Online poker: a cause of myopia? Photo by John Barber on Flickr

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

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

Why Google Fiber is high-speed internet’s most successful failure • Harvard Business Review

Blair Levin and Larry Downes:

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In 2010, Google rocked the $60bn broadband industry by announcing plans to deploy fiber-based home internet service, offering connections up to a gigabit per second — 100 times faster than average speeds at the time. Google Fiber, as the effort was named, entered the access market intending to prove the business case for ultra-high-speed internet. After deploying to six metro areas in six years, however, company management announced in late 2016 that it was “pausing” future deployments.

In the Big Bang Disruption model, where innovations take off suddenly when markets are ready for them, Google Fiber could be seen as a failed early market experiment in gigabit internet access. But what if the company’s goal was never to unleash the disrupter itself so much as to encourage incumbent broadband providers to do so, helping Google’s expansion in adjacent markets such as video and emerging markets including smart homes?

Seen through that lens, Google Fiber succeeded wildly. It stimulated the incumbents to accelerate their own infrastructure investments by several years. New applications and new industries emerged, including virtual reality and the Internet of Things, proving the viability of an “if you build it, they will come” strategy for gigabit services. And in the process, local governments were mobilized to rethink restrictive and inefficient approaches to overseeing network installations.

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This seems like somewhat post-hoc reasoning, doesn’t it? Although one can see Page and Brin seeing this as a one-way bet. If GFiber takes off and is wildly successful, they have a potentially profitable business which is All Google. If it doesn’t? N’importe – it has shocked the local monopolies into trying to compete.

The only flaw is if the local monopolies waited for Google to give up, and went back to what they previously did. And that’s pretty much what happened.
link to this extract

Macron push to drop CIA code quickens as Trump calls EU foe

Helen Fouquet, Marie Mawad and Ania Nussbaum:

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Just weeks after Emmanuel Macron took office last year, his team went over the French state’s most sensitive activities. What it found provided a wake-up call.

The team learned that the country’s intelligence agency — which, among other things, tracks French citizens for homegrown terrorism or anarchist activities — uses software from a CIA-backed startup. Its code is provided by Palantir Technologies Inc., a data-mining company that started out working for the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency.

The use of U.S. technology deep inside the French state isn’t unusual, but for the tech-savvy team of the 40-year-old president, it was a sign that the country needs to make technological independence a top priority — a sentiment that’s become even more urgent after President Donald Trump called the European Union a “foe.”

“No French company was able to provide the work,” Laurent Nunez, the new chief of France’s domestic intelligence agency, told Bloomberg News in July on the sidelines of a conference to present a new anti-terrorism system. “Now we are working to foster a French or European offering. We’re looking toward an objective of launching a tool for all intelligence agencies. And many companies have stepped in.”

The push to find local solutions for mission-critical or sensitive operations is yet another departure from the assumption that the US and its technology would remain a constant ally to Europe.

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In a roundabout and painful way, Trump might actually be a help for European technology companies.
link to this extract

The YouTube stars heading for burnout: ‘the most fun job imaginable became deeply bleak’ • The Guardian

Simon Parkin:

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For years, YouTubers have believed that they are loved most by their audience when they project a chirpy, grateful image. But what happens when the mask slips? This year there has been a wave of videos by prominent YouTubers talking about their burnout, chronic fatigue and depression. “This is all I ever wanted,” said Elle Mills, a 20-year-old Filipino-Canadian YouTuber in a (monetised) video entitled Burnt Out At 19, posted in May. “And why the fuck am I so unfucking unhappy? It doesn’t make any sense. You know what I mean? Because, like, this is literally my fucking dream. And I’m fucking so un-fucking-happy.”

Mills had gained a lot of attention (and 3.6m views) for a slick and cleverly edited five-minute video she posted last November in which she came out as bisexual to her friends, family and followers (many of whom had been asking about her sexuality in the comments). She went on to be featured on the cover of Diva magazine, and won a Shorty award for “breakout YouTuber”. But six months later she posted the Burnt Out video, explaining how her schoolgirl ambition of becoming a YouTuber had led her to bigger and bigger audiences, but that “it’s not what I expected. I’m always stressed. My anxiety and depression keep getting worse. I’m waiting to hit my breaking point.”

The same month Rubén “El Rubius” Gundersen, a 28-year-old Spaniard who is currently the world’s third most popular YouTuber, with more than 30 million subscribers, talked about how he felt as if he was heading for a breakdown, and had, as a result, decided to take a break. They are the latest in a string of high-profile YouTubers, including Erik Phillips (better known as M3RKMUS1C, with 4 million subscribers) and Benjamin Vestergaard (Crainer, with 2.8 million), to have announced hiatuses from the channel, or described their struggles with exhaustion.

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If your schtick is posting something upbeat every day, you’re going to need a support network to keep that going – something which the “YouTube replaces TV!” idea easily misses. It’s a grind, and needs multiple people, as TV shows do.
link to this extract

Why local newspaper websites are so terrible • CityLab

Andrew Zaleski:

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When Emily Goligoski’s parents want to read their local newspaper, the two Ohioans load up the PDF version of the print newspaper on their iPad and scroll through, “turning” digitally pixelated pages instead of reading the stories from the paper’s website.

“My parents refuse to access the website because it’s just so painful to look at,” says Goligoski, a veteran of Mozilla and former user experience research lead for The New York Times.

These are criticisms Goligoski has heard before. As research director of the Membership Puzzle Project—a Knight Foundation-funded collaboration between New York University and Dutch newspaper De Correspondent that’s currently investigating the efficacy of membership models to sustain online news—she has heard time and again from news readers about how they’re increasingly turned off by the presentation they’re offered by local newspapers’ websites.

The torments of these sites are well known: clunky navigation, slow page-loading times, browser-freezing autoplaying videos, a siege of annoying pop-up ads, and especially those grids of bottom-of-the-page “related content” ads hawking belly fat cures and fake headlines (what’s known as Internet chum).

Put another way: Why must newspaper websites suck so damn much?

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Because they’re desperate for ad money? But the precise mechanics of how and why are worth reading. Related: the link below.
link to this extract

Dozens of popular iPhone apps caught sending user location data to monetization firms • TechCrunch

Zack Whittaker:

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A group of security researchers say dozens of popular iPhone apps are quietly sharing the location data of “tens of millions of mobile devices” with third-party data monetization firms.

Almost all require access to a user’s location data to work properly, like weather and fitness apps, but share that data often as a way to generate revenue for free-to-download apps.

In many cases, the apps send precise locations and other sensitive, identifiable data “at all times, constantly,” and often with “little to no mention” that location data will be shared with third-parties, say security researchers at the GuardianApp project.

“I believe people should be able to use any app they wish on their phone without fear that granting access to sensitive data may mean that this data will be quietly sent off to some entity who they do not know and do not have any desire to do business with,” said Will Strafach, one of the researchers.

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Named: ASKfm, C25 5K Trainer, Gas Buddy, Homes.com, Moco, MyRadar NOAA Weather Radar, PayByPhone Parking, Photobucket, and plenty more. The assumption that your data doesn’t really belong to you is so commonplace among these companies; the GDPR makes more and more sense.
link to this extract

Apple supplier shares slide after Trump tells tech giant to make products in US • Reuters

Loh Liang-sa, Yimou Lee and Anne Marie Roantree:

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Shares of Apple suppliers fell across Asia on Monday after U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted that the tech giant should make products in the United States if it wanted to avoid tariffs on Chinese imports.

Trump’s comment came after Apple told U.S. trade officials on Friday that proposed tariffs by Washington in an escalating trade war with China would affect prices for a “wide range” of Apple items, including the Apple Watch. It did not mention the iPhone…

…Chien Bor-yi, an analyst at Taipei-based Cathay Futures Consultant, said Apple’s component supply chain in Taiwan would take a major hit if the United States increased tariffs on Chinese imported products.

“People have concerns about the stock market. It’s not a seller’s market, but it’s also not a buyer’s market. No one knows how deep the well is,” he said.

The technology sector is one of the biggest potential losers in the $200bn tariff list proposed by Washington on Chinese imports because the tariffs would make imported computer parts more expensive.

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I’ve heard Tim Cook explain in person that Apple simply can’t make its products in the US: there isn’t the capacity and the closely-tied ecosystem of suppliers, workers and factories at the scale Apple needs. These tariffs are going to put up prices, and Apple’s going to be the loser – and then the US economy, and then the US citizenry. China isn’t going anywhere.
link to this extract

Tencent shuts poker platform amid widening gaming crackdown • Reuters

Pei Li and Adam Jourdan:

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Tencent Holdings will shut a popular Texas Hold’Em poker video game, the Chinese tech giant said to its users on Monday, in a further step to comply with intensifying government scrutiny hitting the country’s gaming industry.

Tencent said it would formally begin to shutter “Everyday Texas Hold’Em” from Monday and would closer the game’s server from Sept 25. Tencent would compensate users in accordance with regulations of Ministry of Culture.

The Shenzhen-based company, which draws a huge amount of its profit from gaming, is facing mounting challenges this year from stringent regulation and government censorship. It has had to pull one blockbuster game and seen others censured.

The company’s market value slumped by around $20 billion in one day last month over concerns that China would limit gaming after a crackdown on online games citing rising levels of myopia.

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Myopia? Seriously? I don’t mind crackdowns on poker – I think the online games are evil, in that they are pure roach motels for peoples’ money, and can’t imagine they take sufficient care over preventing addicts from spending too much time and money on them – but “rising levels of myopia” must count as one of the most inventive official excuses ever for a crackdown on anything.
link to this extract

The real Goldfinger: the London banker who broke the world • The Guardian

Oliver Bullough:

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when Britain and France attempted to regain control of the Suez canal in 1956, a disapproving Washington froze their access to dollars and doomed the venture. These were not the actions of a neutral arbiter. Britain at the time was staggering from one crisis to another. In 1957, it raised interest rates and stopped banks using sterling to finance trade in an attempt to keep the pound strong (this was the “currency crisis and the high bank rate” that Smithers told Bond about).

City banks, which could no longer use sterling in the way they were accustomed, began to use dollars instead, and they obtained those dollars from the Soviet Union, which was keeping them in London and Paris so as to avoid becoming vulnerable to American pressure. This turned out to be a profitable thing to do. In the US, there were limits on how much interest banks could charge on dollar loans – but not so in London.

This market – the bankers called the dollars “eurodollars” – gave a bit of life to the City of London in the late 1950s, but not much. The big bond issues were still taking place in New York, a fact which annoyed many bankers in London. After all, many of the companies borrowing the money were European, yet it was American banks that were earning the fat commissions.

One banker in particular was not prepared to tolerate this: Siegmund Warburg. Warburg was an outsider in the cosy world of the City. For one thing, he was German. For another, he hadn’t given up on the idea that a City banker’s job was to hustle for business. In 1962, Warburg learned from a friend at the World Bank that some $3bn was circulating outside the US – sloshing around and ready to be put to use. Warburg had been a banker in Germany in the 1920s and remembered arranging bond deals in foreign currencies. Why couldn’t his bankers do something similar again?

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An absorbing long read about how we’ve got into this fine mess.
link to this extract

Many major airports are near sea level. A disaster in Japan shows what can go wrong • The New York Times

Hiroko Tabuchi:

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Kansai airport, which serves the bustling cities of Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe and handled almost 28 million travelers last year, faces an additional predicament. A feat of modern engineering, Kansai sits on an island three miles offshore that was built over the course of a decade from two mountains’ worth of gravel and sand. The airport, which opened in 1994, was built in Osaka Bay partly to minimize noise problems but also to avoid the violent protests over land rights that are the legacy of older airports in Japan, like Narita, which serves Tokyo.

Signs of trouble came early. Engineers had expected the island to sink, on average, less than a foot a year over 50 years after the start of construction as the seabed settled under the airport’s weight. But the island sank more than 30 feet in its first seven years and has continued to descend, now losing 43 feet in elevation at the last measurement.

At that rate, at least one of the airport’s two runways will slip under the waves completely by 2058, according to dire predictions made in a 2015 paper by Gholamreza Mesri, a civil engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and J.R. Funk, a geotechnical engineer. And with sea levels rising because of climate change, Professor Mesri added, the airport could be underwater even sooner. “You won’t have an airport, you’ll have a lake,” he said.

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The pictures of the inundated Kansai airport – with sea walls built to withstand record storm surges, which were then overwhelmed by a new record surge – is stunning. Climate change fights back.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Tesla’s touchscreen: distraction never looked so appealing, or potentially dangerous. Photo by harry_nl 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. Because it’s Monday, or soon will be. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Opinion: why Facebook will never be free of fakes • The New York Times

Siva Vaidhyanathan:

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“As of this morning, the Facebook community is now officially two billion people!” Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, wrote on his Facebook page in July 2017. “We’re making progress connecting the world, and now let’s bring the world closer together.”

It was a monumental achievement. But on Wednesday, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, revealed a number that was almost as startling. She told the Senate Intelligence Committee that from October to last March, Facebook deleted 1.3 billion fake accounts. In other words, an alarming portion of those more than two billion users — more than the company had publicly acknowledged — were fake.

That number should prompt tough questions from Facebook users and advertisers. How many fake accounts were there before Facebook instituted this aggressive defense in 2017? What sort of sites are these — political propaganda or attempted advertising fraud? What countries do these accounts come from? How can anyone — advertisers, investors or Facebook users concerned about its role in our culture and democracy — trust the integrity of the Facebook experience?

Facebook’s latest “transparency report” states that fake pages account for only 3% to 4% of monthly active users at any given time. How can 1.3 billion accounts account for only 3% to 4% of 2.2 billion users? The answer is that such pages are going up faster than Facebook can swat them down.

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Vaidhyanathan is a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of “Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy.” His general point: no matter how small the percentage seems, Facebook is always going to have a lot of fakes at any time.
link to this extract

Tesla touchscreens to offer minimalist ‘fade mode’ • Engadget

Nick Summers:

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Screens can be distracting and, therefore, dangerous if you’re driving an expensive car down the freeway. If you own a Tesla, though, fear not: the company is adding a software feature that will make its giant touchscreens less intrusive. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, replying to a tweet by EV owner Andrew Gold, confirmed that a “fade mode” will soon be added that hides all but “essential info.” It sounds like a neat option, and heck — if the display isn’t working so hard, maybe it will save some battery life too?

Fade Mode will form part of version 9, a highly anticipated firmware update for Tesla’s electric fleet. The update will change the UI in the Model S and crossover Model X to be closer to the Model 3. It should also include some “significant advancements in autonomy,” Musk hinted on a conference call in August. The company’s autopilot software could be patched with a long-anticipated “on-ramp to off-ramp solution” that will move into faster lanes on the freeway, identify your exit, move into the correct lane for the exit and then hand back control at a suitable time.

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Can’t think that having a stonking big tablet just by the steering wheel is anything but a massive distraction. Physical controls on the dashboard might be old-fashioned but they have terrific affordance: you know what the controls can do just by feeling them, in general.
link to this extract

The ‘post-PC era’ never really happened…and likely won’t • Tech.pinions

Mark Lowenstein:

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the growing number of portable PCs that feature touch screens and other tablet-like capabilities are eating a bit into tablet sales, particularly among the student set. The other personification of some aspect of the ‘post-PC’ area, I suppose, is the successful Chromebook line, which is more a reflection of the Cloud and near-pervasiveness of broadband connectivity.

It even appears that Apple doesn’t believe in the ‘post-PC’ mantra in the same way, given the steadily narrowing delta between the largest iPhone and the smallest iPad. Mainly, this is an effort to convince more users to have both an iPhone and an iPad, since I doubt that most users who have both would have a big phone and a small tablet.

So, the question is, what will change in 3 to 5 years? There will be tons of innovation of course, but I’m not expecting the average consumer or business professional to be carrying with them a dramatically different mix of device types or # of devices in the medium term. Even with pens that recognize and convert handwriting better and continual improvements in voice input, there’s still nothing that really beats the good ‘ol keyboard for productivity. And we’re still very locked into the Big Three of word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software. The main difference has been the move to the cloud, improved collaboration, and competitive products from Google.

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This is slightly disingenuous. Since 2013, iPads have outsold Macs by an average of nearly 3x every quarter. Sure, the replacement rate for Macs is probably lower than for iPads. However, we are in the post-PC world. Ask yourself when the last world-roiling program was launched first on a PC. The answer: 2010. (Dropbox and Spotify.) Since then, every important innovation has been on mobile.

We’re in the post-music hall age, but not quite the post-radio age, or the post-TV age. But they’ve all being superseded in turn by more modern methods.
link to this extract

A new study says ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft are causing urban traffic woes • Axios

Steve LeVine and Henrietta Reily:

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Bruce Schaller, a former New York deputy commissioner of transportation and author of the report, tells Axios that when people use a ride-hailing company, they are opting to do so rather than take public transportation, walk or bike. They generally are not choosing between hailing and driving themselves.

U.S. ridership is surging, he said — up 37% last year, to 2.6bn passengers, from 2016. And hailing added 5.7bn miles of driving a year to the nine cities in the study compared with six years ago — Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington.

