, electricity and even dirt. Copper was in there, too, with TreeHugger John noting that “ore extraction and smelting takes a serious toll on the environment, and that the ‘easy pickings’ are already either long gone or in places where mining companies and their nations of origin get no respect.”

Apparently, Peak Copper is back. It takes a lot of it to build an electric car; according to Ernest Scheyder of Reuters, about twice as much as in a gas powered car, and there may not be enough of the stuff:

»

Tesla expects global shortages of nickel, copper and other electric-vehicle battery minerals down the road due to underinvestment in the mining sector, the company’s global supply manager for battery metals told an industry conference on Thursday, according to two sources.

«

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Google Face Match brings privacy debate into the home • Financial Times

Tim Bradshaw:

»

The “Google Nest” rebranding comes with a prompt for Nest customers to merge their user accounts with their Google profiles. “We want to make sure we are seamlessly integrating these devices,” said Rishi Chandra, vice-president and general manager of Google’s Home and Nest products.

For some customers, merging Nest data could include years of information on a family’s comings and goings, home energy usage and security camera video recordings. Google says it will not use that information for advertising.

“That data will never be used for ads personalisation,” said Mr Chandra, before being corrected by a member of Google’s public relations team. “We can never say never,” he added hastily, “but the commitment we are making is, it is not being used.”

Google is hoping to recapture some of the trust it lost this year when it emerged that its Nest security hub included a secret microphone. Mr Chandra conceded that it was a “mistake” not to inform customers when it went on sale.

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It’s time you stopped worrying so much about video game addiction • WIRED UK

Pete Etchells is Reader in Psychology and Science Communication at Bath Spa University:

»

The way loot boxes are implemented varies from game to game. In some, the items are locked into the game environment, with no tangible outside value. In others, they can be bought and sold on external marketplaces (and sometimes for eye-watering sums of money: in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, some items have sold for upwards of $3000).

Regardless of the specific way they are implemented though, there’s some emerging research evidence to suggest that there’s a link between paying for loot boxes and problematic gambling behaviours. What little work we currently have in this area is largely correlational in nature, so we don’t know whether paying for loot boxes causes problematic gambling behaviour, or whether it’s instead the case that people who have a tendency to show problems with gambling are drawn to loot box systems in games. But either way, science is starting to provide an early indication that there are some clear aspects of video games that addiction researchers should be looking at more closely.

These sorts of issues are complex, and don’t fit neatly into simplistic narratives that often form the basis of news reports about gaming effects.

«

Loot boxes are bad news; they’re like fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) – a terrible compulsion to lead on gamblers (who might not even know they’re gamblers).§
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Children change their parents’ minds about climate change • Scientific American

Lydia Denworth:

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The team of social scientists and ecologists from North Carolina State University who authored the report found that children can increase their parents’ level of concern about climate change because, unlike adults, their views on the issue do not generally reflect any entrenched political ideology. Parents also really do care what their children think, even on socially charged issues like climate change or sexual orientation.

Postulating that pupils might be ideal influencers, the researchers decided to test how 10-to-14–year-olds’ exposure to climate change coursework might affect, not only the youngsters’ views, but those of their parents. The proposed pass-through effect turned out to be true: teaching a child about the warming climate often raised concerns among parents about the issue. Fathers and conservative parents showed the biggest change in attitudes, and daughters were more effective than sons in shifting their parents’ views. The results suggest that conversations between generations may be an effective starting point in combating the effects of a warming environment. “This model of intergenerational learning provides a dual benefit,” says graduate student Danielle Lawson, the paper’s lead author. “[It prepares] kids for the future since they’re going to deal with the brunt of climate change’s impact. And it empowers them to help make a difference on the issue now by providing them a structure to have conversations with older generations to bring us together to work on climate change.”

Scientists in the field find the study heartening. “These encouraging results suggest that not only are children increasingly engaged in advocating for their future, they are also effective advocates to their parents,” says climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University. She was not involved in the research but works to bridge the gap between scientists and stakeholders on the issue. “As a woman myself and someone who frequently engages with conservative Christian communities,” she says, “I love that it’s the daughters who were found to be most effective at changing their hard-nosed dads’ minds.”

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Greta Thunberg is just an example, not an outlier.
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512GB SSDs’ price-per-GB estimated to fall below US$0.1 and hit an all-time low this year end • Trendforce

Alan Chen:

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According to research by DRAMeXchange , a division of TrendForce , the NAND flash industry this year is clearly exhibiting signs of oversupply, and SSD suppliers have gotten themselves into a price war, causing SSD prices for PC OEMs to take a dive. Average contract prices for 512GB and 1TB SSDs have a chance to plunge below US$0.1 per GB by the end of this year, hitting an all-time low. This change will cause 512GB SSDs to replace their 128GB counterparts and become market mainstream, second only to 256GB SSDs. We may also look forward to PCIe SSDs achieving 50% market penetration, since PCIe SSDs and SATA SSDS are nearly identical in price.

TrendForce points out that SSD adoption among notebooks had already come above the 50% threshold in 2018. Contract prices for mainstream 128/256/512GB SSDs have fallen a long way by over 50% since peaking in 2017, and those for 512GB and 1TB SSDs have a chance to fall below US$0.1 per GB by year-end. This will stimulate demand from those seeking to replace their 500GB and 1TB HDDs. SSD adoption rate is expected to land between 60 and 65% in 2019.

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$100 for a 1TB SSD. Amazing times.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

She’s closer to the median age of Americans than any current political leader. That’s going to have big consequences soon. CC-licensed photo by nrkbeta 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.

Hey, Alexa: stop recording me • The Washington Post

Geoffrey Fowler:

»

“Eavesdropping” is a sensitive word for Amazon, which has battled lots of consumer confusion about when, how and even who is listening to us when we use an Alexa device. But much of this problem is of its own making.

Alexa keeps a record of what it hears every time an Echo speaker activates. It’s supposed to record only with a “wake word” — “Alexa!” — but anyone with one of these devices knows they go rogue. I counted dozens of times when mine recorded without a legitimate prompt. (Amazon says it has improved the accuracy of “Alexa” as a wake word by 50% over the past year.)

What can you do to stop Alexa from recording? Amazon’s answer is straight out of the Facebook playbook: “Customers have control,” it says — but the product’s design clearly isn’t meeting our needs. You can manually delete past recordings if you know exactly where to look and remember to keep going back. You cannot stop Amazon from making these recordings, aside from muting the Echo’s microphone (defeating its main purpose) or unplugging the darned thing.

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As he points out, this is true too about devices that hook into the Alexa system if they’re activated (I haven’t activated it on Sonos speakers with the capability). Google has changed its defaults: it now doesn’t record. Nor does Apple.
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Google I/O 2019: new, cheaper Pixel smartphone announced • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

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Google executive Brian Rakowski said the cheaper devices are designed to fill in for people left behind by the rising price of many high-end phones. “We can adapt, and this is a good example,” he added.

The 3a and 3a XL displays aren’t as advanced as those on the high-end Pixel smartphones. But in a test, the screens weren’t noticeably inferior. They look nearly identical to the current Pixel 3 line, save for a few key differences:

The new phones have a poly-carbonate back instead of glass or metal; lack wireless charging; main processor is a slightly slower Qualcomm Snapdragon 670 processor (Google says it makes up for some of that with software); 64 gigabytes of storage, but lack the 128 gigabyte option of the more-expensive models; one camera on the front instead of two, which means Group Selfie mode isn’t available on these devices; Pixel Visual Core, a Google chip for processing photos, is missing. Google is replacing that with software that processes photos instead.

Still, the 3a line does include some new features:

Battery life is 30 hours, slightly more than the regular Pixel 3; a headphone jack, so people don’t need to pay extra for wireless earbuds; an augmented-reality feature for 3-D navigation in Google Maps is coming to the phone as a preview (it’ll come to other Pixels as well); camera app gets a Time Lapse feature, which has been present on iPhones (other Pixels will get this too)

Last week, [CFO Ruth] Porat suggested the Pixel phones didn’t perform well in the first quarter. “Hardware results reflect lower year-on-year sales of Pixel, reflecting in part heavy promotional activity industrywide, given some of the recent pressures in the premium smartphone market.”

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So having failed to set the premium market alight, Google’s aiming to do it on the midrange market. Think the competition there is going to be even fiercer; the question is whether Google’s prepared to manufacture in sufficient volume to make a difference (as Benedict Evans observed).
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Gartner Survey: 90% of blockchain-based supply chain projects are in trouble • Modern Consensus

Leo Jakobson:

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Ninety% of blockchain-based supply chain projects are faltering because they cannot figure out important uses for the technology, research firm Gartner said on May 7.

As a result of this inability to identify strong use cases, “blockchain fatigue” will begin setting in over the next five years, according to “Predicts 2019: Future of Supply Chain Operations,” a survey of the wants and needs of more than 300 executives involved in blockchain projects worldwide. In large part, this is due to blockchain suppliers’ inability to live up to the technology’s hype, said Alex Pradhan, a senior principal research analyst at Gartner.

Despite the great amount of time and effort invested in pilot projects aiming to use distributed ledgers to verify authenticity, improve traceability, and build more trust into supply chain transactions, only 19% of respondents ranked blockchain as a very important technology for their business, the company said in a release. Only 9% have invested in it.

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Even 9% sounds like a lot.
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Google plans to rebrand all Home products to Nest • Android Police

Scott Scrivens:

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With the unveiling today of the Google Nest Hub Max, you might be wondering what’s going on with the branding. Google must value the Nest name more than has previously been apparent and will be using it for all of its smart home products going forward.

For now, only the Home Hub is being renamed (to Google Nest Hub), so we won’t see the original Google Home or Home Mini rebranded. But the implication is that if those products were to be updated, they too would carry the Nest appellation. One other consequence of this new direction is that Nest subscribers will be given the choice of switching to a Google account or merging their Nest subscription into a pre-existing Google account. However, the Google Home and Nest apps will continue as distinct products for the time being, although the prospect of merging them is under consideration.

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Google is proving itself as great at snappy naming as Microsoft back in the day.
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Google’s new Pixel 3A phone won’t support Daydream VR • The Verge

Adi Robertson:

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The new Google Pixel 3A phone won’t support Daydream — Android’s built-in, but increasingly forgotten, virtual reality platform. Google confirmed the news before I/O, stating that “resolution and framerate” issues made the phone incompatible with Daydream. Google’s Daydream View headset will continue to work with the older Pixel 3 and other supported Android phones.

Google’s Cardboard headset gave VR a huge boost in the mid-‘10s, when it offered smartphone owners a chance to run very simple VR experiences. Daydream was effectively an upgrade meant for more sophisticated mobile VR. Google launched a dedicated Daydream app with access to a special section of the Google Play Store, as well as the Daydream View, an attractive and relatively cheap headset similar to the Samsung Gear VR.

