Lenovo has paid a fine to settle charges over preinstalled software which could spy on users. Photo by keso on Flickr.

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

Tinder Experiments II: Guys, unless you are really hot you are probably better off not • Medium

“Worst-online-dater”:

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This study was conducted to quantify the Tinder socio-economic prospects for males based on the percentage of females that will “like” them. Female Tinder usage data was collected and statistically analyzed to determine the inequality in the Tinder economy. It was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men. The Gini coefficient for the Tinder economy based on “like” percentages was calculated to be 0.58. This means that the Tinder economy has more inequality than 95.1% of all the world’s national economies. In addition, it was determined that a man of average attractiveness would be “liked” by approximately 0.87% (1 in 115) of women on Tinder…

…The Tinder economy has a higher Gini [inequality] coefficient than 95.1% of the countries in the world. The only countries that have a higher Gini coefficient than Tinder are Angola, Haiti, Botswana, Namibia, Comoros, South Africa, Equatorial Guinea, and Seychelles (which I had never heard of before).

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And yet..
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Lenovo settles FTC charges it harmed consumers with preinstalled software on its laptops • Federal Trade Commission

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Lenovo Inc., one of the world’s largest computer manufacturers, has agreed to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission and 32 State Attorneys General that the company harmed consumers by pre-loading software on some laptops that compromised security protections in order to deliver ads to consumers.

In its complaint, the FTC charged that beginning in August 2014 Lenovo began selling consumer laptops in the United States that came with a preinstalled “man-in-the-middle” software program called VisualDiscovery that interfered with how a user’s browser interacted with websites and created serious security vulnerabilities.

“Lenovo compromised consumers’ privacy when it preloaded software that could access consumers’ sensitive information without adequate notice or consent to its use,” said Acting FTC Chairman Maureen K. Ohlhausen. “This conduct is even more serious because the software compromised online security protections that consumers rely on.”

VisualDiscovery software, developed by a company called Superfish, Inc., was installed on hundreds of thousands of Lenovo laptops. It delivered pop-up ads from the company’s retail partners whenever a user’s cursor hovered over a similar looking product on a website.

To deliver its ads, VisualDiscovery acted as a “man-in-the-middle” between consumers’ browsers and the websites they visited, even those websites that were encrypted. Without the consumer’s knowledge or consent, this “man-in-the-middle” technique allowed VisualDiscovery to access all of a consumer’s sensitive personal information transmitted over the Internet, including login credentials, Social Security numbers, medical information, and financial and payment information.

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Lenovo isn’t just “one of the world’s largest computer manufacturers”; at the time it was the biggest, and it’s still second-biggest. This was just crap.

Also, where’s the settlement and fine with the UK’s or EU’s regulator?
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Fake war photographer gets exposed after fooling the world • Petapixel

Jan Nicolas:

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if it weren’t for some mistakes by Martins and an attentive BBC journalist named Natasha Ribeiro, Martins’ amazing life and photography career would likely still be enjoying its meteoric rise. But Ribeiro became suspicious of Martins after learning about his life and work, and she became even more suspicious when she dug deeper and couldn’t find a single person who had ever met him.

Not a single Brazilian journalist in Iraq, where Martins had supposedly been covering extensively. Not any of the authorities who would have had dealings with Martins. Not any members of the NGOs he said he was a part of.

Martins had given a story and photos to VICE about the battle in Peshmerga, but two other Brazilian correspondents who were there at the same time said they had never met this newly famous photographer — something that is nearly impossible given how tight-knit the community of conflict journalists is.

Martins had told BBC Brazil through a WhatsApp chat that he was working for the United Nations, saying: “I am a humanitarian (volunteer) in the United Nations field and I work in the organization of refugee camps.” But an investigation revealed that there was no record of Martins having ever worked for the UN Refugee Agency, which the organization’s press chief, Adrian Edwards, confirmed to the BBC.

The investigation into Martins soon revealed other oddities, BBC Brazil reports. Martins had developed relationships with at least 6 young, beautiful, and successful women through social networks, and then used each one to relay information to journalists. BBC Brazil found that none of the girlfriends had ever met Martins in real life.

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Ribiero’s report is only on the Portuguese-language section of the BBC.com site; I couldn’t find her name on the English version. But the photos were taken by a real photographer – Daniel Britt. “Martins” flipped them left-for-right to offer as his own. (Something new that TinEye and anti-plagiarism system need to be aware of.)
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Android 8.0 Oreo, thoroughly reviewed • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo has been inside ur android for years now; here’s his review of an OS whose layers will be coming to people some time in the next, oh, a few years. These are just the headings; it’s too big (20,000 words) to excerpt. (Though if you want to jump to the “Good, Bad, Ugly” wrapup, it’s here.)

Remember when desktop operating systems used to merit long piece-by-piece reviews?

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So, coming soon to your phone, your tablet, your watch, your TV, your car, your “things,” and your VR headset—it’s Android 8.0 Oreo. Let’s dive in.

Table of Contents

Project Treble—Finally, real progress on the fragmentation problem
HAL versioning and deprecation
Working with SoC vendors
A ROM revolution
Isolating the media stack
Android’s biggest re-architecture, ever
Notifications—Android’s best feature gets better
The new layout—and its awesome “By the Way” section
The new colors and media notifications
Snoozing notifications
Notification Channels: Great for apps that have it, terrible for apps that don’t
Icon badges and shortcuts
The new ambient notification display
The Great Background Processing Lockdown
Mandatory JobScheduler
RIP Implicit Broadcasts
No more wakelocks, no silent background services
(Somewhat) gracefully declining on older OSes
Limiting scans for location and Wi-Fi
A real API for floating apps
Security
Google Play Protect—Google says “please don’t install antivirus apps”
Sideloading changes
Security grab bag
Emoji: New glyphs and an all-new design
EmojiCompat and Downloadable fonts—updating emojis without a system update
System UI improvements
Adaptive icons—Shape shifting, animated icons
A new widget picker
Picture-in-Picture for phones and tablets
Smart text selection and TensorFlow Lite
AutoFill
Settings—A new theme, a new layout
Streaming OS Updates—never fail an update due to storage space again
Rescue Party
Android Go—Scaling Android for the next billion users
The OS in “Go” mode
Google Play Services gets chopped up
Apps get special “Go” versions and features
Color management
Physics-based animation and the new Easter Egg
The new “SDCardFS” file system wrapper
Grab Bag
“Foundational” improvements address updates, security, speed, and battery life
The Good
The Bad
The Ugly

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How is ARCore better than ARKit? • Super Ventures Blog on Medium

Matt Miesnieks on Google’s augmented reality software kit v Apple’s:

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One developer I spoke to jokingly said “I just looked at the ARCore SDK and they’ve literally renamed the Tango sdk, commented out the depth camera code and changed a compiler flag”. I suspect it’s a bit more than that, but not much more (this isn’t a bad thing!).

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Tango (that money pit for Lenovo and Asus) had been in development for two years inside Google; Apple caught up by buying small AR companies. This is the part where he talks about a key element:

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the real benefits of calibration become visible at the outer limits of the system performance (by definition). Both ARKit and ARCore can both track quite well for many meters before the user notices any drift. I haven’t seen any head-to-head tests done over long times/distances, but it doesn’t really matter. Developers are still getting their heads around putting AR content immediately in front of you. Users can barely comprehend that they can freely walk around quite large distances (and there’s no content to see there anyway). So in terms of how AR applications are really being used, any differences in calibration are pretty much impossible to detect. By the time developers are pushing the boundaries of the SDKs, Google is betting there will be a new generation of devices on the market with far more tightly integrated sensor calibration done at the factory.

For example I spoke to one of the largest IMU [inertial measurement unit] OEMs this week about this topic and he said that their mobile phone IMUs are only factory calibrated to a single operating temperature, in order to reduce costs. This means that the IMU hardware is tuned so it gives the fewest errors at this one temperature. As you continue to use the phone it gets hotter & this will cause the IMU to behave slightly differently than it’s calibrated for, and errors will result. This is fine for most IMU use cases (rotate from portrait to landscape mode for instance), but for VIO once the device heats up, the IMU measurements for dead-reckoning calculations become unreliable and the tracking drifts. This OEM can easily start calibrating for multiple temperature ranges if they are asked (and they will be!), meaning that’s one less source of error that Google’s ARCore VIO code has to eliminate device-type by device-type. Apple, being vertically integrated could address these challenges much faster, while Android needs to wait for the changes to filter through an ecosystem.

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A serf on Google’s farm • Talking Points Memo

Josh Marshall runs the politics website, and has observed Google’s growing monopoly over everything that he and other publishers do online, from ads to email to documents to search to traffic:

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What we’ve experienced is a little different. Google is so big and so powerful that even when it’s trying to do something good, it can be dangerous and frightening.