Uber and other ride-hailing services may not have exacerbated traffic initially. “But now they are clearly a source of congestion, and to deal with congestion you have to deal with them,” he said. Schaller’s report aligns with an October study released by UC Davis. It found that, in U.S. cities, 49% to 61% of ride-hailing trips would have not been made at all — or by walking, biking, or public transit.

Regina Clewlow, a transportation research scientist and an author of the UC Davis study, told Axios that no one expected such consumer demand for the rides.

“Cities were blindsided by the dramatic growth of ride-sharing companies,” she said. Clewlow urged continued investment in public transportation. “There’s no way that ride hailing could move people around as efficiently as mass transit.”

This outcome also repeats history.

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That history is: providing more traffic methods increases traffic.
link to this extract

Verizon’s internet boss Tim Armstrong in talks to leave • WSJ

Sarah Krouse:

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Mr. Armstrong, who came to Verizon in 2015 when it acquired AOL and helped steer its purchase of Yahoo two years later, had tried to combine the two internet companies to challenge Google and Facebook Inc. in digital advertising. But those efforts so far have failed to generate much growth or make the unit, called Oath, more than a side note in the wireless giant’s earnings.

There were recent discussions about whether to spin off the Oath business, the people said, but Verizon has decided instead to integrate some of its operations more closely with the rest of the company. Mr. Armstrong, 47 years old, is in discussions to depart as soon as next month, they said, as are other members of his leadership team.

Verizon and Oath executives have disagreed over what some employees within the digital ad unit see as an overly conservative approach to using wireless subscriber data to boost Oath’s advertising revenue, people familiar with those discussions say.

Senior executives within Verizon are wary of potentially alienating lucrative wireless customers in the name of adding incremental advertising revenue, these people said. Oath contributed less than $4bn in revenue during the first half of the year, compared with the wireless business’s $44bn.

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Just in case you’d forgotten, this is the rump of Yahoo. Sic transit gloria mundi.
link to this extract

Alleged China Mobile leak names ‘iPhone XC’ and ‘iPhone XS Plus’ in Apple’s 2018 iPhone lineup • Mac Rumors

Tim Hardwick:

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First spotted by Japanese tech blog MacOtakara, the China Mobile slide refers to the larger 6.5-inch OLED iPhone as “iPhone XS Plus”, casting doubt on earlier claims that the larger OLED iPhone will take the moniker “iPhone XS Max”. Meanwhile, the lower-spec 6.1-inch LCD iPhone is referred to as “iPhone XC”.

The last time Apple used “C” nomenclature in its smartphones was for 2013’s iPhone 5c, which was priced below the flagship iPhone 5 series and featured a plastic rear case available in blue, green, yellow, white, and pink colors.

Respected Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo expects the 6.1-inch iPhone to be available in red, blue, orange, gray, and white, while the 5.8 and 6.5-inch iPhone models will be available in just three colors – presumably silver, space gray, and gold.

As for the slide’s pricing, which includes 17% Chinese sales tax, the “iPhone XS” is 7388 yuan ($1079), the “iPhone XS Plus” is 8388 yuan ($1225), and the lower-spec “iPhone XC” is 5888 yuan ($860). Minus tax, the “iPhone XS”, “iPhone XS Plus”, and “iPhone XC” prices approximately convert to $900, $1015, and $700, respectively.

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I think that the celebrated discovery last week by 9to5Mac of marketing visuals for the new OLED iPhones and the new Watch design came from a carrier, not Apple. This close to the launch, they need to have the materials in place so that they can do a coordinated launch with Apple. They need to brief their staff – as demonstrated here.

The naming is starting to go all over the place. Like others, I’d expected iPhone 9 for the LCD phone. Assuming it’s right, where does the naming go next year? iPhone Y? iPhone 😀
link to this extract

For second time in three years, mobile spyware maker mSpy leaks millions of sensitive records • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

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mSpy, the makers of a software-as-a-service product that claims to help more than a million paying customers spy on the mobile devices of their kids and partners, has leaked millions of sensitive records online, including passwords, call logs, text messages, contacts, notes and location data secretly collected from phones running the stealthy spyware.

Less than a week ago, security researcher Nitish Shah directed KrebsOnSecurity to an open database on the Web that allowed anyone to query up-to-the-minute mSpy records for both customer transactions at mSpy’s site and for mobile phone data collected by mSpy’s software. The database required no authentication.

A list of data points that can be slurped from a mobile device that is secretly running mSpy’s software.
Before it was taken offline sometime in the past 12 hours, the database contained millions of records, including the username, password and private encryption key of each mSpy customer who logged in to the mSpy site or purchased an mSpy license over the past six months. The private key would allow anyone to track and view details of a mobile device running the software, Shah said.

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It’s like rain on your wedding day, isn’t it.
link to this extract

Things you probably don’t want to do on your [airline] website’s payment pages • KristoferA’s blog

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What’s the problem?
TL/DR: Some airline websites make excessive use of third party scripts/CSS/html hosted on third party sites/hosts not controlled by the website owner, which in turn make them exposed to potential vulnerabilities at those third party sites. In other words: they expose a larger than necessary attack surface. When this is done on payment pages, it increases the chance that they may leak their customers’ credit card details to unauthorized third parties.

I’m responsible for an airline website that does this – what is the worst that could happen?
Someone: either an authorized rogue user at a third party organization, or an unauthorized person who have found a weakness or backdoor that can be used to make modifications to one of the third party hosted scripts (or CSS files) can modify one of the scripts in order to make it capture credit card data and funnel it elsewhere. When discovered, the credit card companies will invite you to pay stiff penalties for the breach if you want to continue processing credit card payments, and depending on where in the world you are located/based you may also be legally required to issue a breach notification. This will inevitably lead to negative publicity for your organization.

Has this ever caused a problem in the real world?
Yes, it has. Not too long ago, Delta had customer credit card data exposed by a third party script loaded on their site as part of a chat help tool:
https://www.delta.com/content/www/en_US/response.html
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-delta-air-cyber-24-7-ai/sears-holding-delta-air-hit-by-customer-data-breach-at-tech-firm-idUSKCN1HC089

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It feels increasingly likely to me that this is how the British Airways hack happened.
link to this extract

The servers are burning • Logic Mag

Dale Markowitz was working as a developer at OKCupid, and made a few changes that… knocked it offline. He thinks that’s OK:

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For most businesses, however, a software crash is not a death knell. If you’re not building self-driving cars, storing sensitive information, or supporting the data backbone of the internet, it may not matter if an error interrupts your service. It’s okay, for example, if a free online dating site goes down for an hour or half a day. In fact, it might even be better for business to trade off bugginess for forward momentum—the ethos behind Facebook’s old mantra “move fast and break things.”

When you allow yourself to build imperfect systems, you start to work differently—faster, more ambitiously. You know that sometimes your system will go down and you’ll have to repair it, but that’s okay. “The fact that it’s easy to fix things means you end up with this methodology where you think, ‘Let’s get a broken thing out there as fast as possible that does sort of what we want, and then we’ll just fix it up,’” says David. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, since preventing errors is inherently difficult. “Even if you spend a whole bunch of time trying to make something that’s perfect, you won’t necessarily succeed,” he explains.

OkCupid was a complex site. Had we tried to make it perfect, it might not have come to exist in the first place.

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His CEO at the time used to say “We can’t sacrifice forward momentum for technical debt” – that is, just build it, don’t mind about the problems building up.

I can see how this attitude comes to become dominant. But it also seems wrong, in the grand sense: debt has to be repaid. You can try to fix things. So did the people who sold collateralised debt obligations. (Via ex-Facebook dev Alec Muffett.)
link to this extract

A top-tier app in Apple’s Mac App Store stole your browser history • TechCrunch

Zack Whittaker:

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Thanks in part to a video posted last month on YouTube and with help from security firm Malwarebytes, it’s now clear what the app [Adware Doctor] is up to.

Security researcher Patrick Wardle, a former NSA hacker and now chief research officer at cybersecurity startup Digita Security, dug in and shared his findings with TechCrunch.

Wardle found that the downloaded app jumped through hoops to bypass Apple’s Mac sandboxing features, which prevents apps from grabbing data on the hard drive, and upload a user’s browser history on Chrome, Firefox and Safari browsers.

Wardle found that the app, thanks to Apple’s own flawed vetting, could request access to the user’s home directory and its files. That isn’t out of the ordinary, Wardle says, because tools that market themselves as anti-malware or anti-adware expect access to the user’s files to scan for problems. When a user allows that access, the app can detect and clean adware — but if found to be malicious, it can “collect and exfiltrate any user file,” said Wardle.

Once the data is collected, it’s zipped into an archive file and sent to a domain based in China.

Wardle said that for some reason in the last few days the China-based domain went offline. At the time of writing, TechCrunch confirmed that the domain wouldn’t resolve — in other words, it was still down.

“Let’s face it, your browsing history provides a glimpse into almost every aspect of your life,” said Wardle’s post. “And people have even been convicted based largely on their internet searches!”

He said that the app’s access to such data “is clearly based on deceiving the user.”

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I’d suggest that anything which claims to be helping you with adware is going to be a scam, unless it comes from a recognised cybersecurity company. The solution to adware is not running vulnerable products such as Flash and Java, and to be wary about what you download. At least Apple makes it hard to run apps from outside the Mac App Store.

This won’t, of course, help anyone’s trust in Huawei, ZTE and other Chinese companies with their own high-profile problems. And there are strong suggestions that the app maker got a lot of fake reviews on the Mac App Store.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Apple’s wearables strategy: the key to its future? Photo by Howard Lawrence B on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive future Start Up posts by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 12 links for you. So it goes. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Why is American mass transit so bad? It’s a long story • CityLab

Jonathan English:

»

One hundred years ago, the United States had a public transportation system that was the envy of the world. Today, outside a few major urban centers, it is barely on life support. Even in New York City, subway ridership is well below its 1946 peak. Annual per capita transit trips in the US plummeted from 115.8 in 1950 to 36.1 in 1970, where they have roughly remained since, even as population has grown.

This has not happened in much of the rest of the world. While a decline in transit use in the face of fierce competition from the private automobile throughout the 20th century was inevitable, near-total collapse was not. At the turn of the 20th century, when transit companies’ only competition were the legs of a person or a horse, they worked reasonably well, even if they faced challenges. Once cars arrived, nearly every US transit agency slashed service to cut costs, instead of improving service to stay competitive. This drove even more riders away, producing a vicious cycle that led to the point where today, few Americans with a viable alternative ride buses or trains.

Now, when the federal government steps in to provide funding, it is limited to big capital projects. (Under the Trump administration, even those funds are in question.) Operations—the actual running of buses and trains frequently enough to appeal to people with an alternative—are perpetually starved for cash. Even transit advocates have internalized the idea that transit cannot be successful outside the highest-density urban centers.

And it very rarely is.

«

Fascinating in-depth look at the topic, and one of an upcoming series. The core problem is that cars were favoured as the suburbs sprawled, and the US has plenty of space; it also doesn’t have old cities as Europe does.
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Twitter permanently bans Alex Jones and Infowars • Daily Beast

Kelly Weill and Maxwell Tani:

»

Twitter banned Infowars and its founder, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, following months of public pressure to do so.

In a series of tweets on Thursday, the company said it had “permanently suspended” accounts associated with Jones and Infowars after numerous complaints that they violated its terms of service prohibiting repeated abusive behavior. A Twitter spokesperson told The Daily Beast specifically that an Infowars video posted on Twitter of Alex Jones berating CNN reporter Oliver Darcy on Wednesday was the final violation of the company’s terms.

“Those are the eyes of a rat,” Jones told Darcy to his face in a live video, where he accused Darcy and CNN of trying police internet content.

“Today, we permanently suspended @realalexjones and @infowars from Twitter and Periscope,” Twitter said in the first of a series of Thursday tweets. “We took this action based on new reports of Tweets and videos posted yesterday that violate our abusive behavior policy, in addition to the accounts’ previous violations,” the company tweeted, linking to its policies on abusive behavior.”“As we continue to increase transparency around our Rules and enforcement actions, we wanted to be open about this action given the broad interest in this case. We do not typically comment on enforcement actions we take against individual accounts, for their privacy,” Twitter continued.

Twitter said it will “take action” if Jones or Infowars seeks to circumvent their ban.

«

The writers everywhere must have had some forewarning about this. The (lengthy, detailed) stories were up at the same time as the tweets, already written. So Twitter is getting its PR act properly together.

So Jones and Infowars are now banned from Twitter and Facebook, and YouTube, and Apple. We will see what effect this has on reach.
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Twitter says Trump not immune from getting kicked off • POLITICO

Nancy Scola and Ashley Gold:

»

Twitter said Tuesday that not even President Donald Trump is immune from being kicked off the platform if his tweets cross a line with abusive behavior.

The social media company’s rules against vitriolic tweets offer leeway for world leaders whose statements are newsworthy, but that “is not a blanket exception for the president or anyone else,” Twitter legal and policy chief Vijaya Gadde told POLITICO in an interview alongside CEO Jack Dorsey.

Trump regularly uses Twitter to heap abuse on his perceived enemies and at times raise the specter of violence, such as when he tweeted last year that if North Korean leaders continued with their rhetoric at the time, “they won’t be around much longer!” Critics say the tweets violate Twitter’s terms of service and warrant punitive action…

…”We have to balance it with the context that it’s in,” [Dorsey] said. “So my role is to ask questions and make sure we’re being impartial, and we’re upholding consistently our terms of service, including public interest.”

Trump’s Twitter threats and taunts have repeatedly prompted calls for his removal from the platform, such as when he tweeted about Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani in July, “NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.” In August, Trump, in tweets, called former White House staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman “wacky,” “deranged” and a “dog.“

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So what exactly would he have to do to get kicked off? He doesn’t specify. (This story appeared before Jones was hoiked.)
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Justice Department to consider allegations of censorship on Facebook, Twitter • The Washington Post

Brian Fung, Craig Timberg and Devlin Barrett:

»

Attorney General Jeff Sessions plans to meet with state attorneys general later this month to discuss whether tech companies may be “intentionally stifling the free exchange of ideas,” the Justice Department said Wednesday in a statement.

The announcement comes a week after the White House said it would explore regulating Google — and minutes after senior executives from Facebook and Twitter finished testifying before a Senate panel on the companies’ efforts to stem the tide of misinformation on their platforms.

Agency spokesman Devin O’Malley said the meeting also will consider whether tech platforms “may have harmed competition” with their actions, a hint that the Justice Department may be weighing antitrust action against the firms.

The meeting, which had been in the works since before Wednesday’s hearing, is expected to take place in Washington on Sept. 25 — and at least three state attorneys general have agreed to participate, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak on the record. The person declined to say which states were involved. But the group does not include New York, whose attorney general, Barbara Underwood, will not be attending, according to her spokeswoman, Amy Spitalnick.

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This is bizarre. What leverage do they think they have over these sites? They aren’t regulated by law – they can’t be because of the First Amendment (about making no law regulating the press, and these networks definitely count as “the press” under any rational interpretation). This is virtue signalling, and stupid whichever arm of politics is doing it.
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Google AMP can go to hell • Polemic Digital

»

If publishers had a choice, they’d ignore AMP entirely. It already takes a lot of resources to keep a news site running smoothly and performing well. AMP adds the extra burden of creating separate AMP versions of articles, and keeping these articles compliant with the ever-evolving standard.

So AMP is being kept alive artificially. AMP survives not because of its merits as a project, but because Google forces websites to either adopt AMP or forego large amounts of potential traffic.

And Google is not satisfied with that. No, Google wants more from AMP. A lot more.

Yesterday some of my publishing clients received messages from Google Search Console [pictured in original]… These are the issues that Google sees with the AMP versions of these websites:

“The AMP page is missing all navigational features present in the canonical page, such as a table of contents and/or hamburger menu.”
“The canonical page allows users to view and add comments, but the AMP article does not. This is often considered missing content by users.”
“The canonical URL allows users to share content directly to diverse social media platforms. This feature is missing on the AMP page.”
“The canonical page contains a media carousel that is missing or broken in the AMP version of the page.”

Basically, any difference between the AMP version and the regular version of a page is seen as a problem that needs to be fixed. Google wants the AMP version to be 100% identical to the canonical version of the page…

The underlying message is clear: Google wants full equivalency between AMP and canonical URL. Every element that is present on a website’s regular version should also be present on its AMP version: every navigation item, every social media sharing button, every comment box, every image gallery.

Google wants publishers’ AMP version to look, feel, and behave exactly like the regular version of the website. What is the easiest, most cost-efficient, least problematic method of doing this? Yes, you guessed it – just build your entire site in AMP. Rather than create two separate versions of your site, why not just build the whole site in AMP and so drastically reduce the cost of keeping your site up and running?

Google doesn’t quite come out and say this explicitly, but they’ve been hinting at it for quite a while.

«

First the URL, now the web page. Can’t accuse Google of lacking ambition.
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Canny Brits are nuking the phone bundle • The Register

Andrew Orlowski:

»

Consumers are now more aware that they can buy the phone and the network access separately, and are increasingly doing so.

“Many were totally unaware of the true value of the plan, and this marks a real change,” CCS Insight analyst Kester Mann told us. CCS Insight calls the unbundling “cracking the code”.