Daydream grew slowly, however. Unlike Cardboard, it didn’t support iOS devices at all. It launched exclusively on Pixel phones, and it spent almost a year restricted to low-profile Android devices before Samsung added support in mid-2017. The delayed rollout was partly because of display issues — Google would only approve low-persistence screens that could provide a very smooth VR experience.

It’s a little ironic that Google itself would decide to sacrifice Daydream support on its new “gOLED” screen, given how long it spent getting other manufacturers on board. Samsung’s new Galaxy S10 line isn’t compatible with Daydream either, and with Pixel and S10 devices off the table, the Daydream View appears largely locked out of the high-end phone market.

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Well that about wraps it up for Daydream VR.
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The coming generation war • The Atlantic

Niall Ferguson and Eyck Freymann:

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As Karl Mannheim pointed out more than 90 years ago, a generation is defined not solely by its birth years but also by the principal historical experience its members shared in their youth, whatever that might be. Nevertheless, we do believe that a generational division is growing in American politics that could prove more important than the cleavages of race and class, which are the more traditional focuses of political analysis.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is often described as a radical, but the data show that her views are close to the median for her generation. The Millennials and Generation Z—that is, Americans aged 18 to 38—are generations to whom little has been given, and of whom much is expected. Young Americans are burdened by student loans and credit-card debt. They face stagnant real wages and few opportunities to build a nest egg. Millennials’ early working lives were blighted by the financial crisis and the sluggish growth that followed. In later life, absent major changes in fiscal policy, they seem unlikely to enjoy the same kind of entitlements enjoyed by current retirees.

Under different circumstances, the under-39s might conceivably have been attracted to the entitlement-cutting ideas of the Republican Tea Party (especially if those ideas had been sincere). Instead, we have witnessed a shift to the political left by young voters on nearly every policy issue, economic and cultural alike…

…Young voters are also far more willing than their elders to point to other countries as proof that the U.S. government isn’t measuring up. Gen Z voters are twice as likely to say that “there are other countries better than the US” than that “America is the best country in the world.” As Ocasio-Cortez puts it: “My policies most closely resemble what we see in the UK, in Norway, in Finland, in Sweden.”

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Ferguson is nobody’s idea of a leftwing radical (quite the opposite), so this is quite notable. The article has absolutely gobsmacking data about the problems that “millennials” face, such as toxic debt, that older generations don’t. And the “better than the US” phrase? Anathema to many older Americans; reality to younger ones.
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Samsung Electronics says no anticipated shipping date yet for Galaxy Fold • Reuters

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Samsung Electronics said on Tuesday it cannot confirm the shipping date for its foldable device Galaxy Fold yet and apologized to its pre-order customers in the United States for the delay.

The world’s top smartphone maker delayed global sales of the splashy $1,980 foldable phone after reviewers discovered problems with its display, dealing a setback to Samsung and its efforts to showcase its innovation.

“If we do not hear from you and we have not shipped by May 31st, your order will be canceled automatically,” the South Korean tech giant’s US subsidiary told Galaxy Fold pre-order customers in an email late on Monday, which was confirmed by a Samsung spokeswoman.

As per US regulations, Samsung was required to notify customers that the pre-orders would be canceled in the event the product had not been shipped by May 31, it said in a separate statement to Reuters.

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Which is going to come first, Brexit or the Galaxy Fold actually going on sale and arriving in punters’ hands?
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How Chinese spies got the NSA’s hacking tools, and used them for attacks • NY Times

Nicole Perlroth, David E. Sanger and Scott Shane:

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Symantec’s discovery, unveiled on Monday, suggests that the same Chinese hackers the agency has trailed for more than a decade have turned the tables on the agency.

Some of the same N.S.A. hacking tools acquired by the Chinese were later dumped on the internet by a still-unidentified group that calls itself the Shadow Brokers and used by Russia and North Korea in devastating global attacks, although there appears to be no connection between China’s acquisition of the American cyberweapons and the Shadow Brokers’ later revelations.

But Symantec’s discovery provides the first evidence that Chinese state-sponsored hackers acquired some of the tools months before the Shadow Brokers first appeared on the internet in August 2016.

Repeatedly over the past decade, American intelligence agencies have had their hacking tools and details about highly classified cybersecurity programs resurface in the hands of other nations or criminal groups.

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This makes it much more risky to deploy hacks; any and all targets are getting much better at isolating and identifying cyberweapons. It’s getting like chemical or biological warfare: the tools are getting too dangerous to deploy.
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Airpods are a tragedy • Vice

Caroline Haskins with the first (?) of a series about “what if you found these artefacts in a thousand years’ time”:

»

For roughly 18 months, AirPods play music, or podcasts, or make phone calls. Then the lithium-ion batteries will stop holding much of a charge, and the AirPods will slowly become unusable. They can’t be repaired because they’re glued together. They can’t be thrown out, or else the lithium-ion battery may start a fire in the garbage compactor. They can’t be easily recycled, because there’s no safe way to separate the lithium-ion battery from the plastic shell. Instead, the AirPods sit in your drawer forever.

Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, which does electronics teardowns and sells repair tools and parts, told Motherboard that AirPods are “evil.” According to the headphones review team at Rtings.com, AirPods are “below-average” in terms of sound quality. According to people on every social media platform, AirPods are a display of wealth.

But more than a pair of headphones, AirPods are an un-erasable product of culture and class. People in working or impoverished economic classes are responsible for the life-threatening, exhaustive, violent work of removing their parts from the ground and assembling them. Meanwhile, people in the global upper class design and purchase AirPods.

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*Microsoft Clippy voice* Hi there! It looks like you’re critiquing capitalism! Would you like to follow your logic through to its effects on your life?
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Why Richland Source built a system for automating high school sports articles (and stopped selling apparel) • Niemen Lab

Christine Schmidt:

»

after completing a beta phase with seven other news organizations (which Richland Source declined to name) and over 20,000 articles published with zero inaccuracies, the team is trying to get other newsrooms onboard.

What do these articles actually look like? Often, just a headline, “Sports Desk” byline, a sentence, and a bunch of ads. (There’s no mention of the software or robo-writing on the articles themselves, but Allred and Phillips pointed to a featured article Richland Source published last week explaining Lede Ai.) Here are some examples, with screenshots of the shorter ones:

Here’s one highlighted in Lede Ai’s whitepaper; it was the longest one I saw:

» Massillon Washington could use an Emily Post tutorial in manners, but its competitive spirit was fine-tuned while punishing Wadsworth 41-19 in Division II Ohio high school football action on Friday night.

The Tigers opened with a 7-0 advantage over the Grizzlies through the first quarter. Massillon Washington’s offense darted to a 24-10 lead over Wadsworth at halftime. The Tigers carried a 27-12 lead into the fourth quarter.

This marked the Grizzlies first loss of the season, as they completed a 12-1 campaign. Massillon sports a 13-0 mark heading to the state semifinals.

The OHSAA releases the state semifinal pairings and locations on Sunday.«

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Sports stories like that are just the most awful wallpaper. The other thing that you come to notice is that sports writeups are almost always about men, for men. They’re a sort of literary shed.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

CC-licensed photo by Steve%20Corey on Flickr

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

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

Human society under urgent threat from loss of Earth’s natural life • The Guardian

Jonathan Watts:

»

Human society is in jeopardy from the accelerating decline of the Earth’s natural life-support systems, the world’s leading scientists have warned, as they announced the results of the most thorough planetary health check ever undertaken.

From coral reefs flickering out beneath the oceans to rainforests desiccating into savannahs, nature is being destroyed at a rate tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10m years, according to the UN global assessment report.

The biomass of wild mammals has fallen by 82%, natural ecosystems have lost about half their area and a million species are at risk of extinction – all largely as a result of human actions, said the study, compiled over three years by more than 450 scientists and diplomats.

Two in five amphibian species are at risk of extinction, as are one-third of reef-forming corals, while other marine animals by down by close to one-third. The picture for insects – which are crucial to plant pollination – is less clear, but conservative estimates suggest at least one in 10 are threatened with extinction and, in some regions, populations have crashed. In economic terms, the losses are jaw-dropping. Pollinator loss has put up to $577bn (£440bn) of crop output at risk, while land degradation has reduced the productivity of 23% of global land.

The knock-on impacts on humankind, including freshwater shortages and climate instability, are already “ominous” and will worsen without drastic remedial action, the authors said.

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Yes, it is depressing. What’s more depressing is the inaction.
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Facebook building cryptocurrency-based payments system • WSJ

Jeff Horwitz:

»

Seeking total investments of about $1bn, Facebook has talked to financial institutions including Visa, Mastercard and payment processor First Data, the people said. The money would underpin the value of the coin to protect it from the wild price swings seen in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, they said.

Facebook is also talking to e-commerce companies and apps about accepting the coin, and would seek smaller financial investments from those partners, one of the people said.

Bloomberg News reported in December that Facebook was working on a digital coin that users of its WhatsApp messaging service could use to transfer money, with a focus on overseas remittances. The New York Times reported in February that the company was seeking to raise as much as $1bn for the project.

Facebook is following rivals including Apple and Amazon into the financial lives of its users. Each has explored or launched major financial products in the past year, joining with traditional financial firms to manage the logistics and regulatory burdens.

Facebook aims to burrow more deeply into the lives of its users. It is building a type of checkout option that consumers could use on other websites, some of the people said. Similar to how a Facebook profile can be used to log into hundreds of websites (including The Wall Street Journal), Facebook envisions allowing those credentials to be selected as a payment method when users buy goods online.

One idea under discussion is Facebook paying users fractions of a coin when they view ads, interact with other content or shop on its platform—not unlike loyalty points accrued at retailers, some of the people said.

This would reward the kind of genuine interaction that Facebook, beset by bots and hate speech, has been trying to encourage. It could also blunt criticism that the company makes billions of dollars on the backs of its users, sometimes in troubling or invasive ways.

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One can see that a cryptocoin (this is definitely not Bitcoin) being used for transactions on WhatsApp could work. As Ben Thompson said in his discussion of this, it might be used to pay for ads. But it would also make it way easier for Facebook to track what you’re doing – and this time, through your spending.
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The fight for the right to drive • New Yorker

M. R. O’Connor:

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Perhaps it was inevitable that a nascent right-to-drive movement would spring up in America, where—as fervent gun-rights advocates and anti-vaccinators have shown—we seem intent on preserving freedom of choice even if it kills us. “People outside the United States look at it with bewilderment,” Toby Walsh, an Australian artificial-intelligence researcher, told me. In his book “Machines That Think: The Future of Artificial Intelligence,” from 2018, Walsh predicts that, by 2050, autonomous vehicles will be so safe that we won’t be allowed to drive our own cars. Unlike Roy, he believes that we will neither notice nor care. In Walsh’s view, a constitutional amendment protecting the right to drive would be as misguided as the Second Amendment. “We will look back on this time in fifty years and think it was the Wild West,” he went on. “The only challenge is, how do we get to zero road deaths? We’re only going to get there by removing the human.”

