“Are you going to the Fortnite Live festival there, Father Ted?” CC-licensed photo by Insomnia Cured Here 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. Untested on Kodak. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

When kids Google themselves • The Atlantic

Taylor Lorenz:

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Allie was in fourth grade the first time she Googled herself. Like Ellen, she wasn’t expecting to find anything, since she doesn’t yet have her own social-media accounts. Google turned up just a few photos, but she was shocked that there was anything at all. She immediately became hyperaware of the image her mother was building for her on Instagram and Facebook. “My parents have always posted about me,” she said. “I was basically fine with it … then I realized I was making an impression and I was an actual person online too, through her page.”

Not all kids react poorly to finding out they’ve been living an unwitting life online. Some are thrilled. In fourth grade, Nate searched his name and discovered that he was mentioned in a news article about his third-grade class making a giant burrito. “I didn’t know,” he said. “I was surprised, really surprised.” But he was pleased with his newfound clout. “It made me feel famous … I got to make new friends by saying, ‘Oh, I’m in a newspaper [online],’” he said. Ever since, he has Googled himself every few months, hoping to find things.

Natalie, now 13, said that in fifth grade she and her friends competed with one another over the amount of information about themselves on the internet. “We thought it was so cool that we had pics of ourselves online,” she said. “We would brag like, ‘I have this many pics of myself on the internet.’ You look yourself up, and it’s like, ‘Whoa, it’s you!’ We were all shocked when we realized we were out there. We were like, ‘Whoa, we’re real people.’”

Natalie’s parents are stringent about not posting photos of her to social media, so there are only a handful of photos of her out there, but she yearns for more. “I don’t want to live in a hole and only have two pics of me online. I want to be a person who is a person. I want people to know who I am,” she said.

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We all want to be someone, don’t we? And this is the first way that children discover that they are, to other people – maybe to the people they want to impress, which is their peers. Comes with a word I hadn’t seen before: “sharenting” (parents who share too much).
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Lessons from 6 software rewrite stories • Medium

Herb Caudill:

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Almost two decades ago, Joel Spolsky excoriated Netscape for rewriting their codebase in his landmark essay Things You Should Never Do.
He concluded that a functioning application should never, ever be rewritten from the ground up. His argument turned on two points:
• The crufty-looking parts of the application’s codebase often embed hard-earned knowledge about corner cases and weird bugs.
• A rewrite is a lengthy undertaking that keeps you from improving on your existing product, during which time the competition is gaining on you.

For many, Joel’s conclusion became an article of faith; I know it had a big effect on my thinking at the time. In the following years, I read a few contrarian takes arguing that, under certain circumstances, it made a lot of sense to rewrite from scratch. For example:
• Sometimes the legacy codebase really is messed up beyond repair, such that even simple changes require a cascade of changes to other parts of the code.
• The original technology choices might be preventing you from making necessary improvements.
• Or, the original technology might be obsolete, making it hard (or expensive) to recruit quality developers.

The correct answer, of course, is that it depends a lot on the circumstances. Yes, sometimes it makes more sense to gradually refactor your legacy code. And yes, sometimes it makes sense to throw it all out and start over.

But those aren’t the only choices. Let’s take a quick look at six stories, and see what lessons we can draw.

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Netscape, Basecamp, Visual Studio, Gmail/Inbox, Fogbugz/Trello, FreshBooks/BillSpring. In depth, fascinating.
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People don’t want to pay big bucks for a new smartphone • ZDNet

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes:

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The survey of 1,303 smartphone buyers in the US, carried out earlier this month for USA Today by SurveyMonkey, makes hard reading for companies who expect buyers to drop a thousand dollars on a smartphone, because it seems that the majority of the market belongs to the sub-$500 smartphone.

Here’s the breakdown

Sub-$300: 30%
$300 to $500: 26%$501 to $750: 25%
$751 to $1,000: 16%
More than $1,000: 3%

For comparison, a 64GB iPhone XR is $749, while a full-spec 512GB iPhone XS Max is a whopping $1,449. This means that the entirety of Apple’s new iPhone line is at the upper end of what people are willing to pay, with the high-end devices existing at the very thinnest end of the wedge.

And it’s the sort of price that most people would balk at when it comes to buying far bigger gadgets such as desktops and laptops.

Apple’s cheapest iPhone currently on sale is the 32GB iPhone 7, which retails for $449. While this seems like a reasonable deal – especially when you consider that Apple’s priciest iPhone is $1,449 – it’s a lot of money for old hardware. It even raises the question of whether Apple could use a budget $300 iPhone designed from the ground-up to be cheap yet functional. 

That would certainly allow Apple the chance to go after a much bigger market share.

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In the words of Gregory House, MD, “everybody lies”. Especially about what they’re prepared to pay for a new smartphone. Though that $750+ group is nearly one-fifth of the whole market. And if you’re looking just at revenue, 44% of the total is in the $750-1,000 space; just 9% in the sub-$300 space. You need revenue to make profit, given fixed overheads.
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The vanishing flights of the monarch butterfly • The New Yorker

Sue Halpern:

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[Emeritus professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas, Chip] Taylor has a one-word explanation for why 2018 was an especially good year for eastern monarchs, and why that good year likely portends bad ones to come: temperature. In March, when the monarchs arrived in Texas from Mexico, the mean temperatures were 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, which should have blown the butterflies all the way to Kansas. The butterflies couldn’t go farther north, though, because it was too cold in northern Texas. “I looked at the weather every day and I’d say, ‘damn, that’s good. Keep your babies in Texas,’” Taylor said. In May, the temperatures were optimal as the butterflies moved north, and they were ideal in the summer as monarchs spread out across their breeding range. Then, in the fall, as the butterflies headed south, those numbers were favorable, too. “What we had this year is everything was positive in every one of those stages,” Taylor told me. “This is why I say this is not likely to happen again—because you’re not likely to see a pattern like this again.”

West of the Rockies, the number of monarchs overwintering in California is estimated to be around twenty thousand, down 86% since last year, which “isn’t completely unprecedented,” Emma Pelton, a researcher with the Xerces Society, told me. “I’ve looked back at data between 1980 and today, and there have been other instances where we’ve had a single-year drop of this magnitude. But the difference is that this is all in the context of a 97% decline since the 1980s.” The current situation, Pelton added, is considered “a quasi-extinction.” There may not be enough butterflies to repopulate the range. If that happens, there will still be western monarchs, but they will be increasingly hard to find. “That would be like losing all the rhinos, except the rhinos in the zoos,” Pelton said. “Really, the threat is that we’re going to lose migration.”

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So even when it’s good, the news is bad.
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AT&T pulls all ads from YouTube amid pedophilia controversy • CNBC

Todd Haselton and Sara Salinas:

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“Until Google can protect our brand from offensive content of any kind, we are removing all advertising from YouTube,” an AT&T spokesperson told CNBC. The company originally pulled its entire ad spend from YouTube in 2017 after revelations that its ads were appearing alongside offensive content, including terrorist content, but resumed advertising in January.

On Wednesday, Nestle and “Fortnite” maker Epic Games pulled some advertising. Disney reportedly also paused its ads.

There’s no evidence that AT&T ads ran before any of the videos brought into question by recent reports. Advertisers such as Grammarly and Peloton, which did see their ads placed alongside the videos, told CNBC they were in conversations with YouTube to resolve the issue.

YouTube declined to comment on any specific advertisers, but said in a statement on Wednesday, “Any content — including comments — that endangers minors is abhorrent and we have clear policies prohibiting this on YouTube. We took immediate action by deleting accounts and channels, reporting illegal activity to authorities and disabling violative comments.”

Also on Thursday, AdWeek obtained a memo YouTube sent to advertisers that outlines immediate changes YouTube says it’s making in an effort to protect its younger audience.

YouTube said it is suspending comments on millions of videos that “could be subject to predatory comments.”

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Peloton and Grammarly seem to be a bit lacklustre about something that is a serious breach of ethics. YouTube enables this stuff. Its algorithms make it easier because, as Ben Thompson pointed out, none of the people doing this is going to report it – so self-reporting fails.
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Citymapper just announced a subscription service for London’s muddled transport network • WIRED UK

Nicole Kobie:

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Citymapper already plots a range of routes in its journey planning app, and soon it’ll let you pay for it all under one subscription. It’s the start of mobility as a service, or at least that’s the company’s ambition. “The idea is to make public transport effortless. The way our app makes it easy to plan, we want to make it easy to pay,” says CEO and founder Azmat Yusuf. “We’re trying to create a vision of this future where mobility is something where, as a user, you care about getting from point A to point B. We want to make it so it’s a bit like a utility, you can access whatever comes along.”

That’s the long-term plan, though the initial packages are rather more limited. From launch, there will be two subscriptions. The first, at about £30 (prices may still be subject to final tweaking), will give Citymapper Pass subscribers full access to zones one and two of Transport for London’s network for a week. For £40, they’ll get the same, plus unlimited rides on TfL’s Santander docked bike shares as well as two journeys on Citymapper’s Ride, its cab-sharing system similar to Uber Pool.

Why sign up? To start, it’s cheaper. The first offer is a £5.10 discount on TfL’s own weekly price for zones one and two. For the second, two trips in Citymapper Ride are worth about £10, while Santander bikes cost £2 a day. Citymapper suggested bulk buying helped keep prices down, and the fares are similar to those offered by group-buying scheme Commuter Club; unlike that system, subscribers will be charged weekly and not be locked in. “It’ll be easy to sign up, easy to pause, easy to cancel,” says Yusuf.

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“Muddled transport network”? In what way is the London transport network muddled? If you buy an Oyster card, you can use any part of it. Citymapper is going to pay TfL the full fare, so it’s bearing the losses here. This is screwy. Anyone can sell pounds for 90p.
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Norwich’s Fortnite Live festival was a complete disaster • Eurogamer.net

Tom Phillips:

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A festival designed to recreate Fortnite on the outskirts of Norwich has, somewhat predictably, not lived up to expectations.

Event organisers flogged 2500 tickets to kids and parents. Entry cost upwards of £12 and unlimited access wristbands a further £20.

In return, families got what amounted to a few fairground attractions. Photos from the event show a climbing wall for three people, archery for four people, and four go-karts.

An attraction dubbed a “cave experience” was a lorry trailer with tarpaulin over it.

An indoors area where you could play actual Fortnite was probably the best thing there – although it cost money to access and you had to queue to do so. So much for free-to-play.

And all of that was if you could actually get into the event to start with. Hundreds of people were left queuing for hours due to staff shortages.

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A tarpaulin over a lorry trailer 😂😂. This is one of those stories which is a delight to research as a journalist, because it keeps turning up people at their absolute bumbling worst. Norwich, as an area, is also famous for its vague efforts to make money by promising far too much from a few lorries in a field.

Unsurprisingly, Epic Games sued since its mark was being used without permission, and the company behind it (“Exciting Events” 😂) has liquidated itself.

As someone commented on Twitter, it was like the episode of Father Ted when the funfair comes to Craggy Island.

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A philosopher argues: AI can’t be an artist • MIT Technology Review

Sean Dorrance Kelly, who is a philosophy professor at Harvard:

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Human creative achievement, because of the way it is socially embedded, will not succumb to advances in artificial intelligence. To say otherwise is to misunderstand both what human beings are and what our creativity amounts to.

This claim is not absolute: it depends on the norms that we allow to govern our culture and our expectations of technology. Human beings have, in the past, attributed great power and genius even to lifeless totems. It is entirely possible that we will come to treat artificially intelligent machines as so vastly superior to us that we will naturally attribute creativity to them. Should that happen, it will not be because machines have outstripped us. It will be because we will have denigrated ourselves…

…my argument is not that the creator’s responsiveness to social necessity must be conscious for the work to meet the standards of genius. I am arguing instead that we must be able to interpret the work as responding that way. It would be a mistake to interpret a machine’s composition as part of such a vision of the world. The argument for this is simple.

Claims like Kurzweil’s that machines can reach human-level intelligence assume that to have a human mind is just to have a human brain that follows some set of computational algorithms—a view called computationalism. But though algorithms can have moral implications, they are not themselves moral agents. We can’t count the monkey at a typewriter who accidentally types out Othello as a great creative playwright. If there is greatness in the product, it is only an accident.

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Your long read for today. May require registration.
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When Kodak accidentally discovered A-bomb testing • Popular Mechanics

Matt Blitz:

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It all started when Kodak had a problem with its packaging. Even today, X-ray film is highly sensitive (much more so than regular photographic film) and subject to ruin due to dirt, scratches and even minimal light exposure. Proper packaging and protection is essential to make sure the film gets from manufacturing to shipping to the customer’s place of business safely. According to an article Webb would write in 1949 for the American Physical Society, the paper and cardboard used for packaging in the ’40s were often salvaged from wartime manufacturing plants where radium-based instruments were also produced. Radium is a naturally occurring radioactive element that can cause flecks of spots or fogging when “in intimate contact with (sensitive film) for a period several weeks.” During wartime, Kodak took precautions to avoid radium contamination. It moved packaging manufacturing to mills where Kodak had full control over the raw materials.

One of these mills was located along the Wabash River in Vincennes, Indiana; it specialized in producing strawboard, used as a stiffener board between sheets of film. When Webb investigated the mysterious fogging in 1945, he found that it originated not from the X-ray film itself but the packaging, which he tracked to this particular mill, and specifically, the production run of strawboard from August 6, 1945. After testing the radioactive material on the strawboard, he discovered—rather alarmingly—that the spots on the film were not caused by radium nor any other naturally occurring radioactive material, but “a new type radioactive containment not hitherto encountered.” What was this unknown radioactive material, he must have wondered, and what was it doing in southwest Indiana?

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This is a wonderful detective story; one wonders whether we could have an equivalent today, in which an innocuous everyday product is a telltale for a huge government project (albeit one that produced a gigantic fireball visible for 250 miles).
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Machine learning predicted lots about film popularity – but this one surprised it. CC-licensed photo by AntMan3001 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.

Pinterest blocks vaccination searches in move to control the conversation • WSJ

Robert McMillan and Daniela Hernandez:

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Pinterest has stopped returning search results for terms relating to vaccinations, a drastic step the social-media company says is aimed at curbing the spread of misinformation but one that demonstrates the power tech companies can exert to control the conversation around hot-button issues.

Most shared images on Pinterest relating to vaccination cautioned against it, contradicting established medical guidelines and research showing that vaccines are safe, Pinterest said. The image-searching platform tried to remove the antivaccination content, a Pinterest spokeswoman said, but has been unable to remove it completely.

Pinterest described the search ban—which the company hasn’t previously publicly discussed but went into effect late last year—as a temporary but necessary measure until it can develop better strategies to sift through what it calls “polluted” content. The company made a similar decision last year to block searches for dubious cancer therapies.

Users can still pin vaccine-related images to their online boards, which could lead to suggestions to more similar content, but the posts no longer show up in searches. “It’s better not to serve those results than to lead people down what is like a recommendation rabbit hole,” said Ifeoma Ozoma, Pinterest’s public policy and social impact manager.

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They’re being responsible. It’s weird. Quite a contrast.
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Samsung’s foldable phone is the Galaxy Fold, price $1,980 • The Verge

Tom Warren:

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Samsung has built a sturdy backbone to the device, with a hinge system that has multiple interlocking gears. All of these gears are hidden at the rear of the device, and allow the Galaxy Fold to transform from tablet to phone modes. At the rear of the device there’s also a triple-camera system that will be used for both tablet and phone modes. There’s a 16-megapixel ultra-wide camera, alongside 12-megapixel wide-angle and telephoto cameras at the rear, and a 10-megapixel cover camera for selfies. Samsung is also creating four different colors for the Galaxy Fold, but it’s the main tablet display that’s key here.

Samsung is allowing the Galaxy Fold to run three apps at once on this Android device, and it’s using an app continuity system to adjust these apps when you move between tablet and phone modes. Apps like WhatsApp, Microsoft Office, and YouTube have all been optimized for the new display and modes, and Samsung has been working with Google to ensure Android 9 Pie fully supports this display.

Samsung demonstrated a variety of apps running in this mode, and the switching from phone to tablet and vice versa. It looks rather smooth in the software right now, but it’s fair to say that the Galaxy Fold looks far better when it’s folded out than being used as a traditional phone. The phone display is clearly designed to be used with one hand, but it’s flanked by large bezels that aren’t found on the tablet mode. We’ll need to get a closer look at the Galaxy Fold to find out exactly how this impacts the device usability, though.

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Sooo.. an iPad you can fold up?
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Oracle claims a fighter of pirated apps is a front for ad fraud • Ad Age

Garett Sloane:

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A company that claims to combat app piracy is a pirate itself, according to a report Oracle released on Wednesday. Oracle claims the company, Tapcore, has been perpetrating a massive ad fraud on Android devices by infecting apps with software that ring up fake ad impressions and drain people’s data.

Based in The Netherlands, Tapcore works with developers to identify when apps are pirated and then enables developers to make money from those bootleg copies by serving ads. Oracle says that Tapcore’s anti-piracy code was a Trojan horse that was generating fake mobile websites to trick ad serving platforms into paying them for non-existent ad inventory.