Only 36% of UK SIM-only customers expect to take a traditional bundle-plus-phone deal when their current plan ends, CCS found [in a survey of 2,000 people in the UK and France]. Mann noted that this figure is considerably higher than the number of SIM-only customers today, who will upgrade to another SIM-only deal – indicating strong growth for the SIM-only bit of the market. One in 12 phones in use is a second-hand phone.

And there are a variety of fascinating knock-on effects.

Phone fatigue … 46% of punters say the latest and greatest phones don’t wow them

For example, almost 10% of UK punters now buy direct through Amazon. Operators, who have traditionally acted as credit companies, will have to make their bundles more flexible and attractive. High-margin manufacturers may have to make more use of the refurbished channel, or make older models available for longer. In fact, all OEMs have to look at refurb and online.

Mann told us all of these trends are happening already.

“The Amazon figure is surprising and significant. And Amazon plays a large part in the overall ‘buying journey’. We found customers who may not have bought the phone through Amazon, but who accessed Amazon in making their buying decision.”

The refurbished market is small, at 4% of new purchases, but growing, according to CCS Insight. “We will see more growth,” Mann predicted, as buyers look to Argos and eBay.

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In Apple’s third act, the iPhone plays supporting role • WSJ

Christopher Mims:

»

In 2017, “services” was already a $30bn business at Apple, and in the company’s most recent quarter, it accounted for nearly $10bn. Because Apple’s services include subscriptions and sales from iCloud, the App Store, Apple Pay and Apple Music, this slice of revenue doesn’t fluctuate as dramatically as hardware sales.

All of Apple’s wearables are not only compatible with Apple’s services, but also seem designed to enhance those revenue streams. Consider the fact that a cellular-connected Apple Watch Series 3 can stream only Apple Music, or that Siri is the only smart assistant you can summon directly from Apple’s AirPods.

“When you get right down to it, is it about Apple’s hardware? Yes, but I’d argue it’s really about having the [Apple] experience on any device you choose to carry, wear or put on,” says Ramon Llamas, an analyst at IDC.

Anytime there is a change to how we use computers, there’s potential for an upset to existing hierarchies. As the first U.S.-listed trillion-dollar company, Apple might seem to be well positioned to dominate the era of wearables. But if wearable computing becomes more about access to the cloud, there’s another trillion-dollar company that’s had more success in cloud computing, as well as in selling those now nearly ubiquitous talking speakers. (Yes, I’m talking about Amazon.com Inc. )

Here’s how Apple maintains its edge and becomes the dominant wearables company: It makes the most capable and one of the most popular smartwatches in the world, but ensures that it’s not as useful without other Apple gadgets and services. Next, it repeats that logic for every class of wearable it eventually makes, be it headphones, glasses, health monitors or others.

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Dear Anonymous Trump official, there is no redemption in your cowardly op-ed • The Intercept

Mehdi Hasan:

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You cannot publish a 965-word piece excoriating Donald Trump’s “worst inclinations” while omitting any and all references to his racism, bigotry, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and white nationalism.

You did find space, however, to heap praise on yourself and your fellow officials. “Unsung heroes.” “Adults in the room.” “Quiet resistance.” “Steady state.”

Are you kidding me? Where were your “unsung heroes” when this administration was snatching kids from their parents and locking them in cages? Drugging them and denying them drinking water?

Where were your “adults in the room” when this administration left 3,000 Americans in Puerto Rico to die because, apparently, it is an island “surrounded by water, big water, ocean water”? Where were they when the president was denying that Hurricane Maria was a “real catastrophe” and lobbing paper towels at the survivors?

Where was your “quiet resistance” when the president was extolling far-right racists as “very fine people” and blaming the violence in Charlottesville on “both sides”? How “quiet” were you when he later disowned his half-hearted and belated denunciation of the “KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups” as “the biggest fucking mistake I’ve made”?

Where was your “steady state” when the president fired the director of the FBI because, he told NBC News, “this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story”? Or when he sacked Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Sally Yates, the acting attorney general? Or when he tweeted, earlier this week, that Attorney General Jeff Sessions shouldn’t have indicted two Republican allies of his over alleged financial crimes?

«

He isn’t wrong. Doublethink like the author of that piece engages in is destructive in every way. And it confirms Trump in his thinking that there’s a “Deep State” undermining him. There is, but it’s coming from the Republicans. And it isn’t opposition; it’s enabling.
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Vine and Musical.ly transformed the music industry – then they disappeared. Will history repeat itself? • Music Business Worldwide

Cherie Hu:

»

Musical.ly [was] a selfie lip-syncing video app headquartered in Shanghai, China that had counted over 100 million monthly active users as of last month.

What was most compelling about Musical.ly to label execs and investors alike was its ability to capture one of the most valuable yet volatile age demographics: young teens. According to Apptopia, around 43% of Musical.ly’s users in the U.S. as of June were 18 years or younger.

As with Vine, major labels and agencies pounced on the opportunity to tap into this young, captive audience, inking record and touring deals with Musical.ly personalities like Jacob Sartorius, Baby Ariel and Loren Gray. In November 2017, Chinese tech company Bytedance acquired Musical.ly in a deal reportedly worth between $800m and $1bn, in an effort to expand the video app’s highly-engaged communities into key markets in Asia and other continents.

Yet, as recently as March 2018, Musical.ly execs were still admitting that they were hard-pressed to find an effective monetization model for their app. Meanwhile, industry execs were beginning to doubt Musical.ly’s long-term impact on culture.

In June, Bobby Simms, strategic advisor to the Midem conference, said that Musical.ly would not be considered in social-media calculations for the upcoming Midem Music Awards in 2019. “If we had held these awards two years ago, Musical.ly would have probably been included as a relevant platform,” said Simms. “But now, not so much.”

Finally, last month, Bytedance announced that it would be folding Musical.ly into TikTok, another owned-and-operated video platform focused on live-streaming.

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Hoaxy beta • Indiana University

»

What is the difference between Hoaxy search and Twitter search?
There are two search modes. Hoaxy search finds claims and related fact checking in a limited corpus of articles from low-credibility and fact-checking sources, dating back to 2016. This mode leverages the Hoaxy API to retrieve relevant articles, accounts, and tweets. Twitter search lets users track articles from any sources posted on Twitter, but only within the last 7 days. Twitter mode uses the Twitter Search API to retrieve relevant, popular, or mixedtweets matching your search query. It is compatible with all advanced search operators. At most, Hoaxy is capable of visualizing the top 1000 accounts and in the case of a Twitter search, this will be the most recently active 1000 accounts if sorted by Recent.

How does Hoaxy search work?
The Hoaxy corpus tracks the social sharing of links to stories published by two types of websites: (1) Low-credibility sources that often publish inaccurate, unverified, or satirical claims according to lists compiled and published by reputable news and fact-checking organizations. (2) Independent fact-checking organizations, such as snopes.com, politifact.com, and factcheck.org, that routinely fact check unverified claims.

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A little unwieldy, but folks interested in tracking unreliable discussions on Twitter might find it useful.
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Design better forms • UX Collective

Andrew Coyle has a ton of dos and don’ts for form-filling online (which, let’s face it, we find ourselves doing with weary frequency):

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Whether it is a signup flow, a multi-view stepper, or a monotonous data entry interface, forms are one of the most important components of digital product design. This article focuses on the common dos and don’ts of form design. Keep in mind that these are general guideline and there are exceptions to every rule.

«

I was particularly taken by this example:

This comes with the comment that “There is a bigger philosophical debate regarding whether a secondary option should even be included.” Well, yes: what’s the logic of offering someone a cancellation as they’re about to sign up? They can just edit the fields, or simply not press the button. But because so many computer dialogs have “Cancel” as a default, this has been carried over by many designers on the basis that “any computer dialog must have ‘Cancel’ as an option.” Not so.
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MEGA.nz Chrome extension caught stealing passwords, cryptocurrency private keys • ZDNet

Catalin Cimpanu:

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The official Chrome extension for the MEGA.nz file sharing service has been compromised with malicious code that steals usernames and passwords, but also private keys for cryptocurrency accounts, ZDNet has learned.

The malicious behavior was found in the source code of the MEGA.nz Chrome extension version 3.39.4, released as an update earlier today.

Google engineers have already intervened and removed the extension from the official Chrome Web Store, and also disabled the extension for existing users.

According to an analysis of the extension’s source, the malicious code triggered on sites such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, GitHub, the MyEtherWallet and MyMonero web wallet services, and the IDEX cryptocurrency trading platform.

The malicious code would record usernames, passwords, and other session data that attackers would need to log in and impersonate users. If the website managed cryptocurrency, the attacker would also extract the private keys needed to access users’ funds.

The extension would send all collected data to a server located at megaopac[.]host, hosted in Ukraine.

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The MEGA.nz folks blamed Google for not allowing publisher signatures on uploaded files. The attackers clearly figured the demographic out – stealing passwords for Amazon, Live, Google, but not Mega itself. Because who cares about Mega?

The wider point though is that there’s a whole infrastructure of browser extensions which can be taken over by force or a nice bribe or a buyout of the developer; then those things can acquire scary amounts of access to everything you do. Browser extensions sound nice, but before Google kills the URL, maybe it should kill the browser extension.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

People didn’t miss having a home button on the iPhone X – so say farewell. Photo by Mark Mathosian 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. That’s what they are. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

I am part of the resistance inside the Trump administration • The New York Times

A “senior official” in the Trump admin – whose identity has been verified, but not published, by the NYT – writes about what’s going on:

»

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.

The result is a two-track presidency.

Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.

Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.

On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.

This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.

Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.

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Seems like the Woodward book has triggered something. (There are 1,212 people this could be.)
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The monopoly-busting case against Google, Amazon, Uber, and Facebook • The Verge

Russell Brandom:

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Antitrust crusaders have built up serious momentum in Washington, but so far, it’s all been theory and talk. Groups like Open Markets have made a strong case that big companies (especially big tech companies) are distorting the market to drive out competitors. We need a new standard for monopolies, they argue, one that focuses less on consumer harm and more on the skewed incentives produced by a company the size of Facebook or Google.

Someday soon, those ideas will be put to the test, probably against one of a handful of companies. For anti-monopolists, it’s a chance to reshape tech into something more democratic and less destructive. It’s just a question of which company makes the best target.

To that end, here’s the case against four of the movement’s biggest targets, and what they might look like if they came out on the losing end.

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A good read. Blocking acquisitions is quite a big part of it.
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What current iPhone X users tell us about the opportunity for the new models • Tech.pinions

Carolina Milanesi:

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When looking at the features individually, 79% of the sample was very satisfied with the Swipe-based gesture UI and 65% was very satisfied with Face ID. The ambivalence on Siri comes across clearly when looking at how the sample was distributed: 33% was somewhat satisfied, 27% was neither satisfied nor dissatisfied and another 21% was somewhat dissatisfied. While this is not great for Apple it is not all bad news either. Users clearly don’t see Siri as a purchase driver or positive differentiator, but they also do not see it as detrimental to their overall experience.

Satisfaction is a very good indicator, but we really wanted to get to how users felt about some of the changes implemented on the iPhone X, so we asked if they agreed or disagreed with some very specific statements.

70% of the panel strongly disagrees that they “miss the home button from previous iPhone models”. Another 14% said they somewhat disagree.

Because some people think differently about the Home Button and Touch ID we wanted to make sure we asked about both. Some users think of Touch ID as an enabler for Apple Pay and authentication across the board, while they think of the Home Button as the “control center” to navigate the iPhone. We asked whether they agreed or disagree with the statement “ I miss having Touch ID on my iPhone”. Here while the overall sentiment remains positive it was a little more muted with 50% saying they strongly disagreed and 21% saying they somewhat disagree.

«

People didn’t mind the lack of a home button, and got used to the gesture-based interface quickly. Same for me: after a few days, you don’t notice it, and going back to a button-based phone seems weird and retrograde.
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Inside the world of Eddy Cue, Apple’s services chief • The Information

Aaron Tilley:

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In 2012, Mr. Cue took on even more responsibility when Mr. Cook fired Scott Forstall, then a senior vice president of the iOS software powering iPhones. Mr. Forstall had overseen the launch of Apple Maps, which was panned due to misplaced landmarks, distorted satellite images and other problems. With Mr. Forstall gone, Mr. Cue took over Apple Maps and Siri, the intelligent assistant that launched as a major feature of the iPhone 4S the prior year.

From the moment he gained responsibility for Siri, Mr. Cue seemed to lack much interest in it, according to people who worked on the project. When Siri team members presented Mr. Cue with technical data around the performance of the assistant—an area of frequent criticism of the technology—Mr. Cue appeared bored and seemed to fall asleep in at least two meetings, said a former Apple employee who was present…

…One obstacle for Mr. Cue, in his meetings with television executives, was that he didn’t encounter the kind of desperation that made it possible for Apple to sign all the major record labels, then being ravaged by piracy, to iTunes. Cord-cutting—people dumping their cable and satellite subscriptions—had not yet emerged as a problem. “Apple kept wanting to use the same playbook, and it’s not going to work in the video world,” said a former Apple executive who worked on video.

Around four years ago, Mr. Cue oversaw development of a version of Apple TV that could integrate with cable services, with the goal of replacing set-top boxes distributed by the likes of Comcast and Time Warner Cable, said a former Apple employee. The Apple TV box—with a coaxial cable port for plugging into cable networks and software to handle the combination of live and on-demand video—never launched due to disagreements with the potential cable partners. Apple engineers involved in the product were dispirited, said a former employee.

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There’s a huge amount of fluff in this piece (at least, if you know anything about Apple; these two items are about the only new elements in it.
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Many US Facebook users have changed privacy settings or taken a break • Pew Research Center

»

Just over half of Facebook users ages 18 and older (54%) say they have adjusted their privacy settings in the past 12 months, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Around four-in-ten (42%) say they have taken a break from checking the platform for a period of several weeks or more, while around a quarter (26%) say they have deleted the Facebook app from their cellphone. All told, some 74% of Facebook users say they have taken at least one of these three actions in the past year.

The findings come from a survey of U.S. adults conducted May 29-June 11, following revelations that the former consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had collected data on tens of millions of Facebook users without their knowledge.

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Personally, I haven’t used Facebook for more than a couple of minutes a month during this year. Twitter, I’m on all the time. I guess it depends what you’re looking to get out of a platform.
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Goldman drops bitcoin trading plans for now: Business Insider • Reuters

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Goldman Sachs Group is ditching plans to open a desk for trading cryptocurrencies as the regulatory framework for crypto remains unclear, Business Insider reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

In recent weeks, Goldman executives have concluded that many steps still need to be taken, most of them outside the bank’s control, before a regulated bank would be allowed to trade cryptocurrencies, the financial news website reported.

“At this point, we have not reached a conclusion on the scope of our digital asset offering,” Goldman Sachs spokesperson Michael DuVally told Reuters.

Major cryptocurrencies plunged on the news. Bitcoin fell nearly 5% to touch a five-day low at $6,985 on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange. Ethereum slid 9%, Litecoin 7.1% and Ripple 7.7%.

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“For now”. I couldn’t find the original BI article, so I guess we’ll have to take this on faith.
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Germany still aims for ‘fair taxation’ of internet companies, says German Finance Ministry • Reuters

Michael Nienaber and Tom Körkemeier:

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Germany has long been cool on proposals from the European Commission which would make firms with significant digital revenues in Europe pay a 3% tax on their turnover on various online services in the European Union. That would bring in an estimated 5bn euros ($5.78bn).

The Bild report said finance ministry officials recommended that profits should continue to be taxed only where a company’s headquarters are based. All other options would bring disadvantages to Germany’s export-oriented industry, it said.

The finance ministry spokesman said the newspaper had “very selectively” cited from an internal document in which officials had simply summarized various models and proposals.

“Such reports are common practice to inform the head of the ministry,” the spokesman said, adding that Scholz was still weighing his options.

Scholz remains convinced that large digital companies must make a “fair contribution” to the financing of public goods, in particular by preventing them from avoiding taxation by shifting profits and through tax optimization, the spokesman said.

French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire called on Scholz and other European counterparts to make a decision soon.

“We need to have decided on this matter by January 2019,” Le Maire told television broadcaster LCI, adding politicians would be judged on their actions in next May’s European elections.

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Probably not many votes in not levying taxes on them, so you can imagine it’s just a question of figuring out how.
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Despite a sharp decline in VR headset shipments in Q2 2018, market outlook remains positive • IDC

»

Worldwide shipments of virtual reality (VR) headsets were down 33.7% year over year in the second quarter of 2018 (2Q18), according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Augmented and Virtual Reality Headset Tracker. IDC expects this to be a temporary setback as the VR market finds its legs. The arrival of new products, such as the Oculus Go and HTC Vive Pro, and new brands, combined with the need for greater headset fidelity all point to a positive outlook for the quarters ahead.

Screenless viewers brought a lot of attention to VR in the early days as the entire market was artificially propped up by brands like Samsung, Alcatel, and Google that bundled the headsets with smartphones. However, since then, the screenless viewer category has declined substantially, shrinking from 1 million headsets in 2Q17 to 409,000 in 2Q18. This category was the largest contributor to the decline in shipments for the overall VR headset market.