Broussard has a term for the insistence that computers can do everything better than humans can: technochauvinism. “Most of the autonomous-vehicle manufacturers are technochauvinists,” she said. “The big spike in distracted-driving traffic accidents and fatalities in the past several years has been from people texting and driving. The argument that the cars themselves are the problem is not really looking at the correct issue. We would be substantially safer if we put cell-phone-jamming devices in cars. And we already have that technology.” Like Roy, she strongly disputes both the imminence and the safety of driverless technology. “There comes a point at which you have to divorce fantasy from reality, and the reality is that autonomous vehicles are two-ton killing machines. They do not work as well as advocates would have you believe.”

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A fascinating article on the inherent tensions as we try to decide whether self-driving cars really will. Not short, but well worthwhile.
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Shipments of PC hard drives predicted to drop by nearly 50% in 2019 • Anandtech

Anton Shilov:

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According to a new financial presentation from Nidec, a Japanese motor manufacturer that is responsible for around 85% of all HDD spindle motors, the company believes that shipments of hard drives for PCs will drop significantly this year. Citing numerous ongoing trends, the motor maker is preparing for HDD motor sales to drop by around 50% year-over-year for 2019. Meanwhile the company also expects sales of other types of HDDs to slow, but not as drastically. In fact, unit shipments of hard drives for datacenters are projected to increase a bit.

According to Nidec’s data, unit sales of hard drives declined by around 43% from 2010 to 2018, going from around 650m units in 2010 to 375m units in 2018. And it looks like sales will continue to drop in the coming years. Recently Nidec revised its HDD shipment forecast downwards from 356m drives to 309m drives in 2019, which will further drop to 290m units in 2020. The recent drops in HDD shipments have already forced Nidec to optimize its HDD motor production capacities and repurpose some capacity to other types of products.

Shipments of PC HDDs have been hit the hardest among all types of HDDs due to a combination of general market weaknesses and the transition of notebooks to SSDs. According to Nidec, shipments of PC HDDs decreased gradually from 289m drives in 2013 to 124m devices in 2018. However, this year sales of hard drives for PCs will drop sharply, going from 124m devices in 2018 to 65m units in 2019, or by around 48%.

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What with the declining SLR market and now this, Japan’s got it hard at the moment.
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A mystery frequency disrupted car fobs in an Ohio city; now residents know why • NY Times

Heather Murphy:

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Not every car fob failed to work, said Chris Branchick, whose parents live in North Olmsted. He said that whenever he visited his parents in his GMC vehicle, the fob would not unlock the car door; if he went in his fiancée’s Nissan, things were fine.

“We thought maybe it was a foreign versus domestic thing,” he said.

Officials from the cable company and AT&T joined the search for answers, and on Thursday, the Illuminating Company, a local electric utility, dispatched inspectors to investigate.

“They began by shutting off the power in the places where they detected the strongest reading for interfering radio frequencies,” said Chris Eck, a company spokesman. But even after shutting off power on an entire block, the overpowering frequency persisted.

“It’s like trying to talk to someone at a nightclub,” said Adam Scott Wandt, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, in explaining how a strong frequency can derail a weak frequency.
Dan Dalessandro, a television repairman, was one of several ham radio aficionados who went to investigate. At first, he said, all he picked up were “little blips” on a signal detector, but on one block — and at one house in particular — the signal was extraordinarily powerful.

By Saturday afternoon, City Councilman Chris Glassburn announced that the mystery had been solved: The source of the problem was a homemade battery-operated device designed by a local resident to alert him if someone was upstairs when he was working in his basement. It did so by turning off a light.

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Yes, I know what you’re thinking: hell of a battery, hell of a light.
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The only thing you can’t subscribe to now is stability • The Atlantic

Amanda Mull:

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For most of American consumer history, subscriptions were the province of magazines, cable, and other media: You paid an annual fee, and news and entertainment organizations gave you their new work as it became available. But as digital-payment technology has improved and people look for ways to navigate stress, stagnant wages, and online shopping’s near-infinite purchase choices, the value proposition of subscriptions has changed. So too have the kinds of products people can subscribe to.

Today, things that can routinely show up at your doorstep include: misshapen vegetables, personalized vitamin cocktails, dog toys, a vast wardrobe of clothing and accessories, and even a sofa. In a consumer market of disposable fast fashion and cheap assemble-at-home furniture, the idea of wasting less while getting to use nicer, higher-quality things for a monthly fee is a compelling sell. But what’s harder to predict is what might be lost when the effort to buy less stuff turns into renting huge swaths of your daily life.
A subscription, at its base, is simply a schedule of recurring fees that gives consumers continual access to goods or services. A car lease is a subscription, but so is your gym membership and the way you use Microsoft Office. Subscription creep dates to at least 2007, when Amazon launched Subscribe & Save, a service that lets shoppers pre-authorize periodic charges for thousands of consumable goods, such as sandwich bags or face wash (or toilet paper), usually at a slight discount over individual purchases. Then, in 2010, came Birchbox, which provides women with miniature portions of beauty products on a monthly basis for $15. At its peak, the company was valued at more than $500m.

Both Amazon’s and Birchbox’s models have been widely copied, and their success underscores the appeal of subscriptions to businesses and consumers alike, according to Utpal Dholakia, a marketing professor at Rice University. “The pain of payment and the friction of how a person is going to pay is totally gone,” he says.

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Neat observation.
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The thing about owning a Tesla no one talks about: nightmarish repair delays • SF Gate

Mike Moffitt:

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Neither vehicle was moving very fast, but the Tesla sustained front fender and suspension damage and wasn’t drivable. So the Burlingame resident had it towed a few days later to Chilton Auto Body in San Carlos, the nearest Tesla-approved body shop and the preferred shop of his insurer, Allstate.

Nearly six months later, he says his Model S still hasn’t been repaired.

“When my car got in an accident, it was somewhere in the thirties to be worked on and the last time I had a conversation with someone there a few weeks ago, there was well over 130 Teslas there to get fixed,” Hedges said.
“Now I think if you’re number 130 [in line to get fixed], it’s going to be well over a year to get your car back.”

We reached out to Chilton Auto Body over the phone and by email to confirm that scores of damaged Teslas were queued up at the shop and to learn out why the wait was so long. A Chilton representative said no one there was available to talk about the issue, referring SFGATE  to a manager who would not be back in the office until mid-May. There was no response to the email.

According to Hedges, Chilton has only two certified Tesla auto body technicians, and only one of of them has the credentials to repair suspensions.

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That’s sure to be the downside of a car that doesn’t have a standard outlet system of dealers.
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The race to develop the moon • New Yorker

Rivka Galchen:

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Water in space is valuable for drinking, of course, and as a source of oxygen. [George] Sowers [a professor of space resources at the Colorado School of Mines, in Golden] told me that it can also be transformed into rocket fuel. “The moon could be a gas station,” he said. That sounded terrible to me, but not to most of the scientists I spoke to. “It could be used to refuel rockets on the way to Mars”—a trip that would take about nine months—“or considerably beyond, at a fraction of the cost of launching them from Earth,” Sowers said. He explained that launching fuel from the moon rather than from Earth is like climbing the Empire State Building rather than Mt. Everest. Fuel accounts for around 90% of the weight of a rocket, and every kilogram of weight brought from Earth to the moon costs roughly $35,000; if you don’t have to bring fuel from Earth, it becomes much cheaper to send a probe to Jupiter.

Down the hall, in the Center for Space Resources’ laboratory, near buckets of lunar and asteroid simulants, was a small 3D printer. Four graduate students were assembled there with Angel Abbud-Madrid, the center’s director. I asked them how difficult it would be to 3D-print, say, an electrolyzer—the machine needed to separate the hydrogen and oxygen in water to make rocket fuel. They laughed.

“Here, let me show you something very fancy,” Hunter Williams, who was wearing sapphire-colored earrings, said. He poured some Morton sea salt into a plastic cup and added water. He stuck two silver thumbtacks through the bottom of the plastic cup, then held a battery up to them. Small bubbles began forming on the thumbtacks. The oxygen was separating from the hydrogen. You probably did this experiment in middle school, without knowing that you were doing rocket science. “The idea is for whatever goes up to the moon to be that simple,” Williams said. “To be that basic.”

“It would be like living off the land,” Ben Thrift, another graduate student, added.

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The Uber IPO is a moral stain on Silicon Valley • NY Times

Farhad Manjoo:

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Uber — and to a lesser extent, its competitor Lyft — has indeed turned out to be a poster child for Silicon Valley’s messianic vision, but not in a way that should make anyone in this industry proud. Uber’s is likely to be the biggest tech I.P.O. since Facebook’s. It will turn a handful of people into millionaires and billionaires. But the gains for everyone else — for drivers, for the environment, for the world — remain in doubt. There’s a lesson here: If Uber is really the best that Silicon Valley can do, America desperately needs to find a better way to fund groundbreaking new ideas.

Today’s Uber is more responsible than yesterday’s: Travis Kalanick, Uber’s onetime Night King, was ousted as chief executive in 2017, and Dara Khosrowshahi, its new chief, has led a thorough rehabilitation. Yet Uber’s early insiders paid no real price for their sins. Mr. Kalanick’s stake will be worth nearly $9bn. Tech giants — including Apple, Google and Jeff Bezos, who all acquired significant stakes in Uber — will make a killing. Saudi Arabian petromonarchs will too.

Not Uber’s drivers. Recent studies show that Uber drivers make poverty wages — about $10 an hour after their vehicle expenses are deducted from their pay. Drivers’ fortunes might only worsen after the company goes public. Uber lost nearly $2bn in 2018, and the best long-term hope for Uber’s business is that drivers disappear altogether, replaced by cars that drive themselves. In rushed pursuit of that profitable vision, one of Uber’s self-driving cars killed a pedestrian last year.

The environmental gains have also yet to materialize.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

The European Commission is anticipated to open an antitrust investigation into Spotify’s complaint about Apple’s App Store. CC-licensed photo by Andrew%20Mager on Flickr

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

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

The existential crisis plaguing online extremism researchers • Wired

Paris Martineau:

»

Many researchers in the field cut their teeth as techno-optimists, studying the positive aspects of the internet—like bringing people together to enhance creativity or further democratic protest, á la the Arab Spring—says Marwick. But it didn’t last.

The past decade has been an exercise in dystopian comeuppance to the utopian discourse of the ’90s and ‘00s. Consider Gamergate, the Internet Research Agency, fake news, the internet-fueled rise of the so-called alt-right, Pizzagate, QAnon, Elsagate and the ongoing horrors of kids YouTube, Facebook’s role in fanning the flames of genocide, Cambridge Analytica, and so much more.

“In many ways, I think it [the malaise] is a bit about us being let down by something that many of us really truly believed in,” says Marwick. Even those who were more realistic about tech—and foresaw its misuse—are stunned by the extent of the problem, she says. “You have to come to terms with the fact that not only were you wrong, but even the bad consequences that many of us did foretell were nowhere near as bad as the actual consequences that either happened or are going to happen.”