“The code is delivering a steady stream of invisible video ads and spoofing domains,” Dan Fichter, VP of software development at Oracle Data Cloud, tells Ad Age. “On all those impressions it looked like the advertiser was running ads on legitimate mobile websites. Not only were they not on a website, they were on an invisible web browser.”

On its website, Tapcore says it works with more than 3,000 apps, serving 150 million ad impressions a day. The apps whose pirated versions it has worked with include titles like “Perfect 365,” “Draw Clash of Clans,” “Vertex” and “Solitaire: Season 4,” according to Oracle’s report.

Tapcore’s scheme works like this, according to Oracle: the app developer signs up with Tapcore and is given code to put in its software. After the app is downloaded by a consumer, hours, even days later, the code updates with new functions—what’s known as sideloading—that turn a device into a fake ad generator.

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Hope Oracle is certain about that, or Tapcore is going to have a big lawyer’s letter.
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Zittrain and Zuckerberg discuss encryption, ‘information fiduciaries’ and targeted ads • Harvard Law

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“The idea of us having a fiduciary relationship with the people who use our services is intuitive,” said Zuckerberg [interviewed by Jonathan Zittrain].  “[Facebook’s] own self-image of ourselves and what we’re doing is that we’re acting as fiduciaries and trying to build services for people. … Where this gets interesting is who gets to decide in the legal sense, or in the policy sense, of what’s in people’s best interest.”

The conversation segued into another topic area involving competing sets of interests: the use of end-to-end message encryption to make private communications inaccessible to eavesdroppers. End-to-end encryption has come under criticism for making it difficult in some cases for law enforcement agents (with the proper warrants) to access evidence locked up on devices. Zittrain raised the possibility that governments not embracing the rule of law might use their legal and technical capabilities to peek into unencrypted private communications at will. “The modern surveillance states of note in the world have a lot of arrows in their quivers… they’ve got a plan B, a plan C, and a plan D,” he said.

Zuckerberg said he is inclined to implement more end-to-end encryption. “I basically think that if you want to talk in metaphors, messaging is like people’s living room, and we definitely don’t want a society where there’s a camera in everyone’s living room,” he said.

Zittrain pointed out that people are happily installing Facebook’s own smart camera–the Portal–in their living rooms. Zuckerberg laughed. “That is I guess… yeah. Though that would be encrypted.”

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How 20th Century Fox uses machine learning to predict a movie audience • Google Cloud blog

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Understanding the market segmentation of the movie-going public is a core function of movie studios. Over the years, studios have invested in high-level data processes to try to map out customer segments, and to make predictions for future films. However, to date, granular predictions at the segment level, not to mention at the customer level, have remained elusive because of technological and institutional barriers.  

Miguel and his team have been able to lift some of those barriers by working with partners like Google Cloud. Together, we’ve built privacy-robust data partnerships to better understand moviegoers, and have developed in-house deep learning models that train on granular customer data and movie scripts to identify the basic patterns in audiences’ preferences for different types of films. In the span of 18 months, these models have become routine considerations for important business decisions, and provide one of their most objective, data-driven, and effective barometers to evaluate the tone of a movie, its affinity with core and stretch audiences, and its potential financial performance.

When it comes to movies, analyzing text taken from a script is limiting because it only provides a skeleton of the story, without any of the additional dynamism that can entice an audience to see a movie. The team wondered if there was some way to use modern, advanced computer vision to study movie trailers, which remain the single most central element of a movie’s entire marketing campaign. The trailer release for a new movie is a highly anticipated event that can help predict future success, so it behoves the business to ensure the trailer is hitting the right notes with moviegoers. To achieve this goal, the 20th Century Fox data science team partnered with Google’s Advanced Solutions Lab to create Merlin Video, a computer vision tool that learns dense representations of movie trailers to help predict a specific trailer’s future moviegoing audience.

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This is entirely predictable, though also slightly weird. However, notice what happens: the right-hand column is what it forecast, the left-hand what happened. The ones to pay attention to are the unexpected, grey ones – particularly Deadpool.

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Which face is real?

Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom at the University of Washington:

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while we’ve learned to distrust user names and text more generally, pictures are different. You can’t synthesize a picture out of nothing, we assume; a picture had to be of someone. Sure a scammer could appropriate someone else’s picture, but doing so is a risky strategy in a world with google reverse search and so forth. So we tend to trust pictures. A business profile with a picture obviously belongs to someone. A match on a dating site may turn out to be 10 pounds heavier or 10 years older than when a picture was taken, but if there’s a picture, the person obviously exists.

No longer. New adverserial machine learning algorithms allow people to rapidly generate synthetic ‘photographs’ of people who have never existed.

Computers are good, but your visual processing systems are even better. If you know what to look for, you can spot these fakes at a single glance — at least for the time being. The hardware and software used to generate them will continue to improve, and it may be only a few years until humans fall behind in the arms race between forgery and detection.

Our aim is to make you aware of the ease with which digital identities can be faked, and to help you spot these fakes at a single glance.

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So now we’re using humans as the adversarial network (which calls out the generative network).
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This Cat Does Not Exist • TCDNE

It’s thispersondoesnotexist but for cats. Though the adversarial network (the yin to the yang of the generative network, which creates the non-existent cat) needs some work; it still lets too many obviously non-cats through.
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Is the insect apocalypse really upon us? • The Atlantic

Ed Yong:

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In their review, Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys found 73 studies showing insect declines.

But that’s what they went looking for! They searched a database using the keywords insect and decline, and so wouldn’t have considered research showing stability or increases. The studies they found aren’t representative either: most were done in Europe and North America, and the majority of insects live in the tropics. This spotty geographical spread makes it hard to know if insects are disappearing from some areas but recovering or surging in others. And without “good baselines for population sizes,” says Jessica Ware from Rutgers University, “when we see declines, it’s hard to know if this is something that happens all the time.”

It’s as if “our global climate dataset only involved 73 weather stations, mostly in Europe and the United States, active over different historical time windows,” explained Alex Wild from the University of Texas at Austin on Twitter. “Imagine that only some of those stations measured temperature. Others, only humidity. Others, only wind direction. Trying to cobble those sparse, disparate points into something resembling a picture of global trends is ambitious, to say the least.”

For those reasons, it’s hard to take the widely quoted numbers from Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys’s review as gospel. They say that 41% of insect species are declining and that global numbers are falling by 2.5% a year, but “they’re trying to quantify things that we really can’t quantify at this point,” says Michelle Trautwein from the California Academy of Sciences.

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Useful nuance, but it’s still concerning unless we’re going to train cockroaches to fertilise all the crops.
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On YouTube, a network of paedophiles is hiding in plain sight • Wired

K.G Orphanides:

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Videos of little girls playing Twister, doing gymnastics, playing in the pool and eating ice lollies are all routinely descended upon by hordes of semi-anonymous commenters, sharing time codes for crotch shots, directing other people to similar videos of children and exchanging phone numbers along with a promise to swap more videos via WhatsApp or Kik. On some videos, confused children who have uploaded videos of them playing in the garden respond to comments asking them how old they are. On one video, a young girl appears to ask another commenter why one of the videos had made him “grow”. The video shows the child and her friend doing yoga and is accompanied by pre-roll advertising from L’Oreal. The video has almost two million views.

“We’re absolutely horrified and have reached out to YouTube to rectify this immediately,” a Grammarly spokesperson said. “We have a strict policy against advertising alongside harmful or offensive content. We would never knowingly associate ourselves with channels like this.”

A spokesperson for Fortnite publisher Epic Games said it had paused all pre-roll advertising on YouTube. “Through our advertising agency, we have reached out to YouTube to determine actions they’ll take to eliminate this type of content from their service,” the spokesperson added. A World Business Forum spokesperson said it found it “repulsive that paedophiles are using YouTube for their criminal activities”. A Peloton spokesperson said it was working with its media buying agency to investigate why its adverts were being displayed against such videos.

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Remarkable investigation – but this is terrible for YouTube’s reputation. (Is there ever good news for YouTube?) This will surely get pickup by the big news organisations. And then, YouTube has a gigantic problem. Not only that; exactly the same story was reported in August 2017. YouTube has failed.
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Nest Secure had a secret microphone, can now be a Google Assistant • CSO Online

Ms. Smith:

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When announcing that a software update will make Google Assistant available on Nest Guard, Google added, “The Google Assistant on Nest Guard is an opt-in feature, and as the feature becomes available to our users, they’ll receive an email with instructions on how to enable the feature and turn on the microphone in the Nest app. Nest Guard does have one on-device microphone that is not enabled by default.”

Nest Secure owners have been able to use Google Assistant and voice commands, but it previously required a separate Google Assistant device to hear your commands. I suppose it depends upon your outlook on if you are happy or creeped out that your security system secretly had an undocumented microphone capable of doing the listening all along.

Google didn’t really focus on the “surprise there was a microphone hidden in the Nest Guard brain of your Nest Secure” angle, preferring a take on how Google Assistant and Nest Guard can help you out.

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This is not something you accidentally include. It’s not something you accidentally forget to tell people about either, because your engineers know that it’s there, because they’re going to enable it in the future: it’s on the schedule.

Surprising that a teardown by iFixit et al didn’t find this. But it’s bad for Google not to tell people, because that’s how you undermine trust.
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Grand Canyon tourists exposed to radiation, safety manager says • AZ Central

Dennis Wagner:

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For nearly two decades at the Grand Canyon, tourists, employees, and children on tours passed by three paint buckets stored in the National Park’s museum collection building, unaware that they were being exposed to radiation.

Although federal officials learned last year that the 5-gallon containers were brimming with uranium ore, then removed the radioactive specimens, the park’s safety director alleges nothing was done to warn park workers or the public that they might have been exposed to unsafe levels of radiation.

In a rogue email sent to all Park Service employees on Feb. 4, Elston “Swede” Stephenson — the safety, health and wellness manager — described the alleged cover-up as “a top management failure” and warned of possible health consequences.

“If you were in the Museum Collections Building (2C) between the year 2000 and June 18, 2018, you were ‘exposed’ to uranium by OSHA’s definition,” Stephenson wrote. “The radiation readings, at first blush, exceeds (sic) the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s safe limits. … Identifying who was exposed, and your exposure level, gets tricky and is our next important task.”…

…Stephenson said the uranium threat was discovered in March 2018 by the teenage son of a park employee who happened to be a Geiger counter enthusiast, and brought a device to the museum collection room…

…The report indicated radiation levels at “13.9 mR/hr” where the buckets were stored, and “800 mR/hr” on contact with the ore. Just 5 feet from the buckets, there was a zero reading. The abbreviation, “mR” typically stands for milliroentgen, a measurement roughly equivalent to a millirem, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The NRC says average radiation exposure in the United States from natural sources is 300 millirems per year at sea level, or 400 at high altitude.

The commission lists a maximum safe dosage for the public, beyond natural radiation, is no more than 2 millirems per hour, or 100 per year.

«

At no point explained: what the hell the buckets were doing there.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

The US FDA is warning old folk not to be vampires. Yup. CC-licensed photo by Abc Abc 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. Almost an armful. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Blood of the young won’t spare rich old people from sadness and death, FDA says • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

»

The US Food and Drug Administration issued an alert Tuesday, February 19, warning older consumers against seeking infusions of blood plasma harvested from younger people. Despite being peddled as anti-aging treatments and cures for a range of conditions, the transfusions are unproven and potentially harmful.

In a statement, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and the director of FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, Peter Marks, wrote: “Simply put, we’re concerned that some patients are being preyed upon by unscrupulous actors touting treatments of plasma from young donors as cures and remedies.”

Establishments in several states are now selling young blood plasma, which is the liquid portion of blood that contains proteins for clotting. The sellers suggest that doses of young plasma can treat conditions ranging from normal aging and memory loss to dementia, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, or post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the FDA.

The claims are wild extrapolations from intriguing but preliminary findings in mouse studies.

«

Ah, mouse studies. When I wrote about science all the time, the phrase “shown in mice” always meant “won’t be shown in humans”. Even so, 2019 really is screwed up if one of its official warnings has to be “don’t be a vampire”.
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Dear OpenAI: please open source your language model • The Gradient

Hugh Zhang is a research in the neuro-linguistic programming group at Stanford University:

»

While OpenAI is correct to be concerned about potential misuse, I disagree with their decision not to open source the GPT-2. To justify this, I first argue that only certain types of dangerous technology should be controlled by suppressing access. Then, on the basis of this analysis, I argue that withholding the full GPT-2 model is both unnecessary for safety reasons and detrimental to future progress in AI.

I broadly classify modern technology with potential for misuse as either destructive or deceptive technology. Destructive technologies operate primarily in the physical realm. Think chemical weapons, lab-engineered super viruses, lethal autonomous weapons, or the atom bomb.

On the other hand, deceptive technologies operate primarily in the realm of our minds and can potentially be misused to manipulate and control people on a broad scale. Think deepfakes, Photoshop, or looking back in history, the Internet or the printing press. With the notable exception of autonomous weapons, fears around AI misuse tend to fall into this category…

…with deceptive technologies, there is an alternative, more effective option. Instead of suppressing a technology, make knowledge of its power as public as possible. While counterintuitive, this method of control relies on realizing that deceptive technologies lose most of their powers if the public is broadly aware of the potential for manipulation. While knowledge of nuclear weapons will not save me from fallout, awareness of recent advances in speech synthesis will make me significantly more skeptical that Obama can speak Chinese. Bullets do not discriminate on one’s beliefs, but my knowledge of modern photo editing makes it difficult to convince me that Putin is capable of riding a bear.

«

I think OpenAI are trying to work out how to make sure it can’t be destructive.
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No, ‘Oumuamua is not an alien spaceship. It might be even weirder • SYFY WIRE

Phil Plait:

»

for the math to work out with the acceleration seen, ‘Oumuamua had to be flat. Like, really flat: So thin that it looked more like a solar sail, a very thin sheet of material designed to catch sunlight and accelerate. But that, in turn, meant that ‘Oumuamua was artificial. As in, a spaceship.

Besides the obvious (it seems like a big leap!), I have my problems with this idea. Not much has changed with that hypothesis since I wrote that, and while I wouldn’t dismiss it being an alien probe out of hand, the evidence doesn’t support that conclusion, and in fact points against it.

So, I ask again: what the frak is ‘Oumuamua?

A new paper has come out that might have a solution, and it’s really clever. Maybe ‘Oumuamua’s not flat. Maybe it’s fluffy.

Fractal structures can look solid but actually be mostly empty space; this is called a Koch Curve, and snowflakes can have structures similar to this. Credit: Eric Baird / Wikimedia

When the astronomers speculated it might be a thin and flat, giving it a large area like a sail, they had to assume a density for it. That’s because the amount of pressure sunlight exerts is very small, so if an object is massive it has to be spread out very thin and big to catch enough sunlight to accelerate it enough to match the observations. So they assumed it had some normal density like 1 – 3 grams per cubic centimeter (roughly somewhere between the density of water to rock).

The new paper turns that around. Instead of assuming a density to find the area, let’s assume the size determined using normal methods is correct, use that to get an area, and from there get the density needed to match the observations.

«

In essence, a three-dimensional interstellar snowflake, an accretion disc from the galaxy’s early days
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Why women are underrepresented in clinical trials • Endpoints (a science publication by Elysium Health)

»

Up until the late 1970s , the decades-long Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, one of the world’s longest running studies of aging, followed more than 1,000 men and zero women—even though women represented the majority of the elderly population. The Physicians Health Study, which concluded in 1989 that taking low-dose aspirin might lower your risk for heart disease, included 22,000 men and zero women. And just a few years ago, researchers investigating the possible interactions between libido-boosting drug flibanserin — known as “female Viagra” — and alcohol, used a study group of 25 participants, of which twenty-three were men.

Historically, excluding women in clinical trials has been less about bias, and more so due to a lack of knowledge about the biological differences between men and women and how disease symptoms might present differently based on sex, says Dr. Natalie DiPietro Mager, an associate professor of pharmacy practice at Ohio Northern University and co-author of a recent paper documenting women’s involvement in clinical trials.

While we’ve seen a dramatic shift toward inclusion in the last 25 years, the biomedical research world still has a long way to go in terms of robust representation of women, says Mager.

«

(Thanks @Reynolds for the link.)
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Interview: David Runciman • E-International Relations

Runciman is professor of politics at the University of Cambridge:

»

Q: You are currently engaged in two fascinating research projects, Conspiracy and Democracy and AI: Trust and Society. Are there conspiracy theories surrounding artificial intelligence in democratic societies and what impact are they having?

DR: One part of the Conspiracy and Democracy project was to look at a common view that AI (and digital technology more generally) is driving conspiracy theories because it’s allowing them to spread. There is a perspective that we live in a world where there are more and more conspiracy theories because the Internet has provided people with an opportunity to believe the craziest things. They then find other people who believe them, creating a network of people. What we’ve found is that this is probably not true. That behaviour does exist, but there are also more people who debunk conspiracy theories, so it’s not all skewed one way. Conspiracy theories are actually debunked quicker. There have always been conspiracy theories, so it’s not a phenomenon of the internet age, it goes way back.