Tethered VR headsets declined 37.3% in 2Q18 largely because major brands like Oculus and Sony were unable to maintain the momentum established during a period of price reductions in 2Q17. As a result, the two brands managed to ship 102,000 and 93,000 headsets respectively in 2Q18. The category leader, HTC, shipped close to 111,000 headsets (excluding the standalone Vive Focus) thanks to the growing popularity of the Viveport subscription service as well as the launch of the Pro headset.

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I would not have guessed HTC would be the category leader in VR headset sales.
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I’ve seen the future of consumer AI, and it doesn’t have one • The Register

Andrew Orlowski went to IFA, the poor lad:

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If ever there was a solution looking for a problem, it’s ramming AI into gadgets to show of a company’s machine learning prowess. For the consumer it adds unreliability, cost and complexity, and the annoyance of being prompted.

How is this so? There are clearly some use cases where, empirically, the statistical predictions made by neural networks has improved the output – speech recognition is a clear example. There are 44 English phonemes: overlapping nets help add valuable context that produce more accurate guesses (and remember, this is all about guessing). And then… there are some use cases that aren’t improved. These turn out to be quite numerous.

In Berlin, I saw two desperate armies converging on the battlefield of consumer AI: white-goods manufacturers looking to add value and margin, and technology companies looking to get into new areas of consumer electronics. LG and Samsung are both, with decades of white goods and tech behind them. As you might expect, both are smitten by AI, LG even more so than its bigger rival, and their vast floor space touted this loudly.

For LG it’s a fairly indiscriminate application of AI – with everything rebranded “ThinQ” and fairly limited in what it can do.

LG, Google and Innit trumpeted a smart kitchen. How is it smart? Well, there’s “voice control, step-by-step guided cooking, and automated expert cook programs”. We learn that “consumers may have had to open up six or seven apps to get the help they need cooking, including nutrition information, recipes, shopping lists, how-to videos, and remote control apps for various devices”, but now they can “enjoy a single elegant journey”.

How is it smart, though?

For example, LG says, if a fridge “knows” there’s a chicken in it, you select a recipe and the oven comes on to start roasting. Most of my very limited number of chicken recipes were learned years ago, however, and when I’m browsing for new ideas, I don’t necessarily want to start cooking right away. And perhaps like me you need to clear the oven of ancient metalware and possibly flammable material before it’s safe to turn on. I wondered how many fires AI will start?

I suppose a connected oven will tell you, and hopefully the fire brigade, that your house is on fire. The AI at the smart insurer can then hike your premiums.

«

He isn’t wrong.
link to this extract

Google wants to kill the URL • WIRED

Lily Hay Newman:

»

Porter Felt and her colleague Justin Schuh, Chrome’s principal engineer, say that even the Chrome team itself is still divided on the best solution to propose. And the group won’t offer any examples at this point of the types of schemes they are considering.

The focus right now, they say, is on identifying all the ways people use URLs to try to find an alternative that will enhance security and identity integrity on the web while also adding convenience for everyday tasks like sharing links on mobile devices.

“I don’t know what this will look like, because it’s an active discussion in the team right now,” says Parisa Tabriz, director of engineering at Chrome. “But I do know that whatever we propose is going to be controversial. That’s one of the challenges with a really old and open and sprawling platform. Change will be controversial whatever form it takes. But it’s important we do something, because everyone is unsatisfied by URLs. They kind of suck.”

The Chrome team has been thinking about URL security for a long time. In 2014, it tried out a formatting feature called the “origin chip” that only showed the main domain name of sites to help ensure that users knew which domain they were actually browsing on. If you wanted to see the full URL, you could click the chip and the rest of the URL bar was just a Google search box. The experiment garnered praise from some for making web identity more straightforward, but it also generated criticism. Within a few weeks of showing up in a Chrome pre-release, Google paused the origin chip rollout.

“The origin chip was Chrome’s first foray into the space,” Porter Felt says. “We discovered a lot about how people think about and use URLs. [But] frankly, the problem space proved harder than we expected. We’re using the feedback that we received back in 2014 to inform our new work.”

«

Bear this in mind as a marker in the sand. How do you improve URLs? All the attempts that have been made (have more domains, add “https” in front of them, make them longer, make them shorter) have come back to the place they used to be.
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Blood-testing firm Theranos to dissolve • WSJ

John Carreyrou:

»

In the wake of a high-profile scandal, the company will formally dissolve, according to an email to shareholders. Theranos will seek to pay unsecured creditors its remaining cash in coming months, the email said.

The move comes after federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and the blood-testing company’s former No. 2 executive, alleging that they defrauded investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars and defrauded doctors and patients.

The executives have denied the charges and face a coming criminal trial.

The dissolution process was precipitated by the fact that Theranos breached a covenant governing a $65 million loan it received from Fortress Investment Group last year. Under the loan terms, Fortress was entitled to foreclose upon the company’s assets if its cash fell beneath a certain threshold.

In the email to shareholders, sent Tuesday, Theranos General Counsel and Chief Executive Officer David Taylor said the company is trying to negotiate a settlement with Fortress that would give the New York private-equity firm ownership of the company’s patents but leave its remaining cash—estimated at about $5 million—for distribution to other unsecured creditors.

«

The letter to stockholders begins “I write with difficult news about the future of the Company.” It’s not difficult news – it’s bad news. Taylor also says that the company owes “at least” $60m to unsecured creditors, meaning they’ll get about 8c per dollar.

Appropriate of course that it’s Carreyrou writing this article, as it was his painstaking reporting which set the whole implosion off. I expect he’ll be there when the office furniture is auctioned off and the doors finally close. Ahab was never so happy.
link to this extract

Evernote lost its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR head in the last month as it eyes another fundraise • TechCrunch

Ingrid Lunden:

»

This is the second major revamp of the startup’s leadership team in a little over two years. In March 2016, the company lost its founding CTO and made a number of other appointments amid a wave of departures and other big changes.

Chris O’Neill, who joined as CEO after long-time leader Phil Libin stepped away from the role, had already shuttered a number of unprofitable operations that Evernote had launched in an attempt to grow the company, including the closure of its accessories business, and several other app efforts such as some versions of Skitch and its Food app. (Today, it has three smartphone apps, its flagship Evernote app, Skitch and Scannable for digitising business cards, receipts and other paper-based items; plus handwriting recognition app Penultimate for tablets.)

In the years since then, Evernote has been somewhat quiet, but there have been other significant changes and divestments. In June, Evernote announced that it would spin out its Chinese operations and become a minority shareholder. Yinxiang Biji, as it’s called, accounted for 10% of Evernote’s revenues. And some of the company’s movement has been problematic: a controversial change in the company’s privacy policy, which would have made it possible for employees in the company to read a user’s notes in the app, got quickly reassessed and altered as people publicly slammed the company.

«

Sounds like a company in trouble. Formerly valued in unicorn territory, having received $290m in funding, it’s now proving that not everything goes up relentlessly.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Huawei is caught up in another benchmarking row. Photo by Rob Pegoraro 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. Smaller than a trillion. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

A retail revolution turns 10 • The New York Times

Gary Rivlin:

»

Ten years ago this week, Amazon.com made its Internet premiere when Mr. Bezos opened a Web site he audaciously called “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore.” Amazon sold only a half-million dollars’ worth of books in the first six months, but was soon posting the kind of gaudy growth rates that impress Wall Street: sales hit $15.7m in 1996 and $147.8m in 1997.

Yet the more familiar story of Amazon in the second half of the 1990’s was the rate at which it burned through cash. In 1999, for example, its revenue hit $1.6m, but it still lost $719m.

To stay aloft, Amazon, based in Seattle, borrowed more than $2bn from banks, but according to regulatory filings, at one point in 2000 it had barely $350m of cash on hand. “After raising billions of dollars,” Mr. Anderson said, “that’s pretty close to hitting the ground.”

Then Mr. Bezos, like the movie hero who saves the day with only moments to spare, turned things around. He shut some distribution centers and laid off one-seventh of his work force. In 2003 – its ninth year of operations, and seven years after going public – Amazon finally turned a profit.

“You have to give Jeff credit,” [Mark] Anderson [published of The Strategic News Service] said. “His goal was to turn Amazon into the Wal-Mart of the online world and, eureka, he’s done it.”

But, he added, it’s time for Mr. Bezos to do as the founders of so many other technology companies have done before him: find a professionally trained chief executive with a deep background in operations to take the reins.

«

Yes, it’s old. From July 2005. And where’s the Strategic News Service, now that Amazon has passed $1 trillion in market cap? Still going. Not worth a trillion, though.
link to this extract

Institutions challenged by vloggers and busybody journalism • NY Mag

Max Read:

»

what vloggers like [Tim] Pool and [Laura] Southern offer over Cops is something that resembles a social relationship. YouTube’s star system has been built on a particularly intimate parasociality: Viewers maintain often intense, but almost entirely one-sided, relationships with the vloggers who record and publish their lives. Tim Pool may not be your actual friend, but he can feel like a friend, and watching his videos can feel like spending time with a friend. “The media,” meanwhile — didn’t they fail to predict Trump? Who are you going to trust, when it comes to shaping your worldview?

Given this, it’s not surprising to find Ngo’s column among the op-eds, always the most parasocial of the newspaper sections. (What is a regular beloved newspaper columnist if not a YouTube star without a channel?) The first person of [Andy] Ngo’s piece [in which he wanders around London as a tourist claiming it shows “failed multiculturalism”] attempts — like a YouTuber’s “Hey guys!” — to establish the kind of trustworthiness that his readers might have difficulty finding in the more institutional writing of the Journal’s reported news. The flip side of this sociability is that outside of the descriptions of his day-to-day activity in London, there are not many facts — certainly very few of the kind that might provide a broader perspective on the question of multiculturalism’s success or failure. What is more important is what Ngo saw, and what is most important is how he felt.

It’s in this focus on the individual reporter’s feelings, I think, that the new busybody journalism distinguishes itself. The experiential journalism that precedes it may be formally similar, but it was almost always rendered in the context of larger institutions — magazines like McClure’s, or later Rolling Stone or Mother Jones or even Vice — that could provide editorial support. Busybody journalism of the kind performed by Pool and Southern positions itself entirely against journalistic institutions, which it regards as hopelessly corrupt, and in giving up on those institutions gives up on their backstops and strictures — processes, like, for example, fact-checking.

«

Ah, that last clause. Zinggg!
link to this extract

Inside Twitter’s long, slow struggle to police bad actors • WSJ

Georgia Wells and Kirsten Grind:

»

in policing content on the site and punishing bad actors, Twitter relies primarily on its users to report abuses and has a consistent set of policies so that decisions aren’t made by just one person, its executives say.

Yet, in some cases, Mr. Dorsey has weighed in on content decisions at the last minute or after they were made, sometimes resulting in changes and frustrating other executives and employees, according to people familiar with the matter.

Understanding Mr. Dorsey’s role in making content decisions is crucial, as Twitter tries to become more transparent to its 335 million users, as well as lawmakers about how it polices toxic content on its site…

… in November 2016, when the firm’s trust and safety team kicked alt-right provocateur Richard Spencer off the platform, saying he was operating too many accounts. Mr. Dorsey, who wasn’t involved in the initial discussions, told his team that Mr. Spencer should be allowed to keep one account and stay on the site, according to a person directly involved in the discussions.

Twitter says Mr. Dorsey doesn’t overrule staffers on content issues. The company declined to make Mr. Dorsey available.

“Any suggestion that Jack made or overruled any of these decisions is completely and totally false,” Twitter’s chief legal officer, Vijaya Gadde, said in a statement. “Our service can only operate fairly if it’s run through consistent application of our rules, rather than the personal views of any executive, including our CEO.”

In the coming weeks, the company plans to start showing users a picture of a tombstone in the place of a tweet that has been taken down as a way to signal that a user has violated a company policy, rather than a notice saying the tweet is unavailable.

«

This doesn’t get that far inside Twitter’s long, slow struggle, to be honest, but I think folk inside Twitter are circling the wagons very tightly right now, so it’s an achievement to get anything out. There isn’t quite a smoking gun on Dorsey in this story, and it’s unclear even which way the gun might be pointing.
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Bob Woodward’s new book reveals a ‘nervous breakdown’ of Trump’s presidency • The Washington Post

Philip Rucker and Robert Costa:

»

A central theme of the book is the stealthy machinations used by those in Trump’s inner sanctum to try to control his impulses and prevent disasters, both for the president personally and for the nation he was elected to lead.

Woodward describes “an administrative coup d’etat” and a “nervous breakdown” of the executive branch, with senior aides conspiring to pluck official papers from the president’s desk so he couldn’t see or sign them.

Again and again, Woodward recounts at length how Trump’s national security team was shaken by his lack of curiosity and knowledge about world affairs and his contempt for the mainstream perspectives of military and intelligence leaders.

At a National Security Council meeting on Jan. 19, Trump disregarded the significance of the massive U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula, including a special intelligence operation that allows the United States to detect a North Korean missile launch in seven seconds vs. 15 minutes from Alaska, according to Woodward. Trump questioned why the government was spending resources in the region at all.

“We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told him.

After Trump left the meeting, Woodward recounts, “Mattis was particularly exasperated and alarmed, telling close associates that the president acted like — and had the understanding of — ‘a fifth- or sixth-grader.’ ”

«

Just on the Korea thing, I highly recommend a book called “The 2020 Commission“, which is a future history about a world where a series of errors, helped by the fifth-grader, leads to North Korea firing off nuclear weapons. Very readable, quite scary, by Jeffrey Lewis, a former US Department of Defense staffer. He knows his stuff.
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Cressida Dick calls for fast legal access to social media accounts • The Guardian

Ben Quinn:

»

The head of Scotland Yard has called for police to be able to quickly access material from social media companies after the suspect in the murder of 13-year-old Lucy McHugh was jailed for withholding his Facebook password.

The Metropolitan police commissioner, Cressida Dick, was speaking after Stephen Nicholson pleaded guilty last week to a charge under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and was sentenced to 14 months’ imprisonment.

Asked if Hampshire police should have been denied the data they had requested, Dick said it was not the first time a police service had approached a social media firm looking for evidence “and had to go through either a very protracted procedure, or has found that it’s impossible to do so”.

She said, during an interview on LBC Radio: “I absolutely think that in certain instances – and it sounds like this is one – law enforcement in the UK ought to have vital evidence which might bring someone to justice. There are complex and practical things for them, and legal things, which I do respect. It’s not as straightforward as it sounds, but I think that’s where we should be.”

Nicholson twice refused to give detectives his Facebook password while being questioned on suspicion of murder and sexual activity with a child. Police were facing difficulties in trying to obtain the messages from Facebook, Southampton crown court was told by prosecutors.

«

The UK law will change and make it easier for the police to get this sort of detail next year. It’s not quite part of the end-to-end encryption row, but you can see the waters getting higher, ever so subtly.
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Huawei & Honor’s recent benchmarking behaviour: a cheating headache • Anandtech

Andrei Frumusanu and Ian Cutress:

»

As part of our phone comparison analysis, we often employ additional power and performance testing on our benchmarks. While testing out the new phones, the Honor Play had some odd results. Compared to the Huawei P20 devices tested earlier in the year, which have the same SoC, the results were also quite a bit worse and equally weird.

Within our P20 review, we had noted that the P20’s performance had regressed compared to the Mate 10. Since we had encountered similar issues on the Mate 10 which were resolved with a firmware update pushed to me, we didn’t dwell too much on the topic and concentrated on other parts of the review.

Looking back at it now after some re-testing, it seems quite blatant as to what Huawei and seemingly Honor had been doing: the newer devices come with a benchmark detection mechanism that enables a much higher power limit for the SoC with far more generous thermal headroom. Ultimately, on certain whitelisted applications, the device performs super high compared to what a user might expect from other similar non-whitelisted titles. This consumes power, pushes the efficiency of the unit down, and reduces battery life.

This has knock-on effects, such as trust, in how the device works. The end result is a single performance number is higher, which is good for marketing, but is unrealistic to any user with the device. The efficiency of the SoC also decreases (depending on the chip), as the chip is pushed well outside its standard operating window. It makes the SoC, one of the differentiating points of the device, look worse, all for the sake of a high benchmark score…

…Huawei stated that they have been working with industry partners for over a year to find the best tests closest to the user experience. They like the fact that for items like call quality, there are standardized real-world tests that measure these features that are recognized throughout the industry, and every company works towards a better objective result. But in the same breath, Dr. Wang also expresses that in relation to gaming benchmarking that ‘others do the same testing, get high scores, and Huawei cannot stay silent’.

He states that it is much better than it used to be, and that Huawei ‘wants to come together with others in China to find the best verification benchmark for user experience’. He also states that ‘in the Android ecosystem, other manufacturers also mislead with their numbers’, citing one specific popular smartphone manufacturer in China as the biggest culprit, and that it is becoming ‘common practice in China’.

«

Ah yes, the Yossarian argument. “What if everyone did that?” “Then I’d be a fool not to!”
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iPhone won’t embed Touch ID in the display anytime soon, says Kuo • 9to5Mac

Zac Hall:

»

Fingerprint recognition still has benefits over Face ID in certain situations, however, so should we expect Touch ID to be part of future iPhone screens? Reliable supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo doesn’t think so.