Worst of all, there don’t appear to be any solutions. The spread of disinformation and rise of online extremism stem from a complex mix of many factors. And the most common suggestions seem to underestimate the scope of the problem, researchers said.

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And that’s quite a depressing thing. Imagine how it must feel for climate change scientists.
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Brussels poised to probe Apple over Spotify’s fees complaint • FT

Rochelle Toplensky:

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Spotify’s complaint centres on Apple’s policy of charging digital content providers a 30% fee for using its payment system for subscriptions sold in its App Store. The policy applies to Spotify and other music subscription services but not apps, such as Uber.

After considering the complaint and surveying customers, rivals and others in the market, the EU competition commission has decided to launch a formal antitrust investigation into Apple’s conduct, according to three people familiar with the probe.

Apple and Spotify both declined to comment.

EU enforcers can require companies to change business practices they deem unlawful and levy fines of up to 10% of a company’s global turnover. The investigations have no set deadlines and can take years to resolve. However, companies can speed up the process and avoid fines by offering to settle the probes with binding promises of behavioural change.

In an interview in March after filing the complaint, Daniel Ek, Spotify’s chief executive, told the Financial Times that the company’s long-running battle with Apple had become “untenable”. He warned that the music-streaming service would raise prices if Apple continued to charge the 30% fee. 

Deezer, a rival music-streaming service, and BEUC, a European consumers’ group, echoed Spotify’s concerns. 

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Well, this is going to get interesting. Assume the EC rules for Spotify: Apple will either have to reduce its 30% fee (to zero?) or let companies offer alternative payment schemes, as Google does.
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April is shaping up to be momentous in transition from coal to renewables • IEEFA US

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This month, for the first time ever, the renewable energy sector (hydro, biomass, wind, solar and geothermal) is projected to generate more electricity than coal-fired plants, which totals about 240 gigawatts (GW) of still-operating capacity. According to data published this month in the Energy Information Administration (EIA) Short-Term Energy Outlook, renewables may even trump coal through the month of May as well.

As the chart below indicates, the EIA sees renewable generation topping coal-fired output sporadically this year, and again in 2020. The estimates in the EIA outlook show renewable energy generating 2,322 and 2,271 thousand megawatt-hours (MWh/day) per day in April and May, respectively. This would top coal’s expected output of 1,997 and 2,239 thousand MWh/day during the same two months.

To be fair, there are seasonal considerations. Of particular note, is the long-held practice of taking coal plants offline during the lower demand periods of the spring (and fall) to perform maintenance and upgrades to ensure that they are ready for the higher demand of the summer and winter seasons. In addition, spring tends to be peak time for hydro generation.

That said, this represents a momentous development driven by the deep transition under way in the electric generation arena.

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Jay Inslee, the latest Democrat to join the 2020 presidential campaign (at the time of writing), has a plan to get the US over to renewables by 2025. Ambitious; and that noise you hear is the Overton window creaking over.
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Analysis: does Google’s $1bn revenue miss reveal a flawed business model? • ZDNet

Tom Foremski:

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Every quarter Google reports a drop in revenues per click – compared with the prior year – of around 20%. This has been going on for years. Google always manages to outpace its falling per click revenues by selling more ads in more places. But is this a sustainable business model? 

The recent financial report could be a sign of cracks in the company’s growth strategy.

Google said that the largest drivers of revenue growth in Q1 included mobile ads. But how many ads can Google show on a mobile screen? Is Google running out of places to sell and show more ads?

The company has been trying to hedge its future by building other business outside of advertising such as its Cloud IT services. These non-advertising businesses reported Q1 revenues of $5.4bn – missing Wall Street estimates of $5.67bn. And “Other bets” such as the Waymo self- driving cars venture reported a loss of $868m.

Clearly, these businesses are far from ready to take up any slack on lower ad revenues, plus they offer far lower profit margins.

The future viability of Google remains in figuring out how to sell more poorly performing ads in more places. This will do little to improve the internet user experience.

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“Revenue miss” means “analyst overestimate”, of course. The point about declining cost-per-click is a good one, and with smartphone growth effectively dead, where are the new slots to place ads? YouTube is the obvious place: we don’t know how many ads appear there.
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When your Amazon purchase explodes • The Atlantic

Alana Semuels:

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An untold number of lithium-ion-battery incidents go unreported, and no one agency tracks them. But the US Fire Administration declared the batteries the “root cause” of at least 195 separate fires and explosions from 2009 to 2017. The Federal Aviation Administration has reported a few hundred incidents of smoke, fire, extreme heat, or explosions involving lithium-ion or unknown batteries in flight cargo or passenger baggage. And there were 49 recalls of high-energy-density batteries from 2012 to 2017, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, concerning more than four million devices, including mobile phones, scooters, power tools, and laptops.

In 2016, David Jarrett, a student at Rowan University, suffered first-, second-, and third-degree burns after a portable phone combusted in his pocket, according to a complaint filed in New Jersey federal court. In 2017, the lithium-ion battery that Kyle Melone had bought for his vape pen on Amazon exploded in his pocket, setting his shorts and leg on fire; he ended up in the intensive-care unit, according to a complaint filed in Rhode Island federal court. Exploding lithium-ion batteries have caused hoverboards to catch fire and houses to burn down; [Greg] Bentley [a lawyer who has taken on a number of cases about Li-ion injuries] told me his clients include a man who lost an eye, another who burned his genitals, and one who experienced “massive brain injury.”

The link among many of these dangerous products is Amazon, where the world shops. More than half of the items sold on Amazon are listed by third-party sellers—not by Amazon itself—which makes ensuring that products are safe and authentic difficult, according to Juozas Kaziukenas, the founder of Marketplace Pulse, a firm that researches Amazon. In the case of batteries, batches of lithium-ion cells made in China that don’t pass inspection sometimes end up listed by sellers on Amazon, said Michael Rohwer, a director of Business for Social Responsibility, a nonprofit that works with companies on their supply-chain practices.

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Google Pixel 3 owners are still facing problems six months later. Here’s the list • 9to5 Google

Ben Schoon:

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Regardless of what issues your phone has, often the only way to get it fixed is to get a replacement device entirely, and that’s where another big problem with the Pixel 3 lies. Google’s customer service for these devices is rough. Reddit is full of horror stories of complete incompetence when trying to get an issue taken care of. Sometimes there are also hilarious mistakes like sending 10 phones to a guy who just wanted a refund.

It speaks volumes that the r/GooglePixel subreddit has a way to escalate your case within Google.

Every smartphone is going to have issues. That’s just a fact, but Google’s Pixel line seems to get some basic things wrong and then not properly fix them for ages. We still love these devices and many on the 9to5Google team personally purchased Pixel 3 devices. However, it’s hard to ignore that, clearly, quality assurance on the Pixel line just isn’t what it should be. It’s also clear that things have actually gotten worse in some ways since the launch of the original Pixel.

Should that stop you from buying the phone? It’s a tough call. I’ll still recommend the Pixel 3 as one of the best Android phones available for the foreseeable future, as I see the issues as an unfortunate asterisk on an otherwise great device.

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Given the small volumes the Pixel 3 has sold – a few million? – the problems that Google still has with customer service suggests that it either hasn’t got a handle on QA, or is underfunding the aftersales process. (Thanks Nic for the link.)
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Maori cultural tattoos invisible in wet collodion prints • FStoppers

Michael B. Stuart:

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A photographer has found an amazingly cool way to capture and honor the art of facial tattoos from the indigenous New Zealand culture the Māori. Using the wet collodion process, the subjects appear to have their ink magically removed in portraits hung next to modern digital photos creating a surreal before and after effect.

The permanent face designs are called tā moko. There is a very rich and cherished history of this tradition. In Māori culture, it is believed everyone has a tā moko under the skin, just waiting to be revealed to the world. Members of the society without the markings were considered of a lesser social status. Receiving the moko was an important milestone in becoming an adult. It was also desirable because they were believed to make oneself more attractive to the opposite sex.

Traditionally the designs were actually chiseled into the skin using a tool called a uhi, as opposed to being punctured like a modern ink based tattoo gun. This means although the pigment of the ink appears invisible in the historical wet collodion photos, you can still see the texture and grooves made by the application tools if you look closely enough. Most of the Māori will opt for the convenience and effectiveness of modern day tattoo tools these days so the disappearance is drastic.

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Next step surely is to apply some machine learning to the new with/without photos, and then apply that to old photos to bring the vanished markings back.
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Health insurance deductibles soar, leaving Americans with unaffordable bills • LA Times

Noam N. Levey:

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At a time when healthcare is poised to be a central issue in the 2020 presidential election, these sources provide a comprehensive look at changes that have profoundly reshaped insurance.
The explosion in cost-sharing is endangering patients’ health as millions, including those with serious illnesses, skip care, independent research and the Times/KFF poll show.

The shift in costs has also driven growing numbers of Americans with health coverage to charities and crowd-funding sites like GoFundMe in order to defray costs.

And it is feeding resentments and deepening inequalities, as healthier and wealthier Americans are able to save for unexpected medical bills while the less fortunate struggle to balance costly care with other necessities.

“It feels like the system isn’t working,” said Andrew Holko, a 45-year-old father of two who is facing $5,000 in outstanding medical bills because of diabetes medications, cortisone injections his wife needs for pelvic pain, a recent trip to the emergency room for his nine-year-old daughter and other services.

Holko’s information technology job puts his household income above $80,000, close to the median for a family of four. But with a mortgage, student loans and two growing children, Holko says he has little extra to cover a $4,000 annual deductible.

Tomas Krusliak, a 27-year-old chef in western Virginia, took on two extra jobs to pay medical bills after his wife had a miscarriage.

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This is one of a pair of pieces the LA Times ran (one an overview of how screwed up the US system is, where employers’ plans cover less and less of individuals’ likely costs, the other looking at individual cases).

Yet aside from a brief mention of the NHS, there’s no view outside; no idea that it could be different. A failure of media, as much as anything.
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Deoldify • Github

Jason Antic has built a deep learning system for colourising old photos – and also video. It’s pretty amazing, using generative adversarial networks (where you pit one that creates an image, and one that says “that’s not good enough, try again” until it’s happy:

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NoGAN training is crucial to getting the kind of stable and colorful images seen in this iteration of DeOldify. NoGAN training combines the benefits of GAN training (wonderful colorization) while eliminating the nasty side effects (like flickering objects in video). Believe it or not, video is rendered using isolated image generation without any sort of temporal modeling tacked on. The process performs 30-60 minutes of the GAN portion of “NoGAN” training, using 1% to 3% of imagenet data once. Then, as with still image colorization, we “DeOldify” individual frames before rebuilding the video.

In addition to improved video stability, there is an interesting thing going on here worth mentioning. It turns out the models I run, even different ones and with different training structures, keep arriving at more or less the same solution. That’s even the case for the colorization of things you may think would be arbitrary and unknowable, like the color of clothing, cars, and even special effects (as seen in “Metropolis”).