It’s also interesting that there is a perception that this technology is responsible for creating conspiracy theories. However, it isn’t until very recently that there were conspiracy theories about the technology itself. There are lots of conspiracy theories now that say that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is secretly up to something. A lot of the reporting on Cambridge Analytica is written in the style of a conspiracy theory. It involves the idea that you uncover the network that involves the Mercers, Trump, and Brexit and everything connects – they’re joining all of the dots. There are more people seeing the world and how everything connects to everything else, and this knowledge is power for a few players in the tech space. But those are still not the dominant conspiracy theories. There are many more conspiracy theories that are depressingly old-fashioned ones and they are anti-Semitic. Even some of the conspiracy theories about technology are anti-Semitic because every conspiracy theory has an anti-Semitic variant of it. It’s not particularly the dominant mode, but I suspect that it will grow.

«

Runciman is always worth listening to; the Talking Politics podcast, which he presents every week, is a necessary antidote to the thin gruel of analysis in most news outlets.
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Researchers blame YouTube for the rise in Flat Earthers • Engadget

Rachel England:

»

Despite steps taken to counteract problematic material YouTube is still a hotbed of hoaxes and fake news — a problem that’s become so prevalent the site recently announced it is changing its AI in a bid to improve matters. But now the scope of the problem has really come to light, as new research suggests that the increasing number of Flat Earthers can be attributed to conspiracy videos hosted on the site.

According to Asheley Landrum, assistant professor of science communication at Texas Tech University, all but one of 30 Flat Earthers interviewed said they hadn’t considered the Earth to be flat until watching videos promoting the theory on YouTube. Presenting her results at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC, Landrum said that most were recommended videos after watching clips about other conspiracies, such as alternative 9/11 theories and fake moon landing theories.

Landrum’s interest in the topic was first piqued after she attended the world’s largest gatherings of Flat Earthers at the movement’s annual conference in Rayleigh, North Carolina, in 2017. She visited the conference again in 2018, when it took place in Denver, Colorado, to interview a number of the attendees. According to Landrum, the one person who didn’t point to YouTube as a catalyst for their opinion change had their mind changed by family members who themselves were convinced by YouTube videos.

«

🙄
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Japan smartphone market Q42018 • Canalys Newsroom

»

Smartphone shipments fell 3.8% year on year in Japan to 9.9m in Q4 2018, marking a fourth consecutive quarter of shipment decline. In terms of shipment numbers, Japan came fourth worldwide, behind China, the US and India; 32.5m smartphones shipped in Japan in the whole of 2018, 1.9% fewer than in 2017.

«

Really wouldn’t have expected Japan to be a bigger market than, well, so many others. (Population of 126 million, 11th largest in the world; China, India and US are the three largest.)

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America’s signature mode of transportation is high-cost rail • Hmm Daily

Jacob Bacharach:

»

This demonstrable ability of other nations to build public works at reasonable—or at least bearable—cost puts lie to the most common excuses for the cost and complexity of American transit projects. America is densely populated and right-of-way property is expensive here? Same goes for Western Europe. America is big? So is China. Unions? Europe, again. You can easily believe that the unique combination of these exacerbating factors of cost and distance would lead to a state where American rail would be the most costly in the world. But more costly by an order of magnitude?

American infrastructure is this costly because of immense, endemic, universal public-private corruption—systems of both direct and financialized graft at every stage of infrastructure development, from the planning to the ribbon-cutting to the use of deferred maintenance to ransack public transportation budgets for cash, year after year, after which the responsible authorities claim that fixing the century-old signals is just too damn pricey. This system of legal fraud begins with the bevies of project consultants, continues through ludicrous private contractor and labor costs, and continues when, years later, high-paid administrative fixers and new armies of consultants and contractors arrive to fix what broke because it was never maintained. It is a system of tolerated kleptocracy that may be the only thing that America still does better than anyone else in the world. It is baked into every assumption about building for the public benefit.

You will of course notice that the responsible scolds saying of a 400-mile railroad, It cannot be done, were not so much in evidence when TransCanada and ConocoPhillips, for example, ran the Keystone Pipeline across 2,000-plus unfriendly miles.

«

I liked his description of Megan McArdle as “a self-styled contrarian libertarian who writes well-actually columns for the Washington Post in the style of a ‘For Dummies’ book”.

Which reminds me, isn’t the US due another infrastructure week real soon now?
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Emoji are showing up in court cases exponentially, and courts aren’t prepared • The Verge

Dami Lee:

»

Bay Area prosecutors were trying to prove that a man arrested during a prostitution sting was guilty of pimping charges, and among the evidence was a series of Instagram DMs he’d allegedly sent to a woman. One read: “Teamwork make the dream work” with high heels and money bag emoji placed at the end. Prosecutors said the message implied a working relationship between the two of them. The defendant said it could mean he was trying to strike up a romantic relationship. Who was right?

Emoji are showing up as evidence in court more frequently with each passing year. Between 2004 and 2019, there was an exponential rise in emoji and emoticon references in US court opinions, with over 30% of all cases appearing in 2018, according to Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman, who has been tracking all of the references to “emoji” and “emoticon” that show up in US court opinions. So far, the emoji and emoticons have rarely been important enough to sway the direction of a case, but as they become more common, the ambiguity in how emoji are displayed and what we interpret emoji to mean could become a larger issue for courts to contend with.

Emoticons started appearing in court in 2004, and they have since been found most commonly in sexual predation cases. But that’s just counting the cases that were able to be tracked with the words “emoji” and “emoticon.” Electronic databases of court opinions aren’t set up to handle the actual emoji, and they aren’t displayed in case database services like Westlaw or Lexis, which is where Goldman finds his references.

«

At which point the question is: how do you translate from emoji to legal English?
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Morgan Stanley: Spaceflight Industries disrupting rocket launch market • CNBC

Michael Sheetz:

»

Spaceflight Industries has two businesses: The all-in-one launch services unit, known as Spaceflight, and a satellite imagery unit called BlackSky. The former “has launched 210 satellites” to date, Morgan Stanley said. Spaceflight isn’t slowing down, either, with contracts to launch about 100 satellites this year.

BlackSky represents the company’s reach into satellite operations. The unit successfully launched two satellites at the end of last year, Global-1 and Global-2, and expects to launch six more this year. Spaceflight Industries aims to eventually have constellation of 60 satellites to provide high-resolution photos of Earth nearly on demand.

The company announced a $150m fundraising round in March for the first 20 satellites of the BlackSky constellation.

Additionally, BlackSky is one of several companies working with Amazon Web Services for the recently-announced AWS Ground Station business. Amazon’s cloud business is building a network of satellite connection facilities, representing the e-commerce giant’s first public move into space-related hardware.

Ground stations are a vital link for transmitting data to-and-from satellites in orbit, used by companies engaged in a variety of activities like weather forecasting, communications and broadcasting. AWS Ground Station aims to remove the heavy capital costs for these companies of building their own ground station networks off of satellite operators.

«

The element of this I find jawdropping is AWS Ground Station, whose announcement completely passed me by. It is “a fully managed service that lets you control satellite communications, downlink and process satellite data, and scale your satellite operations quickly, easily and cost-effectively without having to worry about building or managing your own ground station infrastructure.” Wow.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: pushups by firefighters (in yesterday’s post) probably aren’t a good guide to how the general population is going to get on or a prediction for heart disease – especially as women show different symptoms from men, and few of the firefighters were men. Thanks @Reynolds for pointing this out.

Your pushup capacity could predict your risk of heart disease. CC-licensed photo by Orin Zebest on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Popular Front of Judea? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

New science shows the power of the pushup • Quartz

Chase Purdy:

»

What they hoped to figure out was whether there exists an easy, in-person way that doctors could assess heart disease risk in their patients. It turns out, it might be as simple as asking people to do push-ups, according to a new study published Feb. 15 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

As part of their research, the scientists followed 1,104 firefighters from 10 Indiana-based fire departments for a decade. When the fire fighters would see the their local doctors for routine check-ups, they were also checked for the number of pushups they could complete.

A physician would pull out a metronome and set it at 80 beats per minute. Then the firefighters would be counted for the number of pushups they could complete until they reached 80, missed three or more beats, or stopped entirely because of exhaustion.

Over the 10 years, the researchers reported noticing significantly fewer signs of heart disease-related issues among the firefighters who could complete a greater number of pushups. Among the people who could complete more than 40, there was a 96% reduction in the cardiovascular disease incidents compared to those who could complete fewer than 10.

“The push-up examination requires no special equipment, is low cost or no cost, can easily be performed in almost any setting within two minutes, and provides an objective estimate of functional status,” the researchers wrote in the study. “It is a quantitative measurement that is easily understood by both the clinician and the patient.”

«

That seems quite strenuous. Mean age 39.6, mean BMI 28.7.
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Delivering Shipment Zero, a vision for net zero carbon shipments • Amazon corporate blog

»

Amazon has a long-term goal to power our global infrastructure using 100% renewable energy, and we are making solid progress. With improvements in electric vehicles, aviation bio fuels, reusable packaging, and renewable energy, for the first time we can now see a path to net zero carbon delivery of shipments to customers, and we are setting an ambitious goal for ourselves to reach 50% of all Amazon shipments with net zero carbon by 2030. We are calling this project “Shipment Zero” – it won’t be easy to achieve this goal, but it’s worth being focused and stubborn on this vision and we’re committed to seeing it through…

…To track our progress on this journey and as part of an overall commitment to sharing our sustainability goals, we plan to share Amazon’s company-wide carbon footprint, along with related goals and programs, later this year.

«

Actually? 50% isn’t ambitious enough. 100% would be ambitious. 50% isn’t one thing or the other.

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Facebook is out of control and politicians have no idea what to do • The Guardian

Simon Jenkins:

»

Some of the report’s accusations are astonishing. Facebook “purposefully obstructed” the committee. Its boss, Mark Zuckerberg, who “continues to choose profit over data security,” held parliament in contempt. His rambling empire is portrayed as lying, thieving “digital gangsterism”. Yet British electoral law is puny. It is “unfit for purpose,” leaving elections “vulnerable to foreign influence, disinformation and voter manipulation”. Not a week passes without evidence that cybersecurity is inadequate and public services have been left vulnerable to hacking.

So far, so familiar, as are the report’s proposals: the usual comfort blankets of a code of ethics, an independent regulator and “more transparency”. We have sought them for a decade and still not found them. The real question is, why not? What are the pressures, who are the lobbyists, why the inertia? As over Brexit, parliament is fine at demolition, hopeless at construction. The spirit fails at the door marked Something Must Be Done.

The Germans are so ahead of Britain that they have Facebook staff fact-checking frantically, taking down material. America is steeling itself for a monopoly-busting assault on Silicon Valley. The Russians are running wild round the regulators. The Chinese are pioneering web “repatriation”, in effect blocking anything they consider unsuitable. Much of this is not nice for purists, but it must be full of lessons. The running joke among social media pundits is that regulation is so far behind technology – and profit – as to be out of sight.

We still await a legal declaration that social media platforms are publishers not “conduits”. That has to be rubbish. Copyright on the internet is where it was for the printed word in the 19th century, which was nowhere until the law caught up. Attempts to tax and fine social media operators fall foul of the scandalous indulgence of tax shelters. Those who do not pay taxes where they live should not be allowed to live there, period.

«

Once he gets onto a topic, Jenkins goes through it at a gallop. You can read the full DCMS report on Facebook. The evidence includes a ton of hyperlinks – including a tranche of Six4Three emails, crucial to some of the adverse findings about Facebook.
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Music created by artificial intelligence is better than you think • Medium

Stuart Dredge:

»

Can an A.I. create original music? Absolutely. Can it create original music better than a human can? Well, it depends which human you’re comparing the A.I.’s music to, for a start.

Human-created music already spans everything from the sublime to the unlistenable. While an A.I. may not be able to out-Adele Adele (or Aretha Franklin, or Joni Mitchell) with a timeless song and performance, it can compose a compelling melody for a YouTube video, mobile game, or elevator journey faster, cheaper, and almost as well as a human equivalent. In these scenarios, it’s often the “faster” and “cheaper” parts that matter most to whoever’s paying.

The quality of A.I. music is improving in leaps and bounds as the technology becomes more sophisticated. In January 2017, Australian A.I.-music startup Popgun could listen to a human playing piano and respond with a melody that could come next; by July 2018, it could compose and play piano, bass, and drums together as a backing track for a human’s vocals.

Popgun is just one of a number of technology startups exploring the potential of A.I. and what it could mean for humans — both professional musicians and those of us who can barely bang a tambourine in time alike. Startups include Jukedeck, Amper Music, Aiva, WaveAI, Melodrive, Amadeus Code, Humtap, HumOn, AI Music, Mubert, Endel, and Boomy, while teams from Google, Sony, IBM, and Facebook are also looking at what A.I. music can do now and what it could do in the future.

«

As he points out, really quick way to get corporate music or YouTube vlog stuff. As much as anything you could get it to seed something which you improve.
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Apple expected to launch 16in MacBook Pro, 31in 6K display, iPhones with reverse wireless charging • News18

Kunal Khullar:

»

We could see a brand new MacBook this year as reliable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has yet again revealed announcements that Apple could make in 2019. Known for his precise predictions, Kuo has said in a research note, that Apple will release a new 16in MacBook Pro, a 31in 6K monitor, iPhones with bilateral charging, new iPads, and more.

While it sounds uncanny, the analyst says that new MacBook Pro having dimensions between 16in and 16.5in with an updated design is expected to launch this year. This would make it the biggest MacBook since the 17in MacBook which stopped selling in 2012. As an add-on, the 13in MacBook Pro might get the option of adding 32GB of RAM. Currently, the 13in variant only supports up to 16GB of RAM while the 15-inch variant supports 32GB.

We can also expect a new display from the company, a 31.6in 6K resolution monitor which is said to feature “mini-LED backlight” to render excellent picture quality. There is also the mention of a new Mac Pro with “easy to upgrade components”.

«

These are some seriously weird predictions. 16in? There’s also predictions of a 10.2in iPad Pro. It’s all strange sizes and stuff.
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China surveillance firm tracking millions in Xinjiang – researcher • Reuters

Cate Cadell and Philip Wen:

»

A Chinese surveillance firm is tracking the movements of more than 2.5 million people in the far-western Xinjiang region, according to a data leak flagged by a Dutch internet expert.

An online database containing names, ID card numbers, birth dates and location data was left unprotected for months by Shenzhen-based facial-recognition technology company SenseNets Technology Ltd, according to Victor Gevers, co-founder of non-profit organisation GDI.Foundation, who first noted the vulnerability in a series of social media posts last week.

Exposed data also showed about 6.7m location data points linked to the people which were gathered within 24 hours, tagged with descriptions such as “mosque”, “hotel,” “internet cafe” and other places where surveillance cameras were likely to be found.

“It was fully open and anyone without authentication had full administrative rights. You could go in the database and create, read, update and delete anything,” said Gevers.

«

When surveillance states get sloppy.
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China reveals plans for first solar power station in space • Sydney Morning Herald

Kirsty Needham:

»

A solar power station orbiting the earth at 36,000 kilometres could tap the energy of the sun’s rays without interference from the atmosphere, or seasonal and night-time loss of sunlight, Chinese media reported.

Construction of an early experimental space power plant has begun in the inland city of Chongqing, China’s Science and Technology Daily reported on its front page.

A researcher from the China Academy of Space Technology Corporation, Pang Zhihao, said a space solar power station held the promise of providing “an inexhaustible source of clean energy for humans”.
Electric cars could be charged at any time and any place.

It could reliably supply energy 99% of the time, at six times the intensity of solar farms on earth, he said.

Chinese scientists first plan to build and launch small- to medium-sized solar power stations to be launched into the stratosphere to generate electricity, between 2021 and 2025.

The next step will be a megawatt-level space solar power station, slated for construction in 2030.

«

This is slightly bonkers. That’s a geostationary orbit, but you’d only need a tiny amount of drift for that downward beam to start zapping substantial areas of land. Or of course zapping other satellites in orbit.
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Google may kill Android’s Back button for Android Q’s new gestures • XDA Developers

Mishaal Rahman:

»

Since Apple removed the iconic home button in favor of gesture navigation on the iPhone X, we’ve seen companies roll out their own implementations of gesture controls. Some gesture control systems like the one from OnePlus and Xiaomi are widely praised for their intuitiveness and eye-catching animations, while others like the one from Google in Android Pie have been met with mixed reviews. Just as Google accidentally leaked Android P’s gestures before Google I/O 2018, we have found evidence of a prototype revamp of navigation gestures from a leaked build of Android Q that we obtained last month.

In Android 9 Pie, the 3 button navigation system was replaced by a two-button system. Although the recent apps button was removed, the back button stayed. The home button, however, turned into a gesture pill.

Most of the complaints that people have towards Android Pie’s gestures focus on the presence of the dedicated back button and the difficulty of performing the long swipe up of the pill to open the app drawer. While I don’t know if the latter gesture will be changed in Android Q, there’s a really good chance that Google may kill the dedicated back button.

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It’s had a good run.