Here’s an example.

With the events of recent months and years, Google is apparently now trying to weed out publishers that are using its money streams and architecture to publish hate speech. Certainly you’d probably be unhappy to hear that Stormfront was funded by ads run through Google. I’m not saying that’s happening. I’m just giving you a sense of what they are apparently trying to combat. Over the last several months we’ve gotten a few notifications from Google telling us that certain pages of ours were penalized for ‘violations’ of their ban for hate speech. When we looked at the pages they were talking about they were articles about white supremacist incidents. Most were tied to Dylann Roof’s mass murder in Charleston.

Now in practice all this meant was that two or three old stories about Dylann Roof could no longer run ads purchased through Google. I’d say it’s unlikely that loss to TPM amounted to even a cent a month. Totally meaningless. But here’s the catch. The way these warnings work and the way these particular warnings were worded, you get penalized enough times and then you’re blacklisted.

Now, certainly you’re figuring we could contact someone at Google and explain that we’re not publishing hate speech and racist violence. We’re reporting on it. Not really. We tried that. We got back a message from our rep not really understanding the distinction and cheerily telling us to try to operate within the no hate speech rules. And how many warnings until we’re blacklisted? Who knows?

If we were cut off, would that be Adexchange (the ads) or DoubleClick for Publishers (the road) or both? Who knows?

…Google is so powerful and so all-encompassing that it can actually do great damage unintentionally. As a general matter, I’d say our worst experiences with Google – and to be fair, none have been that bad – have been cases like these where Google is so big and its customers and products (people are products) are so distant from its concerns that we’ve gotten caught up in or whiplashed by rules or systems that simply don’t make any sense or are affirmatively absurd in how they affect us. One thing I’ve observed with Google over the years is that it is institutionally so used to its ‘customers’ actually being its products that when it gets into businesses where it actually has customers it really has little sense of how to deal with them…

…When I discussed a few of these issues on Twitter a couple days ago, some people said: Well, the publishers brought it on themselves. They went for the cheap clicks or gaming Facebook’s or Google’s algorithms. So they brought it on themselves.

This is true to an extent but I think misses the point. It’s not about anyone’s individual morality. Not the publishers or the platform monopolies. It’s a structural issue. Monopolies are bad for the economy and they’re bad politically. They also have perverse consequences across the board. The money that used to fund your favorite website is now going to Google and Facebook, which doesn’t produce any news at all.

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He offers another example to do with email which is almost comical – except it’s so potentially disastrous. The strange thing is that Google is becoming so dominant people are either thinking “oh well” or “we must do everything possible not to be in this position”. Most are in the former group.
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Google: time to return to not being evil • Vivaldi Browser

Jon von Tetzchner has known Google since its earliest days, having been the first to incorporate its search (in the Opera browser):

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Our cooperation with Google was a good one. Integrating their search into Opera helped us deliver a better service to our users and generated revenue that paid the bills. We helped Google grow, along with others that followed in our footsteps and integrated Google search into their browsers.

However, then things changed. Google increased their proximity with the Mozilla foundation. They also introduced new services such as Google Docs. These services were great, gained quick popularity, but also exposed the darker side of Google. Not only were these services made to be incompatible with Opera, but also encouraged users to switch their browsers. I brought this up with Sergey Brin, in vain. For millions of Opera users to be able to access these services, we had to hide our browser’s identity. The browser sniffing situation only worsened after Google started building their own browser, Chrome.

Now, we are making the Vivaldi browser. It is based on Chromium, an open-source project, led by Google and built on WebKit and KHTML. Using Google’s services should not call for any issues, but sadly, the reality is different. We still have to hide our identity when visiting services such as Google Docs.

And now things have hit a new low.

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The low? Vivaldi’s AdWords account was suspended, for no clear explanation. Live by the AdWord, die by the AdWord.
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Samsung is ‘a ship without a captain,’ says co-CEO • CNET

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[Samsung group leader Jay Y.] Lee’s imprisonment has [Samsung Electronics chief] Yoon [Boo-Keun] stressed, he told Süddeutsche Zeitung. He added that as head of the consumer electronics business, he takes a near-term view for products while it’s Lee’s responsibility as vice chairman to map the long-term strategy. But Yoon now has to think longer term, the newspaper reported.

Yoon also told Süddeutsche Zeitung that the Internet of Things hasn’t taken off as quickly as hoped because there aren’t clear and compelling consumer use cases, and privacy and security are also considerations. Still, Samsung plans for all of its products to be internet-connected by 2020.

Samsung’s newest focus for the Internet of Things is embedding its Bixby voice assistant into its various connected appliances and televisions. The “smart sidekick” debuted on the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus earlier this year and will also be available on the Note 8 when it hits the market.

Bixby acts as a new interface to control your phone, but it will be different for Samsung’s appliances and televisions, Yoon told Süddeutsche Zeitung. For Samsung’s connected refrigerators, Bixby will be able to recommend recipes based on what you have in your kitchen, the newspaper said. For TVs, it would learn what shows you normally watch and automatically play them when you turn on the television.

“Integration is already in full swing,” Yoon said, according to Süddeutsche Zeitung.

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Also interesting: not using OLED in TVs because of “some long-term problems with colour and burn-in”. Which implies something about using OLED phones for longer than a few years – TVs tend to last five years or more.
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Trump’s South Korea trade talk is just that • Bloomberg Gadfly

Shelly Banjo:

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even without North Korea’s recent escalation, it seems unlikely America will totally quash the 2012 trade pact, known as KORUS.

America is South Korea’s second-largest trading partner after China, while South Korea holds a spot much farther down the US list. But America doesn’t actually have the capability or know-how to manufacture a whole lot of everyday things it needs, such as cell phones and computers.

So even though South Korea represents the US’s seventh-largest trading partner, the North Asian nation sells a lot more than it buys: America’s goods trade gap with South Korea was $27.7bn in 2016, more than double the $11.9bn deficit in 2007.

That means even if Trump wanted to rip up KORUS, there’s little chance the river of stuff flowing into the US would stop. Rather, dissolving the pact would drive up consumer prices of smartphones and SUVs.

From a corporate perspective, fewer than 1% of South Korean companies depend on America for a meaningful amount of sales. Out of 2,750 publicly traded businesses, just 66 get more than a fifth of their revenue from the Americas, according to an analysis of data compiled by Bloomberg. 

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Samsung would be affected; the US is its biggest market. But there’s just no way this is going to happen. The timing is terrible, and the idea is stupid.
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What do US wireless operators want in the next iPhone? • BTIG Research

Walter Piecyk:

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We estimate that iPhones represent nearly half of all smartphones in the United States. Wireless operators and investors are therefore very interested in what technologies and spectrum bands are included each year as they can determine whether these companies are able to leverage their network and spectrum investments. Adding spectrum to a network doesn’t do much good if the smartphones don’t take advantage of it. Unfortunately, the operators don’t really know for sure what is included in each iPhone prior to its launch. So, here’s a quick review of what each national wireless operator in the United States would like included this year.

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This is pretty technical, but would be useful to anyone who’s really into phone/network interaction.
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Landmark Intel judgment critical for other EU antitrust cases • Reuters

Foo Yun Chee:

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Europe’s top court will rule on Wednesday whether US chipmaker Intel offered illegal rebates to squeeze out rivals in a judgment that could affect EU antitrust regulators’ cases against Qualcomm and Alphabet’s Google.

The ruling by the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) could also provide more clarity on whether rebates are anti-competitive by nature or whether enforcers need to prove the anti-competitive effect.

The European Commission in a 2009 decision said that Intel tried to thwart rival Advanced Micro Devices by giving rebates to PC makers Dell, Hewlett Packard, NEC and Lenovo for buying most of their computer chips from the company.

It handed down a €1.06bn ($1.3bn) fine, a record that was subsequently eclipsed by the €2.4bn fine levied on Google in June this year.

A lower court upheld the EU competition authority’s decision in 2014, but last year an ECJ court adviser backed Intel’s arguments.

An adverse ruling for the Commission on Wednesday could result in a radical review of ongoing cases, said Andrew Ward, a partner at Madrid-based law firm Cuatrecasas.

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Hard to see how a rebate isn’t, in effect, a price cut or subsidy. This isn’t like consumer rebates, where the expectation is that only a small percentage will actually take advantage of them because of the tedium of the rebate process.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

Your happiness with an app is often inversely related to the length of time you spend using it. Photo by CommScope on Flickr.

A selection of 13 links for you. Your mum did warn you. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Myanmar conflict: Fake photos inflame tension • BBC News

Jonathan Head is the BBC’s South East Asia correspondent:

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A recent surge in violence in the northern part of Myanmar’s Rakhine state has been accompanied by a slew of misleading images being shared on social media.

Photos and video purporting to be from the conflict have been circulated widely. Much of it is gruesome and inflammatory, and much of it is wrong.