In a new research note shared today, Kuo argues that Fingerprint On Display, or FOD, technology will grow 500% in 2019 as Android phones continue to adopt the technology, but Kuo says Apple won’t be embedding Touch ID in new iPhones next fall.

In-screen Touch ID hasn’t been rumored for the iPhone XS this year, and rumors that Apple was working on the technology last summer have been denied.

Kuo argues that Apple’s facial recognition technology as a biometric security solution is serving the iPhone line well. Android phones instead will serve as the testbed for steadily improving Fingerprint On Display technology.

Kuo says that limiting factors so far have included support for high-end OLED screens and not mid-range LCD screens, but that is changing and fueling adoption.

«

Samsung might put FOD into the Galaxy S10 next year, Kuo reckons. Interested to see to what extent the next version of Face ID improves over last year’s.
link to this extract

The new science of seeing around corners • Quanta Magazine

Natalie Wolchover:

»

While vacationing on the coast of Spain in 2012, the computer vision scientist Antonio Torralba noticed stray shadows on the wall of his hotel room that didn’t seem to have been cast by anything. Torralba eventually realized that the discolored patches of wall weren’t shadows at all, but rather a faint, upside-down image of the patio outside his window. The window was acting as a pinhole camera — the simplest kind of camera, in which light rays pass through a small opening and form an inverted image on the other side. The resulting image was barely perceptible on the light-drenched wall. But it struck Torralba that the world is suffused with visual information that our eyes fail to see.

“These images are hidden to us,” he said, “but they are all around us, all the time.”

The experience alerted him and his colleague, Bill Freeman, both professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to the ubiquity of “accidental cameras,” as they call them: windows, corners, houseplants and other common objects that create subtle images of their surroundings. These images, as much as 1,000 times dimmer than everything else, are typically invisible to the naked eye. “We figured out ways to pull out those images and make them visible,” Freeman explained.

The pair discovered just how much visual information is hiding in plain sight. In their first paper, Freeman and Torralba showed that the changing light on the wall of a room, filmed with nothing fancier than an iPhone, can be processed to reveal the scene outside the window. Last fall, they and their collaborators reported that they can spot someone moving on the other side of a corner by filming the ground near the corner. This summer, they demonstrated that they can film a houseplant and then reconstruct a three-dimensional image of the rest of the room from the disparate shadows cast by the plant’s leaves. Or they can turn the leaves into a “visual microphone,” magnifying their vibrations to listen to what’s being said.

«

Quanta is an impressive site if you’re into science at all.
link to this extract

Samsung unveiling a foldable smartphone this year • CNBC

Arjun Kharpal:

»

Samsung will unveil details of a foldable smartphone later this year, the CEO of its mobile division told CNBC, amid rumors that such a device was in the works.

DJ Koh said that “it’s time to deliver” on a foldable device after consumer surveys carried out by Samsung showed that there is a market for that kind of handset.

Speaking to CNBC, Koh was tight-lipped on how the folding screen could work but ran through the design thinking of the upcoming smartphone, particularly how Samsung is trying to differentiate the experience from a tablet once it is unfolded.

“You can use most of the uses … on foldable status. But when you need to browse or see something, then you may need to unfold it. But even unfolded, what kind of benefit does that give compared to the tablet? If the unfolded experience is the same as the tablet, why would they (consumers) buy it?,” Koh said at the IFA electronics show in Berlin last week.

“So every device, every feature, every innovation should have a meaningful message to our end customer. So when the end customer uses it, (they think) ‘wow, this is the reason Samsung made it’.”

The device may sound similar to a traditional flip phone which relied on a hinge to connect the two parts of the handset. But Samsung is likely to focus on creating an actual screen that bends. The Wall Street Journal reported in July that an upcoming foldable smartphone would use a single screen.

«

He’s going to reveal details of the phone later this year? Not the phone? Wow, it’s almost as if Samsung is trying to distract from the launch of another phone. The Galaxy Note?
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Overused – and probably useless. Photo by nchenga on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Franken-algorithms: the deadly consequences of unpredictable code • The Guardian

Andrew Smith takes a deep dive:

»

some HFT firms were allowing the algos to learn – “just letting the black box try different things, with small amounts of money, and if it works, reinforce those rules. We know that’s been done. Then you actually have rules where nobody knows what the rules are: the algorithms create their own rules – you let them evolve the same way nature evolves organisms.” Non-finance industry observers began to postulate a catastrophic global “splash crash”, while the fastest-growing area of the market became (and remains) instruments that profit from volatility. In his 2011 novel The Fear Index, Robert Harris imagines the emergence of AGI – of the Singularity, no less – from precisely this digital ooze. To my surprise, no scientist I spoke to would categorically rule out such a possibility.

All of which could be dismissed as high finance arcana, were it not for a simple fact. Wisdom used to hold that technology was adopted first by the porn industry, then by everyone else. But the 21st century’s porn is finance, so when I thought I saw signs of HFT-like algorithms causing problems elsewhere, I called Neil Johnson [a physicists specialising in complexity who studied stock market volatility] again.

“You’re right on point,” he told me: a new form of algorithm is moving into the world, which has “the capability to rewrite bits of its own code”, at which point it becomes like “a genetic algorithm”. He thinks he saw evidence of them on fact-finding forays into Facebook (“I’ve had my accounts attacked four times,” he adds). If so, algorithms are jousting there, and adapting, as on the stock market. “After all, Facebook is just one big algorithm,” Johnson says.

“And I think that’s exactly the issue Facebook has. They can have simple algorithms to recognize my face in a photo on someone else’s page, take the data from my profile and link us together. That’s a very simple concrete algorithm. But the question is what is the effect of billions of such algorithms working together at the macro level? You can’t predict the learned behavior at the level of the population from microscopic rules. So Facebook would claim that they know exactly what’s going on at the micro level, and they’d probably be right. But what happens at the level of the population? That’s the issue.”

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link to this extract

Statement of Principles on Access to Evidence and Encryption • Australian Government Department of Home Affairs

»

The Governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are committed to personal rights and privacy, and support the role of encryption in protecting those rights. Encryption is vital to the digital economy and a secure cyberspace, and to the protection of personal, commercial and government information.

However, the increasing use and sophistication of certain encryption designs present challenges for nations in combatting serious crimes and threats to national and global security. Many of the same means of encryption that are being used to protect personal, commercial and government information are also being used by criminals, including child sex offenders, terrorists and organized crime groups to frustrate investigations and avoid detection and prosecution.

Privacy laws must prevent arbitrary or unlawful interference, but privacy is not absolute. It is an established principle that appropriate government authorities should be able to seek access to otherwise private information when a court or independent authority has authorized such access based on established legal standards. The same principles have long permitted government authorities to search homes, vehicles, and personal effects with valid legal authority.

The increasing gap between the ability of law enforcement to lawfully access data and their ability to acquire and use the content of that data is a pressing international concern that requires urgent, sustained attention and informed discussion on the complexity of the issues and interests at stake. Otherwise, court decisions about legitimate access to data are increasingly rendered meaningless, threatening to undermine the systems of justice established in our democratic nations.

«

The five governments at the top are the “Five Eyes” – which share intelligence intensively to solve cross-border espionage, terror and other malicious plots. One can see them here wishing to return the world to the late 1990s period when the US wouldn’t allow the export of “military encryption” – anything more than 40-bit, roughly speaking. The leaking of Phil Zimmermann’s Pretty Good Privacy source code across national borders ended that. And code is speech, so it can’t be held back at the US border.

Unfortunately for the Five Eyes, this isn’t about privacy. It’s courts against mathematics, and maths always wins. It is possible to build end-to-end encrypted apps. Nothing can stop that. If you ban them on iOS (easy-ish), they’ll be created, published and used on Android. This toothpaste is out of the tube.
link to this extract

Deep Angel and the Aesthetics of Absence • Deep Angel

Deep Angel is an MIT project which uses AI to subtract objects from pictures, rather than adding fakes:

»

If the future of media is manipulation, then the antidote to this future is a Zen kind of emptiness. Not “nothingness” nor a “void,” but rather the non-limitation and nondefinition of the infinite. With Deep Angel’s artificial intelligence, you become an active participant in the chaos of media creation. You can erase objects from photographs. Like Joseph Stalin, you can treat history as a malleable fiction, disappear unwanted artifacts, and develop a new world order. But, be careful. Once you know how to erase history, your view on history might change. The reassuring illusion of photography as fact will vanish. Seemingly paradoxically, a truth emerges from the revelations of falsehoods…

…Deep Angel is powered by a neural network architecture that builds upon Mask R-CNN and Deep Fill to create an end-to-end targeted object removal pipeline.

«

link to this extract

Why the world is full of buttons that don’t work • CNN Style

Jacopo Prisco:

»

In London, which has 6,000 traffic signals, pressing the pedestrian button results in a reassuring “Wait” light. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the “green man” — or “pedestrian stage,” in traffic signal design terminology — will appear any sooner.

“We do have some crossings where the green light comes on automatically, but we still ask people to press the button because that enables accessible features,” said Glynn Barton, director of network management at Transport for London, in a phone interview.

These features, such as tactile paving and audible traffic signals, help people with visual impairments cross the road and are only activated when the button is pressed. As for the lights, a growing number of them are now integrated into an electronic system that detects traffic and adjusts intervals accordingly (giving priority to buses if they’re running late, for example), which means that pressing the button has no effect.

Others, meanwhile, only respond to the button at certain times of day.

“But, in the majority of cases, pressing the button will call the pedestrian stage,” said Barton.
Close the door?

So what about the most jabbed button of them all: the “close door” in elevators? If you live in the US, it almost certainly doesn’t work.

“To put it simply, the riding public will not be able to make the doors close any faster using that button,” said Kevin Brinkman of the National Elevator Industry in an email.

But there’s a very good reason for this: the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. “This legislation required that an elevator’s doors remain open long enough for anyone with disability or mobility issues, such as using crutches or a wheelchair, to get on board the cab safely,” said Brinkman.

So, unless the allotted boarding time has been reached, pressing the button will do nothing. It’s only there for firefighters, emergency personnel and maintenance workers, who can override the delay with a key or a code.

«

They’re called “placebo buttons”, of course.
link to this extract

TSMC ex-employee charged with trade secrets theft • Digitimes

Jessie Shen:

»

A Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) employee has been charged with stealing secrets from the pure-play foundry.

Surnamed Chou, the former TSMC deputy manager of technology stands accused of copying confidential documents regarding the foundry’s 16nm and 10nm node processes and related facilities, and trying to take the data with him to a new job in China, according to Taiwan’s Hsinchu District Prosecutors’ Office.

Chou had resigned from TSMC, ready to join Shanghai Huali Microelectronics (HLMC) when he was arrested, the office said. Chou has now been indicted for breach of trust.

«

link to this extract

The baroness, the ICO fiasco, and enter Steve Wozniak • FT Alphaville

Jemima Kelly on an $80m ICO [initial coin offering] scheme kicked off by Conservative peer Michelle Mone and businessman boyfriend Doug Barrowman, who with their four board members apparently have “a track record of over 300 [not a typo] years in business”; it didn’t go quite as planned:

»

We spoke to several of EQUI’s bounty-hunters [online boosters who write encouraging social media messages and push ICOs, for money] and were shown Telegram messages. When they complained about the amount there were getting paid or the way they were being treated, EQUI threatened them with lawyers if they “bad-mouthed” the company. One Telegram message sent to a group of bounty hunters said “police can track you down if you threaten & track and bad mouth our brand name”; another sent the same day said “you are all so stupid”.

EQUI declined to comment on the messages. That a peer of the realm’s business appears to have threatened criminal consequences for people encouraged to take part in its unregulated investment scheme is, if nothing else, a bad look.

One bounty-hunter, Maksim Koselev, a 29-year-old Russian warehouse worker, told us he had spent about 10 to 15 minutes per day, seven days a week, promoting EQUI online for the months during which the ICO was running, which included writing two promotional articles about the company in Russian. He’s worked as a bounty-hunter for more than 100 ICOs, he said, and apart from the exit scams — where those raising money disappear with the funds they have raised — this is the worst experience he’s ever had. He, and others, said bounty-hunters should have been paid 2% of the $7m Equi raised, particularly given that EQUI is still planning to raise money from investors. He told us: “We’ve been thrown out of the window with this… This is not the way you talk, even to bounty-hunters. They treat people like nothing.”

Our experience of interacting with EQUI has also been a bit… strange. When we contacted the company via its website we were replied to by Baroness Mone’s press officer, who offered us a “deal on an exclusive”. When we asked some questions about the bounty-hunters’ complaints, we were told that “anything that is written that is defamatory to EQUI or our founders we will take severe action”.

«

One has to congratulate Kelly on picking her way through the thickets of this story while avoiding defamation. Well, one hopes so on the latter.
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Whose name should be on the laws of physics for an expanding universe? • Ars Technica

Krzysztof Bolejko:

»

The expansion of the universe was one of the most mind-blowing discoveries of the 20th century.

Expansion here means that the distance between galaxies in general increases with time, and it increases uniformly. It does not matter where you are and in which direction you look at, you still see a universe that is expanding.

When you really try to imagine all of this, you may end up with a headspin or even worse. The rate at which the universe is currently expanding is described by the Hubble Law, named after Edwin Hubble, whose 1929 article reported that astronomical data signify the expansion of the universe.

But Hubble was not the first. In 1927, Georges Lemaître had already published an article on the expansion of the universe. His article was written in French and published in a Belgian journal.

Lemaître presented a theoretical foundation for the expansion of the universe and used the astronomical data (the very same data that Hubble used in his 1929 article) to infer the rate at which the universe is expanding.

In 1928, the American mathematician and physicist Howard Robertson also published an article in Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, where he derived the formula for the expansion of the universe and inferred the rate of expansion from the same data that were used by Lemaître (a year before) and Hubble (a year after).

Robertson did not know about Lemaître’s work.

«

“Hubble-Lemaître’s Constant” doesn’t quite trip off the tongue. Bet it gets called the HLC if this passes.
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From Android to iPhone: Some things were good, but I’ll never switch • Android Authority

C. Scott Brown:

»

With this experiment, I wanted to take away the safety net. I wanted to dive into the Apple ecosystem head-first and see if it’s as clunky and bad as I thought it was.

Here are the rules I placed on myself:

• I used an iPhone 8 Plus (Rose Gold, if it matters) on the latest version of iOS (11.4.1) from Sunday morning to the following Sunday morning — a full seven days.
• During that time, I could not even touch my Android daily driver: a OnePlus 5. I had to touch some other Android phones here and there because I work for Android Authority, so it’d be hard not to.
• Anything I could do on the iPhone I did on the iPhone. That means texting, messaging, phone calls, music, internet searches, and more.
• I relied on Apple apps as much as possible and only used the default settings and setup whenever I could.

Over the course of the week, I installed third-party apps like Facebook, Starbucks, Amazon, Slack, and so on. I tried my best to use every basic feature of the phone at least once, including things like Apple Pay, the Apple App Store, Apple Maps, and Apple News.

Be forewarned: both Apple and Android criticism is coming your way.

«

It’s a fair and interesting comparison. But his principal complaint – his real showstopper complaint – is about notification grouping (which is what Android users have disliked about iOS for years). Strange to test iOS less than two weeks before Apple will release a version which will change notification grouping. Sure, who’d expect him to know that? Except he mentions it.
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Google at 20: how a search engine became a literal extension of our mind • The Conversation

Benjamin Curtis is a lecturer in philosophy and ethics:

»

Make no mistake about it, this is a seismic shift in human psychology, probably the biggest we have ever had to cope with, and one that is occurring with breathtaking rapidity – Google, after all, is just 20 years old, this month. But although this shift has some good consequences, there are some deeply troubling issues we urgently need to address.

Much of my research spans issues to do with personal identity, mind, neuroscience, and ethics. And in my view, as we gobble up Google’s AI driven “personalised” features, we cede ever more of our personal cognitive space to Google, and so both mental privacy and the ability to think freely are eroded. What’s more, evidence is starting to emerge that there may be a link between technology use and mental health problems. In other words, it is not clear that our minds can take the strain of the virtual stretch. Perhaps we are even close to the snapping point.

“Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?”

This was the question posed in 1998 (coincidentally the same year Google was launched) by two philosophers and cognitive scientists, Andy Clark and David Chalmers, in a now famous journal article, The Extended Mind. Before their work, the standard answer among scientists was to say that the mind stopped at the boundaries of skin and skull (roughly, the boundaries of the brain and nervous system).

But Clark and Chalmers proposed a more radical answer. They argued that when we integrate things from the external environment into our thinking processes, those external things play the same cognitive role as our brains do. As a result, they are just as much a part of our minds as neurons and synapses. Clark and Chalmers’ argument produced debate, but many other experts on the mind have since agreed.

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Is anyone doing a “I went a week without a search engine” story to celebrate Google’s 20versary? Seems like an obvious story to demonstrate this effect. I think anyone would find it difficult (search engines are all around us) and painful (we don’t realise how heavily we rely on search).
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Fortnite on PlayStation doesn’t have cross-platform play with other consoles because they are worse, explains Sony boss • The Independent

Andrew Griffin:

»

Sony has been embroiled in controversy since earlier this year when the game was released for Nintendo Switch and it said that PlayStation players would not be able to play with them. What’s more, players found that once they had logged in on their PlayStation, they could not log in to the same account on other platforms, despite both options being available for Xbox and PC players.