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LG puts foldable phone on hold, focuses on “optional” dual displays • Android Authority

Scott Adam Gordon:

»

In an email today, an LG spokesperson said: “Since Mr. Hwang (former MC President) made that statement in October, management didn’t see the market as becoming very favourable for an expensive, first-gen foldable smartphone. So we’ve decided to focus our efforts in other areas, such as optional dual displays.”

Earlier in January, rumors emerged suggesting an LG device with an optional display was headed to MWC 2019. The extra screen is tipped to be part of an additional phone case.

LG isn’t the only manufacturer wary of the folding phone market. Last month, Honor President George Zhao said folding phones were “too thick and heavy,” and questioned if consumers really needed them.

With all of that in mind, Kwon said LG was “fully ready” to respond to folding smartphone demand if it’s there. It seems like LG has the technology, but whether it will pursue it may depend on what everybody thinks of the Galaxy F.

«

Probably wise, given that (1) LG’s mobile phone business fell even deeper into the red in Q4 (-18% operating margin) (2) its mobile phone business shrank by 42% in Q4, and by 29% for the year. LG is becoming an afterthought in the phone space. When was its heyday?
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Samsung gives up on Blu-Ray, will not release any new players in the US • Gizmodo

Tom McKay:

»

This is not entirely surprising. The 4K UHD Blu-ray market is growing fast, but disc sales in general fell by double digits (11.5% in Q3 2018, per Variety) and the growth of streaming may have left the format without much of a future. Last year, competitor Oppo also dropped out of the Blu-ray market. As Engadget noted, the Digital Entertainment Group said that 2.3m devices capable of playing 4K Blu-rays were purchased in the U.S. in the first nine months of 2018, “but those included game consoles that might never play a disc-based movie.”

Meanwhile, subscription video services reach many times that number of households (Netflix alone is in the 150m range). It seems like there is a significant number of consumers who don’t think they need an expensive Blu-ray player to enjoy movies (as Forbes noted, well over half of disc sales are still DVDs). Additionally, Samsung’s devices didn’t support Dolby Vision, just HDR10 and HDR10+, further limiting their appeal to a subset of the Blu-ray market.

In any case, Blu-rays are not quite going the way of the dinosaur yet—indeed, they remain the best way for home viewing as close to movie-theater quality as possible—but they are being undercut by the rise of streaming.

«

Not surprising when you consider this graphic (taken from The Verge, same story) and try to find Blu-ray viewing. It’s the light green bit.

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How Huawei targets Apple trade secrets • The Information

Wayne Ma:

»

To arrange the November meeting [with the maker of Apple’s heart sensor component for its Watch], the Huawei engineer first dangled a potential business deal with the supplier, according to messages reviewed by The Information.

“Our design is similar to Apple’s,” the engineer wrote in a text message to the executive with the supplier. “Let’s first talk generally about the cost of a prototype before we provide the schematic,” he wrote. “Sales of Huawei wearables this year are expected to hit 1 million units,” he added.

After the executive expressed reservations about making a component that was too similar to Apple’s, the Huawei engineer backpedaled. “The shape of the product won’t be the same,” the engineer said.

At one point, the Huawei engineer emailed the executive a photo of material it was considering for a heart rate sensor. “Feel free to suggest a design you already have experience with,” the engineer wrote.

The Huawei engineer attended the supplier meeting with four Huawei researchers in tow. The Huawei team spent the next hour and a half pressing the supplier for details about the Apple Watch, the executive said.

“They were trying their luck, but we wouldn’t tell them anything,” the executive said. After that, Huawei went silent.

In another incident, Huawei is suspected of copying a connector Apple developed in 2016 that made the MacBook Pro hinge thinner while still attaching the computer’s display to its logic board, according to a person familiar with the matter. A similar component, made of 13 similar parts assembled in the same manner, showed up last year in Huawei’s MateBook Pro, which was released as a competitor to Apple’s MacBooks, the person said. Apple submitted a patent for the component in 2016, and it remains pending.

Huawei approached multiple Apple suppliers with expertise making the component and provided them with the same schematic. Those suppliers recognized the component as Apple’s design and refused to make it for Huawei, the person said. But Huawei eventually found a willing manufacturer.

In response to questions from The Information, Huawei said it requires its suppliers to uphold a high standard of ethics and expects them to honor their confidentiality obligations to other customers when communicating with Huawei.

«

Huawei, the new Samsung, and then some. Odd that they can’t just disassemble things to figure this out.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Brexit effects mean the UK’s House of Commons needs four sides rather than two, according to a new study. CC-licensed photo by UK Parliament 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. Interactive, but not graphically. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google backtracks on Chrome modifications that would have crippled ad blockers • ZDNet

Catalin Cimpanu:

»

At the root of Ghostery’s benchmark into ad blocker performance stands Manifest V3, a new standard for developing Chrome extensions that Google announced last October.

The long-winded document contained many new rules about what Chrome functions and APIs an extension should use. One of the modifications was for extensions that needed to intercept and work with network requests. Google wanted extension developers to use the new DeclarativeNetRequest API instead of the older webRequest API.

This new API came with limitations that put a muzzle on the number of network requests an extension could access. It took some time before ad blocker developers caught on to what this meant, but when they did, all hell broke loose, with both extension developers and regular users accusing the browser maker of trying to kill third-party ad blockers for the benefit of Chrome’s new built-in ad blocker (which wouldn’t be impacted).

Chrome engineers justified the change by citing the performance impact of not having a maximum value for the number of network requests an extension could access.

But the Ghostery team disagreed with this assessment.

“This work [referring to the study] was motivated by one of the claims formulated in the Manifest V3 proposal of the Chromium project: ‘the extension then performs arbitrary (and potentially very slow) JavaScript’, talking about content-blockers’ ability to process all network requests,” said Cliqz, the company behind the Ghostery ad blocker.

“From the measurements, we do not think this claim holds, as all popular content-blockers are already very efficient and should not incur any noticeable slow-down for users,” they added.

«

Basically, it seems Google wants to stop any adblockers that aren’t its own, because it wants the choice of which ads are blocked to be its own, not users’.
link to this extract

How Brexit has created four new political factions – interactive graphic • The Guardian

Josh Holder:

»

Our study clusters MPs by the similarity of their voting patterns: if two MPs always vote the same way, the chart groups them tightly together.

The patterns on key Brexit votes reveal the emergence of four cross-party political factions that are wrangling for control of the negotiations.

A cross-party group of pro-European MPs usually votes with each other, with or against their own frontbenches, while Europhobe Conservatives now constitute a party within the party.

«

The votes described here probably won’t mean anything to anyone outside the UK, but scroll down and the evolution from two-party system to four-group dynamic becomes clear. The Europhobes are indeed a party within a party in the Tories, and extremists outside the party in Labour. The Europhiles, meanwhile, are effectively homeless, politically. There are rumours that the Labour Europhiles will break away this week.
link to this extract

Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets • Opaque Link

»

To prevent theft by the distribution layer, the sales layer randomly tests dead drops by tasking different members of the distribution layer with picking up product from a dead drop and hiding it somewhere else, after verification of the contents. Usually each unit of product is tagged with a piece of paper containing a unique secret word which is used to prove to the sales layer that a dead drop was found. Members of the distribution layer have to post security – in the form of cryptocurrency – to the sales layer, and they lose part of that security with every dead drop that fails the testing, and with every dead drop they failed to test. So far, no reports of using violence to ensure performance of members of these structures has become known.

This concept of using messaging, cryptocurrency and dead drops even within the merchant structure allows for the members within each layer being completely isolated from each other, and not knowing anything about higher layers at all. There is no trace to follow if a distribution layer member is captured while servicing a dead drop. He will often not even be distinguishable from a regular customer. This makes these structures extremely secure against infiltration, takeover and capture. They are inherently resilient.

Furthermore the members of the sales layer often employ advanced physical tradecraft to prevent surveillance by the procurement layer when they pick up product. This makes it very hard to dismantle such a structure from the top.

If members of such a structure are captured they usually have no critical information to share, no information about persons, places, times of meeting. No interaction that would make this information necessary ever takes place.

It is because of the use of dead drops and hierarchical structures that we call this kind of organization a Dropgang.

«

We ain’t on the Silk Road any more.
link to this extract

Differential privacy: an easy case • Substack

Mark Hansen:

»

By law, the Census Bureau is required to keep our responses to its questionnaires confidential. And so, over decades, it has applied several “disclosure avoidance” techniques when it publishes data — these have been meticulously catalogued by Laura McKenna, going back to the 1970 census.

But for 2020, the bureau will instead release its data tables using a “formal privacy” framework known as “differential privacy.”

A unique feature of this new approach is that it explicitly quantifies privacy loss and provides mathematically provable privacy guarantees for those whose data are published as part of the bureau’s tables. 

Differential privacy is simply a mathematical definition of privacy. While there are legal and ethical standards for protecting our personal data, differential privacy is specifically designed to address the risks we face in a world of “big data” and “big computation.”

Given its mathematical origins, discussions of differential privacy can become technical very quickly.

«

Apple and Google use this to make it harder to de-anonymise personal data. This is quite a long post, but it explains it while sticking to quite simple maths.
link to this extract

Internet censorship: Facebook, Patreon will always be frustrating • Bloomberg

Tyler Cowen:

»

Facebook recently has devoted a lot of resources to regulating speech on its platform. Yet undesired uses of the platform hardly have gone away, especially outside the U.S. Furthermore, the need for human judgment makes algorithms increasingly costly and hard to scale. As Facebook grows bigger and reaches across more regions and languages, it becomes harder to find the humans who can apply what Facebook considers to be the proper standards. 1

I’d like to suggest a simple trilemma. When it comes to private platforms and speech regulation, you can choose two of three: scalability, effectiveness and consistency. You cannot have all three. Furthermore, this trilemma suggests that we — whether as users, citizens or indeed managers of the platforms themselves — won’t ever be happy with how speech is regulated on the internet.

One view, which may appear cynical, is that the platforms are worth having, so they should appease us by at least trying to regulate effectively, even though both of us know they won’t really succeed. Circa 2019, I don’t see a better solution. Another view is that we’d be better off with how things were a few years ago, when platform regulation of speech was not such a big issue. After all, we Americans don’t flip out when we learn that Amazon sells copies of “Mein Kampf.”

The problem is that once you learn about what you can’t have — speech regulation that is scalable, consistent and hostile to bad agents — it is hard to get used to that fact. Going forward, we’re likely to see platform companies trying harder and harder, and their critics getting louder and louder.

«

(Via Nathan Taylor’s fine roundup.)
link to this extract

The cloud is just someone else’s computer… but what if it were your computer? • Coding Horror

»

Given the prevalence and maturity of cloud providers, it’s even a little controversial these days to colocate actual servers, but we’ve also experimented with colocating mini-pcs in various hosting roles. I’m still curious why there isn’t more of a cottage industry for colocating mini PCs. Because … I think there should be.

I originally wrote about the scooter computers we added to our Discourse infrastructure in 2016, plus my own colocation experiment that ran concurrently. Over the last three years of both experiments, I’ve concluded that these little boxes are plenty reliable, with one role specific caveat that I’ll explain in the comments. I remain an unabashed fan of mini-PC colocation. I like it so much I put together a new 2019 iteration…

…Let’s break this down and see what the actual costs of colocating a Mini-PC are versus the cloud. Let’s assume a useful life of say, three years? Given the plateauing of CPU speeds, I think five years is more realistic, but let’s use the more conservative number to be safe.

$880 mini-pc 32GB RAM, 6 CPUs, 500GB SSD
$120 taxes / shipping / misc
$29 × 12 × 3 = $1,044
That’s $2,044 for three years of hosting. How can we do on Digital Ocean? Per their current pricing page:

32GB RAM, 8 vCPUs, 640GB SSD
$160/month
$160 × 12 × 3 = $5,760

«

Colocation is quite a thing.

link to this extract

AAAS: Machine learning ‘causing science crisis’ • BBC News

»

Machine-learning techniques used by thousands of scientists to analyse data are producing results that are misleading and often completely wrong.

Dr Genevera Allen from Rice University in Houston said that the increased use of such systems was contributing to a “crisis in science”.

She warned scientists that if they didn’t improve their techniques they would be wasting both time and money. Her research was presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington.

A growing amount of scientific research involves using machine learning software to analyse data that has already been collected. This happens across many subject areas ranging from biomedical research to astronomy. The data sets are very large and expensive.

But, according to Dr Allen, the answers they come up with are likely to be inaccurate or wrong because the software is identifying patterns that exist only in that data set and not the real world.

“Often these studies are not found out to be inaccurate until there’s another real big dataset that someone applies these techniques to and says ‘oh my goodness, the results of these two studies don’t overlap‘,” she said.

“There is general recognition of a reproducibility crisis in science right now. I would venture to argue that a huge part of that does come from the use of machine learning techniques in science.”

«

Reproducibility means what it says: can you get the same result starting from the same data? This isn’t a new problem – it’s just becoming more visible.
link to this extract

The convergence of the phone and laptop • AVC

Fred Wilson:

»

The Gotham Gal [Wilson’s wife, who also works in venture capital] wanted to get a new laptop. Her late 2015 Macbook has started to fade on her.

So yesterday we made a visit to the local Apple Store and checked out the options. We looked at the Macbooks, the Macbook Airs, and we also looked at the iPad Pros. We debated the choice and she ended up deciding to go for the iPad Pro. We work with a few people who have iPad Pros and love them. And she noticed how much I am using and enjoying my Pixel Slate.

One of the most interesting things about these hybrid tablet/laptop devices is that they run operating systems that are designed for the tablet or phone. They are touch devices like our phones vs mouse devices like our laptops.

A good example of this is how I do email on my Pixel Slate. I could run Gmail in the browser on my Pixel Slate. But I have found it much more pleasing to do email in the Gmail Android App on my Pixel Slate. I swipe emails away like I do on my phone. But I also have the keyboard when I want to write a long response. It is literally the best of both worlds.

«

I think she’s going to be happy with it, though I wonder what is actually meant by saying a 2015 machine “has started to fade”. The comments on the piece are worth reading too: as many saying she’ll go back to a laptop as saying the tablet is the way forward.
link to this extract

Sam Jadallah to join Apple as its new leader on smart home devices • CNBC

Christina Farr:

»

Jadallah previously ran a start-up called Otto, which made a $700 lock that was backed by the venture firm Greylock. He also spent more than a decade at Microsoft, and had a stint in venture capital at the firm Mohr Davidow.

Otto suspended its operations four months after launching its beautifully-designed Bluetooth- and Wi-Fi-enabled luxury lock. In interviews, Jadallah hinted at having found a buyer, which pulled out at the last minute.

About 70% of the early team behind Otto were actually poached from Apple’s ranks, Jadallah has previously said. The lock was compared favorably by reviewers to the “Apple of smart locks.” It’s not clear whether Jadallah will bring these early employees with him, or will have a fresh mandate to hire. There are currently about half-a-dozen job openings in Apple’s home division.

But Apple also competes against rivals like Alphabet and Amazon, both of which have had a head start on moving into the home.

«

As was discussed on the latest Talk Show podcast by John Gruber and Rich Mogull, it makes no sense for Apple to offer an Apple TV, HomePod, integration to home devices via HomeKit, and yet not have something comparable to Eero or the Google Home router. Maybe Jadallah will see that too.
link to this extract

Major games publishers are feeling the impact of peaking attention • MIDiA Research

Karol Severin:

»

Earlier in February, Electronic Arts (EA) reported disappointing quarterly results; now Activision has laid off nearly 800 staff, mostly in marketing and sales.

As MIDiA has reported multiple times before, engagement has declined throughout the sector, suggesting that the attention economy has peaked. Consumers simply do not have any more free time to allocate to new attention seeking digital entertainment propositions, which means they have to start prioritising between them.

This downward trend in engagement has persisted for a while now, and the latest quarterly results from some major games publishers confirm that a revenue slowdown will ultimately follow consumer behaviour. Arguably sooner than most of the games industry would have thought.

Publishers will be quick to blame declining engagement and revenues on Fortnite. While the title indeed intensified the manifestation of the peak attention economy dynamics among gamers, the coming slowdown is part of a much bigger challenge – how to capture attention in an increasingly attention-scarce landscape…

…Not only is engagement declining across mobile, PC and console gaming, at the same time, video is winning the race against gaming in capturing attention on multipurpose devices such as PC. Between Q1 and Q4 2018, gaming on PC declined faster than TV show viewing on PC among gamers.

«

They’re all watching Twitch or YouTube rather than playing the games themselves. It’s like football losing its park players. But the idea that the attention economy can’t grow any further is quite dramatic.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A Little Red Book? How retro. President Xi makes you use an app now. CC-licensed photo by g33kgrrl 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. Spared again! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook’s security team tracks posts, location for ‘BOLO’ threat list • CNBC

Salvador Rodriguez:

»

In early 2018, a Facebook user made a public threat on the social network against one of the company’s offices in Europe.

Facebook picked up the threat, pulled the user’s data and determined he was in the same country as the office he was targeting. The company informed the authorities about the threat and directed its security officers to be on the lookout for the user.