Deep-seated mistrust and rivalry between Rohingya Muslims and the majority Buddhist population in Rakhine have led to deadly communal violence in the past. The Rohingya have faced decades of persecution in Myanmar where they are denied citizenship.

(Warning: This article contains images some people may find upsetting.)

Information is very sketchy and journalists have very limited access to this region. Even those who have managed to reach the area have found that the volatile situation and intense hostility towards the Rohingyas makes it very difficult to gather information.

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Myanmar, remember, is a country which has gone from 10% mobile phone penetration at the end of 2013 among its 60 million population to 50% by mid-2015 to 80%; over 60% total have smartphones.

And guess what: fake news and radical hate groups have taken full advantage of that, in a country which has gone from barely any broad sharing of news to the uncontrolled form. (The linked article is from May 2017.)
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App ratings • Time Well Spent

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On average, comparing between “Happy” and “Unhappy” amounts of usage of the same apps, their unhappy amount of time is 2.4x the amount of happy time.

😊 22 mins per day on Facebook vs. ☹️ 59 mins.
😊 12 mins per day on CandyCrush instead of ☹️ 47 mins.
😊 29 mins per day on Reddit instead of ☹️ 57 mins.
😊 26 mins per day on Instagram instead of ☹️ 54 mins.

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Data collected from a pool of 200,000 iPhone users – so this feels representative. It’s part of a project by Time Well Spent which is ” trying to bring attention to how big tech companies are designing their apps to capture as much of your attention as possible. Our goals with using these apps are not the same as their business goals.”

That graph showing how unhappy users spend more time in apps is dramatic.
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Even an Apple store can’t prevent the death of a US mall • Quartz

Mike Murphy:

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The American mall is dying, and not even Apple can save it.

While more brick-and-mortar stores are projected to close this year than during the 2008 recession, Apple remains the world’s most profitable retailer; according to market research, it generates $5,546 per square foot of retail space. Apple’s stores are so effective at bringing in foot traffic that they can lift an entire mall’s sales by 10%.

But nothing rose gold can stay: Apple blog 9to5Mac noticed on Sept. 1 that Apple’s store in Simi Valley, California (just north of Los Angeles), is shutting down on Sept. 15. It is the first Apple store to permanently close in the US.

9to5Mac postulates that the mall the store is in, the Simi Valley Town Center, faces declining traffic, as many other stores there have also been shuttering. Earlier this year, Macy’s said it would be closing one of two stores it operates in the mall—one of the 65 locations it plans to close across the US in 2017.

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There’s another Apple store about 10 miles from the one that’s closing. But how strange if Apple’s retail march should be stymied by the collapse of other retailers.
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Instagram Says Hack That Targeted Celebrities Was Wider Than Previously Thought – WSJ

Deepa Seetharaman:

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Social-media app Instagram said a hack it disclosed earlier this week affected a larger number of users than it previously detected.

Instagram, owned by Facebook, earlier this week said hackers stole email addresses and phone numbers—but not passwords—tied to some celebrity accounts.

On Friday, the photo- and video-sharing app said the theft affected regular users as well and wasn’t just “targeted at high-profile users.” Instagram reiterated that no passwords were stolen.

The contact information was stolen after hackers exploited a bug in Instagram’s software that the company says has since been patched up.

Instagram, which has 700 million monthly users, said it doesn’t know which specific accounts were affected and said a “low percentage” of its users were affected, without providing more specific figures.

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Email addresses and phone numbers. That’s calamitous. The article says “it typically takes a lot of work to gain control of a user’s phone number or email account without the help of a stolen password”. Perhaps they’re unaware of SIM fraud, which is an easy way to get those. But for celebrities (or anyone), having someone else get your phone number in this way is bad.
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iOS cropping • All this

Dr Drang:

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I’m pretty sure I’ve always been frustrated by the way cropping works in the iOS Photos app. It’s usually presented as being so easy—just drag the crop handles where you want—but that isn’t really how it works. Quite often, a handle you aren’t dragging moves too, screwing up your careful editing…

…There is a way around this, but it’s also unintuitive, and I often forget about it until my crop is ruined and I have to start over again.

Instead of dragging the crop handles at the corners of the image, touch and drag from the middle of an edge. For God knows what reason, cropping this way doesn’t change the position of the other crop handles.

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I wasn’t particularly aware of this as an annoyance, but it clearly bugs him a lot. (Also, I don’t think it will change.)
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Flat UI elements attract less attention and cause uncertainty • Nielsen-Norman Group

The usability testers compared “flat” and “slightly 3D” pages:

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When we compared average number of fixations and average amount of time people spent looking at each page, we found that:
• The average amount of time was significantly higher on the weak-signifier versions than the strong-signifier versions. On average participants spent 22% more time (i.e., slower task performance) looking at the pages with weak signifiers.
• The average number of fixations was significantly higher on the weak-signifier versions than the strong-signifier versions. On average, people had 25% more fixations on the pages with weak signifiers.
(Both findings were significant by a paired t-test with sites as the random factor, p less than 0.05.)

This means that, when looking at a design with weak signifiers, users spent more time looking at the page, and they had to look at more elements on the page. Since this experiment used targeted findability tasks, more time and effort spent looking around the page are not good. These findings don’t mean that users were more “engaged” with the pages. Instead, they suggest that participants struggled to locate the element they wanted, or weren’t confident when they first saw it.

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Even so, people are going to go with flat design, because it’s trendy. For a couple of years. Then it’ll be 3D buttons everywhere.
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Paris Hilton backs an eyebrow-raising crypto project • FT Alphaville

Kadhim Shubber:

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What is LydianCoin? Oh boy, you’re going to enjoy this.

LydianCoin is from a company called Gravity4, whose chairman and chief executive, Gurbaksh Chahal, pleaded guilty in 2014 to misdemeanour battery charges of domestic violence.

The digital advertising business claims to be “the world’s first A.I. big data marketing cloud” and is raising $100m (!!!) through the sale of Lydian “tokens” to finance the development of… well, nothing really:

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100% of the proceeds raised by the sale of Lydian tokens will be held by LydianCoin Pte. (in fiat currency or cryptocurrency, as financial, security, and other considerations may demand) as reserves against the cost of services to be performed for Lydian token holders upon negotiation of the token back to Lydian.

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If the whitepaper is to be believed, the whole idea here is that people will pay for Lydian tokens and use them to buy advertising campaigns from LydianCoin, which in turn licences its technology, products and services from Gravity4. The money won’t be used for anything. It will just sit there, covering the enormous balance sheet liability this ICO will create for LydianCoin.

We’ve often talked about how ICOs are like buying funfair tickets for a funfair that hasn’t been built yet. This is like buying tokens for rides at a funfair when you could just use your money to pay for the rides directly.

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I think this is going to flop, because of the action taken in the next link.
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China herds ICO cats • Bloomberg Gadfly

Tim Culpan on the decision by China to regulate (essentially, stop) “initial coin offerings” – the profusion of new cryptocurrencies, which are blooming like algae in a fetid pond:

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Chinese policy makers have allowed bitcoin to flourish almost unchecked. To be sure, regulators had shown their concern over the digital currency aiding capital flight and money laundering by curtailing withdrawals earlier this year. Yet their general hands-off approach allowed China to become a global center of trading and mining (the process by which transactions are verified).

Libertarians decry the limited controls China has put on bitcoin, while others have argued that regulation equals legitimacy. Those who think the government has been heavy-handed need to take a look at the country’s foreign-exchange and capital controls.

Banning ICOs means regulators are taking a much firmer stance on this fundraising method than they ever had on bitcoin. Offerings were getting so out of hand that it was becoming a cliche. I’ve written before on why these new tokens are like penny stocks (and that’s a good thing), so I won’t belabor the point. But whereas bitcoin is just one crytpocurrency propped up by a demand narrative, the majority of new tokens issued this year are of zero value. Let me be clear: It’s not that most of these new coins are of low value; most of them have no value whatsoever.

About 10% of all money raised in ethereum-based ICOs has been stolen by cybercriminals, according to a recent estimate by Chainalysis. By August, cybercrime losses had tallied $225m, the digital currency analysts wrote. And that doesn’t take into account all the money flowing into tokens that weren’t stolen, but simply funded scams or projects with no future.

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The ICO bubble is just astonishing. I really find it hard to believe that people are so credulous. But clearly some are.
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Russian election hacking efforts, wider than previously known, draw little scrutiny • The New York Times

Nicole Perlroth, Michael Wines And Matthew Rosenberg:

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The calls started flooding in from hundreds of irate North Carolina voters just after 7 a.m. on Election Day last November.

Dozens were told they were ineligible to vote and were turned away at the polls, even when they displayed current registration cards. Others were sent from one polling place to another, only to be rejected. Scores of voters were incorrectly told they had cast ballots days earlier. In one precinct, voting halted for two hours.