Gamers have continued to protest that the restrictions are unfair. But Sony has been clear that it will not change the policy.

Speaking at the IFA technology show in Berlin, Sony chief executive Kenichiro Yoshida said he felt playing on the PlayStation 4 was the best experience for gamers and therefore should not be compromised.

“On cross-platform, our way of thinking is always that PlayStation is the best place to play. Fortnite, I believe, partnered with PlayStation 4 is the best experience for users, that’s our belief,” he said, according to Press Association.

“But actually, we already opened some games as cross-platform with PC and some others, so we decide based on what is the best user experience. That is our way of thinking for cross-platform.”

Fortnite has amassed more than 125 million players since the launch of its battle royale mode last year, with many choosing to play on mobile devices such as their phone or tablet.

«

PlayStation players are second-class citizens in this, and that rankles with them. Sony can bluster, but this is dangerous: if Fortnite survives at the top for a year or even two, that could have a significant effect on its perception with the upcoming generation.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Transporting bauxite (here as a slurry) in a ship can be really dangerous. Photo by Norsk Hydro ASA on Flickr.

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

A selection of 13 links for you. Well, some of us are labouring. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Mystery of the cargo ships that sink when their cargo suddenly liquefies • The Conversation

»

Think of a dangerous cargo and toxic waste or explosives might come to mind. But granular cargoes such as crushed ore and mineral sands are responsible for the loss of numerous ships every year. On average, ten “solid bulk cargo” carriers have been lost at sea each year for the last decade.

Solid bulk cargoes – defined as granular materials loaded directly into a ship’s hold – can suddenly turn from a solid state into a liquid state, a process known as liquefaction. And this can be disastrous for any ship carrying them – and their crew.

In 2015, the 56,000-tonne bulk carrier Bulk Jupiter rapidly sunk around 300km south-west of Vietnam, with only one of its 19 crew surviving. This prompted warnings from the International Maritime Organisation about the possible liquefaction of the relatively new solid bulk cargo bauxite (an aluminium ore).

A lot is known about the physics of the liquefaction of granular materials from geotechnical and earthquake engineering. The vigorous shaking of the earth causes pressure in the ground water to increase to such a level that the soil “liquefies”. Yet despite our understanding of this phenomenon, and the guidelines in place to prevent it occurring, it is still causing ships to sink and taking their crew with them.

Solid bulk cargoes are typically “two-phase” materials as they contain water between the solid particles. When the particles can touch, the friction between them makes the material act like a solid (even though there is liquid present). But when the water pressure rises, these inter-particle forces reduce and the strength of the material decreases. When the friction is reduced to zero, the material acts like a liquid (even though the solid particles are still present).

A solid bulk cargo that is apparently stable on the quayside can liquefy because pressures in the water between the particles build up as it is loaded onto the ship.

«

There’s a terrific part of the book The Martian which involves a similar calamity. The science of this is pretty scary: you wouldn’t want to be on a ship with something thixotropic like this.
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The Top 10: Mnemonics • The Independent

John Rentoul:

»

This list started with “X is a cross”, by which Tom Chivers remembers which is the X-axis and which is the Y on a graph. “My son’s been told ‘Y to the sky’ which seems to work as well,” said Funkadelic Horse. Thanks to Stephen Tall and Xlibris1 for drawing this to my attention.

1. How I wish I could calculate pi. The number of letters gives the first seven digits of pi: 3.141592… Thanks to Andrew Ruddle, who said piphilology is the word for the invention and study of mnemonics for pi. 

«

And nine more excellent ones, none of which is Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain, or Norwich. The periodic table elements (first 18) is especially clever.
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Tech-support scams prompt Google to act • WSJ

Samarth Bansal and Rob Barry:

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The move comes after a Wall Street Journal investigation found fraudsters were exploiting Google’s advertising system by purchasing search ads and masquerading as authorized service agents for companies such as Apple.

For instance, the first result in a recent Google search for the phrase “Apple tech support” showed a link to Apple.com and a toll-free number, with the suggestion: “Get instant help from our experts.” The Journal found that the phone number didn’t belong to Apple and instead led to a call center that engages in tech-support scams.

Responding to questions about the ads earlier this week, a Google spokeswoman told the Journal the company was committed to removing bad ads, and last year removed more than 100 such ads per second for violating company policies.

On Friday, Google announced a more stringent crackdown on tech-support ads. “We’ve seen a rise in misleading ad experiences stemming from third-party technical support providers and have decided to begin restricting ads in this category globally,” Google’s global product policy director David Graffsaid on the company’s blog.

Google plans to roll out a verification program “to ensure that only legitimate providers of third-party tech support can use our platform to reach consumers,” Mr. Graff wrote…

…A 2018 study found 72% of sponsored ads on major search engines related to technical support queries led to scam websites.

These scams are on the rise: Microsoft Corp. , which receives around 12,000 complaints about tech support scams every month, reported a 24% increase in such complaints through 2017. The Federal Trade Commission registered 45,000 complaints about online tech support fraud in 2016, which the agency estimates is only a fraction of the true total.

«

I first wrote about these scammers back in 2010, and they’d been going for a while even then. Also, how exactly is Google going to “verify” that a company is legit, and that it won’t just sell its database to a scam group?
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Changing our approach to anti-tracking • Firefox Future Releases

Nick Nguyen:

»

Anyone who isn’t an expert on the internet would be hard-pressed to explain how tracking on the internet actually works. Some of the negative effects of unchecked tracking are easy to notice, namely eerily-specific targeted advertising and a loss of performance on the web. However, many of the harms of unchecked data collection are completely opaque to users and experts alike, only to be revealed piecemeal by major data breaches. In the near future, Firefox will — by default — protect users by blocking tracking while also offering a clear set of controls to give our users more choice over what information they share with sites.

Over the next few months, we plan to release a series of features that will put this new approach into practice through three key initiatives…

«

This will look similar to Safari’s tracker blocking and cookie blocking. If that gives them an advantage in page load speeds, then Google is either going to have to find some magic way to speed up Chrome. Assuming, that is, that the speed difference is brought to peoples’ attention, and that Chrome doesn’t have other elements that people find preferable. Would anti-tracking plus speed be enough to make people change?

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Can Beethoven send takedown requests? A first-hand account of one German professor’s experience with overly broad upload filters • Wikimedia Foundation

Ulrich Kaiser:

»

The first video I uploaded to YouTube promoted the website where my digitized copies of public domain recordings are available to download. In this video, I explained my project, while examples of the music played in the background. Less than three minutes after uploading, I received a notification that there was a ContentID claim against my video. ContentID is a system, developed by YouTube, which checks user uploaded videos against databases of copyrighted content in order to curb copyright infringement. This system took millions of dollars to develop and is often pointed to as a working example of upload filters by rights holders and lawmakers who wish to make such technology mandatory for every website which hosts user content online. However, these claims ignore the widespread reports of its often flawed execution.

In fact, when I replied to the claim on my introductory video stating that the claimant’s own website said that the date of the recording’s first publication was in 1962, and thus it was in the public domain, the claim was withdrawn with no further ado. This interaction sparked a curiosity in me: were other users uploading public domain music to YouTube receiving similar requests?

I decided to open a different YouTube account “Labeltest” to share additional excerpts of copyright-free music. I quickly received ContentID notifications for copyright-free music by Bartok, Schubert, Puccini and Wagner. Again and again, YouTube told me that I was violating the copyright of these long-dead composers, despite all of my uploads existing in the public domain.

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That’s both the composition and the performance in the public domain. ContentID isn’t perfect, but you can see how it might fail to distinguish a performance from 1964 and 1962. That’s pretty granular.
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Electric vehicles in California: their day will come, and might come suddenly • Bloomberg

Nathaniel Bullard:

»

In the first half of the year, vehicles with a battery were more than 10% of new vehicle sales in California. The model mix includes hybrids like the Toyota Prius that have no electric charging plugs, as well as plug-in hybrids and pure electric cars with no combustion engine at all.

The data reveal three trends. The first is the steady erosion of hybrid market share, which is down from seven% of new sales in 2013 to four% in the first half of 2018. That’s noteworthy, and so is the fact that battery electric vehicles are now more popular than plug-in hybrids.

In 2017, the plug-in electric car market is now more than six% of new car sales in California. It’s not a big number — but it will get bigger, and it’s worth asking, “how much bigger?”

My colleague Colin McKerracher suggested we look at Norway for guidance on how much bigger California’s electric car market could be. 

It took Norway about a decade to reach six% electric vehicle sales but then only five years to go from 6% to 47%. Norway is a special case, given that the country has generous incentives that aren’t replicated elsewhere. It does show, though, that inflection points occur, and when they do, markets can change quickly.

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Isn’t that why we call them inflection points?
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AI camera shootout: LG V30S vs Huawei P20 Pro vs Google Pixel 2 • Android Authority

Robert Triggs tries out the “AI” photo tweaks for colour profiles and post-processing (and has lots of photos to prove it):

»

it’s a mixed bag across all of the devices we tested. LG and Huawei’s tweaks ranged from subtle to overbearing. Most of the time, it’s preferable to leave the AI setting off. Many of the changes could be imitated at leisure afterwards if you really want them. Google’s HDR+ implementation is very different and clearly helps to compensate for the rare occasions when the camera’s exposure is a little off. It also offers improved dynamic range over other cameras, but this sometimes comes at the cost of drab colors. Overall, it’s the most subtle and consistent of the technologies.

LG definitely offers the most basic AI camera technology of the three. It does little more than color profile and filter switching. Google’s HDR+ is much more useful for general image enhancements. Huawei’s P20 Pro appears to do a bit of both.

Getting an AI camera to even detect the desired scene can be tricky, as there is only a limited range of options to pick from. LG’s software spits out plenty of words for what it’s looking at, but often this won’t result in a change of settings. Huawei’s is similarly finicky, struggling to tell the difference between Flowers and Greenery settings, and constantly switching in and out of the Blue Sky option. Google’s tech is better in this regard because it’s always available should you need it, but often subtle enough not to be missed if it doesn’t trigger.

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To me, the AI photos look worse in pretty much every case.
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India’s biometric database is creating a perfect surveillance state — and US tech companies are on board • Huffington Post

Paul Blumenthal and Gopal Sathe:

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Microsoft, which uses Aadhaar in a new version of Skype to verify users, declined to talk about its work integrating products with the Aadhaar database. But Bill Gates, Microsoft’s founder, has publicly endorsed Aadhaar and his foundation is funding a World Bank program to bring Aadhaar-like ID programs to other countries. Gates has also argued that ID verification schemes like Aadhaar in itself don’t pose privacy issues. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has repeatedly praised Aadhaar in both his recent book and a tour across India.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment, but according to a BuzzFeed report, the company told Indian customers not uploading a copy of Aadhaar “might result in a delay in the resolution or no resolution” of cases where packages were missing.

Facebook, too, failed to respond to repeated requests for comment, though the platform’s prompts for users to log in with the same name as their Aadhaar card prompted suspicions from users that it wanted everyone to use their Aadhaar-verified names and spellings so they could later build in Aadhaar functionality with minimal problems.

A spokesman for Google, which has its own payments platform in India called Tez, told HuffPost that the company has not integrated any of its products with Aadhaar. But there was outrage earlier in August when the Aadhaar helpline was added to Android phones without informing users. Google claimed in a statement to the Economic Times this happened “inadvertently” 

But the same features that are set to make tech companies millions are are also the ones that threaten the privacy and security of millions of Indians.

“As long as [the data] is being shared with so many people and services and companies, without knowing who has what data, it will always be an issue,” said Srinivas Kodali, an independent security researcher. “They can’t protect it until they encrypt it and stop sharing data.”

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You thought that democracies didn’t do surveillance databases?
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The broken promise of Android Treble • BirchTree

Matt Birchler:

»

Google surprised everyone when they announced the Android Pie (then just Android P) beta would be on more than just Google’s own phones this year. The full list was:

• Sony Xperia XZ2
• Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S
• Nokia 7 Plus
• Oppo R15 Pro
• Vivo X21
• OnePlus 6
• Essential PH‑1
Not a bad list! I mean it would be nice for Samsung, Motorola, LG, or HTC to be on the list, as these are all very niche phones in the US, but it’s certainly progress.

So here were are a month after Android Pie was released, so let’s look at how many of these beta phones have been updated to Pie. After all, they were running the beta all summer, so they should be ready to go, right?

Phone	Status
Sony Xperia XZ2:	Coming in November 2018
Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S:	Unknown, but alpha build leaked online
Nokia 7 Plus:	Coming in September 2018
Oppo R15 Pro:	Unknown, no announcements
Vivo X21:	”Q4 2018” so likely close to the end of the year
OnePlus 6:	Q4 2018, so likely also by December
Essential PH‑1:	Released same day as Pixel devices

I have 2 things to say about this:

One, this is a sad showing by these companies who were involved in the official Android Pie beta. They’ve had Pie in beta since May and they were not able to have it ready when Google released Pie to the world. A month after launch and we’re still looking at October through “someday” on most of these phones.

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Android OS updating is still like hunting the snark.
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Why California’s privacy law won’t hurt Facebook or Google • WIRED

Ex-Facebook ads person Antonio Garcia Martinez:

»

To understand why the CCPA won’t impact Facebook in any meaningful way requires understanding (at a high level, not to worry) how Facebook’s ads ecosystem treats data and outside partners. Unlike much of the ad-tech world, Facebook lives in a walled garden where no data leaves and very little enters. When an advertiser wants to retarget you, it exchanges your contact information with Facebook, both sides agreeing to a pseudonym for you, before placing you in one or more targeting buckets (“shoe shoppers,” for example). For Facebook’s most powerful and invasive micro-targeting, almost no data is shared between advertiser and publisher, and data middlemen are largely absent. Which is why, if you download your data from Facebook, the juiciest information is in the least remarkable section: “Advertisers Who Uploaded a Contact List With Your Information.” Users and journalists fixate on the supposed creepiness of Facebook having a call log for you, for example, but the real targeters are buried in that list of companies sharing contact information. The CCPA won’t change this.

So who is impacted by the CCPA?

«

Essentially, companies you’ve never heard of but which inveigle themselves into your browser and all your activities all the time.
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Chinese smartphone makers are winning in India — the fastest growing market • VentureBeat

Manish Singh:

»

India’s smartphone market is currently a key battleground for a number of phone makers from China, Taiwan, and South Korea. As the smartphone shipments slow in many parts of the globe, India’s handset market continues to grow. July saw 42 different smartphone models launched in the nation, up from 25 models during the same period last year, research firm Counterpoint told VentureBeat.

Most of the new handsets are from Chinese smartphone makers, many of whom see India as their most important market.

Leading the charge is Xiaomi, which last year ended Samsung’s five-year-streak as the top phone vendor in the nation. The period between April and June of this year was the fourth consecutive quarter for Xiaomi as the top vendor in India, according to IDC. Xiaomi (29.7% market share as of Q2) has aggressively undercut the offerings of its rivals by selling inexpensive but high-quality smartphones in India. A spokesperson for the company said that India is currently its most important market.

In the second quarter of this year, four of the top five smartphone makers were Chinese, according to IDC. In addition to Xiaomi, that number includes Oppo (7.6% market share), Vivo (12.6%), and Transsion (5%). Together with other Chinese phone makers such as Lenovo, the group held two-thirds of the local smartphone market in the second quarter, IDC said in a report published last month. Less than three years ago, the aggregate market share of these companies was under 15% in India.

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Apple is pretty much invisible there, with about 1% of the market. Possible clue: India is really, really price-conscious, and per-capita GDP is $1,940.
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Tesla, software and disruption • Benedict Evans

Evans considers what parts of Tesla’s IP might give it disruptive power: batteries, motors, software, “experience”, or autonomous driving:

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Tesla’s first bet is that it will solve the vision-only problem before the [rivals’] other sensors get small and cheap, and that it will solve all the rest of the [self-driving] autonomy problems by then as well. This is strongly counter-consensus. It hopes to do it the harder way before anyone else does it the easier way. That is, it’s entirely possible that [Google’s] Waymo, or someone else, gets autonomy to work in 202x with a $1000 or $2000 LIDAR and vision sensor suite and Tesla still doesn’t have it working with vision alone. 

The second bet is that Tesla will be able to get autonomy working with enough of a lead to benefit from a strong winner takes all effect – ‘more cars means more data means better autonomy means more cars’. After all, even if Tesla did get the vision-only approach working, it doesn’t necessarily follow that no-one else would. Hence, the bet is that autonomous capability will not be a commodity. 

This takes us back to the data. Tesla clearly has an asset in the data it can collect from the 200k+ Autopilot 2 cars it’s already sold. On the other hand, Waymo’s cars have driven 8m miles, doubling in the last year or so. Tesla’s have driven more (without LIDAR, but set that aside), but how much do you need? 

This is really a question about all machine learning projects: at what point are there diminishing returns as you add more data, and how many people can get that amount of data? It does seem as though there should be a ceiling for autonomy – if a car can drive in Naples for a year without ever getting confused, how much more is there to improve? At some point you’re effectively finished. So, how many cars do you need before your autonomy is as good as the best on the market? How many companies might be able to reach that? Is this 100 or a thousand cars driving for a year, or 1 million cars? And meanwhile, machine learning itself is changing quickly – one cannot rule out the possibility that the amount of data you need might shrink dramatically. 