My best guess is that the models are learning some interesting rules about how to colorize based on subtle cues present in the black and white images that I certainly wouldn’t expect to exist. This result leads to nicely deterministic and consistent results, and that means you don’t have track model colorization decisions because they’re not arbitrary. Additionally, they seem remarkably robust so that even in moving scenes the renders are very consistent.

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Probably won’t be long before we have all the old silent black-and-white films in full colour and stable video.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: twisted graphene isn’t a room-temperature superconductor, unless your room is at 1.7 Kelvin.

Take two layers of graphene (this is one), twist one by 1.1 degrees, and you get a superconductor. CC-licensed photo by UCL Mathematical + Physical Sciences on Flickr

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Instagram and Facebook ban far-right extremists • The Atlantic

Taylor Lorenz:

»

In an effort to contain misinformation and extremism that have spread across the platforms, Instagram and its parent company, Facebook, have banned Alex Jones, Infowars, Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson, Laura Loomer, and Paul Nehlen under their policies against dangerous individuals and organizations. They also banned the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has repeatedly made anti-Semitic statements.

Infowars is subject to the strictest ban. Facebook and Instagram will remove any content containing Infowars videos, radio segments, or articles (unless the post is explicitly condemning the content), and Facebook will also remove any groups set up to share Infowars content and events promoting any of the banned extremist figures, according to a company spokesperson. (Twitter, YouTube, and Apple have also banned Jones and Infowars.)

Jones, Yiannopoulos, Watson, Loomer, Nehlen, and Farrakhan are all personally banned, as are any accounts set up in their likeness. But users may still praise those figures on Instagram and share content related to them that doesn’t violate other Instagram and Facebook terms of service. “We’ve always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate, regardless of ideology. The process for evaluating potential violators is extensive and it is what led us to our decision to remove these accounts today,” a Facebook spokesperson said via email.

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So overdue. Very interesting to see Facebook (and thus of course Instagram) decide that they want to be known for not hosting extremism, and in favour of truth. It also puts a lot of the edge cases on notice: tip too far over, and you’re out.
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Hitting the gym makes esports athletes more successful • The Next Web

Rachel Kaser:

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A study by Professor Ingo Froböse of the University of Cologne found that, even though they appear to be sitting still, esports players are frequently putting out a lot of effort. As Froböse told Deutsche Welle, “The amount of cortisol produced is about the same level as that of a race-car driver. This is combined with a high pulse, sometimes as high as 160 to 180 beats per minute, which is equivalent to what happened during a very fast run, almost a marathon.”

Given those demands, and how often and how long players have to practice, it’s probably no surprise esports pros have to maintain good fitness just to survive.

Eric Sanders, head of eSports operations with 100 Thieves, which has pros in League of Legends, Call of Duty, Fortnite, and Apex Legends, told TNW players often get up early or stay up late in order to hit the gym while still getting their hours in with the game. “We have a fair amount of players who work out 5-6 days a week… we have a few guys on our Call of Duty team who’ll play until 11 at night and go lift at 11:30.”

So what do esports players do when they hit the gym? There’s no one answer that best suits all pros — many have their own trainers and routines they follow. But most team managers and coaches who spoke with TNW said it’s not the specific exercise that matters, but the consistent routine.

Jasper Schellens, fitness and nutrition coach with FaZe Clan, an organization that started with three YouTubers but has since ballooned into teams in six separate esports, said to TNW of the exercises he assigns, “rowing exercises, chin-ups… they’re sitting down a lot and leaning forward a little bit, so I try to focus a lot more on the back exercises because it pulls them straight so they don’t get neck or back pain… I also try to work on their cardio so they don’t fatigue as much or as fast.”

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OK, they might have an elevated pulse, but that’s not the same as being in aerobic or anaerobic stress, which is what athletes encounter.
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Pornhub is “extremely interested” in acquiring Tumblr • Buzzfeed News

Ryan Broderick:

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Pornhub Vice President Corey Price said in an email to BuzzFeed News that the porn-streaming giant is extremely interested in buying Tumblr, the once uniquely horny hub for young women and queer people that banned adult content last December to the disappointment of many of its users.

Price said that restoring Tumblr’s NSFW edge would be central to their acquisition of it, were it to actually happen.

Tumblr owner Verizon is reportedly currently seeking a buyer for the blogging platform, which according to the Wall Street Journal has struggled to meet revenue targets.

“Tumblr was a safe haven for those who wanted to explore and express their sexuality, adult entertainment aficionados included,” Price told BuzzFeed News. “We’ve long been dismayed that such measures were taken to eradicate erotic communities on the platform, leaving many individuals without an asylum through which they could comfortably peruse adult content.”

«

You know, I can see that being a really good fit. Pornhub would know how to monetise the porn, and it could expand its income base with the non-porn on Tumblr.

And of course Verizon didn’t have a clue what to do with Tumblr.
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The US government wants a man at the center of a massive “cryptocurrency scheme” held without bail • Amy Castor

Amy Castor is a freelance journalist who has been covering many of the twists and turns of the crypto world:

»

The US government wants a football businessman linked to an investigation into $850 million of missing Tether and Bitfinex funds to be held without bail.

According to a memorandum in support of detention filed with the District Court of Arizona on May 1, Reginald Fowler poses a serious fight risk due to his overseas connections and access to hundreds of millions of dollars.

The court doc also presents startling new twists in an already tangled plot—a “Master US Workbook,” which details the financial operations of the “cryptocurrency scheme,” fake bond certificates worth billions of dollars, and a counterfeit money operation.

Reggie Fowler

Fowler, 60, is a football businessman. He was a former co-owner of the Minnesota Vikings and the original main investor in the Alliance of American Football (AAF)—an attempt to form a new football league. The AAF collapsed when Fowler withdrew funding—after the Department of Justice froze his bank accounts in late 2018.

I did a search on Pacer and got a number of hits showing Fowler has been in and out of courts for years. In fact, in 2005, ESPN reported that he had been sued 36 times.

«

The allegations against Fowler are jawdropping – including one that says he tried to pass off fake bonds for billions of dollars.
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The successful conspiracy inside YouTube to kill Internet Explorer 6 • Chris Zacharias

Chris Zacharias:

»

I do not recall the exact triggering event that led to our web development team laying out plans to kill IE6 over lunch in the YouTube cafeteria. Perhaps it was the time I pushed out a CSS stylesheet that included an attribute selector on a semi-supported HTML element. Any reasonable web developer would expect this to be ignored by browsers not up to the task. This was not the case with older flavors of IE. Under very specific conditions, an attribute selector on an unsupported HTML element in IE would create an internal recursion that would at best, cause the browser to crash and at worst, trigger a blue screen of death. Or perhaps it was the hundredth time one of our software engineers had innocently pushed out an tag with an empty src attribute. Nobody joining the team could be expected to know that in early versions of IE, the browser would load the root path “/” for empty src attributes. The tag would suddenly behave like an , loading our homepage and all of its dependent resources in what could become an exponentially expanding recursive loop. Whenever an empty image tag found its way on to the homepage, it was all-hands-on-deck emergency to locate and replace the offending code before we melted our servers into paperweights.

Regardless of whatever the event at that time was, it had been brutal and it had been IE6 related.

«

I love how this account begins in the tone of an old man at the opening of a film talking to a young helper. I think the screenplay then says “DISSOLVE TO YOUTUBE CAFETERIA”. Like tears in the rain…

Also, it’s not a conspiracy if it’s for good, right?
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There used to be an app for that • Medium

OurPact makes a “control your kid’s screen time” app which Apple recently yanked from the App Store, saying that its use of Mobile Device Management (MDM) – an API Apple provides – left it vulnerable to hacking:

»

Shortly after the release of the iPhone in 2007, a growing body of research confirmed the negative impact of excessive screen time exposure for growing children and teens. In 2012, the OurPact team recognized the lack of solutions available on iOS and set out to develop comprehensive parental controls for families. We don’t just develop OurPact, we use it in our own homes.

From day one, our focus has been what’s best for parents and their children. A core part of that mission is a commitment to data protection and user privacy — we never have and never will sell or provide any user data to any third party.

Since its initial release, OurPact has employed a public, documented Apple technology known as MDM.

While MDM was initially intended for company-owned or personally-owned BYOD implementations, it has also been used by many parental control applications to give parents more freedom to manage their children’s mobile devices. In recent years, Apple has also extended MDM for use by children and teachers in schools.
OurPact’s core functionality would not be possible without the use of MDM; it is the only API available for the Apple platform that enables the remote management of applications and functions on children’s devices. We have also been transparent about our use of this technology since the outset, and have documented its use in our submissions to the App Store.

«

Plenty of detail in this, and Apple doesn’t come out looking at all good. The MDM point looks extremely weak, in fact.
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Amazing AI generates entire bodies of people who don’t exist • Futurism

Dan Robitzski:

»

A new deep learning algorithm can generate high-resolution, photorealistic images of people — faces, hair, outfits, and all — from scratch.

The AI-generated models are the most realistic we’ve encountered, and the tech will soon be licensed out to clothing companies and advertising agencies interested in whipping up photogenic models without paying for lights or a catering budget. At the same time, similar algorithms could be misused to undermine public trust in digital media.

The algorithm was developed by DataGrid, a tech company housed on the campus of Japan’s Kyoto University, according to a press release.

In a video showing off the tech, the AI morphs and poses model after model as their outfits transform, bomber jackets turning into winter coats and dresses melting into graphic tees.

«

So that’s another group of jobs gone. (Thanks Charles Knight for the link.)
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With a simple twist, a ‘magic’ material is now the big thing in physics • Quanta Magazine

David Freedman:

»

Physicists are excited about magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene [which becomes superconducting when two layers are rotated by 1.1 degrees] not because it’s likely to be a practical superconductor but because they’re convinced it can illuminate the mysterious properties of superconductivity itself. For one thing, the material seems to act suspiciously like a cuprate, a type of exotic ceramic in which superconductivity can occur at temperatures up to about 140 kelvin, or halfway between absolute zero and room temperature. In addition, the sudden jumps in twisted bilayer graphene — from conducting to insulating to superconducting — with just a tweak of an external electric field indicate that free electrons are slowing to a virtual halt, notes physicist Dmitri Efetov of the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Barcelona, Spain. “When they stop, [the electrons] interact all the more strongly,” he said. “Then they can pair up and form a superfluid.” That fluidlike electron state is considered a core feature of all superconductors.