Susan Greenhalgh, a troubleshooter at a nonpartisan election monitoring group, was alarmed. Most of the complaints came from Durham, a blue [Democrat]-leaning county in a swing state. The problems involved electronic poll books — tablets and laptops, loaded with check-in software, that have increasingly replaced the thick binders of paper used to verify voters’ identities and registration status. She knew that the company that provided Durham’s software, VR Systems, had been penetrated by Russian hackers months before.

“It felt like tampering, or some kind of cyberattack,” Ms. Greenhalgh said about the voting troubles in Durham.

There are plenty of other reasons for such breakdowns — local officials blamed human error and software malfunctions — and no clear-cut evidence of digital sabotage has emerged, much less a Russian role in it. Despite the disruptions, a record number of votes were cast in Durham, following a pattern there of overwhelming support for Democratic presidential candidates, this time Hillary Clinton.

But months later, for Ms. Greenhalgh, other election security experts and some state officials, questions still linger about what happened that day in Durham as well as other counties in North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia and Arizona.

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SharknAT&To • Nomotion Blog

J. Hutchins dug into the AT&T cable modem, as provided to millions of customers, and found tons of awful security holes:

»

It was found that the latest firmware update (9.2.2h0d83) for the NVG589 and NVG599 modems enabled SSH and contained hardcoded credentials which can be used to gain access to the modem’s “cshell” client over SSH. The cshell is a limited menu driven shell which is capable of viewing/changing the WiFi SSID/password, modifying the network setup, re-flashing the firmware from a file served by any tftp server on the Internet, and even controlling what appears to be a kernel module whose sole purpose seems to be to inject advertisements into the user’s unencrypted web traffic. Although no clear evidence was found suggesting that this module is actually being used currently, it is present, and vulnerable.

«

In other words, the superuser account has a hardcoded password. And it could insert ads into your internet browsing. Delightful.
link to this extract

Why 16% of the code on the average site belongs to Facebook, and what that means • Medium

Ben Regenspan:

»

According to data collected by BuiltWith.com, 6% of the top 10,000 most high-traffic sites load content from Facebook’s servers. For the vast majority of them, that content is likely Facebook’s Javascript SDK, a huge block of code that is needed to display such features as the Like button (as seen on many media sites) and Facebook comments widgets (also used on many big media sites, Buzzfeed among them). The SDK code is so big that it represents about 16% of the total size of all Javascript on the average web page.

One of the culprits behind modern websites taking so long to download
As a sizable and widely-used software library, the Facebook SDK is a nice way of illustrating some of the answers to the questions: just why is the average site today so big? And how much does size actually matter?

…If you want to use the Like button, stop and reconsider. Facebook no longer displays Likes of a page prominently (or, in most cases, at all) on user timelines. It’s better to use a simple custom Share button or link, and as a side benefit, doing so will prevent Facebook from tracking all visits to your page and interfering with the privacy of your users. Sites that have eliminated the Like button have failed to identify any negative impact of doing so when it comes to Facebook traffic referrals.

«

link to this extract

Donald Trump’s EPA is now attacking journalists [updated] • Gizmodo

Tom McKay:

»

On Saturday, Associated Press journalists Jason Dearen and Michael Biesecker reported at least five toxic, Houston-area Superfund sites in the path of Hurricane Harvey had been deluged with floodwater, potentially distributing the assorted nasty things contained within across a much larger geographical area. The AP report noted while its reporters were able to access the sites via boat, the Environmental Protection Agency was not on scene, and did not provide a timeline for when its staff would be able to visit them.

Now the EPA, which is under the control of Donald Trump appointee and longtime EPA hater Scott Pruitt, has fired back with one of the administration’s favorite tactics: smearing the messenger. In an extraordinary statement that appeared on the agency’s website on Sunday, the EPA called the AP report “misleading” and attacked Biesecker’s “audacity” and credibility.

“Here’s the truth: through aerial imaging, EPA has already conducted initial assessments at 41 Superfund sites—28 of those sites show no damage, and 13 have experienced flooding,” the EPA wrote.

Notably, the EPA tried to bury that its “initial assessment” was conducted with “aerial images,” not actual on-site assessments, and that the agency had failed to visit at least 11 possibly storm-damaged Superfund sites as of Saturday. That is completely in line with the original AP report.

«

The EPA tried to raise the stakes by claiming that Biesecker “has a history of not letting the facts get in the way of his story”. This is untrue; the EPA’s mouthpiece claimed it was untrue that Pruitt met DOW CEO Andrew Liveris before deciding not to ban a Dow-made pesticide. In fact, the meeting, as reported by Biesecker, did take place; but it was removed from the EPA’s schedule. The two certainly met, at an energy conference in Houston.

The pesticide, by the way, is reckoned by scientists to affect the brain development of foetuses and infants. But Pruitt decided to allow its sale to continue. Whose environment is the agency protecting, precisely?
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*Insane state of today’s advertising part 3.* • Google+

Artem Russakovski:

»

Companies like Cedato and http://Adap.tv (now OneByAOL?) are the scum of the Internet. Ads like these make me so mad. Just look at this shit.

A static ad loads. Then behind the scenes thousands of requests continue to execute, absolutely destroying browser performance. And the worst part is nothing is even happening on the screen – the ad that is showing is completely static.

Currently reproducible here:
1. Open Chrome Dev Tools on desktop.
2. Load up http://api-us-east-1.adsnative.com/v1/creative.html?crid=rtb%3A45%3Anone&sid=0be93fcee93f4debb1b4d92a1f5eb39f_22eb05f1
3. Disable your ad blocker on that page and reload.
4. Observe the sad state of today’s advertising hasn’t changed in years since I first brought it up here https://plus.google.com/+ArtemRussakovskii/posts/7jMWV7oCQpn and here https://plus.google.com/+ArtemRussakovskii/posts/VgrLdYcoifr.

Advertising companies that do this – you are the reason people use ad blockers. Greedy and incompetent.

«

Russakovski is founder of AndroidPolice.com and apkmirror.com; anything that drives people to use adblockers is bad news for him. As has emerged, what’s going on here is fraud – stuffing video preroll ads into static ads.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Website readers! You could sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam. (Aren’t you glad you had to hunt this out rather than having it take over the page?)

Mechanical reproduction rights date back to the phonograph. But is Spotify exempt? Photo by origamidon on Flickr.

You can now 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. Not to be used for underground tests. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The fake-news fallacy • The New Yorker

Adrian Chen reviews a book on “the art of fake news”:

»

One lesson you get from Hemmer’s research is that the conservative skepticism of gatekeepers is not without a historical basis. The Fairness Doctrine really was used by liberal groups to silence conservatives, typically by flooding stations with complaints and requests for airtime to respond. This created a chilling effect, with stations often choosing to avoid controversial material. The technical fixes implemented by Google and Facebook in the rush to fight fake news seem equally open to abuse, dependent, as they are, on user-generated reports.

Yet today, with a powerful, well-funded propaganda machine dedicated to publicizing any hint of liberal bias, conservatives aren’t the ones who have the most to fear. As Facebook has become an increasingly important venue for activists documenting police abuse, many of them have complained that overzealous censors routinely block their posts. A recent report by the investigative nonprofit ProPublica shows how anti-racist activism can often fall afoul of Facebook rules against offensive material, while a post by the Louisiana representative Clay Higgins calling for the slaughter of “radicalized” Muslims was deemed acceptable. In 2016, a group of civil-rights activists wrote Facebook to demand that steps be taken to insure that the platform could be used by marginalized people and social movements organizing for change. There was no high-profile meeting with Zuckerberg, only a form letter outlining Facebook’s moderation practices. The wishful story about how the Internet was creating a hyper-democratic “participatory culture” obscures the ways in which it is biased in favor of power.

«

link to this extract

How Russian & alt-right Twitter accounts worked together to skew the narrative about Berkeley • Arc Digital

“Caroline O”:

»

The narrative surrounding last weekend’s protests in Berkeley took shape on social media and was picked up, at least in part, by mainstream news outlets. The result was a skewed presentation of events that was almost entirely devoid of the context in which they took place. Even more troubling: that narrative was influenced by pro-Russian social media networks, including state-sponsored propaganda outlets, botnets, cyborgs, and individual users.

In the case study below, I describe how the narrative surrounding Berkeley was picked up and shaped by Russian-linked influence networks, which saw a chance to drive a wedge in American society and ran with it. Next, I look at the individual accounts and users that were identified as top influencers on Twitter, and explore what they were posting, how they worked together to craft a narrative, and the methods they used to amplify their message. Finally, I look at how news coverage of the events in Berkeley was shaped by the skewed narrative that emerged on social media.