“He made a veiled threat that ‘Tomorrow everyone is going to pay’ or something to that effect,” a former Facebook security employee told CNBC.

The incident is representative of the steps Facebook takes to keep its offices, executives and employees protected, according to more than a dozen former Facebook employees who spoke with CNBC. The company mines its social network for threatening comments, and in some cases uses its products to track the location of people it believes present a credible threat.

«

“BOLO” is “be on the lookout”. There seemed to be a fair amount of pearl-clutching about this online, but it seems reasonable to me: recall that a woman critically injured three people in a shooting at YouTube in April 2018, and she had made lots of noise about her anger on social media ahead of time. I’d say it’s sensible to protect your employees.
link to this extract

The dawn of the Little Red Phone • China Media Project

David Bandurski:

»

The platform is interesting and significant not only for the nature of its content as reflective of a renewed push to enforce the dominance of the Party’s ideology and positions, and to consolidate the power of Xi Jinping around the developing notion of “Xi Jinping Thought,” but also for the way it reinvents the process of ideological dominance for the digital era.

This is most evident in the points system employed by the “Xi Study Strong Nation,” the way it is engineered to make demands, in actionable and measurable ways, on how Party members spend what might otherwise be considered their personal time.

The idea is that users of the platform earn points through their active engagement with the material, so that more time on the platform rewards more points. Reading one article earns you 0.1 points. Watching a single video earns you 0.1  points. And a full 30 minutes of either reading articles or viewing video content earns you a full 1.0 points. The beauty of digital media technology — disquieting for those who care about privacy and freedom from intrusion — is that our smart apps know a great deal about our actual behaviour. This means that “Xi Study Strong Nation” (and by extension the Party) cannot be bamboozled into awarding points in the absence of real engagement, meaning that you will have to not just open an article or video but will have to stick with it. The app will know if you’ve only viewed the first paragraph, or if you’ve moved away from the video. If you want to earn points (and you are probably now required to), you will have to devote your full attention to the Party.

«

Scary. It really is 1984-style surveillance.
link to this extract

New AI fake text generator may be too dangerous to release, say creators • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

»

Feed it the first few paragraphs of a Guardian story about Brexit, and its output is plausible newspaper prose, replete with “quotes” from Jeremy Corbyn, mentions of the Irish border, and answers from the prime minister’s spokesman.

One such, completely artificial, paragraph reads: “Asked to clarify the reports, a spokesman for May said: ‘The PM has made it absolutely clear her intention is to leave the EU as quickly as is possible and that will be under her negotiating mandate as confirmed in the Queen’s speech last week.’”

From a research standpoint, GPT2 is groundbreaking in two ways. One is its size, says Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s research director. The models “were 12 times bigger, and the dataset was 15 times bigger and much broader” than the previous state-of-the-art AI model. It was trained on a dataset containing about 10m articles, selected by trawling the social news site Reddit for links with more than three votes. The vast collection of text weighed in at 40 GB, enough to store about 35,000 copies of Moby Dick.

The amount of data GPT2 was trained on directly affected its quality, giving it more knowledge of how to understand written text. It also led to the second breakthrough. GPT2 is far more general purpose than previous text models.

«

They’re not releasing it because they haven’t yet figured out all the ways it might be used maliciously. Echoes the moratorium on genetic engineering of bacteria in the 1970s. But the first time I’ve seen it for a neural network.

I mean, imagine it allied to the next system…
link to this extract

Thispersondoesnotexist.com is face-generating AI at its creepiest • The Next Web

Tristan Greene:

»

Nvidia is a company most lauded for its impressive graphics cards. But in the world of machine learning, it’s one of the most ingenious companies using deep learning today. A couple of years back TNW reported on a new generative adversarial network (GAN) the company developed. At the time, it was an amazing example of how powerful deep learning had become.

This was cutting edge technology barely a year ago. Today, you can use it on your phone. Just point your web browser to “thispersondoesnotexist.com” and voila: the next time your grandmother asks when you’re going to settle down with someone nice, you can conjure up a picture to show them.

«

It really is pretty amazing. The paper explaining it is remarkable. Try it: Thispersondoesnotexist.com.
link to this extract

Amazon cancels HQ2 plans in New York City • WSJ

Laura Stevens, Jimmy Vielkind and Katie Honan:

»

The company said in a blog post Thursday that its commitment to a new headquarters required supportive elected officials and collaboration.

“While polls show that 70% of New Yorkers support our plans and investment, a number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward with the project we and many others envisioned in Long Island City,” the company said.

Amazon’s decision to abandon plans for a new headquarters in the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City marks a stunning reversal. Amazon spent a year conducting a public search for a second headquarters, in which hundreds of locations vied for a shot at a promised 50,000 jobs and $5bn in investment…

The governor and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, fellow Democrats who have often clashed, led the deal to woo Amazon and have continued to support it.

Local officials, though, questioned everything from the project’s impact on transportation to neighborhood gentrification, as well as Amazon’s opposition to unionization.

Mr. de Blasio said Thursday afternoon that the company threw away an opportunity to be in New York. “You have to be tough to make it in New York City,” he said in a statement. “We gave Amazon the opportunity to be a good neighbor and do business in the greatest city in the world. Instead of working with the community, Amazon threw away that opportunity.”

«

link to this extract

Ad IDs behaving badly • The Appcensus Blog

Serge Egelman:

»

both iOS and Android have policies that prohibit developers from transmitting other identifiers alongside the ad ID. For example, in 2017, it was major news that Uber’s app had violated iOS App Store privacy guidelines by collecting non-resettable persistent identifiers. Tim Cook personally threatened to have the Uber app removed from the store. Similarly, Google’s Play Store policy says that the ad ID cannot be transmitted alongside other identifiers without users’ explicit consent, and that for advertising purposes, the ad ID is the only identifier that can be used…

…I examined the AppCensus database [of Android apps] to examine compliance with this policy. That is, are there apps violating this policy by transmitting the ad ID alongside other persistent identifiers to advertisers? When I performed this experiment last September, there were approximately 24k apps in our database that we had observed transmitting the ad ID. Of these, approximately 17k (i.e., ~70%) were transmitting the ad ID alongside other persistent identifiers. Based on the data recipients of some of the most popular offenders, these are clearly being used for advertising purposes.

…as of today, there are over 18k distinct apps transmitting the Ad ID alongside other persistent identifiers.

In September, our research group reported just under 17k apps to Google that were transmitting the ad ID alongside other identifiers. The data we gave them included the data types being transmitted and a list of the recipient domains, which included some of the following companies involved in mobile advertising…

«

They’ve heard nothing from Google. Those apps have billions of installs. Among the companies involved in mobile advertising is DoubleClick. You know, Google’s advertising arm.
link to this extract

The RCA Selectron — Tubes vs. Transistor

»

It’s 1959 and this man is worried. He may work for General Electric but he has counterparts at Westinghouse, Sylvania, RCA and the rest of the Tube Titans and they are worried as well. That Regency pocket transistor radio may be a cute novelty item but IBM has just announced their 1401 and 1620 computer lines. And they use only transistors. No tubes.

This man is worried because he sees his entire capital plant becoming scrap within the decade. He makes tubes.

But this is America headed into the sixties. There is nothing that a half a dozen paunchy middle-aged white men can’t solve over a lunch, some cigars, and more than a few martinis. A plan was hatched: A smear campaign on that little three-legged bastard.

«

And it would have worked if it hadn’t been for you interfering kids with your TRANSISTOR RADIOS.
link to this extract

Chinese smartphone vendors take a record 32% market share in Europe in 2018 • Canalys

»

Canalys estimates show that European smartphone shipments fell 4% in 2018 to 197m units. In Q4 2018, shipments fell 2% to 57m, though Chinese vendors gained significantly. Samsung remained the largest vendor in 2018 but its shipments were down over 10% at 61.6m units. Apple was down 6% but clung onto second place with 42.8m units shipped. Huawei was the stand-out vendor, growing 54% with 42.5m shipments. Relative newcomers Xiaomi and HMD Global grew strongly and were fourth and fifth respectively.

“The US administration is causing Chinese companies to invest in Europe over the US. The European market is mature, and replacement rates have lengthened, but there is an opportunity for Chinese brands to displace the market incumbents. The likes of Huawei and Xiaomi bring price competition that has stunned their rivals as they use their size against the smaller brands in Europe.”

Western European smartphone shipments fell 8%, the biggest decline of the sub-regions, to 128m units in 2018, the lowest level since 2013. An increase in average selling prices, caused by an uplift in flagship pricing by Apple, Samsung and Huawei, offset some of the declines.

«

China, Europe, the US: all shrinking.
link to this extract

Ex-FBI director: every day is a new low in Trump’s White House • The Atlantic

Andrew G. McCabe, in an extract from his new book about his time as FBI director, describes a call he took from Trump on his first day in the job, in May 2017 – when Trump demanded to know why James Comey had been allowed to fly back, from giving a speech, on an official plane:

»

I told him that bureau lawyers had assured me there was no legal issue with Comey coming home on the plane. I decided that he should do so. The existing threat assessment indicated he was still at risk, so he needed a protection detail. Since the members of the protection detail would all be coming home, it made sense to bring everybody back on the same plane they had used to fly out there. It was coming back anyway. The president flew off the handle: That’s not right! I don’t approve of that! That’s wrong! He reiterated his point five or seven times.

I said, I’m sorry that you disagree, sir. But it was my decision, and that’s how I decided. The president said, I want you to look into that! I thought to myself: What am I going to look into? I just told you I made that decision.

The ranting against Comey spiraled. I waited until he had talked himself out.

Toward the end of the conversation, the president brought up the subject of my wife. Jill had run unsuccessfully for the Virginia state Senate back in 2015, and the president had said false and malicious things about her during his campaign in order to tarnish the FBI. He said, How is your wife? I said, She’s fine. He said, When she lost her election, that must have been very tough to lose. How did she handle losing? Is it tough to lose?
I replied, I guess it’s tough to lose anything. But she’s rededicated herself to her career and her job and taking care of kids in the emergency room. That’s what she does.

He replied in a tone that sounded like a sneer. He said, “Yeah, that must’ve been really tough. To lose. To be a loser.”

I wrote a memo about this conversation that very day. I wrote memos about my interactions with President Trump for the same reason that Comey did: to have a contemporaneous record of conversations with a person who cannot be trusted.

«

link to this extract

What happened when I moved into a house that had solar panels • Bloomberg

Esmé Deprez:

»

The solar array was a modern addition to a property that otherwise hadn’t changed much since 1950, when the late owner, Michael “Jug” Jogoleff, moved into the home’s 948 square feet as a preschooler with his mother and aunt, transplants from Iowa. He never moved again. He grew tall and barrel-chested and remained a lifelong bachelor, becoming a neighborhood fixture who organized block parties. His décor reflected his obsession with all things electronic, in particular ham radio. “Radios and computers were packed into every available square inch of space he could find,” and “his roof bristled with every form of antenna,” Santa Barbara’s amateur radio club wrote after he died of cancer at the age of 70 in January 2017. “He was the consummate ‘ham’ and could build anything—and did! Amateur radio has lost one of the last of the ‘real hams.’”

Two days after walking through Jug’s ham shack, we made an offer. A week later, just before we entered escrow, we learned the solar array hadn’t belonged to Jug. It was, in the language of the industry, a third-party-owner, or TPO, system, belonging to Sunrun Inc., the largest provider of residential solar in the U.S. I started looking into the TPO model. It’s used less often than it once was, but it’s been important in making residential solar, once out of reach for most people, much more widespread. The reason is simple: homeowners usually pay nothing upfront. A company like Sunrun puts solar panels on your roof, connects them to your home, and claims a tax benefit for owning the system. Going forward, you pay Sunrun to provide the bulk of your electricity needs instead of your utility.

I’d soon learn that the system was tied to the title of the house. It appeared that if we bought Jug’s place, we’d have to assume his lease arrangement with Sunrun. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this as a buyer, but it definitely piqued my curiosity as a journalist. I set out to examine the value proposition carefully.

«

A good thing she did: third-party ownership is pretty poisonous, especially when it comes to selling (or buying) a property. There’s a lot to this article, which digs deep into what’s happening with this model – much of it built on unreliable financial promises. Solar works, but capitalism about the future sometimes doesn’t.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: “computer programmer” did exist as a notion in the 1950s, contrary to my surprise expressed in No.1,003. Thanks Seth Finkelstein for the info.

Women were some of the earliest programmers – here with a decryption system for the US Army. CC-licensed photo by brewbooks on Flickr.

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

A selection of 12 links for you. Happy Valentine’s day, keep on with the love. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The secret history of women in coding • The New York Times

Clive Thompson:

»

[Mary Allen] Wilkes remembered her junior high school teacher’s suggestion [from her geography teacher, who in 1950 said she should be a computer programmer]. In college, she heard that computers were supposed to be the key to the future. She knew that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a few of them. So on the day of her graduation, she had her parents drive her over to M.I.T. and marched into the school’s employment office. “Do you have any jobs for computer programmers?” she asked. They did, and they hired her.

It might seem strange now that they were happy to take on a random applicant with absolutely no experience in computer programming. But in those days, almost nobody had any experience writing code. The discipline did not yet really exist; there were vanishingly few college courses in it, and no majors. (Stanford, for example, didn’t create a computer-science department until 1965.) So instead, institutions that needed programmers just used aptitude tests to evaluate applicants’ ability to think logically. Wilkes happened to have some intellectual preparation: As a philosophy major, she had studied symbolic logic, which can involve creating arguments and inferences by stringing together and/or statements in a way that resembles coding.

Wilkes quickly became a programming whiz. She first worked on the IBM 704, which required her to write in an abstruse “assembly language.” (A typical command might be something like “LXA A, K,” telling the computer to take the number in Location A of its memory and load it into to the “Index Register” K.) Even getting the program into the IBM 704 was a laborious affair. There were no keyboards or screens; Wilkes had to write a program on paper and give it to a typist, who translated each command into holes on a punch card. She would carry boxes of commands to an “operator,” who then fed a stack of such cards into a reader. The computer executed the program and produced results, typed out on a printer.

«

To me, the remarkable person in this is the geography teacher in 1950. Why did they think of a woman being a computer programmer – a discipline that didn’t exist? The word “computer” mean “person who computes” at that time. Think about it too long, and you could start thinking it’s a meddling time traveller.
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Apple invites Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon to video launch • Bloomberg

Anousha Sakoui and Mark Gurman:

»

The Cupertino, California-based technology giant is planning a March 25 event to announce both services, according to people familiar with the plan. The iPhone maker invited Hollywood stars, including Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Garner and director JJ Abrams, to attend, one of the people said.

The video service is similar to Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime Video and Netflix Inc. products, and will include TV shows and movies either acquired or funded by Apple. The company has created dozens of original programs so far, but hasn’t wrapped them in a subscription yet. The paid service will launch by the summer, the people said. They asked not to be identified discussing private plans.

The company’s premium news service will be integrated into the Apple News app, letting consumers subscribe to a bundle of titles for a monthly fee. Some publishing executives are wary of taking part, Bloomberg News reported in December.

Final details are still being worked out, and Apple’s plans could change…

The magazine subscription service, which has been in testing with Apple employees for months, will launch as part of an iOS 12.2 update scheduled for release this spring. The updated Apple News app will include a Magazines tab similar to the app Texture, which Apple acquired last year.

«

link to this extract

Apple, Google in crosshairs for carrying app that lets Saudi men track wives • NPR

Laura Sydell:

»

In Saudi Arabia, women’s lives are highly restricted. For example, according to Human Rights Watch, women have always needed permission from a male guardian, usually a father or husband, to leave the country. In the past, paper forms were required prior to travel.

The Absher app makes the process a lot more convenient for Saudi men. And it’s drawing criticism, especially from human rights advocacy groups…

…This week, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., sent a letter to both companies asking them to remove the app. “Saudi men can also reportedly use Absher to receive real-time text message alerts every time these women enter or leave the country or to prevent these women from leaving the country,” he wrote.

In an interview with NPR on Monday, Apple CEO Tim Cook was asked about Absher. “I haven’t heard about it,” he said. “But obviously we’ll take a look at it if that’s the case.”

NPR also reached out to Google, but the company has not responded…

Ironically, Absher has also been helpful to a few women trying to escape the repressive Saudi regime. [HRW senior researcher Rothna] Begum says some women have managed to secretly change the settings in the app on their male guardian’s phone so that it allows them to travel.

However, she says, Google and Apple need to push back against the Saudi government and either disable the app entirely or disable the features that enable men to track women in their families. “By not saying anything,” she says, “they’ve allowed the government to facilitate the abuse.”

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link to this extract

How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t do it • Recode

Kurt Wagner:

»

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Recode co-founder Kara Swisher agreed to conduct an interview Tuesday on Twitter, and it had all the makings of a great read: the CEO of one of the most influential and controversial tech platforms in the world taking questions from one of the industry’s most ferocious reporters.

The only problem? No one could follow along.

Despite the public interview and a dedicated hashtag (#karajack) for the event, it didn’t take long before the dozens of tweets between the two started to get confusing. They were listed out of order, other users started chiming in, and there was no way to properly follow the conversation thread.