The main reason 30 years of studying cuprates has shed relatively little light on the phenomenon is that cuprates are complex, multi-element crystals. “They’re poorly understood materials,” said Efetov, noting that they superconduct only when precisely doped with impurities during their demanding fabrication in order to add free electrons. Twisted bilayer graphene, on the other hand, is nothing but carbon, and “doping” it with more electrons merely requires applying a readily varied electric field. “If there’s any system where we can hope to understand strongly correlated electrons, it’s this one,” said Jarillo-Herrero. “Instead of having to grow different crystals, we just turn a voltage knob, or apply more pressure with the stamps, or change the rotation angle.” A student can try to change the doping in an hour at virtually no cost, he notes, versus the months and tens of thousands of dollars it might take to try out a slightly different doping scheme on a cuprate.

Also unique, said MacDonald, is the small number of electrons that seem to be doing the heavy lifting in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene — about one for every 100,000 carbon atoms.

«

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Helping small business phones get smart with CallJoy • Google blog

Bob Summers, general manager for CallJoy:

»

My team within Area 120, Google’s workshop for experimental projects, conducted testing and found that small businesses receive an average of 13 phone calls every day. If you apply that average to America’s 30.2 million small businesses, that would equal roughly 400 million incoming daily calls to local businesses from consumers placing a to-go order, booking an appointment, inquiring about inventory and more. That’s why we built CallJoy, a cloud-based phone agent that enables small business owners to measure, improve and automate customer service.

With CallJoy, small businesses have access to the same customer service options that have historically only been available to larger corporations. If you’re associated with small business using CallJoy, here’s how it works: After a quick setup, you’ll receive a local phone number. CallJoy will immediately begin blocking unwanted spam calls so you receive the calls that matter—the ones from customers. Then, when the phone rings, the automated CallJoy agent answers, greets callers with a custom message and provides basic business information (like hours of operation).

«

Wait – 13 calls per day? That’s about one every 45 minutes. Maybe every half hour, if you have a lunch break. That’s not a lot, is it? Basically Google seems to be turning the human responder into a web page. Wonderfully annoying for customers: now it’s a call centre!
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You’re holding it wrong — touching the corner of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S5e reportedly kills Wi-Fi performance • Android Police

Ryan Whitwam:

»

The Samsung Tab S4 is a nice piece of hardware if you’re into Android tablets, but it’s very expensive. The new Tab S5e has some of the S4’s features but drops the price to $400. It turns out it also drops the WiFi signal when you touch the corner. Maybe we’re all just holding it wrong.

Based on reports from multiple users, the tablet’s upper left corner (in portrait) needs to remain unobstructed to maintain WiFi performance. The Tab S5e is a large-ish 10.5-inch tablet with a widescreen ratio. So, it’s a bit ungainly to hold in portrait orientation. However, in landscape, the aforementioned corner is where you’d naturally want to place your hand.

Users on Instagram have shown that WiFi connectivity can drop completely when touching the corner. Meanwhile, SamMobile has confirmed there’s an issue by eliciting a 50% drop in signal strength when covering the corner. The issue brings to mind Apple’s “you’re holding it wrong” incident with the iPhone 4.

«

Though I bet many more iPhone 4s were sold than Galaxy Tab S4Es. Wonder if this person also worked on the Fold?
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Japan to develop computer virus to defend against cyberattacks • Japan Times

»

Japan will develop its first-ever computer virus by next March as a defense measure against cyberattacks, sources have said.

The Defense Ministry is considering malware that can break into a computer system, hoping such a computer virus could work as a deterrent against cyberattacks, the sources said Monday.

The government has said it is looking to enhance its defense capabilities beyond the ground, marine and air domains to address security challenges in new areas such as cyberspace and outer space amid technological advances in recent years.

Japan lags behind other countries in addressing the threat of cyberattacks. It plans to increase the number of personnel in its cyberspace unit to 220 from 150, compared with 6,200 in the United States, 7,000 in North Korea and 130,000 in China, according to the ministry.

«

“Only to be used for defensive purposes”, apparently.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Every catastrophe has its deniers: the latest suggests Notre Dame’s fire wasn’t an accident. CC-licensed photo by Bradley Weber on Flickr

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Isn’t that enough? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Silicon valley is awash in Chinese and Saudi cash — and no one is paying attention (except Trump) • Vox

Theodore Schleifer:

»

This is Silicon Valley in 2019 — a playground for foreign countries eager to fulfill their grand strategies. To some extent, this is to be embraced: If the United States has a comparative advantage in tech companies — and if capitalism is global — then it should welcome the transformation of Silicon Valley. America welcomes foreign money in the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq; so, too, should it welcome foreign money in US private companies, especially from close partners like Singapore.

But the rise of foreign money has turned Silicon Valley into a geopolitical minefield for venture capitalists and startups, requiring American startups to make judgment calls and react to crosscurrents that would’ve been strange to the industry decades ago.

Who in Saudi Arabia exactly was directly liable for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi?

Was Huawei actually a threat to America’s national security?

“It’s the world of geopolitics coming to venture,” Rob Ackerman, a venture capitalist active in cybersecurity, said. “It’s got a lot more gray than black and white — and we’re all trying to figure that out.”

Or as an American investor now living in Israel, Mike Eisenberg, recalled telling an entrepreneur recently: “You thought you’re in business. You’re actually in politics.”

This was all true even before the force that has reshaped every American industry over the past two years — Donald Trump — exacerbated that reality. Foreign money courses through the Silicon Valley bloodstream, and his administration isn’t happy about it.

But for too long, most people in Silicon Valley have treated foreign cash with a collective shrug, seeing money as money and not truly considering the ethical and regulatory challenges of taking investment from certain foreign countries, Recode interviews with more than 50 venture capitalists, startups, lawyers, and others involved in cross-border investing reveal. Now Silicon Valley is scrambling to assess its own exposure in this new world order.

Money from two countries in particular has ignited a debate in Silicon Valley about the responsibilities of startups and their investors: China and Saudi Arabia.

«

It’s all changed a hell of a lot from the days when it was a few VCs on Sand Hill Drive.
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America’s favorite door-locking app has a data privacy problem • OneZero

Sage Lazzaro:

»

Latch is on a mission to digitize the front door, offering apartment entry systems that forgo traditional keys in favor of being able to unlock entries with a smartphone. The company touts convenience — who wants to fiddle with a metal key? — and has a partnership with UPS, so you can get packages delivered inside your lobby without a doorman. But while it may keep homes private and secure, the same can’t be said about tenants’ personal data.

Latch — which has raised $96m in venture capital funding since launching in 2014, including $70m in its Series B last year — offers three products. Two are entry systems for specific units, and one is for lobbies and other common areas like elevators and garages. The company claims one in 10 new apartment buildings in the U.S. is being built with its products, with leading real estate developers like Brookfield and Alliance Residential now installing them across the country.

Experts say they’re concerned about the app’s privacy policy, which allows Latch to collect, store, and share sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) with its partners and, in some cases, landlords. And while Latch is far from the only tech company with questionable data practices, it’s harder for a tenant to decouple from their building’s door than, say, Instagram: If your landlord installs a product like the keyhole-free Latch R, you’re stuck. The issue of tenant consent is currently coming to a head in New York City, where residents of a Manhattan building are suing their landlord in part over privacy concerns related to the app.

«

Latch wouldn’t be interviewed but said that it offers smartphone app unlocking, Bluetooth proximity, or keycard. But the problem is still about controlling where the information goes.
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Facebook users are posting videos of themselves lighting wood on fire to spread hoaxes about the Notre Dame fire • Poynter

Daniel Funke:

»

To debunk the viral beam-burning videos, Les Décodeurs and AFP didn’t use standard digital verification tools like InVid and Google’s reverse image search. The videos are false, but they’re real.

Instead, the fact-checkers did what many outlets call “triangulating the truth” — speaking to a variety of different experts in order to prove whether or not a claim without obvious concrete evidence is true or false. In this case, AFP and Les Décodeurs spoke to scientists, fire safety experts and engineers, all of whom told them that it’s difficult to set anything on fire in the open air.

That’s no reason to conclude the Notre Dame fire, which started inside the cathedral — not in the open air — was set intentionally, the fact-checkers reported.

The viral, do-it-yourself beam-burning videos are part of a larger effort to spread misinformation about the cause of the Notre Dame fire April 15. That effort has been amplified extensively by the American right, Laurent said.

The goal is to continue pushing the false, Islamophobic narrative that Muslim terrorists were somehow behind the Notre Dame fire.

«

The article also has a graphic showing the reach of the viral nonsense, and of the fact-checking. The latter pales into insignificance.
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Apple Watch has record breaking quarter and it’s not letting up • Wareable

James Stables:

»

“The [Apple Watch business] is now about the size of a Fortune 200 company, an amazing statistic when you consider it’s only been four years since we delivered the very first Apple Watch,” said Tim Cook, Apple CEO.

Impressive stuff, as Apple CFO Luca Maestri explained:

“Wearables, home and accessories revenue set a new March quarter revenue record at 5.1 billion, fuelled primarily by the strong performance of our wearables business, which grew close to 50%.

“Within this category, Apple Watch is the best-selling and most loved smartwatch in the world, and produced its best results ever for a non-holiday quarter. It’s reaching many new customers, with three-quarters of purchases going to customers who have never owned an Apple Watch before,”

This confirms what we already know – that Apple is totally bossing the smartwatch market.

But it shows how much appetite there is for this segment, and that’s good news for everyone. The walled garden of iOS and high ticket price means there’s always room for other companies to play, which explains the success of the Fitbit Versa and Samsung Galaxy Watch.

However, as CCS Insight’s Ben Wood tweeted, it’s also a great lock-in. The Apple Watch can only be used with iPhones, so those millions of people who are investing are far more likely to stay within the iOS ecosystem with a new iPhone.

«

Since you’re wondering, Fortune 200 companies in 2018 had annual revenues of more than $14.6bn. If you assume a $400 ASP, that’s 36.5m Watches sold in the 12-month period. Meanwhile, everyone in London seems to have AirPods.
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The productivity pit: how Slack is ruining work • Vox

Rani Molla:

»

Consulting firm McKinsey said back in 2012 that workplace communications technologies have the potential to increase employee productivity by up to 25%.

“The average interaction worker spends an estimated 28% of the workweek managing email and nearly 20% looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks,” according to the study. McKinsey figured people would be able to more easily and quickly accomplish these task using new workplace software.

That’s happened to an extent, but other problems have arisen.

Much like the ubiquitous open-floor plan, this type of software is meant to get different parts of a company working together, to break down hierarchies, to spark chance interactions and innovations.

In practice it can be hell.

The addition of yet another communications tool can result in a surfeit of information.

On average, employees at large companies are each sending more than 200 Slack messages per week, according to Time Is Ltd., a productivity-analytics company that taps into workplace programs — including Slack, calendar apps, and the Office Suite — in order to give companies recommendations on how to be more productive. Power users sending out more than 1,000 messages per day are “not an exception.”

Keeping up with these conversations can seem like a full-time job. After a while, the software goes from helping you work to making it impossible to get work done.