This is just a single case study in a larger story, but it serves as an important reminder that Russia is still exploiting social media to harm U.S. interests — and that plenty of Americans are willing to join in on the effort.

«

On Twitter as @rvawonk, she does do a lot of interesting, factual analysis.
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Spotify: don’t compare us to Napster • Hollywood Reporter

Eriq Gardner:

»

Spotify, facing a lawsuit claiming “staggering” copyright infringement, is attempting to distinguish itself from illegal file sharing services of yore and putting an issue front and center that will likely command notice throughout the entertainment and tech sectors. Namely, in court papers filed Wednesday, Spotify argues that “streaming” implicates neither reproduction nor distribution rights under copyright law.

Bob Gaudio, a songwriter and founding member of the group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, is suing Spotify in the wake of the company’s proposed $43 million settlement in a class action. In Gaudio’s lawsuit, that settlement is called an “empty gesture that encourages infringement and is entirely insufficient to remedy years of illegal activity.”

Spotify, led by CEO Daniel Ek, licenses sound recordings from record labels and also has blanket licenses from the likes of ASCAP and BMI so that it may publicly perform musical compositions.

What Gaudio’s lawsuit alleges — as did the prior class action — is Spotify is violating the reproduction rights of publishers and songwriters. Those making a mechanical reproduction of a musical composition can obtain a compulsory license and bypass having to negotiate terms with publishers. However, those doing so have to follow certain protocol like sending out notices and making payments. The lawsuit claims that Spotify hasn’t done an adequate job of doing this.

«

This would be a hell of a result for Spotify if it succeeds in this argument. Somehow I doubt it will, though.
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Upgrade downturn: why are people holding on to their old phones? • The Guardian

Sarah Butler and myself on what’s stalling the phone market:

»

A common refrain among phone owners outside the [Regent Street Apple Store] shop is to point to their handset and state: “I’ll probably wait till it breaks.” The new iPhone makes its debut on 12 September and is rumoured to have a number of new features for an Apple device, including doing away with the home button on the front of the handset, but there is a perception among mobile phone owners that the pace of technological evolution has slowed.

Phone replacement has slumped in the UK since 2013, when consumers bought a new one every 20 months. According to retailer Dixons Carphone, people now buy a new handset every 29 months.

Speaking outside the Apple store on Regent Street, Leon Allard, 31, said: “These days, especially with the iPhone, there is not a lot of difference between the phones coming out.” He added that price was also a “big thing” when considering upgrades, with the next iPhone expected to cost at least £800 in the UK.

At a nearby Carphone Warehouse branch, there was little urgency for an upgrade. Tinu Thomas, 29, said he had owned a Motorola phone for nearly four years and would probably hold on to it for another year. “I would like to say I’m a gadget freak,” he said. “I love technology but I don’t see the value in upgrading. I use my phone for Facebook, WhatsApp and voice calls and I’m still able to do all of that with my almost four-year-old phone.”

«

link to this extract

Response to NY Post article • NYPD News

Deputy commissioner of Information & Technology Jessica Tisch:

»

This Sunday, while a Post reporter was writing her story, NYPD officers used their smartphones to help respond to over 25,000 911 calls; ran 18,000 searches; and viewed 1,080 flyers of missing or wanted persons. Sunday is a slow day.

Three years ago we made the decision to bring mobility to the NYPD. At that time, neither iOS nor Android phones allowed us to cost-effectively utilize prior investment in custom Windows applications.

Moreover, we assessed that the Windows platform would be most effective at achieving our goal of securing 36,000 devices that would be used for sensitive law enforcement operations. This was of paramount importance. The devices were rolled out as tools to help officers fight crime, enhance their safety and improve policing in New York City.

The contract entered provided for the smartphones at no cost. It also allowed for the NYPD to replace the smartphones with devices of our choosing two years later, also at no cost.

We have since continually reviewed the evolution of mobile platforms. A year ago, we learned that improvements in Apple controls would allow NYPD to responsibly and cost effectively move our mobility initiative to the Apple platform. We began plans to make the transition, which will take effect this fall.

Our smartphone initiative is 45% under budget. Based on current rate of spending, we expect to stretch what was initially budgeted at two years of spending to more than four years.

«

Ah. So the phones were free, and they can be replaced for free. Microsoft took a gamble that it would be stronger by now, but instead it failed. I wrongly thought that Tisch would get fired over this, before knowing the details of the free phones.

Instead, she looks quite smart: for the cost of a few app rewrites, the NYPD doesn’t have to gamble on the mobile platform war.
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Inside the black market where people pay thousands of dollars for Instagram verification • Mashable

Kerry Flynn:

»

“I mean if Mashable wants to pay for it, I can get you a blue check over night,” reads a recent Twitter direct message.

This is a guy who knows a guy, a middleman in the black market for Instagram verification, where anyone from a seasoned publicist to a 22-year-old digital marketer will offer to verify an account—for a price. The fee is anywhere from a bottle of wine to $15,000, according to a dozen sources who have sold verification, bought verification for someone else, or directly know someone who has done one or the other.

“These guys pay all their bills from one to two blue checks a month,” another message from the middleman added later.

The product for sale isn’t a good or a service. It’s a little blue check designated for public figures, celebrities, and brands on Instagram. It grants users a prime spot in search as well as access to special features. 

«

link to this extract

Rental camera gear destroyed by the solar eclipse of 2017 • Lens Rentals

Zach Sutton:

»

despite our warnings, we still expected gear to come back damaged and destroyed. And as evidence to our past posts of broken gear being disassembled and repaired, we figured you’d all want to see some of the gear that we got back and hear what went wrong. But please keep in mind, this post is for your entertainment, and not to be critical of our fantastic customer base. Things happen, and that’s why we have a repair department. And furthermore, we found this to be far more exciting than we were disappointed. With this being the first solar eclipse for Lensrentals, we didn’t know what to expect and were surprised with how little of our gear came back damaged. So without further ado, here are some of the pieces of equipment that we got back, destroyed by the Solar Eclipse of 2017.

The most common problem we’ve encountered with damage done by the eclipse was sensors being destroyed by the heat. We warned everyone in a blog post to buy a solar filter for your lens, and also sent out mass emails and fliers explaining what you need to adequately protect the equipment. But not everyone follows the rules, and as a result, we have quite a few destroyed sensors. To my personal surprise, this damage was far more visually apparent than I even expected, and the photos below really make it visible. 

«

Lots more where that came from. Lesson: though many will, in any crowd there are people who won’t listen.
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Leaked Surface Mini images provide a closer look at Microsoft’s canceled tablet • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Surface Mini images leaked earlier this year, and now we’re getting an even closer look at Microsoft’s canceled tablet. Evan Blass has published marketing images for the Surface Mini, revealing a red rubber case with a kickstand and full specifications. The Surface Mini was reportedly a 7.5in device with a 1440 x 1080 display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor, 1GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage. It appears that Microsoft was planning black, red, and blue variants of the Surface Mini before its cancellation.

«

Very wise to cancel it. The vogue for mini-tablets passed in 2013 or so; phablets have eaten that market for all but kids, and this wouldn’t have appealed to kids.
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Windows is doomed • The Week

Navneet Alang:

»

the continually rising tides of Apple and Google’s platforms will likely wash Windows away as people shift their work and play habits to opposing platforms. While many are fond of saying that you still need Windows for real work, as analyst Benedict Evans likes to point out, “the connective tissue of work needs to be rebuilt” in light of mobile, AI, and the cloud — and it’s hard to see how Windows will be a part of that as new technologies emerge in new places.

It’s not that Microsoft is oblivious to this reality. Recognizing a do-or-die scenario, Microsoft has now retrenched when it comes to Windows, putting its efforts into desktop and making Windows work on ARM, the type of chips found in iPhones and Android phones. The new, rumored goal is that using ARM will not only let Microsoft and its partners make thin, light laptops and tablets with great battery life, it will also let them create a phone that runs full Windows and can be used as a complete computer when docked into a keyboard, mouse, and monitor — and in doing so, give Microsoft a complete device to offer its millions of customers.

But this is likely just fantasy. As the deal with Amazon suggests, companies need a platform of their own to build out the vertically integration that has made Apple and Google so wildly successful. Platforms are like networks, and without the core node of mobile in a mobile-first world, Microsoft’s Windows cannot last.

«

I wouldn’t hold my breath on this one. COBOL is pretty old, and it’s still underpinning banks and transactions around the world.
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Stop trying to kill the headphone jack • The Next Web

Abhimanyu Ghoshal:

»

Over a year ago, I wrote about how phone makers were starting to do away with headphone jacks. I’ve seen this unfortunate trend – which I hoped would just be a passing fad – continue to plague devices well into 2017, and it looks like we’re still in danger of losing one of the most essential features our phones have to offer today.