Swisher’s questions about Twitter’s complex abuse policies and Dorsey’s subsequent responses were floating around my timeline along with the regular tech news and opinions I always look at. If you wanted to find a permanent thread of the chat, you had to visit one of either Kara or Jack’s pages and continually refresh. It made for a difficult and confusing experience.

Dorsey even admitted so himself.

“I am going to start a NEW thread to make it easy for people to follow (@waltmossberg just texted me that it is a “chaotic hellpit”),” Swisher tweeted, referencing Recode’s other co-founder, the now-retired Walt Mossberg.

«

I think this is a misunderstanding. Twitter isn’t a real-time service in that way. This is trying to use a hammer as a saw.
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Tracking sanctions-busting ships on the high seas • BBC News

Chris Baraniuk:

»

For a long time, being out at sea meant being out of sight and out of reach. And all kinds of shenanigans went on as a result – countries secretly selling oil and other goods to countries they’re not supposed to under international sanctions rules, for example, not to mention piracy and kidnapping.

The problem is that captains can easily switch off the current way of tracking ships, called the Automatic Identification System (AIS), hiding their location.

But now thousands of surveillance satellites have been launched into space, and artificial intelligence (AI) is being applied to the images they take. There’s no longer anywhere for such ships to hide.

Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, says his firm’s satellite imagery analysis has identified Iranian tankers moving in and out of port, despite US sanctions restricting much of the country’s oil exports. He’s watched North Korea – which is limited by international rules to 500,000 barrels of refined oil every year – taking delivery of fuel via ship-to-ship transfers on the open ocean.

Turning off the AIS transponders that broadcast a ship’s position, course and speed, is no longer a guarantee of anonymity.

His firm can even ascertain what cargo a ship is carrying – and how much – just by looking at its shadow on the water, says Mr Madani.

«

Tankertrackers is pretty cheap if you were into analysis of oil supply lines – $299 per year.
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Dimensions.Guide: a database of dimensioned drawings

»

Dimensions.Guide is a comprehensive reference database of dimensioned drawings documenting the standard measurements and sizes of the everyday objects and spaces that make up our world. Created as a universal resource to better communicate the basic properties, systems, and logics of our built environment, Dimensions.Guide is a free platform for increasing public and professional knowledge of life and design.

«

Wow. It looks like a sort of Wikipedia of design elements – potentially, a fabulous resource.
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Huawei accuses US of ‘political’ campaign against telecoms group • Financial Times

Yuan Yang:

»

[Huawei chairman] Eric Xu questioned the US’s motives on Wednesday, pointing to Washington’s extensive surveillance programmes.

“Is [the US] truly thinking about cyber security and protecting the privacy of other countries’ citizens, or do they have other motives?” he said.

“Some say that because these countries are using Huawei equipment, it makes it harder for US agencies to obtain these countries’ data,” he added.

Mr Xu also revealed that Huawei would spend more than $2bn to restructure the code used in its telecoms services worldwide after a series of “confrontational” meetings with Britain’s cyber security agency over the issue.

The company is likely to face further criticism from the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre, the UK watchdog that reviews the company’s security systems, which last year noted the “repeated discovery of critical shortfalls” in the group’s technical processes. Last week, Huawei told the UK government it would take up to five years to address the concerns.

According to Mr Xu, the watchdog had demanded that Huawei rewrite the code it uses in telecoms products to be clearer and more readable, including legacy code written decades ago…

…Mr Xu also dismissed concerns about Huawei being blocked in Australia and New Zealand, saying: “The Australian market isn’t as big as [the Chinese city of] Guangzhou, and the New Zealand market isn’t as big as my hometown.”

«

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IBM AI fails to beat human debating champion • Engadget

Saqib Shah:

»

Champion debater Harish Natarajan triumphed in a live showdown against IBM’s Miss Debater AI at the company’s Think Conference in San Francisco on Monday. The 2012 European Debate winner and IBM’s black monolith exchanged quick retorts on pre-school subsidies for 25 minutes before the crowd hailed Natarajan the victor.

Each side was given 15 minutes to prep for the clash, after which they presented a four-minute opening statement, a four-minute rebuttal, and a two-minute summary. The 700-strong audience, meanwhile, was comprised of top debaters from Bay Area schools and more than a hundred journalists.

Miss Debater (formerly known as Project Debater) pulled arguments from its database of 10 billion sentences taken from newspapers and academic journals. A female voice emanating from the human-sized black box spouted its answers, while three blue balls floated around its display.

The face-off was the latest event in IBM’s “grand challenge” series pitting humans against its intelligent machines. In 1996, its computer system beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, though the Russian later accused the IBM team of cheating, something that the company denies to this day – he later retracted some of his allegations. Then, in 2011, its Watson supercomputer trounced two record-winning Jeopardy! contestants.

In the lead-up to Monday’s bout, Natarajan suggested that debating may prove a harder battleground for AI than Go and video games. “Debating is…more complicated for a machine than any of those…” he wrote in a LinkedIn post.

«

Well I’d hope that debating was tougher than just stringing sentences together. Though I doubt Natarajan has any real idea of how hard Go or Dota 2 are for a machine or a human at the very top level.
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How white space killed an enterprise app (and why data density matters) • UX Design

Christie Lenneville and Patrick Deuley:

»

The protagonist is a well-intentioned UX Designer at a large high-tech company who was given a new project: Redesign an internal control panel that was ugly, hard to learn, and stuffed full of content on every screen (so much data). Everyone agreed it needed modernization—it looked like it was from the early 2000s, after all!

So this designer set out to solve the problem, taking cues from modern consumer apps.

The new design simplified every screen. It broke apart huge pages into smaller, more focused ones. It used progressive disclosure to hide presumably insignificant information. And since today’s users don’t mind scrolling (ahem), the design incorporated white space in all of the usual places—around headers, content blocks, and in table rows. The breathing room was glorious.

It lasted one month before the company was forced to retire it.

Users absolutely hated the new system. Sure, the old system was ugly, but it had everything they needed, right at their fingertips! Their jobs were incredibly fast paced—they worked in a tech support call center and were rated on productivity metrics. They didn’t have time to click or scroll to find information while the clock was literally ticking.

In their eyes, this new system wasn’t an upgrade, it was a boondoggle. It wasn’t just a little frustrating—it made them mad.

«

But, as it explains, you can do better design for those awful enterprise apps.
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Indian smartphone market grows 10% in 2018 • Canalys Newsroom

»

India remained one of the bright spots in an otherwise declining global smartphone market in 2018. Smartphone shipments in the country were up by more than 12m at 137m, the best growth of any market in absolute volume terms. India now accounts more than 10% of the world’s smartphone market, up from 6% five years ago. It is one of six markets in the top 20 that posted positive full-year growth, with its performance outshone by Indonesia (17.1%), Russia (14.1%) and Italy (10.0%). Of these four markets, India is the only one that has seen consecutive growth for the past three years.

In terms of vendors, Xiaomi took pole position for the first time in 2018, shipping 41.0m units to take 30% of the total Indian smartphone market. Despite being knocked off first place, Samsung still grew shipments by 20% and took a 26% share of the market. Vivo, Oppo and Micromax held third, fourth and fifth place respectively.

«

Notice the squeeze on “others” there.
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UK smartphone shipments fell 14% in Q4 2018 • Strategy Analytics

»

Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics, added, “Apple shipped 3.0 million smartphones and captured a dominant 41% marketshare in the UK during Q4 2018. Apple has a prestigious brand and extensive retail presence across the UK market. Despite a slight decline from a year ago, Apple’s grip on the UK smartphone market remains fairly tight and the iPhone has two times more marketshare than closest rival Samsung.”

Woody Oh, Director at Strategy Analytics, added, “Samsung clung on to second place with 19% smartphone marketshare in the UK during Q4 2018, down from 21% a year ago. Samsung’s UK smartphone marketshare has more than halved during the past six years. Samsung is facing intense competitive pressure from Huawei, who is targeting Samsung’s core segments in the midrange and premium-tier with popular models such as the P20. Huawei’s UK smartphone marketshare has leapt from 8% in Q4 2017 to 12% in Q4 2018. Huawei is growing fast in the UK, due to heavy co-marketing of its models with major carriers like EE.”

«

One other thing: Q4 is the biggest sales quarter of the year. Huawei is clearly eating Samsung’s breakfast, lunch and tea.
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Dollar sales of smartwatches in the US are up 51%, totalling nearly $5bn • NPD

»

While Apple is the clear market leader, the new Smartwatch Total Market Report reveals that the top three brands (Apple, Samsung, and Fitbit) made up 88% of smartwatch unit sales during the timeframe. However, traditional watch manufacturers, like Fossil, and fitness-focused brands, like Garmin, are working to grow their share of the market, as they continue to expand into the smartwatch category.

“Over the last 18 months smartwatch sales gained strong momentum, proving the naysayers, who didn’t think the category could achieve mainstream acceptance, had potentially judged too soon,” said Weston Henderek, director, industry analyst for NPD Connected Intelligence. “The ability to be truly connected via built-in LTE without the need to have a smartphone nearby proved to be a tipping point for consumers, as they now recognize the value in being able to complete a wide range of tasks on the device including receiving notifications, messaging, accessing smart home controls, and more.”

Sixteen% of US adults now own a smartwatch, which is up from 12% in December of 2017, based on NPD’s Consumers and Wearables Report. The younger 18-34 age demographic is currently carrying the overall growth in the smartwatch market with 23% penetration.

«

Android/Wear OS has, at best, 12% on that basis (Samsung has its own GearOS). The modular approach just doesn’t work for smartwatches at this stage of the platform – if it ever will.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Your gut bacteria can affect how prone you are to depression. CC-licensed photo by Tony Webster 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. Jumpers for goalposts. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

More than 26 million people have taken an at-home ancestry test • MIT Technology Review

Antonio Regalado:

»

As many people purchased consumer DNA tests in 2018 as in all previous years combined, MIT Technology Review has found.

Surging public interest in ancestry and health—propelled by heavy TV and online marketing—was behind a record year for sales of the tests, which entice consumers to spit in a tube or swab their cheeks and ship the sample back to have their genomes analyzed.

By the start of 2019, more than 26 million consumers had added their DNA to four leading commercial ancestry and health databases, according to our estimates. If the pace continues, the gene troves could hold data on the genetic makeup of more than 100 million people within 24 months.

The testing frenzy is creating two superpowers—Ancestry of Lehi, Utah, and 23andMe of Menlo Park, California. These privately held companies now have the world’s largest collections of human DNA.

For consumers, the tests—which cost as little as $59—offer entertainment, clues to ancestry, and a chance of discovering family secrets, such as siblings you didn’t know about. But the consequences for privacy go well beyond that.

«

Individually, people care about their privacy. Collectively, they don’t, or can’t.
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Publishers chafe at Apple’s terms for subscription news service • WSJ

Benjamin Mullin, Lukas Alpert and Tripp Mickle:

»

Apple’s plan to create a subscription service for news is running into resistance from major publishers over the tech giant’s proposed financial terms, according to people familiar with the situation, complicating an initiative that is part of the company’s efforts to offset slowing iPhone sales.

In its pitch to some news organizations, the Cupertino, Calif., company has said it would keep about half of the subscription revenue from the service, the people said. The service, described by industry executives as a “Netflix for news,” would allow users to read an unlimited amount of content from participating publishers for a monthly fee. It is expected to launch later this year as a paid tier of the Apple News app, the people said.

The rest of the revenue would go into a pool that would be divided among publishers according to the amount of time users spend engaged with their articles, the people said. Representatives from Apple have told publishers that the subscription service could be priced at about $10 a month, similar to Apple’s streaming music service, but the final price could change, some of the people said.

«

The story’s clearly coming from the news orgs, but they’re not very clear about what Apple’s offering and not offering. Doesn’t sound too attractive for them; they’d do better through the App Store (max 30% payout, then 15%), but even better getting the subscriptions directly. Hard to think why Apple thinks it has any leverage here; conversions are sure to be low from the News app, because there’s always another news source offered free. (Also: “offset slowing iPhone sales”? Please. The take on few million subscriptions would barely be a rounding error for any of Apple’s divisions.)
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Links between gut microbes and depression strengthened • Nature

»

The authors used DNA sequencing to analyse microbiota in the faeces of more than 1,000 people enrolled in Belgium’s Flemish Gut Flora Project. The team then correlated different microbial taxa with the participants’ quality of life and incidence of depression, using self-reported and physician-supplied diagnoses. The researchers validated the findings in an independent cohort of 1,063 individuals in the Netherlands’ LifeLines DEEP project. Finally, they mined the data to generate a catalogue describing the microbiota’s capacity to produce or degrade molecules that can interact with the human nervous system.

The researchers found that two groups of bacteria, Coprococcus and Dialister, were reduced in people with depression. And they saw a positive correlation between quality of life and the potential ability of the gut microbiome to synthesize a breakdown product of the neurotransmitter dopamine, called 3,4-dihydroxyphenylacetic acid. The results are some of the strongest yet to show that a person’s microbiota can influence their mental health.

These are still correlations, not causes. Researchers know that the gut microbiota can produce or stimulate the production of neurotransmitters and neuroactive compounds, such as serotonin, GABA and dopamine, and that these compounds can modulate bacterial growth. The challenge now is to find out whether, and how, these microbe-derived molecules can interact with the human central nervous system, and whether that alters a person’s behaviour or risk of disease. At least now, answering these questions is a wise pursuit, not a wild one.

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We’re only just starting to understand our inner space. Our understanding of our microbiota (microbes in our gut and body) has only really begun this century.
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Uber releases Ludwig, an open source AI ‘toolbox’ built on top of TensorFlow • VentureBeat

Kyle Wiggers:

»

Want to dive earnestly into artificial intelligence (AI) development, but find the programming piece of it intimidating? Not to worry — Uber has your back. The ride-hailing giant has debuted Ludwig, an open source “toolbox” built on top of Google’s TensorFlow framework that allows users to train and test AI models without having to write code.

Uber says Ludwig is the culmination of two years’ worth of work to streamline the deployment of AI systems in applied projects and says it has been tapping the tool suite internally for tasks like extracting information from driver licenses, identifying points of interest during conversations between driver-partners and riders, predicting food delivery times, and more.

“Ludwig is unique in its ability to help make deep learning easier to understand for non-experts and enable faster model improvement iteration cycles for experienced machine learning developers and researchers alike,” Uber wrote in a blog post. “By using Ludwig, experts and researchers can simplify the prototyping process and streamline data processing so that they can focus on developing deep learning architectures rather than data wrangling.”

«

You have to want to dive earnestly, because it’s not just “here’s some pictures, this is what they are, off you go”.
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‘Link to the rest’: the 12-year journey to 1,000 days of @TheOverspill links • Medium

I wrote about this.. can I call it a journey?

»

When I first started at a national newspaper in 1995, the aim was to write one well-sourced and researched story in a day. This was entirely for print, in a world before people had dialup internet on their desk, let alone high-speed broadband in their pocket. (At least they had mobile phones. You have no idea how difficult it used to be to get hold of people before mobile phones.)

Within five years, everyone had broadband on their desk, and now there was a lot more information coming in, and a lot more places to look. One of the moments I recall was managing to find the patent filings for the Segway just a few minutes before the deadline for delivering the piece at 5pm, which could then be used to illustrate it. That was January 2001. (Weirdly, that piece isn’t on The Independent’s own site, but is on its Irish sibling paper’s.)

Then everyone had web sites, and there were web sites which simply pulled together lists of things that were on other web sites. Everything became connected.

That also meant that the number of stories you could potentially write in a day — check and research for yourself, write, publish — went up dramatically. From picking one story a day for print, suddenly you could write three per day, having picked from 10 potential ones, because the checking process was easier.

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Councils given new powers to block phone boxes being built • Daily Telegraph

Katie Morley:

»

Councils will be able to block the building of new phone boxes following a landmark ruling from the High Court.

Westminster council was yesterday granted new powers to stop its pavements becoming swamped with hundreds of phone boxes, which it claims are being used for “nefarious purposes” like drug dealing and prostitution.

Until now installing phone boxes has not required planning permission, but now that will change giving council bosses the ability to stop them being built.

Judges agreed that phone boxes primary function is now not for people making phone calls, but companies beaming out adverts day and night.  

Westminster City Council cabinet member for place shaping and planning, Richard Beddoe said: “”Many phone boxes are in a state of disrepair and we suspect are being used for nefarious purposes. Most people haven’t used a phone box in the last twenty years. We don’t need them any more.”

«

So much for the BT/InLink plan, which was for sort-of internet phone boxes, which were instead used by drug dealers.

(I rewrote the intro/lede, which originally read: “New phone boxes will be blocked from being built by councils for first time, following a landmark ruling from the High Court.” The sentence is backward; it implies the councils build the phone boxes (they don’t, they give them permits), it’s passive (“will be blocked by”) rather than active (“councils can block”), and a landmark ruling implies it’s the first time, so that phrase is surplus.)
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💃😂✊: how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat everyone at Twitter in nine tweets • The Guardian

Max Benwell:

»

When it comes to Twitter, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress last November, beats every other US politician hands, nose and elbows down. She has built one of the most engaged followings on Capitol Hill in just eight months and was even appointed to teach social media lessons to her colleagues upon her arrival.