So: it’s possible that Tesla gets SLAM working with vision, and gets the rest of autonomy working as well, and its data and its fleet makes it hard for anyone else to catch up for years. But it’s also possible that Waymo gets this working and decides to sell it to everyone.

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This article is quite hard to extract from, but that’s pretty much the nut. Evans says he started out writing it as a comparison of Tesla and Netflix, but Tesla is too particular in so many ways.
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Global smartwatch shipments grew 37%yoy in q2 2018, apple watch series 1 the most popular model.

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Looking at the different smartwatch platforms, Research Analyst, Flora Tang, added, “Proprietary platforms continue to dominate the smartwatch market. The smartwatch engine is mostly powered by Apple’s watchOS or Fitbit OS or Samsung’s lone adoption of Tizen OS and different flavors of RTOS implementations and all are closed platforms. Hybrid watches which are mostly non-touch smartwatches based on proprietary platforms and sensors, mostly from Swiss watchmakers declined 22% YoY.

The shift to Androidwear OS still hasn’t happened like we have seen in Android for smartphones. This is partly due to lesser focus, less intuitive UI and selective smartwatch OEM partnerships by Google over the last few years for Androidwear OS. Google hopes to change this with the upcoming launch of wear OS 2.0 based watches but will need a complete overhaul of the UI, powerful integration of key Android experiences and by striking key partnerships.”

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But look at Android’s share. That’s tiny. Of course its problem is, and remains, that most Android phone OEMs have tried and given up on watches because they lack the scale and expertise to make them profitably, while traditional high-end watch makers are a bit wary.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: a word was missing from Friday’s post. If you didn’t miss it, don’t worry, If you did, it was quite obvious, wasn’t it?

Apple’s got a shiny shindig coming up in September. Photo by Shinya Suzuki 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. Also: Friday! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How Facebook has flattened human communication • Medium

David Auerbach is a writer and software engineer:

»

The conclusions and impact of data analyses more often flow from the classifications under which the data has been gathered than from the data itself. When Facebook groups people together in some category like “beer drinkers” or “fashion enthusiasts,” there isn’t some essential trait to what unifies the people in that group. Like Google’s secret recipe, Facebook’s classification has no actual secret to it. It is just an amalgam of all the individual factors that, when summed, happened to trip the category detector. Whatever it was that caused Facebook to decide I had an African-American “ethnic affinity” (was it my Sun Ra records?), it’s not anything that would clearly cause a human to decide that I have such an affinity.

What’s important, instead, is that such a category exists, because it dictates how I will be treated in the future. The name of the category — whether “African American,” “ethnic minority,” “African descent,” or “black” — is more important than the criteria for the category. Facebook’s learned criteria for these categories would significantly overlap, yet the ultimate classification possesses a distinctly different meaning in each case. But the distinction between criteria is obscured. We never see the criteria, and very frequently this criteria is arbitrary or flat-out wrong. The choice of classification is more important than how the classification is performed.

Here, Facebook and other computational classifiers exacerbate the existing problems of provisional taxonomies. The categories of the DSM dictated more about how a patient population was seen than the underlying characteristics of each individual, because it was the category tallies that made it into the data syntheses. One’s picture of the economy depends more on how unemployment is defined (whether it includes people who’ve stopped looking for a job, part-time workers, temporary workers, etc.) than it does on the raw experiences and opinions of citizens.

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His “laws of internet data”, set out in this piece (which is an extract from his forthcoming book BITWISE), are terrific too.
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Exclusive: Apple Watch Series 4 revealed — massive display, dense watch face, more • 9to5Mac

Zac Hall:

»

In addition to discovering exclusive iPhone XS details today, 9to5Mac can exclusively share the first look at the new Apple Watch Series 4. This is the new Apple Watch that we believe Apple will unveil at its special event announced earlier today.

The biggest change is the all-new edge-to-edge display. Apple has been rumored to be working on ~15% bigger displays for both sizes of Apple Watch — that rumor has been confirmed in the images we’ve discovered. As expected, Apple has achieved this by dramatically reducing the bezel size around the watch display.

In addition to taking the display edge-to-edge, we’re also looking at a brand new watch face capable of showing way more information than the current faces offered. The analog watch face shows a total of eight complications around the time and within the clock hands. While we haven’t seen a new digital face yet, it’s likely that Apple has designed more new watch faces to take advantage of the larger display.

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I like the complications (the extra bits on the watch face). And that’s definitely a bigger display, though the same size body (you can tell from the watch strap).

Love to know where they found the marketing images, since they’re insisting these are not mockups.
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Exclusive: this is ‘iPhone XS’ — design, larger version, and gold colors confirmed • 9to5Mac

Guilherme Rambo:

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Earlier today Apple officially announced when and where it will hold its next big event. Apple’s September 12th event is expected to include the introduction of three new iPhones, and 9to5Mac can exclusively share the first look at both new 5.8in and 6.5in OLED iPhones: the iPhone XS.

We believe that the new 5.8-inch and 6.5-inch iPhones will both be called iPhone XS. We also believe iPhone XS will come in a new gold color option not previously offered on the new design. Apple leaked its own gold version of the iPhone X through the FCC, but it has not been available to purchase.

Other details are still to be determined, but we can report with certainty that iPhone XS will be the name, the OLED model will come in two sizes including a larger version, and each will be offered in gold for the first time.

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Follow the link: they definitely look like phones. They have nice wallpaper though.
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Exclusive: Trump told Kim Jong Un in Singapore he’d declare end to Korean War • Vox

Alex Ward:

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President Donald Trump told North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during their Singapore summit in June that he’d sign a declaration to end the Korean War soon after their meeting, according to multiple sources familiar with the negotiations.

But since then, the Trump administration has repeatedly asked Pyongyang to dismantle most of its nuclear arsenal first, before signing such a document.

That decision is likely what has led to the current stalemate in negotiations between the two countries — and the increasingly hostile rhetoric from North Korea.

“It makes sense why the North Koreans are angry,” one source told me. “Having Trump promise a peace declaration and then moving the goalposts and making it conditional would be seen as the US reneging on its commitments.”

Here’s the background: North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, which started the war. The United States, as part of a United Nations force, intervened on behalf of South Korea, and China later intervened on behalf of the communist North. It was a bloody conflict that ultimately killed some 5 million soldiers and civilians.

Fighting ceased in 1953, but the warring parties only signed an armistice — a truce — which means the war technically continues to this day. Both Koreas still have troops and weaponry at or near the border, known as the Demilitarized Zone. This is one major reason North Korea has oriented its foreign policy around how to deter a future attack by the United States and South Korea, mostly by developing a strong nuclear program that includes around 65 nuclear warheads and missiles that can reach all parts of the US mainland…

…in the agreement Kim and Trump signed after their summit, two items about establishing peace between the two countries came before a denuclearization commitment, which helps explain why North Korea thinks a peace declaration should come before nuclear concessions.

But Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has repeatedly asked Pyongyang to hand over 60 to 70% of its nuclear warheads within six to eight months.

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Trump is such an idiot. He thought he could get the most paranoid nuclear dictator in the world to fall for a bait-and-switch? So that’s the end of that. North Korea will go back to underground trading with China, Russia and Iran.
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Video game music is just as good an introduction to classical music for children as a concert, arts chief says • Daily Telegraph

Camilla Turner:

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James Williams, managing director at the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO), said that computer games are an important  “access point” for youngsters to experience classical music for the first time.

“I think exposure to orchestral music in all its forms is a fantastic thing,” he said. “It is encouraging to hear that there are platforms and opportunities for young people to engage with orchestral music, albeit in different mediums.  It is about sparking their interest.

“What we are finding is once we have lit that fire there is a real desire to carry that journey on and explore.If [computer games] are the trigger and the catalyst that can only be a really positive thing.”

The RPO commissioned a survey where children aged six to 16 were asked about how they encounter classical music. Just under one in six (15%) said they listen to classical music “when it’s part of a computer game I’m playing”, compared to just 11% who said “when I go to music concerts”.

The most popular ways in which children experience classical music were via film soundtracks, followed by television, according to the YouGov poll.

Mr Williams said that computer game music is now “recognised as an art form in its own right”, with some “very prestigious” composers involved.

“This is a very big industry now, all the major gaming companies commission their own music and they often have their own in house composers,” Mr Williams told The Daily Telegraph. “The church and the royal court were the two major sponsors of music hundreds of years ago. Now music is being created in different enterprises and genres.”

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My teen boys listen to video game music even if they aren’t playing. It’s a complete genre.
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Why Google doesn’t rank right-wing outlets highly • The Atlantic

Alexis Madrigal:

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Many right-wing outlets are embedded inside advocacy groups, like the Heritage Foundation’s The Daily Signal. Others are tiny blogs without the human resources to do original reporting: According to its staff page, HotAir, which Bolyard cited, has four editors (one of whom is pseudonymous). Even The Blaze, another outlet Bolyard cited, is reportedly down to fewer than 50 employees; the august Weekly Standard looks to have an editorial staff of only 35. Still other right-wing media organizations don’t adhere to the standards of journalism as the mainstream media recognizes them, peddling conspiracy theories or engaging in ethically questionable “reporting” practices or vowing to “break down the barriers between news and opinion, journalism and political participation.” Left-leaning outlets like Salon and DailyKos likewise shouldn’t expect to compete with The New York Times on Google placement.

All media outlets have to reckon with the power of opaque platforms, and there is plenty to critique about Google’s attempts to rank news stories, let alone URLs. The company’s concept of “relevance,” for example, is caught in a strange loop between what people want and what people think it provides: Google sees pages as relevant if people engage with them, but people trust Google to serve up relevant things, so they engage with what Google shows them…

…But even if the methodology is flawed, Google applies it equally to all the media organizations in its news universe. It might not be a “free” marketplace of ideas, but it is a marketplace with fairly well-known and nonpartisan rules. If right-wing sites aren’t winning there, maybe Google isn’t the problem.

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Ooh, the marketplace of ideas. Right-wing organisations don’t losing in marketplaces.
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Apple buys startup focused on lenses for AR glasses | Reuters

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Apple has acquired a startup focused on making lenses for augmented reality glasses, the company confirmed on Wednesday, a signal Apple has ambitions to make a wearable device that would superimpose digital information on the real world.

Apple confirmed it acquired Longmont, Colorado-based Akonia Holographics. “Apple buys smaller companies from time to time, and we generally don’t discuss our purpose or plans,” the iPhone maker said in a statement.

Akonia could not immediately be reached for comment. The company was founded in 2012 by a group of holography scientists and had originally focused on holographic data storage before shifting its efforts to creating displays for augmented reality glasses, according to its website…

…Akonia said its display technology allows for “thin, transparent smart glass lenses that display vibrant, full-color, wide field-of-view images.” The firm has a portfolio of more than 200 patents related to holographic systems and materials, according to its website.

Akonia also said it raised $11.6m in seed funding in 2012 and was seeking additional funding. It was unclear whether that funding ever materialized or who the firm’s investors were.

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Ah yes, augmented reality. We now go over to report on progress with the latest AR headset, from Magic Leap. Over to Geoff Fowler. Geoff?
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Magic Leap’s $2.3bn augmented-reality gear meets actual reality and stumbles • The Washington Post

Geoffrey Fowler got his hands on one:

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we’re not going to be staring down at phone screens forever, ignoring family members and walking into traffic. Apple and other tech companies are eying AR as a phone replacement, too. AR glasses have wider potential than virtual-reality gear, which effectively blindfolds you. The Magic Leap goggles, called Lightware, are translucent. When you wear them, it looks like a virtual world is painted on top of the real one — a creature is running around your desk; a web browser window is hanging on your wall.

There is, no doubt, a lot to be worked out for a new kind of computing device. But I’m surprised Magic Leap is not further along on the basics — or even just some experiences to make you go “whoa.” The Magic Leap One cannot be dismissed as just a prototype. Not only is it for sale, the company has announced a partnership to, at some point, bring a product to AT&T stores for demonstrations. Magic Leap says this first version is for “creators” and programmers.

Most curious: The company blamed some of my challenges on an improper fit of its headgear. My fit had been set up by an agent Magic Leap sends to deliver all purchases. I was left wondering how it will ever sell the product to millions if hardware calibration is that delicate…

…Google Glass was sunk, in part, by how it made its owners look. The Magic Leap One looks like a prop from “Mad Max: Fury Road” — very cool if you’re looking for a futuristic costume, but not something you would wear walking down the street. (Magic Leap doesn’t recommend wearing it outdoors, anyway.)

The design also introduces social problems. Though you can see the people around you, they have no idea what you’re looking at — if you’re paying attention, or even if you’re recording them. This information imbalance also contributed to Google Glass’s woes.

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Consumer genomics will change your life, whether you get tested or not • Genome Biology

Razib Khan and David Mittelman:

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These enormous numbers of genotyped consumers will generate massive returns on scale, allowing for greater innovation and insight. If hundreds of millions of consumers contribute to genetic databases, then the power of genealogical algorithms to infer matches will increase, until the likelihood of matching a relative, if you have close relatives (at least in the United States), will converge upon total certainty. Public databases such as GEDMatch now include data from one million samples, sufficient to predict a 90% chance of finding at least one third-cousin relative. Even with this ‘small’ database, consumers will almost certainly find relatives, and many of them. Genealogy has proved itself to be a sector with an affluent and passionate consumer base, as evidenced by the multibillion dollar valuation of the Ancestry online database thanks to millions of discretionary subscriptions.

The huge numbers of genotypes provided by consumers are valuable for genealogy, but as the numbers of genotypes increase into the millions, the data become even more valuable for trait prediction and medical applications. The large sample sizes allow for greater statistical power to detect genome-wide associations, which may be useful in linking genomic markers to functional traits and clinical phenotypes. 23andMe, for example, has amassed a database with sample numbers in the millions with which they are now working to obtain genotype–phenotype associations. The analysis of rare variations becomes immensely powerful when sample sizes approach a hundred million genotypes, and medicine could be truly personalized when such massive information reservoirs are available. We simply do not know what we might be able to do until we hit those sample sizes, as that is still unexplored territory.

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It’s the medical applications that are the most interesting, along with rapid DNA testing – even for a few genes which could affect your response to particular drugs, for example. The cross-matching that’s possible once you get a large enough population could, as they say, open up whole new territories.
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Smart speakers: 43% of german users can’t imagine life without one • Strategy Analytics

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7% of German residents now claim to use a smart speaker, and 43% of those users agree that they “can’t imagine living without” one. 61% say that smart speakers have “greatly improved the way I use technology at home,” and 68% agree that “smart speakers are much more useful than I thought they would be.” The results suggest that smart speakers are set to become widely established in German homes in the next few years. The online survey was carried out with 1000 users of smart speakers in Germany in July/August 2018.

Other key findings from the research include:

• German users are already purchasing multiple smart speakers to be used in different parts of the home
• The average number of smart speakers owned by each household is 1.96.
• The most popular location for smart speakers in Germany is the living room (71%), followed by the kitchen (29%) and the bedroom (27%)
• The most popular uses of smart speakers are listening to music from a streaming music service and getting weather information – 46% of users do this at least once a day
• 85% of German users are satisfied with their smart speaker overall. The least satisfying aspects of smart speakers are their security and their ability to answer any sort of question
David Watkins, Director, Smart Speakers at Strategy Analytics says: “Smart speakers may have come to the German market later than some other countries but this research suggests that they are likely to become just as popular. Application developers can now begin to work with these new platforms safe in the knowledge that they are quickly becoming established and that the number of users across the country will continue to grow rapidly.”

Strategy Analytics research suggests that shipments of smart speakers in Germany will reach 6.1M units in 2018, an increase of 185%. In Q2 2018 Amazon had a market share of 58%, followed by Google with 31%.

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The new Sonos Amp is coming to save your old speakers • The Verge

Chris Welch went to see Sonos’s new $600 just-an-amp:

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There will certainly be consumers who immediately go out and buy the Amp. But by and large, it’s going to be a powerful hub for high end audio dealers, installers, and integrators. The Connect:Amp became an essential piece of kit for people who make a career out of upgrading homes to be smarter and more automated. These folks undertake the challenge of outfitting every room with the best entertainment and music options money can buy. And then they bring order to everything so that it works under one unified system — from the likes of Crestron or Control4 — to make tech as convenient as possible for a client. They hide the wires and tuck all the necessary components into a neatly-organized rack. Our Home of the Future series sheds some light on the complexity of all this.

For Sonos, catering to these integrators can result in their clients purchasing thousands of dollars worth of the company’s products and spending years locked into the Sonos ecosystem. The goal is for the Amp to take the Connect:Amp’s place in the brain of a connected home. Because then it’s a central fixture that stays there for who knows how long. It’s a worthwhile business effort — especially when you remember that Sonos and its partners are increasingly trying to sell bundles of multiple speakers to people with cash burning a hole in their pocket. The Amp opens up even more lucrative bundle possibilities for Sonos and the many businesses that are part of the installed solutions channel.