We’ve tested a wide range of phones over the past year, and found that a number of premium handsets like the the iPhone 7, the Essential Phone and Xiaomi’s Mi 6 have nixed the jack. Others, like the OnePlus 5, Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8 and the brand new LG V30, still have them. The story is similarly fragmented at the lower end of the price spectrum too.

Basically, there’s no consensus among brands, or even within them, about whether it’s a good idea to ditch the jack – but I implore hardware makers to keep it around, for all that is holy and good in the world.

For one thing, there’s no real reason to kill it off. Last year, LeEco’s president of R&D Liang Jun told The Verge that ditching the headphone jack and going USB-C only didn’t impact the manufacturing process, or help the Chinese gadget maker save space in its phone design.

If other brands believe this approach can help them make phones slimmer, I’d like to register my protest against the idea. I’m fine with a device that I can literally talk to, connect to the internet and shoot ultra-high-resolution video with being 8mm thick, thanks very much. If there’s any honest justification at all for killing the jack, I haven’t heard it yet.

«

I’ve been using an iPhone 7 for a year, and it doesn’t have a 3.5mm jack. It came with a dongle. I haven’t noticed the lack of a headphone jack port at any point, except a couple of time on a car journey where I wanted to listen to a podcast on the stereo and couldn’t (the car had Aux In, no Bluetooth). The radio worked though.

I think if there’s a dongle, it’s not a problem. If there isn’t, it could be a problem – but Bluetooth gets around a lot of things now.
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Augmented Reality: iOS Human Interface Guidelines • Apple Developer

»

Use the entire display to engage people. Devote as much of the screen as possible to viewing and exploring the physical world and your app’s virtual objects. Avoid cluttering the screen with controls and information that diminish the immersive experience.

Create convincing illusions when placing realistic objects. Not all AR experiences require realistic virtual objects. Those that do, however, should include objects that appear to inhabit the physical environment in which they’re placed. For best results, design detailed 3D assets with lifelike textures and use the information ARKit provides to position objects on detected real-world surfaces, scale objects properly, reflect environmental lighting conditions on virtual objects, cast virtual object shadows on real-world surfaces, and update visuals as the camera’s position changes.

Consider physical constraints. Bear in mind that people may attempt to use your app in an environment that’s not conducive to an optimal AR experience. For example, they may open your app in a location where there isn’t much room to move around or there aren’t large, flat surface areas. Try to anticipate scenarios that might present challenges, and clearly communicate requirements or expectations to people up front. Consider offering varying sets of features for use in different environments.

Be mindful of the user’s comfort. Holding a device at a certain distance or angle for a prolonged period of time can be fatiguing.

«

There are a couple more – safety, gradual introduction of motion, audio and haptic feedback – and then much more. One of the key ones is going to be “handling problems”. Not long to go now.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Your Wi-Fi router might be slowing down your network if you’re using old standards with new ones. Photo by portalgda on Flickr.

A selection of 13 links for you. But you knew that. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Smartphone growth expected to remain positive as shipments forecast to grow to 1.7 billion in 2021 • IDC

»

According to a new forecast from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, worldwide smartphone shipments are expected to maintain positive growth through 2021. IDC expects shipments to grow from 1.47 billion in 2016 to just over 1.7 billion in 2021. In 2016, the market experienced its first-ever single-digit growth year with shipments up just 2.5% over 2015.

IDC believes the combination of new user demand as well as a somewhat stagnant 2-year replacement cycle will be enough to keep the market at a 5-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.3%.

“The big inflection point that everyone is watching for is when the smartphone market experiences its first year-over-year decline,” said Ryan Reith, program vice president with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Device Trackers.

«

Even this looks a bit optimistic if the South American economies don’t get their act together.

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Facebook removes one million accounts every day, security chief says • CNBC

John Shinal:

»

Facebook turns off more than 1 million accounts a day as it struggles to keep spam, fraud and hate speech off its platform, its chief security officer says.

Still, the sheer number of interactions among its 2 billion global users means it can’t catch all “threat actors,” and it sometimes removes text posts and videos that it later finds didn’t break Facebook rules, says Alex Stamos.

“When you’re dealing with millions and millions of interactions, you can’t create these rules and enforce them without (getting some) false positives,” Stamos said during an onstage discussion at an event in San Francisco on Wednesday evening.

Stamos blames the pure technical challenges in enforcing the company’s rules — rather than the rules themselves — for the threatening and unsafe behavior that sometimes finds its way on to the site.

«

link to this extract

Sony WF-1000X release date, price and specs • CNET

David Carnoy:

»

Say hello to the WF-1000X, Sony’s first set of totally wireless earphones due to hit stores in September. What makes them special? Well, not their price. They’re $200, £200 or AU$399. But they are lightweight, sports friendly and have something Apple’s AirPods don’t have: active noise cancellation.

That’s right, this model is part of Sony’s new 1000X line, which includes over-the-ear and neckband-style models, all of which feature Sony’s excellent noise cancellation, as well as the ability to customize the sound via Sony’s Headphones Connect app.

Like a lot of these types of headphones, battery life isn’t great at three hours, but the earphones come with a battery case that gives you an additional two charges for a total of nine hours.

«

1) Terrible name

2) less good battery life. AirPods manage five hours per charge; the case recharges them back up; for as much as 24 hours total.

3) noise cancellation is nice, but not essential

4) pricier.
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Fitbit well-positioned with new ionic smartwatch • Kantar Worldpanel

»

Contrary to gloomy forecasts for some vendors resulting in part from the Apple Watch attracting much of the attention and enthusiasm, activity trackers continue to hold a strong lead in the market, making up 65% of the installed base versus 35% for smartwatches. But the momentum belongs to the smartwatches, which have experienced growth rates of more than 50% year-over-year, while the base for activity trackers grew just 15% during the same period.

In the US, Fitbit dominates the overall wearables space. Nearly half (47%) of all US wearables owners have a Fitbit. While 16% of owners in the wearables category have an Apple Watch, Apple dominates the smartwatch category, with a 41% share. Apple has performed very well in terms of wearables customer satisfaction, with buyers rating the Apple Watch an 8.6 out of 10. Fitbit customers give that company a slightly lower satisfaction rating (8.2 out of 10), but Fitbit’s latest offering, the Charge 2, draws level in satisfaction with the Apple Watch, also at 8.6 out of 10…

…Unlike the rapid growth seen in demand for smartphones, there does not appear to be a significant group of potential buyers for wearables waiting in the wings. Amongst those who do not currently own a wearable, a mere 4.6% tell us they will “probably” or “definitely” purchase one in the next 12 months.

Of those that intend to purchase, 39% say they will buy a smartwatch, 30% a fitness tracker, and 31% remain undecided.

«

So about 1 in 20 looking to buy a wearable; overall, 1 in 50 looking for a smartwatch. Out of 100 million smartphone users, that would be 2m sold. Apple’s doing better than that, so either demand is falling or it’s very uneven.
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Wi-Fi Beacon Pollution • r1ch.net

Richard Stanway:

»

All Wi-Fi routers / access points broadcast something called a “beacon” every 100 milliseconds. This contains all the data that a device needs in order to be able to join the network. From what frequencies and encryption modes are used to what kind of power saving and 802.11n parameters are supported – it’s all there. When you open up the list of wireless networks on your phone for example, the data from all the beacon frames is what’s used to fill in the list of networks. Beacon frames are broadcast constantly, even if there are no clients connected.

Unfortunately the 802.11 specification requires that beacon frames are broadcast at the slowest speed and oldest standard that the access point supports, in order to allow compatibility with old devices. This means that beacons are often sent out using 802.11b at 1 mbps, a standard which dates back to 1999 and is very slow compared to today’s 450 mbps 802.11n or 1.3gbps+ 802.11ac networks. As radio spectrum is a shared medium, no other nearby devices on the same frequency can send while a beacon is being transmitted.

Wireless devices are not supposed to begin sending until the spectrum is clear, which results in another problem when access points are in different locations (as is typically the case). A client in between two distant access points will see beacons from both of them, but the access points themselves are not aware of each other, thus creating interference when they transmit at the same time.

«

Stanway advises setting your router to support only 802.11n or 802.11ac if possible because the older standard generate more beacon frames which take up more radio airtime.
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A tale of two industries: how programming languages differ between wealthy and developing countries • Stack Overflow Blog

David Robinson:

»

In a recent post, we saw that the traffic to Android questions (as a percentage of a country’s Stack Overflow visits) tends to be negatively correlated with a country’s GDP per capita. This may lead us to wonder if the same is true of any other tags.

When we explore major programming languages and platforms, some that stand out besides Android include PHP, Python, and R.

The amount of Android and PHP traffic is negatively correlated with a country’s income, while Python and R are positively correlated. In each case we can see exceptions (Korea uses more Android than we’d expect, and China more Python), but generally the correlations are strong. (Each has an R2 around .5-6, with p-values « 10-6 after adjusting for multiple testing).