How does she do it? I spend my days analyzing data for the Guardian and helping run our social media accounts, so I’m used to digging into numbers and figuring out what gets people going. And more often than not, it’s the less obvious things that reveal what’s really happening.

Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter account (@AOC) has more than 3.1 million followers. It has gained more than 2.6 million of these in the last eight months. Before she won her primary in June, beating a powerful 10-term Democratic incumbent, she only had 446,000 followers.

«

“Only”? That’s an amazing number. But as this piece goes on to point out, in this medium she’s like a fish swimming in water and makes everyone else look like a lumbering landlubber. It actually helps that her policies aren’t centrist, because the (often faux) outrage about them travels far faster and wider than dull tweaked-version-of-previous policies.
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Your smart light can tell Amazon and Google when you go to bed • Bloomberg

Matt Day:

»

For several years, Amazon and Google have collected data every time someone used a smart speaker to turn on a light or lock a door. Now they’re asking smart-home gadget makers such as Logitech and Hunter Fan Co. to send a continuous stream of information.

In other words, after you connect a light fixture to Alexa, Amazon wants to know every time the light is turned on or off, regardless of whether you asked Alexa to toggle the switch. Televisions must report the channel they’re set to. Smart locks must keep the company apprised whether or not the front door bolt is engaged.

This information may seem mundane compared with smartphone geolocation software that follows you around or the trove of personal data Facebook Inc. vacuums up based on your activity. But even gadgets as simple as light bulbs could enable tech companies to fill in blanks about their customers and use the data for marketing purposes. Having already amassed a digital record of activity in public spaces, critics say, tech companies are now bent on establishing a beachhead in the home.

“You can learn the behaviors of a household based on their patterns,” says Brad Russell, who tracks smart home products for researcher Parks Associates Inc. “One of the most foundational things is occupancy. There’s a lot they could do with that.”

Some device makers are pushing back, saying automatic device updates don’t give users enough control over what data they share, or how it can be used. Public guidelines published by Amazon and Google don’t appear to set limits on what the companies can do with the information they glean about how people use appliances.

Amazon and Google say they collect the data to make it easier for people to manage their home electronics…

…When smart speakers first hit the market, using them to command another device worked like this. After receiving the command “Alexa, turn on the light,” the software would ask the light bulb maker’s servers for the current status of the bulb. After a reply came back confirming the switch was off, Alexa would instruct the light to turn on.

Now, in a push that accelerated last year, Amazon and Google are recommending—and, in some cases, requiring—that smart home makers tweak their code to reverse that relationship. Instead, the light bulb must report in to the hub with its status at all times.

«

That could quickly get messy if your home has lots of devices, and it feels eminently hackable. Also: were you wondering why Amazon might want to buy a company that routes all your home data? Now you know.
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Apple fails to block porn and gambling “enterprise” apps • Techcrunch

Josh Constine:

»

Developers simply have to fill out an online form and pay $299 to Apple, as detailed in this guide from Calvium. The form merely asks developers to pledge they’re building an Enterprise Certificate app for internal employee-only use, that they have the legal authority to register the business, provide a D-U-N-S business ID number, and have an up to date Mac. You can easily Google a business’ address details and look up their D-U-N-S ID number with a tool Apple provides. After setting up an Apple ID and agreeing to its terms of service, businesses wait one to four weeks for a phone call from Apple asking them to reconfirm they’ll only distribute apps internally and are authorized to represent their business.

With just a few lies on the phone and web plus some Googleable public information, sketchy developers can get approved for an Apple Enterprise Certificate.

Given the number of policy-violating apps that are being distributed to non-employees using registrations for businesses unrelated to their apps, it’s clear that Apple needs to tighten the oversight on the Enterprise Certificate program. TechCrunch found thousands of sites offering downloads of “sideloaded” Enterprise apps, and investigating just a sample uncovered numerous abuses.  Using a standard un-jailbroken iPhone. TechCrunch was able to download and verify 12 pornography and 12 real-money gambling apps over the past week that were abusing Apple’s Enterprise Certificate system to offer apps prohibited from the App Store. These apps either offered streaming or pay-per-view hardcore pornography, or allowed users to deposit, win, and withdraw real money — all of which would be prohibited if the apps were distributed through the App Store.

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Terrific journalism. Apple suddenly finds it has an Augean stable.
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Announcing Extra Crunch • Techcrunch

Matthew Panzarino,
Danny Crichton and
Eric Eldon:

»

I won’t bury the lede. TechCrunch is launching a subscription product called, appropriately and deliciously, Extra Crunch.

Extra Crunch, as it says on the tin, is an additional layer of content, coverage, product and events-based offerings for our most regular and engaged readers. This will consist of articles that go more in-depth on topics in the entrepreneurship and startup universe, of course.

In addition to cutting closer to the bone on the topics we already cover on a daily basis, we’ll be tackling a lot of the practical nuts and bolts issues that confront founders, entrepreneurs, analysts and tech workers — from issues like inclusion and diversity to navigating hiring, legal and product decisions to mental health and wellness in high-performance environments. We want to gather the expertise and knowledge of the founders that have come before and those that are in the thick of it now.

«

$15 per month or $150 per year. (So a 17% discount if you buy annually.) The challenge is always going to be: how do you decide what to put inside the pay perimeter, and what outside? That juicy news story – shouldn’t it be inside, so people pony up to read? Or outside, to get traffic and maybe get business at the margin?
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Mm, tasty! Must be why Amazon snapped up mesh startup eero. CC-licensed photo by Alan Levine on Flickr.

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

A selection of 12 links for you. Really millennium bug-proof, eh? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Amazon buys mesh WiFi startup Eero to connect smart homes • Engadget

Jon Fingas:

»

Amazon is still busy snapping up companies to bolster its smart home business. This time it’s acquiring Eero, the startup that has developed a solid reputation for its mesh WiFi routers. There’s no mystery as to why it’s making the move — it likes the thought of an easy-setup WiFi system that can connect all the smart devices in your household, even in remote corners.

“We are incredibly impressed with the eero team and how quickly they invented a WiFi solution that makes connected devices just work,” Amazon’s Dave Limp said.

The company hasn’t said how much it will pay for the deal or when it will close.

While it’s too soon to say exactly what Amazon has planned for Eero, it’s easy to see how the acquisition could help its bottom line. There’s now a vast range of Alexa-aware devices that need reliable internet connections to work properly. Ring’s doorbells and sensors could also benefit, as could Amazon’s streaming services and Fire TV devices. With Eero, Amazon could become a one-stop shop that supplies both smart home gadgets and the routers you need to get them online.

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Wonder if this makes it more or less likely that eero will come to the UK. Also, one reader tells me that Ring-branded equipment is being sold off in corporate auctions: maybe there’s an Amazon rebrand (Echo Video?) on the way. I wonder if eero will also get rebranded.

Also: a missed opportunity for Apple.
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Mars One is dead • Engadget

Daniel Cooper:

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The company that aimed to put humanity on the red planet has met an unfortunate, but wholly-expected end. Mars One Ventures, the for-profit arm of the Mars One mission was declared bankrupt back in January, but wasn’t reported until a keen-eyed Redditor found the listing. It was the brainchild of Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp, previously the founder of green energy company Ampyx Power. Lansdorp’s aim was to start a company that could colonize one of our nearest neighbors.

Mars One was split into two ventures, the non-profit Mars One Foundation and the for-profit Mars One Ventures. The Swiss-based Ventures AG was declared bankrupt by a Basel court on January 15th and was, at the time, valued at almost $100 million. Mars One Ventures PLC, the UK-registered branch, is listed as a dormant company with less than £20,000 in its accounts.

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Oh well, have to make do tidying up here rather than messing up there.
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Google Docs gets an API for task automation | TechCrunch

»

Google today announced the general availability of a new API for Google Docs that will allow developers to automate many of the tasks that users typically do manually in the company’s online office suite. The API has been in developer preview since last April’s Google Cloud Next 2018 and is now available to all developers.

As Google notes, the REST API was designed to help developers build workflow automation services for their users, build content management services and create documents in bulk.

Using the API, developers can also set up processes that manipulate documents after the fact to update them, and the API also features the ability to insert, delete, move, merge and format text, insert inline images and work with lists, among other things.

The canonical use case here is invoicing, where you need to regularly create similar documents with ever-changing order numbers and line items based on information from third-party systems (or maybe even just a Google Sheet). Google also notes that the API’s import/export abilities allow you to use Docs for internal content management systems.

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That has been a long time coming. It’s quite Javascript-y, and needs a special download and so has to be run from a specific machine (including servers).
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China’s demographic danger grows as births fall far below forecast • WSJ

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Chinese leaders in 2016 scrapped the decades-old one-child policy after economists warned it was creating a demographic time bomb for China, contributing to a shrinking workforce and a rapidly aging population.

New data show the reversal isn’t having the anticipated impact. The number of newborns in China dropped to 15.23 million in 2018, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. That’s two million less than 2017 and 30% below the median official forecast of more than 21 million.

It was also the lowest level of births since 1961, when millions were struggling to survive during China’s Great Famine. Newborns eventually become workers, making them essential to economic growth in the long run.

“The demographic outlook does appear to be deteriorating faster than officials had expected,” analysts at Capital Economics wrote in a recent research note.

That’s making it harder for officials to lower taxes much to stimulate growth, since doing so could make it tougher to shore up underfunded pension programs. It’s also making it harder to encourage consumers to boost spending, as more people worry over health and retirement costs.

The demographic outlook is fueling fears China could grow old before it gets rich, leaving it with too few workers to cover the cost of its aging population. That could stoke economic troubles that far outlast turbulence from trade battles this year.

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China’s median age is about to cross over the US’s (at 38 years old) and start catching up with Japan’s 48 years old. The proportion over 65 compared to those of working age is forecast to pass the US in 2040, though still be behind Japan.
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Apple iPhone sales in China fell by a fifth in fourth quarter, says IDC • Reuters

Brenda Goh, Sonam Rai and Sankalp Phartiyal:

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Apple no longer breaks out detailed numbers on iPhone shipments in its quarterly results, meaning that surveys and channel checks by the likes of IDC are often the clearest indicator of shifts in sales.

The figures in the report showed a 19.9% fall in Apple’s smartphone shipments in the final quarter of 2018, while Huawei’s grew 23.3%. That reduced Apple’s market share to 11.5% from 12.9% a year earlier, the report said.

“Besides regular performance upgrades in 2018 and small changes to the exterior, there has not been any major innovation that supports users to continue to change their phones at the greatly increased price,” the report said.

“The severe macro environment in China and the assault of domestic brands’ innovative products have also been reasons for Apple’s continued decline.”

A separate report from another common industry source, Hong Kong-based Counterpoint, earlier this month confirmed a similar sharp fall in sales in India – another big emerging market where Apple is struggling.

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YouTube attempts to tame self-created conspiracy monster • NY Mag

Madison Malone Kircher:

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David Hogg… survived the Parkland school shooting that left 17 of his classmates and teachers dead, only to have to endure viral videos peddling a conspiracy that he was not a high schooler, but rather a paid crisis actor. Following the shooting, the video of Hogg spiked to the No. 1 trending spot on YouTube before the platform finally took it down. A different video from the same user purporting to show Hogg “forgetting his lines” was left up even after the other video was removed by YouTube. (It has since also been deleted.) This week, Valentine’s Day will mark one year since the Parkland shooting.

[Former YouTube engineer Guillaume] Chaslot wrote [on Twitter] that YouTube has two options when it comes to curbing conspiracy-theory videos: that “people spend more time on round earth videos” or that the company “change the AI.” “YouTube’s economic incentive is for solution 1,” he continued. “After 13 years, YouTube made the historic choice to go towards 2.”

It feels like we’re giving YouTube way too much credit here [for downplaying conspiracy videos]. YouTube didn’t have to give Alex Jones, a man who claims the shooting at Sandy Hook didn’t happen, a platform for as long as it did. (YouTube finally banned Jones in August 2018.) Just like (before January) it didn’t have to let people continue posting scientifically debunked schlock about how vaccines cause autism just because those videos technically weren’t violating the rules. The company isn’t going with option two at great cost to its bottom line. The company is going with option two because the cost of people calling it out for going with option one for so long is becoming untenable.

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Apple, Google criticised for Saudi Absher app that tracks women • INSIDER

Bill Bostock:

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Apple and Google have been accused of helping to “enforce gender apartheid” in Saudi Arabia, by offering a sinister app which allows men to track women and stop them leaving the country.

Both Google Play and iTunes host Absher, a government web service which allows men to specify when and how women can cross Saudi borders, and to get close to real-time SMS updates when they travel.

Absher also has benign functions — like paying parking fines — but its travel features have been identified by activists and refugees as a major factor in the continued difficulty women have leaving Saudi Arabia.

Neither Apple nor Google responded to repeated requests for comment from INSIDER over several days prior to publication.

INSIDER reported on the existence of Absher last week, along with the story of Shahad al-Mohaimeed, a Saudi teen refugee who evaded the system to claim asylum in Sweden.

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Bets on whether this will be removed? It’s a bit like Find My Friends (which we call Stalk My Family), but with added patriarchy: insert woman’s passport number, number of journeys she can make, and a place where they can cancel her permission to travel. It’s had more than a million downloads.

But what app store rule(s) does it break?
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The fundamental problem with Silicon Valley’s favorite growth strategy • Quartz

Tim O’Reilly:

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Hoffman recalls his own success with the “blitzscaling” philosophy during the early days of Paypal. Back in 2000, the company was growing 5% per day, letting people settle their charges using credit cards while using the service for free. This left the company to absorb, ruinously, the 3% credit card charge on each transaction. He writes:

“I remember telling my old college friend and Paypal co-founder/CEO Peter Thiel, ‘Peter, if you and I were standing on the roof of our office and throwing stacks of hundred-dollar bills off the edge as fast as our arms could go, we still wouldn’t be losing money as quickly as we are right now.’”

But it worked out. Paypal built an enormous user base quickly, giving the company enough market power to charge businesses to accept Paypal payments. They also persuaded most customers to make those payments via direct bank transfers, which have much lower fees than credit cards. If they’d waited to figure out the business model, someone else might have beat them to the customer that made them a success: eBay, which went on to buy Paypal for $1.5 billion (which everyone thought was a lot of money in those days), launching Thiel and Hoffman on their storied careers as serial entrepreneurs and investors.

Of course, for every company like Paypal that pulled off that feat of hypergrowth without knowing where the money would come from, there is a dotcom graveyard of hundreds or thousands of companies that never figured it out. That’s the “risks potentially disastrous defeat” part of the strategy that Hoffman and Yeh talk about. A strong case can be made that blitzscaling isn’t really a recipe for success but rather survivorship bias masquerading as a strategy.

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Apple ‘black site’ gives contractors few perks, little security • Bloomberg

Joshua Brustein:

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Apex is one tiny part of a sprawling global network of staffing firms working with Apple; it is not even the only firm staffing the facility at Hammerwood Avenue. For Apple Maps alone, workers are spread across several locations in Silicon Valley, as well as in Austin, Texas; London; the Czech Republic; and India, according to people who worked on the project. The operation involves thousands of contractors. At Hammerwood, the population has exceeded 250 at times, although the number fluctuates and Apple declined to give a current count.

Places like Hammerwood undermine the mythology of Silicon Valley as a kind of industrial utopia where talented people work themselves to the bone in exchange for outsize salaries and stock options. A common perception in the Bay Area is that its only serious tech-labor issue is the high cost of living driven by the industry’s obscene salaries. But many of those poorer residents work in tech, too. For decades, contractors and other contingent workers have served meals, driven buses, and cleaned toilets at tech campuses. They’ve also built circuit boards and written and tested software, all in exchange for hourly wages and little or no job security.

In different forms, temporary labor as an alternative to full-time employment has grown across the U.S. economy. Companies in many industries now use staffing firms to handle work once done by full-time workers. The technology industry offers one of the starkest examples of how the groups’ fortunes have diverged. While companies aren’t required to disclose the sizes of their contingent workforces, there’s ample evidence that tech companies use large numbers of contractors and temps. Last year, Bloomberg News reported that direct employees at Alphabet Inc.’s Google accounted for less than half its workforce. 

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Back in 2012, Alexis Madrigal was let inside one of the places where Google updates Google Maps. “It has all the free food, ping pong, and Google Maps-inspired Christoph Niemann cartoons that you’d expect, but it’s still a low-slung office building just off the 101 in Mountain View in the burbs,” he wrote. Wonder if he just didn’t see the bits where they queued for the toilets, and so on. Clever PR.
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Yeah, Apple is probably building a modem • DIGITS to DOLLARS

Jay Goldberg:

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the fact that the modem team is just now moving likely means that their modem effort is still fairly nascent. There is a lot of work to be done here, especially in building out support for older wireless standards. Any modem today has to support all the existing cellular standards going back to 2G GSM/GPRS/EDGE. That is a time-consuming process. Moreover, to be competitive, Apple’s modem will have to build 5G capabilities. If they are starting from scratch, it is hard to see them finishing all of that in less than a year, even at an incredible sprint. Admittedly, Apple is always full of surprises, so they probably have some clever shortcut that escapes us mere mortals, but even still, it is pretty unlikely that next year’s (2020) iPhone would have an Apple modem.