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Until I read Welch’s piece, I was puzzled by who Sonos was aiming at with something at that price which isn’t a speaker (though those are also coming next year). This makes it clear.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

This is basically all homeopathy uses. You’d think they could avoid poisoning people. Photo by Petras Gagilas 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. It’s the weather. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The FTC is investigating a crowdfunding campaign that disappeared with more than $700K • The Verge

Ashley Carman:

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The Federal Trade Commission might have a renewed interest in justice for crowdfunding backers. Emails seen by The Verge show that the agency is investigating at least one crowdfunding campaign gone bad — the iBackPack — which raised more than $700,000 across both Indiegogo and Kickstarter.

The backpack’s creator, Doug Monahan, marketed the device as a Wi-Fi-enabled, battery-packed backpack that would power gadgets on the go and provide a local hot spot for wearers’ friends. It launched on Indiegogo in 2015 and Kickstarter in 2016. Years later, the backpack has yet to ship, although some backers did receive “beta” device accessories, like batteries and cables, some time ago. Monahan’s two previous campaigns never reached their funding goals, but they were eventually used to market the iBackPack.

These backers tell The Verge that an FTC agent began reaching out to them this week in an effort to research the campaign…

…The iBackpack backers believe Monahan sold their information to other crowdfunding companies, as evidenced by communications they’ve had with some of these groups. They’ve also been told that the years-long delays had to do with undefined battery issues, including possible lithium-ion battery explosions. Monahan last posted an update to Kickstarter and Indiegogo in March 2017.

One backer said he was told by the FTC agent over email that the agency will “always try to recover any money we can for consumers when we file cases in court. Unfortunately, if the money has already been spent by the company or individual there is no money to recover.”

The website for iBackPack no longer functions, nor does the listed email address, and Monahan is completely incommunicado. The backers hope the FTC can find him and recover their funds, or at least bring his ill-fated campaign to light.

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Monahan’s going to have to change his name if he wants to survive in the modern world. Searches on his name in future will be brutal.
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Homeopathic company expands recall as FDA warns of “life-threatening” infections • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

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On Tuesday, the agency issued its own alert about King Bio’s products and offered a scathing perspective of the company’s manufacturing standards and business.

In the agency’s alert, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb was quoted as saying: “We take product-quality issues seriously, and when we see substandard conditions during the course of our inspections—in this case conditions that are leading to high levels of microbial contamination with the potential to harm the public—we act swiftly to try to ensure the products are removed from circulation.”

The alert went on to note that, in a recent FDA inspection of King Bio’s manufacturing facility, the agency discovered that “several” microbial contaminants had turned up in the company’s products, including the bacteria Burkholderia multivorans. This is an opportunistic pathogen that causes severe illnesses in people with compromised immune systems and is a rare but emerging cause of meningitis. The FDA added that it also found evidence indicating “recurring microbial contamination associated with the water system used to manufacture drug products.”

After King Bio issued the expanded recall on August 22, the FDA immediately notified the company that it needed to do more. “The FDA contacted King Bio on August 23, 2018 and recommended the company again expand its recall to include all products that use water as an ingredient, including drug products for humans and animals,” the agency explained in the alert.

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Amazing: how can a company that (basically) sells water screw something like this up so colosally?
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Huge Wear OS redesign is coming, check out how it works in these GIFs • Android Authority

C. Scott Brown:

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The updated Wear OS will put more of an emphasis on getting to important information at the time it matters most to you. It also brings smarter health tracking and coaching (in tandem with the newly updated Google Fit) and more proactive help from Google Assistant.

Google hopes that these new features will help you get the most out of every minute of every day.

In the Wear OS redesign, you can easily see your notifications as well as quickly get to settings and functions that you use often. By swiping up on the screen you’ll see a stream of notifications along with Google Assistant-powered smart replies you can easily send with a quick tap.

Swiping down from the top of your watch face will bring up handy shortcuts to most important apps, like Google Pay, Find my Phone, and more.

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So, basically, a lot closer to Apple’s WatchOS.

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Miami’s other water problem • Bloomberg

Christopher Flavelle:

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As developers built out Southeast Florida, they found that instead of connecting each new home to the local sewer system, it was often easier to install septic tanks. Miami-Dade has about 90,000. “It was the magic carpet for quick, cheap development in Florida,” says Brian Lapointe, a research professor at Florida Atlantic University who focuses on the role of septic tanks in water contamination. These tanks are typically used in rural areas where homes are too far apart to justify connecting them to a central sewage system—but also in places where residential construction happens faster than municipal infrastructure development. Septic tanks trap solid waste, which is supposed to be pumped out, while the liquid stuff drains into the soil, where gravity and time filter out bacteria and whatever else is in it before it reaches groundwater. In Southeast Florida, that groundwater is especially close to the surface—and rising.

The state requires at least two feet of dry soil between the bottom of the drainage field and the top of the water table, but Lapointe says that during the wet season, the groundwater in parts of southern Florida already comes above that two-foot threshold. More intense flooding and rainstorms will swell the water table further, on top of the gains caused by sea level rise, sending partially treated human waste into the aquifer. That waste can contain E. coli bacteria, which cause diarrhea, vomiting, and even kidney failure. High levels of nitrates, another component of untreated waste, cause what’s called blue baby syndrome, in which infants’ blood can no longer carry sufficient oxygen.

Lapointe adds that one of the ways researchers track septic-tank contamination is by tracking the levels of acetaminophen in the groundwater. “People’s medications are coming with that septic-tank effluent.” The wonders of the human digestive system are many and varied, containing any number of other bacteria and viruses—“all these other organic compounds that may or may not be affected by the treatment at the utility plant,” he says.

How long does Miami have before the water table overwhelms the septic system? Officials, including the South Miami mayor, worry that the point of failure is closer than people realize. Says Stoddard, “I’m convinced that some of those septic systems are working by force of habit rather than by the laws of physics.”

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And this is only one of multiple ways that Flavelle describes in which south Florida’s water supply is overwhelmed and liable to pollution. But who wants to pay taxes for better services?
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With expectations of a positive second half of 2018 and beyond, smartphone volumes poised to return to growth • IDC

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Android’s smartphone share will hover around 85% share throughout the forecast. Volumes are expected to grow at a five-year CAGR of 2.4%, with shipments approaching 1.41bn in 2022. Among the more interesting trends happening with Android shipments is that average selling prices (ASPs) are growing at a double-digit pace. IDC expects Android ASPs to grow 11.4% in 2018 to $262, up from $235 in 2017.

IDC expects this upward trajectory to continue through the forecast, but at a more tempered low single-digit rate from 2019 and beyond. This is a sign of many OEMs slowly migrating their user base upstream to the slightly more expensive handsets. Overall this is a positive sign that consumers are seeing the benefits of moving to a slightly more premium device than they likely previously owned. The broad range of colors, screen sizes, features, and brands are a large catalyst for this movement.

For iOS, iPhone volumes are expected to grow by 2.1% in 2018 to 220.4m in total. IDC is forecasting iPhones to grow at a five-year CAGR of 2.0%, reaching volumes of 238.5m by 2022. With larger screen iOS smartphones coming up for launch in the second half of 2018, IDC has shifted greater volumes into the 6in to sub-7in screen size forecast for iOS. Products are on schedule to begin shipping in the third quarter and ramping up into the fourth quarter of 2018, with volumes growing to account for half of all iPhones shipped by 2022.

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The OS market is a complete duopoly; 85% Android, 15% iOS. And IDC sees it continuing that way. Apple gets the money, Android gets the volume.
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Amazon suspends reviews of US Open coverage after deluge of complaints • The Guardian

Mark Sweney:

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Amazon’s $40m five-year deal to broadcast the US Open to UK tennis fans – its first exclusive broadcast of a sports event – was meant to showcase the Silicon Valley giant’s streaming prowess and prove it can match traditional broadcasters and become a credible home for live sport.

The company, which has successfully streamed NFL matches in the US, has pulled out all the stops, including setting up its own studio at Flushing Meadows and drafting in former players such as Jim Courier, Greg Rusedski, Annabel Croft and Mark Petchey.

However, the internet giant has been inundated with complaints about a host of problems including the picture and sound quality of its streaming service and an inability to record matches. Almost 90% of the 650 reviews posted by subscribers to its £5.99 Prime Video service, home to its US Open coverage, gave Amazon just 1 or 2 stars.

“There is no replay option, no ability to record [and] the picture quality is very poor,” said one unhappy tennis fan. “It’s like going back in time 25 years.”

Others urged Amazon to “give tennis back to Sky and Eurosport”, which both used to broadcast the US Open in the UK before Amazon snapped up the exclusive rights.

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Total 765 complaints by the time it suspended them; 627 of them 1-star. The five-star ones insist that it’s just about download speed, and ignore the fact that ITV and Eurosport had coverage of every court – not just three or four. Someone’s getting fired at Amazon.
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Announcing LTE Beacon for asset tracking • Estimote

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Today we are proud to announce another revolutionary IoT device. Once again, we chose to leverage emerging IoT technologies (LTE M1 and NB-IoT) and have designed and productized a new device we call the “Estimote LTE Beacon.”

It’s a small, wireless beacon that can compute both its precise indoor and outdoor position. It can talk directly to the cloud and last multiple years on a battery.
Estimote LTE Beacons are designed primarily to seamlessly locate assets and vehicles when they move between indoor and outdoor environments. Their secure firmware/cloud software is crafted to provide true “proof of location” and “proof of delivery.”

Since the device is fully programmable using JavaScript, it can also support other creative use-cases — for example, it can act as a remotely managed iBeacon or a gateway used to configure other Bluetooth beacons.

The best way to think of this new IoT device is to imagine it as a small smartphone, but without a screen. It can last years between charges and the cost is similar to a beacon. It has cellular LTE connectivity, built-in GPS, and Bluetooth radio. And it is also possible to create and download apps that run on the LTE beacon.

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Apparently a use for this will be for Hilton and other hotel chains so that housekeepers can push it as a panic button: it’s accurate to a metre.
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Russia secretly ran news websites in eastern Europe • Buzzfeed News

Holger Roonemaa and Inga Springe:

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Russian state media created secret companies in order to bankroll websites in the Baltic states — a key battleground between Russia and the West — and elsewhere in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

The scheme has only come to light through Skype chats and documents obtained by BuzzFeed News, Estonian newspaper Postimees, and investigative journalism outlet Re:Baltica via freedom of information laws, as part of a criminal probe into the individual who was Moscow’s man on the ground in Estonia.

The Skype logs and other files, obtained from computers seized by investigators, reveal the secrets and obfuscating tactics used by Russia as it tries to influence public opinion and push Kremlin talking points.

The websites presented themselves as independent news outlets, but in fact, editorial lines were dictated directly by Moscow. Raul Rebane, a leading strategic communications expert in Estonia, said that this scheme and others like it are “systemic information-related activities on foreign territory. In other words — information warfare.”

He said that Russian propaganda networks in the Baltics had been operating for years but had become more intense recently. “The pressure to turn [Estonia] from facing the West to facing the East has grown.”

Long before Russian interference in the 2016 US election became one of the biggest stories in the world, and Kremlin disinformation campaigns became a household issue, Moscow faced accusations of trying to influence public opinion in the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which are all members of NATO.

The revelations about the websites in the Baltic states provide a rare and detailed inside look into how such disinformation campaigns work, and the lengths to which Moscow is willing to go to obscure its involvement in such schemes.

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Don’t pretend Facebook and Twitter’s CEOs can’t fix this mess • WIRED

Ellen Pao (who was, for a time, CEO of Reddit):

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Companies can address harassment without hurting their platforms. Taking down shitty content works, and research supports it. When we took down unauthorized nude photos and revenge porn, nothing bad happened. The site continued to function, and all the other major sites followed. A few months later, we banned the five most harassing subreddits. And we saw right away that if we kept taking down the replacement sites, they would eventually disappear. University researchers who studied the impact of the ban report that it successfully shut down the content and changed bad behavior over time on the site—without making other sites worse.

If you’re a CEO and someone dies because of harassment or false information on your platform—even if your platform isn’t alone in the harassment—your company should face some consequences. That could mean civil or criminal court proceedings, depending on the circumstances. Or it could mean advertisers take a stand, or your business takes a hit.

Today, I don’t see a single CEO or even board member who is willing (or perhaps able) to step up and say: “Enough. I’m willing to focus on quality and user experience. I am willing to take a hit on quantity to create a real place for meaningful conversation and to end harassment, misinformation, and the goal of engagement at any cost.” We need to fill this vacuum of leadership.

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Of course, advertisers are happy to ignore the consequences too; let’s not forget that. They’re the ones who can ultimately make these free-to-use services really think about what they’re doing. If companies were pulling multi-million campaigns and making a noise about it, perhaps that would do it. Though we’ve seen that with YouTube, and little changed.
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The rise of giant consumer startups that said no to investor money • Recode

Jason Del Rey:

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When Moiz Ali launched his startup Native, the maker of a natural deodorant brand, he couldn’t help but be self-conscious when mingling with other Bay Area entrepreneurs.

“In Silicon Valley, it’s often embarrassing when you haven’t raised money,” Ali told Recode recently. “When I’d go to parties or dinners, entrepreneurs would talk about how many employees they had. But for me, it was just me.”

Native eventually secured $550,000 from professional and individual investors, a relative pittance in the startup world where $100 million funding rounds and billion dollar valuations are discussed in a way that could sound like the norm.

For Ali, the limited funds meant cautious spending on marketing, a staff size that never rose above 10 and, even rarer, the need to turn a profit on each sale. In the earliest days, Ali and his small team also followed up with every disappointed customer — an education that eventually led to what’s called “product-market fit,” or the creation of a good that a large number of people in a certain market want.

So when Native sold to Procter & Gamble last year for $100 million in cash — just two-and-a-half years after launching — Ali could laugh last; he still owned more than 90% of his business and was worth a fortune. As important to him, he kept a strong grip on the brand’s destiny by remaining its CEO.

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In a way, this story is unintentionally hilarious: as though a new tribe had been discovered, which Doesn’t! Take! Venture! Capital! Funding! When in reality, working your way up from “small and profitable” to “big and profitable” has been a favoured business approach since forever. All that’s slightly tweaked is that “direct-to-consumer” can use the web to expand their sales base, and follow up with happy (or sad) customers.
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Nest x Yale smart lock now supports Google Assistant voice commands • Android Central

Joe Maring:

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This is the first time any voice commands have been available for the Nest x Yale, and with Google Assistant support, you’ll be able to check the status of the lock, lock your door, and add it to any of your Assistant Routines. For example, if you add the Nest x Yale lock to a Routine titled “Goodnight”, you can turn off your lights, set an alarm, and lock all your doors with just one command.

All of these controls should prove to be mighty convenient, but take note that you won’t be able to unlock your door using Google Assistant. This was done as a sort of security precaution, and if you ask us, is a smart move on Nest’s part. Nest says you’ll be able to use Assistant commands for the Nest x Yale on both Google Home speakers and smartphones.

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As it happens I wasn’t asking you, Joe, but it’s staringly obvious that you don’t want a door that can be unlocked using voice control. We don’t even need to go into why.

Meanwhile, the “Goodnight” routine is undoubtedly a clever idea, and those of a nervous disposition might like to be able to be sure whether the door is locked or unlocked. Baby steps, but that’s the way to make the smart home really work.
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Fitbit heart data reveals its secrets • Yahoo Finance

David Pogue:

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Before you freak out: Fitbit’s data is anonymized. Your name is stripped off, and your data is thrown into a huge pool with everybody else’s. (Note, too, that this data comes only from people who own Fitbits — who are affluent enough, and health-conscious enough, to make that purchase. It’s not the whole world.)

Most of what you’re about to read involves resting heart rate. That’s your heart rate when you’re still and calm. It’s an incredibly important measurement. It’s like a letter grade for your overall health. “The cool thing about resting heart rate is that it’s a really informative metric in terms of lifestyle, health, and fitness as a whole,” says Scott McLean, Fitbit’s principal R&D scientist.

For one thing — sorry, but we have to go here — the data suggests that a high resting heart rate (RHR) is a strong predictor of early death. According to the Copenhagen Heart Study, for example, you’re twice as likely to die from heart problems if your RHR is 80, compared with someone whose RHR is below 50. And three times as likely to die if your RHR is over 90.

Studies have found a link between RHR and diabetes, too. “In China, 100,000 individuals were followed for four years,” says Hulya Emir-Farinas, Fitbit’s director of data science. “For every 10 beats per minute increase in resting heart rate, the risk of developing diabetes later in life was 23% higher.”

So what’s a good RHR? “The lower the better. It really is that simple,” she says. Your RHR is probably between 60 and 100 beats a minute. If it’s outside of that range, you should see a doctor. There could be something wrong.

…Fitbit’s data confirms a lot of what cardiologists already know. But because the Fitbit data set is ridiculously huge, it unearthed some surprises, too.

“I was a researcher in my past life,” says McLean. “You would conduct an experiment for 20 minutes, then you’d make these huge hypotheses and conclusions about what this means for the general population. We don’t have to do that. We have a large enough data set where we can confidently make some really insightful conclusions.”

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Some of it really is counterintuitive – such as these on heart rate by age, and against BMI.

It would be great to be able to analyse this data in more detail – but Fitbit’s not making it public.
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