We’ll emphasize that we’re not suggesting any causality here. We’re certainly not suggesting that programming language choice affects a country’s average income, but we’re also not saying that a country’s wealth directly influences their use of technologies. We suspect that the drivers are likely a mixture of economic and social factors (level of education, age of the software industry, level of outsourcing) that are, in general, correlated with a country’s wealth.

«

link to this extract

Hey Cortana, open Alexa: Microsoft and Amazon’s first-of-its-kind collaboration • The Official Microsoft Blog

Andrew Shuman is corporate VP of Cortana Engineering:

»

With Alexa as a guest on Cortana, Cortana users will now have another way of making their lives easier with a great shopping experience. Say you are at work, and you receive a text from your partner saying, “We’re running low on diapers.” In the future, on your Windows 10 PC, iPhone or Android phone, you could simply say, “Hey Cortana, open Alexa,” and ask Alexa to order diapers using your preferred payment method for your Amazon account.

«

Everything about this scenario is “whaaat?” Why doesn’t your partner yell for Alexa to do it? Or just order it on their phone rather than texting? Why do you ask Cortana on your (for example) Android phone rather than Google Assistant? Why get Alexa to order the nappies when you could just do it on the Amazon app?

As Neil Cybart said in his newsletter, this is – despite appearances – a coalition of weaklings: Amazon has no presence except in the home, and Microsoft has no presence… anywhere, really. (Well, Windows 10 PCs, if people really want. Except there’s no Alexa there.)
link to this extract

Ev Williams on Medium’s Spotify-ish future, why publishers left, and why he changed his mind about ads • Nieman Journalism Lab

»

Laura Hazard Owen: A lot of the publishers left, though. The Ringer, The Awl.
Williams: Some of the bigger ones have left. There are hundreds of publishers still on Medium. We talked to The Ringer and some of the others at the beginning of the year about what their plans are and what our plans are, and we made clear that anyone who is dedicated to pursuing an ad-driven business model is probably not the best fit. We’re not going to be developing or incorporating ad technology. It made sense for publishers who needed that to migrate off. There are lots of publishers who weren’t doing [advertising] and for the most part they’ve stayed, so that’s really the distinction.
There wasn’t a lot of doubt that we shouldn’t partner with people who had incompatible business models with us.

Owen: So native advertising — which you guys previously seemed to see as a promising area — is gone, too?
Williams: We’re not doing any advertising, native or not. All the advertising on Medium, pretty much, unless publishers did it themselves, has been native. We did a few native content projects with brands, both ourselves and in partnership with some of our publishers. Those deals actually worked pretty well, and we saw a path there, but it wasn’t the long-term path that we wanted to pursue.

«

It’s going to be niche at best.
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Rethinking audio editing on mobile • Anchor app on Medium

Michael Mignano, co-founder and CEO of Anchor, a podcasting app, realised that trying to edit waveforms of sound on a mobile was a non-starter:

»

When we introduced our Anchor Videos feature a few weeks back, we started automatically transcribing audio so our users could easily convert their segments into something digestible and shareable on social media. It occurred to us that this same transcription could be leveraged to design the simple, intuitive, mobile-first experience we had been looking for. After all, when you’re trimming most audio, what are you really doing? You’re deciding which words or phrases you want to include and which you want to exclude. So that’s what we did.

Starting today, you can now edit call-ins and other people’s segments before adding them to your own station or podcast. It’s simple:

Before adding your audio, choose a starting word and an ending word, and you’re done.

We’ll discard the rest of the audio and just add the part you want your listeners to hear. It’s that easy (and it really does work great on mobile, even if you’re on the go).

We’re thrilled with this first step towards making audio easier to edit on mobile, and we can’t wait to see what new kinds of creativity this feature unlocks.

«

GOD WHAT A BRILLIANT, OVERDUE FEATURE. Even if it only transcribes approximately – a 90% correct rate is fine – this will make editing on a mobile (and even more so, on a tablet) a breeze. Available free for iOS and Android.

A boon for podcasters, and perhaps journalists looking to transcribe stuff – or radio journalists looking to create clips. Tell your friends. (I’ve got no connection with Anchor, just think it looks smart. Waveforms are a pain to edit.)
link to this extract

Kushners’ China deal flop was part of much bigger hunt for cash • Bloomberg

David Kocieniewski and Caleb Melby:

»

Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser, wakes up each morning to a growing problem that will not go away. His family’s real estate business, Kushner Cos., owes hundreds of millions of dollars on a 41-story office building on Fifth Avenue. It has failed to secure foreign investors, despite an extensive search, and its resources are more limited than generally understood. As a result, the company faces significant challenges.

Over the past two years, executives and family members have sought substantial overseas investment from previously undisclosed places: South Korea’s sovereign-wealth fund, France’s richest man, Israeli banks and insurance companies, and exploratory talks with a Saudi developer, according to former and current executives. These were in addition to previously reported attempts to raise money in China and Qatar…

…The mortgage on their tower is due in 18 months. This has led to concerns that Kushner could use—or has perhaps already used—his official position to prop up the family business despite having divested to close relatives his ownership in many projects to conform with government ethics requirements. Federal investigators are examining Kushner’s finances and business dealings, along with those of other Trump associates, as they probe possible collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. Kushner has already testified twice before closed congressional committees and denies mixing family business with his official role.

This article, which describes new details of the company’s troubled finances and its overseas fundraising efforts, is based on a review of thousands of pages of financial documents and interviews with more than two dozen executives, business partners, real estate agents, deal participants and analysts. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private deals. Some feared legal reprisals or other retaliation from one of the country’s most powerful families.

«

Yes, Russia is involved. The ticking clock on this will make 2019 quite interesting, if nothing dramatic happens first – which it well might.
link to this extract

We said Google was dangerously powerful, then Google proved us right • Buzzfeed

Matt Stoller worked at Open Markets – now ejected from the New America thinktank:

»

At Open Markets, we started with the same questions that most Americans have. What went wrong? Why did we allow a concentrated system of Too Big to Fail banks to crash our economy? Why can’t our industrial system reduce carbon emissions and help limit the impact of climate change?

These kinds of questions about the power of finance and industry have been debated in America for decades, and bankers and industrialists have dedicated vast amounts of their money to influencing that debate. But in recent years, a new class of corporate power has begun to shape our world, prompting a new set of questions: Why have we allowed the internet’s information monopolists to seize so much control of our digital lives? And why have they financially strangled our free press, and allowed propaganda and fake news to crawl out of the slime and influence elections?

The answer is monopoly power. The companies that hold that power, led by Google, have become massively influential in Washington — hence the fact that we’ve been thrown out of our think tank and must now set up an independent shop (CitizensAgainstMonopoly.org is our temporary website). They’re also wielding their power over the rest of corporate America — terrifying everyone from grocery store owners to carmakers and book publishers, and even the very Silicon Valley startup scene they were once a part of.

For hundreds of years, Americans realized that this kind of misuse of property in the form of monopoly power was a threat to their political liberties. We saw it for what it was: autocratic.

This was a widely held belief, on the left and on the right. Friedrich Hayek had an entire chapter on the danger of monopolies in his classic political tome The Road to Serfdom. Labor scholars warned that monopolies represented the “dictatorial and fascist trends within our own country.” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave a speech to Congress making this same point, and it was a speech that Hayek quoted in his book.

Fundamentally, monopoly power is political power. It lets a small group of people exercise control over a much larger group, which results in both extremes of wealth inequality and extremes of political corruption. It is why anger is bubbling up in most Western democracies, regardless of the voting system or safety net — we are all dealing with the same monopoly institutions.

What Google did, in attempting to silence my colleagues, was in fact a call to action.

«

link to this extract

In the interest of transparency, New America releases email correspondence with Barry Lynn • New America

The thinktank at the centre of the “Google leaned on them for having people critical of it” story follows up:

»

In order to provide greater clarity and context to the issues raised in the New York Times article dated Wednesday, August 30th, New America is releasing in its entirety email correspondence from its President and CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter to the former director of Open Markets, Mr. Barry Lynn.

The first email quoted in the New York Times is from June 2016, a full year ago. Subsequently, we continued to support the work of Open Markets while asking Barry to abide by institutional norms of transparency and collegiality.

The next two emails, one of which was also quoted by the New York Times today, are from this summer. They again focus on Barry’s obligations to his fellow program directors and to the institution as a whole. We would not have released them as a matter of employee confidentiality, but as they were partially released by the New York Times, we are providing them in the interest of full context and transparency.

«

This June 2016 email from Slaughter is pretty damning; it’s clear NA was compromised by its funding from Google.

There’s then a June 30 email “concerning notice and cooperation when things that one program does affects other programs”, which also says his actions of June 26 were “a breach of faith, imperiling the institution as a whole in a way that could have been avoided.”