Second, this is bad news for Intel who is currently the sole source supplier for iPhone modems. Apple has been long rumored to be working on its own laptop CPU to replace Intel, and now it seems Apple is also designing out the Intel modem. We suspect that Intel will still provide something to Apple’s modem, perhaps some form of IP license or sale of software libraries to speed up the development. There is also an outside chance that Apple just buys Intel’s modem team. We have no idea if this is happening, but it would certainly speed up the hiring for Apple’s modem team.

Third, there is a possibility that this is an Apple head fake of some sort. Why did this story leak now and who leaked it? Reuters only cites “two people familiar with the move”. This does not sound like an Apple employee. The author, Stephen Nellis, covers Apple and Qualcomm, and seems to have a pretty broad contact network. So one scenario is that Apple directly leaked this story, probably as a way of ratcheting up the pressure on Qualcomm, any means necessary for World War Patents. Another scenario is that Apple’s modem team has gotten big enough that keeping it secret is just not possible anymore.

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Airpods 2 with grip coating, and AirPower, said to launch this spring • Macrumors

Tim Hardwick:

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Rumor site MySmartPrice said one of its “trusted sources” claims the AirPods 2, tipped for release this year, will offer better bass response thanks to improved internals, and both the earbuds and case will include a special matte coating to enhance grip, similar to a coating used on the glass back of Google’s Pixel 3 phone.

The report also repeats previous rumors suggesting Apple’s second-generation AirPods will feature health monitoring features, including heart-rate monitoring, and claims that battery life is likely to be more or less similar to the current model.

In addition, the site believes the new AirPods 2 earphones will be available in black and white colors and cost around $200, a $40 increase on the current price, although whether this detail comes from the same source or just speculation is unclear.

The site’s source offers no concrete launch window for the AirPods 2, however in a separate report this morning, DigiTimes reiterated previous rumors from its supply chain sources that Apple will release new-generation AirPods in the first half of this year. Apple supplier Inventec is a major assembler of AirPods and expects its shipments to grow further as a result of the launch, which has also been tipped for early 2019 by well-connected Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

Meanwhile, MySmartPrice claims Apple’s AirPower wireless charging pad will be thicker than originally planned due to an internal 8-7-7 coil configuration, and will finally be released in Spring this year, “alongside the wireless charging case for the first-generation AirPods.” Apple is expected to release a standalone AirPods case that can be purchased as an upgrade for existing AirPods to enable wireless charging.

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If correct, that separates heartrate monitoring from the Watch, which would imply Apple foresees broader benefits from the health space. Even in the UK, the number of people you see wearing them is surprising: it’s a bit like when the iPod became a sleeper hit almost overnight in 2003.
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Exclusive: undercover spy exposed in NYC was one of many • Associated Press

Raphael Satter on attempts by the mysterious NSO Group, whose software was used to hack activists’ phones in Mexico, to entrap those suing it:

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Who hired the undercover agents remains unclear, but their operational and digital fingerprints suggest they are linked.

The six operatives all began approaching their targets around the same time with individually tailored pitches. Their bogus websites followed the same patterns; all of them were hosted on Namecheap and many were bought at auction from GoDaddy and used the Israeli web design platform Wix. The formatting of the websites was similar; in at least two instances — MGP and Lyndon Partners — it was identical. Even the operatives’ email signatures were the same — consisting of three neatly packed, colorful lines consisting of a phone number, web address and email.

The operatives’ LinkedIn pages were similar, too, featuring men in sunglasses shot from a distance, facing away from the camera, or at unusual angles — a tactic sometimes use to frustrate facial recognition algorithms.

Despite the indications that the undercover agents are all linked, there is no conclusive evidence who they might work for. An Israeli television channel, Channel 12, broadcast a report on Saturday claiming that an Israeli private investigation firm, Black Cube, had been investigating issues around the lawsuits against NSO. The TV channel showed secretly shot footage of the Cypriot lawyer, Markou, and the London journalist, Hamid, which matched the pair’s description of their encounters with undercover agents.

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Lying to people about who you’re working for is much harder now if they intend to check you. Does the company exist? How long has the website existed? Why are the photos odd? All this has changed spycraft dramatically.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Yes, we have done 999 previously. Thanks Euan Williamson for the GIF.

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. Survived my personal Millennium Bug, but will the bugs? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’ • The Guardian

Damian Carrington:

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The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review.

More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.

The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history, with huge losses already reported in larger animals that are easier to study. But insects are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by 17 times. They are “essential” for the proper functioning of all ecosystems, the researchers say, as food for other creatures, pollinators and recyclers of nutrients.

Insect population collapses have recently been reported in Germany and Puerto Rico, but the review strongly indicates the crisis is global. The researchers set out their conclusions in unusually forceful terms for a peer-reviewed scientific paper: “The [insect] trends confirm that the sixth major extinction event is profoundly impacting [on] life forms on our planet.

“Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades,” they write.

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Intensive agriculture and pesticides mainly blamed. But climate change too.

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Young people who play video games have higher moral reasoning skills • inews.co.uk

Rhiannon Williams:

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Researchers from Bournemouth University asked 166 adolescents aged between 11 and 18-years old about their video game habits and questions designed to measure their moral development – the thought process behind determining what is right or wrong.

The children and teenagers who said they played more video games from a wide variety of genres had increased moral reasoning scores, including titles containing violent content.

Violent games were found to have a positive relationship with moral reasoning while mature content was more likely to produce a negative one, the report published in published in journal Frontiers in Psychology found.

The Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty franchises were highlighted as examples of titles related to lower moral scores, alongside variables including the length of time spent playing games, how many years they’ve been playing games, the level of engagement and m0ral narrative within a game.

Male participants displayed significantly higher moral reasoning scores than their female counterparts, which contradicted previous findings, the researchers claimed. Girls also experienced higher levels of stress while playing…

…The study suggested several explanations for the higher moral scores, including that developed moral reasoning could be supported by higher proficiency at morally disengaging with the subject, e.g. the ability to view the game as ‘just a game’.

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Fact-checking Facebook was like playing a doomed game of whack-a-mole • Buzzfeed News

Brooke Binkowski, former managing editor of the Snopes.com fact-checking site:

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It was clear from the start that that this list was generated via algorithm. It contained headlines and URLs, and a graph showing their popularity and how much time they had been on the site. There were puzzling aspects to it, though. We would often get the same story over and over again from different sites, which is to be expected to a certain degree because many of the most lingering stories have been recycled again and again. This is what Facebook likes to call “engagement.”

But no matter how many times we marked them “false,” stories would keep resurfacing with nothing more than a word or two changed. This happened often enough to make it clear that our efforts weren’t really helping, and that we were being directed toward a certain type of story — and, we presumed, away from others.

What were the algorithmic criteria that generated the lists of articles for us to check? We never knew, and no one ever told us.

There was a pattern to these repeat stories though: they were almost all “junk” news, not the highly corrosive stuff that should have taken priority. We’d be asked to check if a story about a woman who was arrested for leaving her children in the car for hours while she ate at a buffet was true; meanwhile a flood of anti-semitic false George Soros stories never showed up on the list. I could never figure it out why, but perhaps it was a feature, not a bug.

And here we are today, with Snopes and the Associated Press pulling out of their partnerships within days of each other. It doesn’t surprise me to see this falling apart, because it was never a sufficient solution to a crisis that still poses a real threat to our world.

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Not only that: Binkowski spotted the Myanmar disinformation scheme being spread on Facebook long before it hit the broader news, took it to Facebook… nothing. Perversely, she felt responsible for that failure. Now, if you’re wondering how people fall for conspiracy stuff…
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SOtM sNH-10G Network Switch Review – Reviews • Audiophile Style

“KenRW” is reviewing a network switch – an Ethernet switch – aimed at audiophiles, and has a Q+A with the manufacturer:

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Q : When was the development started and completed?
A : It was started at the end of 2017 and completed around Sep of  2018.
 
Q : How was it invented? Even though there are many routers and switches already available?
A : Because we’ve experienced sound quality differences by the different network devices but there was nothing to fulfill the quality of sound, so we started development for audio equipment. 
 
Q : What is the benefit of using sNH-10G into the system?
A : As for the audio equipment, the most important factor is sound quality. Also it has the optical ports and LED on/off feature.
 
Q :What is the technical background of sNH-10G?
A : All SOtM products have their own unique technical points. The sNH-10G is for the network audio device, every LAN port has filtering technology, which improves sound quality dramatically and this filtering technology has also been applied to the iSO-CAT6. 

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$800 for an 8-port switch. With a “specially designed Ethernet noise filter”. Oh lord. Google can filter out conspiracy videos, but this is a whole different genre altogether: the irredeemably gullible. (Via Adewale Adetugbo; see the thread by Wesley George.)
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Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds panic myth: the infamous radio broadcast did not cause nationwide hysteria • Slate

Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow:

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How did the story of panicked listeners begin? Blame America’s newspapers. Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted. In an editorial titled “Terror by Radio,” the New York Times reproached “radio officials” for approving the interweaving of “blood-curdling fiction” with news flashes “offered in exactly the manner that real news would have been given.” Warned Editor and Publisher, the newspaper industry’s trade journal, “The nation as a whole continues to face the danger of incomplete, misunderstood news over a medium which has yet to prove … that it is competent to perform the news job.”

The contrast between how newspaper journalists experienced the supposed panic, and what they reported, could be stark. In 1954, Ben Gross, the New York Daily News’ radio editor, published a memoir in which he recalled the streets of Manhattan being deserted as his taxi sped to CBS headquarters just as War of the Worlds was ending. Yet that observation failed to stop the Daily News from splashing the panic story across a legendary cover a few hours later.

From these initial newspaper items on Oct. 31, 1938, the apocryphal apocalypse only grew in the retelling. A curious (but predictable) phenomenon occurred: As the show receded in time and became more infamous, more and more people claimed to have heard it. As weeks, months, and years passed, the audience’s size swelled to such an extent that you might actually believe most of America was tuned to CBS that night. But that was hardly the case.

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See also: the number of people at the Sex Pistols’ first gig, and the number when Bob Dylan went electric and someone shouted “Judas!”
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I blocked Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple • Gizmodo

Kashmir Hill:

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I am using a Linux laptop made by a company named Purism and a Nokia feature phone on which I am relearning the lost art of T9 texting…

…in preparation for the week, I export all my contacts from Google, which amounts to a shocking 8,000 people. I have also whittled down the over 1,500 contacts in my iPhone to 143 people for my Nokia, or the number of people I actually talk to on a regular basis, which is incredibly close to Dunbar’s number.

I wind up placing a lot of phone calls this week, because texting is so annoying on the Nokia’s numbers-based keyboard. I find people often pick up on the first ring out of concern; they’re not used to getting calls from me.

I don’t think I could have done this cold turkey.
On the first day of the block, I drive to work in silence because my rented Ford Fusion’s “SYNC” entertainment system is powered by Microsoft. Background noise in general disappears this week because YouTube, Apple Music, and our Echo are all banned—as are Netflix, Spotify, and Hulu, because they rely on AWS and the Google Cloud to get their content to users.

The silence causes my mind to wander more than usual. Sometimes this leads to ideas for my half-finished zombie novel or inspires a new question for investigation. But more often than not, I dwell on things I need to do.

Many of these things are a lot more challenging as a result of the experiment, such as when I record an interview with Alex Goldman of the podcast Reply All about Facebook and its privacy problems.

I live in California, and Alex is in New York; we would normally use Skype, but that’s owned by Microsoft, so instead we talk by phone and I record my end with a handheld Zoom recorder. That works fine, but when it comes time to send the 386 MB audio file to Alex, I realize I have no idea how to send a huge file over the internet.

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So essentially like living in 1995. Take it from a survivor: we managed. (OK, there weren’t Linux laptops. But Windows and MacOS at the time were pretty much the same as Linux is now.)
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Let there be light switches • Reading Design

Dan Hill:

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A light switch can stick around for decades, as with the doorhandle. When you touch the switch, you are subconsciously sensing the presence of others who have done so before you, and all those yet to do so. You are also directly touching infrastructure, the network of cables twisting out from our houses, from the writhing wires under our fingertips to the thicker fibres of cables, like limbs wrapped around each other, out into the countryside, into the National Grid.

If we always replace touch with voice activation, or simply by our presence entering a room, we are barely thinking or understanding, placing things out of mind. While data about those interactions exist, it is elsewhere, perceptible only to the eyes of the algorithm. We lose another element of our physicality, leaving no mark, literally. No sense of patina develops, except in invisible lines of code, datapoints feeding imperceptible learning systems of unknown provenance. As is often the case with unthinking smart systems, it is a highly individualising interface, revealing no trace of others.

In his book Being Ecological, it’s telling that Timothy Morton selects the light switch to explain Heidegger’s notions of vorhanden and zuhanden. He relates the condition of being jetlagged in a Norwegian hotel room, when “the light switch seems a little closer than normal, a little differently placed on the wall”…

The light switch when jetlagged is vorhanden — suddenly present-at-hand, “oppressively obvious” —where usually its everyday resilience means it is zuhanden, simply ready-at-hand, normalised, routine. When “stumbling around”, he notes that we don’t pay attention to the object itself — here, the irreducible thing that is the light switch —and so nor do we stand any chance of paying attention to the broader systems of living, of infrastructure, that it is connected to, and part of – and, for Morton, our understanding of mass extinction due to climate change.

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Bet you didn’t expect to arrive there when you started that extract.
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Apple tells app developers to disclose or remove screen recording code • TechCrunch

Zack Whittaker:

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In an email, an Apple spokesperson said: “Protecting user privacy is paramount in the Apple ecosystem. Our App Store Review Guidelines require that apps request explicit user consent and provide a clear visual indication when recording, logging, or otherwise making a record of user activity.”

“We have notified the developers that are in violation of these strict privacy terms and guidelines, and will take immediate action if necessary,” the spokesperson added.

It follows an investigation by TechCrunch that revealed major companies, like Expedia, Hollister and Hotels.com, were using a third-party analytics tool to record every tap and swipe inside the app. We found that none of the apps we tested asked the user for permission, and none of the companies said in their privacy policies that they were recording a user’s app activity.

Even though sensitive data is supposed to be masked, some data — like passport numbers and credit card numbers — was leaking.

Glassbox is a cross-platform analytics tool that specializes in session replay technology. It allows companies to integrate its screen recording technology into their apps to replay how a user interacts with the apps. Glassbox says it provides the technology, among many reasons, to help reduce app error rates. But the company “doesn’t enforce its customers” to mention that they use Glassbox’s screen recording tools in their privacy policies.

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Whittaker has been on a tear with these stories.
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The exercise “recovery” industry is largely bogus • Vox

Julia Belluz:

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When health journalist Christie Aschwanden was traveling the world as a competitive ski racer in the 1990s and 2000s, recovery between training sessions basically meant doing nothing — taking a day to sleep in or lie around with a good book.

About a decade ago, she noticed something had changed: recovery became a thing athletes actively performed — with foam rollers, cryotherapy, or cupping — as part of their training routines. These recovery tools were heavily marketed to athletes, including amateur ones, as a means to boost performance and bust muscle aches.

In a new book, Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery, Aschwanden walks through all the biggest recovery fads of the past decade — and exposes the shoddy science backing most of them.

It’s an intelligent and entertaining tour of fitness research for anyone who exercises, with clear advice on what actually works to aid recovery. I won’t give away all the juicy details in the book, but I did ask Aschwanden to walk me through three of the most dubious recovery methods she uncovered. Here’s what she told me.

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Hydration overhyped, cold post-exercise bad, cupping nonsense. Relaxing baths good.
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Sprint sues AT&T over its fake 5G branding • Engadget

Richard Lawler:

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In its claim, Sprint said it commissioned a survey that found 54% of consumers believed the “5GE” networks were the same as or better than 5G, and that 43% think if they buy an AT&T phone today it will be 5G capable, even though neither of those things are true. Sprint’s argument is that what AT&T is doing is damaging the reputation of 5G, while it works to build out what it calls a ” legitimate early entry into the 5G network space.”

Following the announcement of Sprint’s lawsuit, AT&T provided us with the following statement: “We understand why our competitors don’t like what we are doing, but our customers love it. We introduced 5G Evolution more than two years ago, clearly defining it as an evolutionary step to standards-based 5G…”

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A number of Android phones, and Apple in its betas, are showing “5GE” in the menu bar for AT+T on this. I’ve seen suggestions on Twitter that Apple doesn’t have a choice in what it displays; that it comes in the form of an image file from the network. Good for Sprint suing, though – which was the obvious move: none of the handset manufacturers is going to. Totally not in their interest.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: a link to a story about VPNs ascribed to Tech In Asia actually came from Abacus News. You should read it. (It’s not about abacuses.)