«

“Power users” are the curse of these, and many other systems. They dominate conversations, flood the zone, and make it hard to feel you’re keeping up. Similarly on social media, they’re the ones who drag the conversation around to what they want to talk about – not necessarily what it should be about.
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Feds just seized part of Bitfinex’s ‘missing’ $850m, arrest made • Modern Consensus

Leo Jakobson:

»

Funds seized by the feds from an HSBC Bank account were allegedly used to commit bank fraud by secretly transferring U.S. dollars to and from customers of cryptocurrency exchanges, according to an indictment issued Tuesday.

That same bank account was reportedly used by Bitfinex to transfer money to its customers when it was having trouble finding a mainstream bank willing to work with after Wells Fargo ceased doing business with it.

In an indictment announced on April 30, the U.S. Department of Justice said that funds were seized from HSBC Bank USA account 141000147, among others. That account is notable because on Oct. 6 , 2018, The Block Managing Editor Larry Cermak tweeted a screenshot of instructions from Bitfinex showing customers how to wire U.S. dollars to their wallets via HSBC Bank N.A. account 141000147, identified as belonging to Global Trading Solution, LLC.

Bitfinex appears to have gotten caught up in the case after the payment processor it was using as a bank, Crypto Capital, told them in August 2018 that $850m the exchange had on account with them had been seized by authorities. Those governments were identified by Bitfinex General Counsel Stuart Hoegner as the US, Portugal, and Poland. Crypto Capital is owned by Global Trading Solution, LLC.

«

It’s not clear if this is money laundering, outright scamming, trying to evade the authorities, or what, but Bitfinex and Tether are starting to unravel: Tether is now apparently “only 74% backed” by actual money.
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Smartphone shipments experience deeper decline in Q1 2019 with a clear shakeup among the market leaders • IDC

Worldwide volumes down 6.6%; stagnation rules the day:

»

“The less than stellar first quarter in the United States can be attributed to the continued slowdown we are witnessing at the high end of the market,” said Anthony Scarsella, research manager with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. “Consumers continue to hold on to their phones longer than before as newer higher priced models offer little incentive to shell out top dollar to upgrade. Moreover, the pending arrival of 5G handsets could have consumers waiting until both the networks and devices are ready for prime time in 2020.”

Samsung saw volumes drop 8.1% in 1Q19 with shipments of 71.9m. The results were enough to keep Samsung in the top spot of the market, but Huawei is continuing to close the gap between the two smartphone leaders. Despite challenging earnings in terms of profits, Samsung did say that the recently launched Galaxy S10 series did sell well during the quarter. With the 5G variant now launched in its home market of Korea and plans to bring this device and other 5G SKUs to other important markets in 2019, it will be equally crucial for Samsung not to lose focus on its mid-tier product strategy to fend off Huawei.

Huawei moved its way into a clear number two spot as the only smartphone vendor at the top of the market that saw volumes grow during 1Q19. Impressively, the company had year-over-year growth of 50.3% in 1Q19 with volumes of 59.1m units and a 19.0% market share. Huawei is now within striking distance of Samsung at the top of the global market. In China, Huawei continued its positive momentum with a well-rounded portfolio targeting all segments from low to high. Huawei’s high-end models continued to create a strong affiliation for the mid to low-end models, which are supporting the company’s overall shipment performance.

Apple had a challenging first quarter as shipments dropped to 36.4m units representing a staggering 30.2% decline from last year. The iPhone struggled to win over conusmers in most major markets as competitors continue to eat away at Apple’s market share. Price cuts in China throughout the quarter along with favorable trade-in deals in many markets were still not enough to encourage consumers to upgrade. Combine this with the fact that most competitors will shortly launch 5G phones and new foldable devices, the iPhone could face a difficult remainder of the year. Despite the lackluster quarter, Apple’s strong installed base along with its recent agreement with Qualcomm will be viewed as the light at the end of the tunnel heading into 2020 for the Cupertino-based giant.

«

Neil Cybart, a former sell-side analyst who has his own model for how Apple’s numbers fit together, reckons IDC is lowballing by a mile with its 36m figure; reckons it sold “way more”. The unit figure sales are all over the place, depending which analyst company you go to.
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How taxpayers covered a $1,000 liquor bill for Trump staffers (and more) at Trump’s club • Pro Publica

Derek Kravitz:

»

At some point later that evening [during Chinese president Xi’s visit to Mar-a-Lago], a group repaired to Mar-a-Lago’s Library Bar, a wood-paneled study with a portrait of Trump in tennis whites (titled “The Visionary”) hanging nearby. The group asked the bartender to leave the room so it “could speak confidentially,” according to an email written by Mar-a-Lago’s catering director, Brooke Watson.

The Secret Service guarded the door, according to the email. The bartender wasn’t allowed to return. And members of the group began pouring themselves drinks. No one paid.

Six days later, on April 13, Mar-a-Lago created a bill for those drinks, tallying $838 worth of alcohol plus a 20% service charge. It covered 54 drinks (making for an average price of $18.62 each) of premium liquor: Chopin vodka, Patron and Don Julio Blanco tequilas and Woodford Reserve bourbon. Watson’s email did not specify how many people consumed the alcohol or who the participants were. (It stated that she “was told” the participants included then-strategist Steve Bannon and then-deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin. Bannon, who has said he stopped drinking years ago, said he didn’t drink at Mar-a-Lago and didn’t recall the episode. Hagin did not respond to requests for comment.)

The bill was sent to the State Department, which objected to covering it. It was then forwarded to the White House, which paid the tab.

The unusual cocktail hour underscores a unique push and pull in the current administration: Donald Trump’s White House pays a bill and Donald Trump’s club reaps the revenue. (It’s unclear if the White House asked any of those drinking to reimburse the government; the White House declined to comment.)

«

Still astonished that this behaviour is countenanced; there’s plenty similar in the story. It would be like Jimmy Carter insisting that the White House serve peanuts with every meal and at every function, sourced from his peanut farm – which he’d handed to his kids. (Carter was forced to sell his peanut farm on becoming president in 1976.)
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Amazon’s facial-recognition technology is supercharging local police • Washington Post

Drew Harwell:

»

A grainy picture of someone’s face — captured by a security camera, a social-media account or a deputy’s smartphone — can quickly become a link to their identity, including their name, family and address. More than 1,000 facial-recognition searches were logged last year, said deputies, who sometimes used the results to find a suspect’s Facebook page, visit their home or make an arrest.

But Washington County [where Amazon’s system has been used since late 2017] also became ground zero for a high-stakes battle over the unregulated growth of policing by algorithm. Defense attorneys, artificial-intelligence researchers and civil rights experts argue that the technology could lead to the wrongful arrest of innocent people who bear only a resemblance to a video image. [Amazon’s system] Rekognition’s accuracy is also hotly disputed, and some experts worry that a case of mistaken identity by armed deputies could have dangerous implications, threatening privacy and people’s lives.

Some police agencies have in recent years run facial-recognition searches against state or FBI databases using systems built by contractors such as Cognitec, IDEMIA and NEC. But the rollout by Amazon has marked perhaps the biggest step in making the controversial face-scanning technology mainstream. Rekognition is easy to activate, requires no major technical infrastructure, and is offered to virtually anyone at bargain-barrel prices. Washington County spent about $700 to upload its first big haul of photos, and now, for all its searches, pays about $7 a month.

It’s impossible to tell, though, just how accurate or effective the technology has been during its first 18 months of real-world tests.

«

That last bit feels like it ought to have a lot more emphasis, doesn’t it? But wow, that is cheap. $7, compared with all the shoe leather and time of hunting down and going through photos.
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A weather tech startup wants to do forecasts based on cell phone signals • MIT Technology Review

Douglas Heaven:

»

Other forecasters use proxies, such as radar signals. But by using information from millions of everyday wireless devices [ie mobile phones], ClimaCell claims it has a far more fine-grained view of most of the globe than other forecasters get from the existing network of weather sensors, which range from ground-based devices to satellites. (ClimaCell taps into those, too.)

The company has now opened a new research center in Boulder, Colorado, where it is developing a new mathematical model that turns cell phone observations into weather data that can be plugged into a simulation. The more accurate your picture of the weather today, the more accurate your forecast for tomorrow.

The model can be tweaked to focus on the region, the type of weather, and the frequency of updates a subscriber wants. That would help renewable-energy companies know how much sunshine is going to hit their solar panels or how much wind will hit their turbines, for example. Better forecasting lets power providers match up supply and demand.

“There’s always a need for better forecasting,” says weather scientist Ken Mylne at the Met Office, the UK’s national weather service. “It’s impossible to do perfect forecasts, but we keep trying to narrow that gap between impossibility and perfection.”

«

What isn’t made clear in the story is quite what data gets collected – barometric? (Not all phones do that.) Temperature? (Very few phones do that, if any.) It seems promising yet also hand-wavy.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Jakarta is sinking fast – so Indonesia’s government will name a different city as its capital. CC-licensed photo by Mulya Amri 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.

WeWork files for IPO…which is funny all by itself • Dealbreaker

Thornton McEnery:

»

Every time we’ve learned anything about WeWork, it looks more and more like the company is a financial sandcastle built on a rainy day using sand that SoftBank bought at a 500% markup. We know we like to make a big deal here about spending more than you make, but we sometimes get the urge to give WeWork a pass, because it spends sooooo much more than it makes and then creates nonsense accounting principles out of thin air to justify said drunken sailor budgeting decisions. WeWork is so brazenly full of shit about so many things that we legitimately respect the company at this point. After all, how can you not kind of love a real estate arbitrage plan that has spent so much time cosplaying up as a tech unicorn that it has staked claim to new frontiers in the exploration of affected tech pomposity? 

The release of the WeWork S-1 is going to be something of a secular holiday at Dealbreaker HQ. We look forward to waking up late, eating a reasonably strong THC edible to prepare our minds properly and then digging into the document, reading line after line composed with the single objective of pretending that “The We Company” is indeed a $70bn revolution in modern living and not just a wildly overvalued machine powered by its founder and CEO passing money between his own hands with such speed and force that he has somehow created the financial accounting equivalent of cold fusion.

Man, this IPO is gonna be a rocket.

«

“Dude, are you one of the dragons in Game of Thrones because you sure burnt them to a crisp.”
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Apple’s iPhone sales drop 17% • WSJ

Tripp Mickle:

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Apple’s core iPhone business, which accounts for about two-thirds of total sales, has been hobbled by smartphone owners holding onto devices longer and by competition in China where local competitors offer lower-priced, feature-rich handsets. Its iPhone sales fell 17% in the quarter to about $31bn.

Apple blunted the damage from its iPhone business by extending the robust growth of services like app sales and streaming-music subscriptions, which collectively jumped 16%. It also said it would increase the size of its ongoing share buyback program by $75bn.

The report on Tuesday capped off a mixed bag of results from tech giants, including a major stumble by Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. that caused its stock to plunge nearly 8% on Tuesday. The digital-advertising giant and e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc. both over the past week reported their slowest revenue growth in four years as their core businesses showed signs of maturity.

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The headline’s a little misleading: Apple’s iPhone revenues dropped 17%. (Counterpoint Research reckons iPhone unit sales dropped by 20%.) Mac revenues dropped 5%, but iPad revenues were up 21% (!), “Wearables, Home and Accessories” up 30% (!!) and Services up 16% (~, wait for News+ and TV+ and so on to feed in). China was down 22%, which apparently isn’t as bad as some had been expecting. The revenue falloff – and iPhone sales drop – was all in emerging markets, and China.
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Bloomberg alleges Huawei routers and network gear are backdoored • Ars Technica

Peter Bright:

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Vodafone, the largest mobile network operator in Europe, found backdoors in Huawei equipment between 2009 and 2011, reports Bloomberg. With these backdoors, Huawei could have gained unauthorized access to Vodafone’s “fixed-line network in Italy.” But Vodafone disagrees, saying that while it did discover some security vulnerabilities in Huawei equipment, these were fixed by Huawei and in any case were not remotely accessible, and hence they could not be used by Huawei.

Bloomberg’s claims are based on Vodafone’s internal security documentation and “people involved in the situation.” Several different “backdoors” are described: unsecured telnet access to home routers, along with “backdoors” in optical service nodes (which connect last-mile distribution networks to optical backbone networks) and “broadband network gateways” (BNG) (which sit between broadband users and the backbone network, providing access control, authentication, and similar services).

In response to Bloomberg, Vodafone said that the router vulnerabilities were found and fixed in 2011 and the BNG flaws were found and fixed in 2012. While it has documentation about some optical service node vulnerabilities, Vodafone continued, it has no information about when they were fixed. Further, the network operator said that it has no evidence of issues outside Italy.

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Bloomberg hyped this like crazy, but it feels storm-teacuppy here.
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These ads think they know you • The New York Times

Stuart Thompson:

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“The way ads are targeted today is radically different from the way it was done 10 or 15 years ago,” said Frederike Kaltheuner, who heads the corporate exploitation program at Privacy International. “It’s become exponentially more invasive, and most people are completely unaware of what kinds of data feeds into the targeting.”

With that in mind, we want to share how we targeted these ads, what we learned, and why it might disturb you.

Targeted advertising was once limited to simple contextual cues: visiting ESPN probably meant you’d see an ad for Nike. But advertising services today use narrow categories drawn from a mind-boggling number of sources to single out consumers. (Like many publishers, The Times uses targeted advertising to find potential subscribers and readers.)

To build the ads for our experiment, we imagined some extremely specific targets and built profiles of those people. Then we chose 16 attributes that matched those profiles from a list of about 30,000 – a list that’s rarely seen by people outside the industry.

We could do this because many companies, like retailers and credit card providers, sell customer information to data companies. Most data providers declined to tell us where their data comes from or how they built their models, so the sources in the ads below come from the ad experts who helped us create the campaign. Our experiment would have been blocked on Facebook because the company bans most ads showing how you’ve been targeted…

…“In the next election, I think it is inevitable that every single voter will have been profiled based on what they have been reading, watching and listening to for years online,” said Johnny Ryan, the chief policy officer at Brave, a private web browser that allows users to block ads and trackers.

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Very clever piece of work.
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Indonesia’s planning minister announces capital city move • BBC News

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Indonesia is moving its capital city away from Jakarta, according to the country’s planning minister.

Bambang Brodjonegoro said President Joko Widodo had chosen to relocate the capital in “an important decision”.

The new location is not yet known. However state media reports one of the front runners is Palangkaraya, on the island of Borneo.

Jakarta, home to over 10 million people, is sinking at one of the fastest rates in the world.

The announcement comes after Mr Widodo declared victory in the country’s general election earlier this month, though official results will not be announced until May 22.

The idea of moving the capital has been floated several times since the country gained independence from the Dutch in 1945. In 2016, a survey found that the mega-city had the world’s worst traffic congestion. Government ministers have to be escorted by police convoys to get to meetings on time.

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They’re moving it because of the sinking, not the traffic: at present rates the whole city will be underwater by 2050. That’s 30 years away. One generation.
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Lackner’s carbon-capture technology moves to commercialization • Arizona State University

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The proprietary technology acts like a tree that is thousands of times more efficient at removing CO2 from the air. The “mechanical trees” allow the captured gas to be sequestered or sold for re-use in a variety of applications, such as synthetic fuels, enhanced oil recovery or in food, beverage and agriculture industries. 

Unlike other carbon-capture technologies, SKH’s technology can remove CO2 from the atmosphere without the need to draw air through the system mechanically using energy-intensive devices. Instead, the technology uses the wind to blow air through the system. This makes it a passive, relatively low-cost and scalable solution that is commercially viable. If deployed at scale, the technology could lead to significant reductions in the levels of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere, helping to combat global warming…

…The “mechanical tree” is a novel geometery that is agnostic to wind direction. Each one contains a stack of sorbent-filled disks. When the tree-like column is fully extended and the disks spread apart, air flow makes contact with the disk surfaces and the CO2 gets bound up. During regeneration, the disks are lowered inside the bottom container. Inside the chamber, the CO2 is released from the sorbent. The released gas is then collected, purified, processed and put to other uses, while the disks are redeployed to capture more CO2.

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Promising, though shouldn’t it just be sequestration?
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This pollution-busting window cleans the air with photosynthesis • WIRED UK

Anna Marks:

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What if your windows could photosynthesise? London-based design practice ecoLogicStudio has created Photo.Synth.Etica, a “biocurtain” that captures one kilogram of carbon dioxide per day – the equivalent of 20 large trees. The carbon-neutral biocurtain uses microalgae to capture carbon dioxide from polluted air and produce oxygen. “It is a new kind of urban symbiosis,” says co-founder Claudia Pasquero.

As the Sun’s rays shine through Photo.Synth.Etica, the microalgae photosynthesise: polluted urban air enters the bottom of the curtain and gradually rises to meet the cyanobacteria cells in the living cultures. These consume the toxic particles so that the air is cleaned as it rises, while also sequestering the carbon and producing oxygen, which is released at the top. “The curtain interacts with the air of the environment in which it is embedded,” Pasquero explains. “It acts as a medium that allows the air to flow through and trade CO2 with the microalgae before escaping the system.”

The curtain is designed to be hung from the side of a building. It is composed of 16 modules, each 2m x 7m, and made from two layers of transparent bioplastic, which are welded together to create pockets of microalgae suspended in a biogel medium. This results in a bright green, snake-like pattern that becomes luminescent at night.

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Price between £270 to £1,800 per square metre, depending. Trees are pretty much free, of course, though they take a lot longer to “fabricate”.
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Google Pixel 3 is a sales disappointment, sells less than the Pixel 2 • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

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basically Google is admitting that there is some tough competition out there for the Pixel 3 and that the phone isn’t selling as well as its predecessor. Google doesn’t break out “hardware results” in its earnings report, so we can only guess at what the year-over-year difference is. It was bad enough to mention in an earnings call, though.

We weren’t huge fans of the changes in the Pixel 3. The smaller version was $799—$150 more than the Pixel 2 from the year earlier—and the larger Pixel 3 XL was $50 more than the Pixel 2 XL, or $899. For this extra money, Google downgraded from a metal back to glass, it stuck with a meager 4GB of RAM—the lowest of any Android flagship—and it even made some software blunders like locking users into its half-baked gesture navigation system (which it is still trying to fix in this year’s Android Q release). To top it all off, the designs were pretty ugly, ranging from the dated Pixel 3 bezels to the outrageously large display notch on the Pixel 3 XL.

As for the Pixel 3’s competition, Google has to deal with mainstream juggernauts like Apple’s iPhone XS and Samsung’s Galaxy S10—phones from two companies with a stronger focus on hardware, more carrier deals, and bigger advertising budgets. In the enthusiast market, Samsung offers higher specs, and OnePlus offers better value with a device like the OnePlus 6T.

Google’s Pixel distribution network is also downright terrible compared to the competition. Google sells the Pixel in only a tiny handful of countries, while its competitors have a worldwide presence. The Pixel 3 is for sale in a whopping 12 countries and has zero retail stores. In the US, Google’s only real carrier partner is Verizon.

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The distribution network is much the same as last year. The key difference is the price, really. And would Pixel 2 owners upgrade? Google would be looking to get Pixel 1 owners, and skim off others. Too late, it seems.
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Huawei gains record 34% of China’s declining smartphone market • Canalys

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China’s smartphone market contracted 3% to 88.0m units in Q1 2019, making it the market’s worst performance since 2013. Market leader Huawei grew its share to a record 34%, up by more than 10% on the same period last year, making it the only vendor in the top five to report growth in an otherwise declining market. Huawei (including Honor) shipped just under 30m smartphones. It was followed by Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi and Apple, which each suffered year-on-year declines.

…”Oppo and Vivo are both shifting their product strategies to refresh their brands,” said Canalys Research Analyst Yiting Guan. Vivo is going for a bigger product portfolio in China to cover a wider range of consumer demographics than before, and now offers seven product families. Oppo has put a strong emphasis on its new Reno series to renew its appeal in the mid-to-high-end segment. More interestingly, its RealMe spin-off has been brought from India to China to compete at the low end with Xiaomi and Huawei, including Honor.

Xiaomi recorded quarterly growth against its weak Q4 last year as it improved its channel inventory situation, but still suffered a year-on-year decline in both shipments and market share…Apple shipped 6.5m iPhones in the last quarter, suffering its worst decline in two years. “Despite the iPhone’s installed base in China being well over 300 million, it is vital that Apple prevents users deserting it for Android vendors. Apple faces a challenge in China to localize its software and services offerings as quickly as in Western markets,” said Jia.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

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

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

Dave Lee:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tech for good! It can happen.
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The once-hot robotics startup Anki is shutting down after raising more than $200 million • Recode

:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It’s very unusual for Apple to make a public statement like this. It removed 11 of 17 of the most-downloaded screen time/parental control apps, which the NY Times suggested was anti-competitive. Apple’s saying: not at all.
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Global 5G wireless networks threaten weather forecasts • Nature

Alexandra Witze:

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

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

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

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But the US, as often happens, isn’t listening.
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Why pleasure always trumps possessions • Financial Times

Janan Ganesh:

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

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

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

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Because economists can’t value what they can’t price.
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Making sense of Huawei • Balding’s World

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Mozur, Jonah M. Kessel and Melissa Chan:

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

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

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

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

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Want to know what it isn’t good at? Stopping crimes such as assault.
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A bitter turf war is raging on the Brexit Wikipedia page • WIRED UK

Matt Reynolds:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Predictable, I suppose. But at least Wikipedia has checks and balances, of sorts.
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Uber’s IPO and local network effects • Tech-Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The feature Apple needs to change in AirDrop • Yahoo Finance

Rob Pegoraro:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I was ready to ignore this – 90% of people never shift from defaults – but for that “expire after time” suggestion, which is fair. Perhaps in iOS 13?
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