What happened June 26? Lynn published the Open Markets piece applauding the EC finding against Google. Case closed, I think: New America caved over its fears of criticising Google. It doesn’t specify exactly how much of its funding comes from Google, but one suspects it’s a lot.
link to this extract

The dumb fact of Google money • The Atlantic

Alexis Madrigal:

»

The scale of Silicon Valley money and Washington money are so different that the introduction of the former into the latter is almost comical. You’ve got companies amassing tens of billions of dollars in cash with mechanics that are linked to particular regulatory and tax regimes. And those regimes are held up by people who measure donations in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

This is a key component of what Robert Reich (a decade ago) called supercapitalism. Many times the most efficient way to make money is to change the rules governing how that money can be made.

“Supercapitalism has not stopped at the artificial boundary separating economics from politics. The goal of the modern corporation—goaded by consumers and investors—is to do whatever is necessary to gain competitive advantage,” Reich wrote. “That includes entering any battleground where such gains can be made. Washington—and other capital cities around the world where public policies are devised—has become a competitive battleground because public policies often help some companies or industries while putting rivals at a comparative disadvantage.”

And one of the best ways to change (or freeze) policy making and regulation is to change the conversations that people are having in Washington, D.C., through funding research at think tanks.

«

link to this extract

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“Our male co-founder? Er.. he’s just over here”. Photo by Horia Varlan on Flickr.

A selection of 12 links for you. Consistency, that’s the word. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The day an army of bots turned on bot researchers • Daily Beast

Joseph Cox:

»

On Aug. 18, DFR Lab published an analysis on how U.S. alt-right platforms mimicked the sentiment of pro-Russian outlets concerning Charlottesville. The following week, ProPublica picked up the story, but something strange happened: Apparent bots quickly retweeted the article thousands of times.
A day later, an account with just 74 followers described investigative journalism news operation ProPublica as an “alt-left #HateGroup and #FakeNews site funded by Soros.” That tweet racked up some 23,000 retweets, seemingly from a group of bots. A similar tweet managed to grab more than 12,500 retweets. Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at DFR Lab, then wrote his own analysis of the tweets against ProPublica, and a guide on how to spot a bot.

Those retweet bots don’t really help propagate a tweet: Most probably don’t have any followers who are real users. Instead, their goal is likely to saturate a target’s notifications.

“They are not amplifying the accounts, but what they are doing is intimidating the users,” Nimmo told The Daily Beast. “They’re standing in an empty room, shouting really, really, loudly.”

But things got weirder.

“The Atlantic Council’s tweets, which are normally retweeted a couple dozen times, got retweeted almost 108,000 times and some of us got loads of fake new followers,” Donara Barojan, also from the DFR Lab, told The Daily Beast. She gained more than 1,000 new Twitter followers, most of which appeared to be automated accounts.

Barojan said most of the bots that followed her don’t tweet. But the automated accounts have been on Twitter for years.

«

It’s that latter point – that the accounts have been there for years – which always intrigues me. Were they planted there years ago? Bought from spammers who seeded them a long time ago? Hacked more recently (my guess)? Remember that Adrian Chen’s canonical article about paid Russian trolls dates from June 2015, and describes events from mid-2014 onwards. And re-read that article, which contains this:

»

The boom in pro-Kremlin trolling can be traced to the antigovernment protests of 2011, when tens of thousands of people took to the streets after evidence of fraud in the recent Parliamentary election emerged. The protests were organized largely over Facebook and Twitter and spearheaded by leaders, like the anticorruption crusader Alexei Navalny, who used LiveJournal blogs to mobilize support. The following year, when Vyascheslav Volodin, the new deputy head of Putin’s administration and architect of his domestic policy, came into office, one of his main tasks was to rein in the Internet.

«

Perhaps Russia really has been playing a long, long game.
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Tech firms team up to take down ‘WireX’ Android DDoS botnet • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

»

Experts tracking the attacks soon zeroed in on the malware that powers WireX: Approximately 300 different mobile apps scattered across Google‘s Play store that were mimicking seemingly innocuous programs, including video players, ringtones or simple tools such as file managers.

“We identified approximately 300 apps associated with the issue, blocked them from the Play Store, and we’re in the process of removing them from all affected devices,” Google said in a written statement. “The researchers’ findings, combined with our own analysis, have enabled us to better protect Android users, everywhere.”

Perhaps to avoid raising suspicion, the tainted Play store applications all performed their basic stated functions. But those apps also bundled a small program that would launch quietly in the background and cause the infected mobile device to surreptitiously connect to an Internet server used by the malware’s creators to control the entire network of hacked devices. From there, the infected mobile device would await commands from the control server regarding which websites to attack and how.

Experts involved in the takedown say it’s not clear exactly how many Android devices may have been infected with WireX, in part because only a fraction of the overall infected systems were able to attack a target at any given time. Devices that were powered off would not attack, but those that were turned on with the device’s screen locked could still carry on attacks in the background, they found.

“I know in the cases where we pulled data out of our platform for the people being targeted we saw 130,000 to 160,000 (unique Internet addresses) involved in the attack,” said Chad Seaman, a senior engineer at Akamai, a company that specializes in helping firms weather large DDoS attacks (Akamai protected KrebsOnSecurity from hundreds of attacks prior to the large Mirai assault last year).

The identical press release that Akamai and other firms involved in the WireX takedown agreed to publish says the botnet infected a minimum of 70,000 Android systems, but Seaman says that figure is conservative.

“Seventy thousand was a safe bet because this botnet makes it so that if you’re driving down the highway and your phone is busy attacking some website, there’s a chance your device could show up in the attack logs with three or four or even five different Internet addresses,” Seaman said in an interview with KrebsOnSecurity. “We saw attacks coming from infected devices in over 100 countries. It was coming from everywhere.”

«

(This is not the same as the Android ad fraud botnet linked in yesterday’s Overspill.)
link to this extract

Post a boarding pass on Facebook, get your account stolen • Michal Špaček

»

When searching for boarding passes on Facebook, I found a picture of an Aztec code taken by a man who wished to remain anonymous. He’s well known in certain circles, has about 120,000 followers on Twitter, and founded something in Europe and in the United States too. The code in the picture contained his United Airlines frequent flyer number. This airline treats such numbers as a super secret access codes. If they print a frequent flyer number on an official correspondence they print only last 3 digits and the rest is masked, like a password. There was a full number in the Aztec code, of course, so I was thinking of using it to try and hijack that person’s account. Because why not, right, it shouldn’t be that easy.

So I went to the United Airlines website, selected Forgot password, and entered the name and the number from the scanned Aztec code. What followed were two security questions that were answered within a few seconds: “the first major city that you visited” was the city where this person was born, and “your favorite cold-weather activity” in the Alpine country was not golf. The system correctly recognized that me was, in fact, him and then I could set up a new password for his account. Update August 25: this happened in June 2016, United has since added an additional step in which they require the customer to click a link which was emailed to them to change their password. Seems that nowadays, I’d be able to just trigger such email.

I did not set a new password, I wasn’t there to cause anyone any trouble. I sent a message to that person, just like I sent one to Petr Mára. He had deleted the picture with the Aztec code from Facebook (it’s still on Twitter, though), but he didn’t believe I could hijack the account. He thought the website would send a new password to him.

After a brief explanation, he understood. Oh shit, you’re right. You could have just changed the password. This is crazy. Yeah, it is. Just because he’s uploaded his boarding pass I could steal his account. Maybe there might be a stored payment card for future purchases, or I could make him get stuck somewhere.

«

Do not take a picture of your boarding pass and put it on social media. (Perhaps should have linked this before summer holidays, eh.)
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Why we’re disabling comments on aljazeera.com • Al Jazeera English

»

Today, we disabled the ability to comment on stories on aljazeera.com. It’s a decision that we’ve given much thought to, and one that we feel ultimately best serves our audience.

The mission of Al Jazeera is to give a voice to the voiceless, and healthy discussion is an active part of this. When we first opened up comments on our website, we hoped that it would serve as a forum for thoughtful and intelligent debate that would allow our global audience to engage with each other.

However, the comments section was hijacked by users hiding behind pseudonyms spewing vitriol, bigotry, racism and sectarianism. The possibility of having any form of debate was virtually non-existent.

«

And another one down. I should have been keeping a list.
link to this extract

These women entrepreneurs created a fake male cofounder to dodge startup sexism • Fast Company

John Paul Titlow:

»

Witchsy, the alternative, curated marketplace for bizarre, culturally aware, and dark-humored art, celebrated its one-year anniversary this summer. The site, born out of frustration with the excessive clutter and limitations of bigger creative marketplaces like Etsy, peddles enamel pins, shirts, zines, art prints, handmade crafts and other wares from a stable of hand-selected artists. Witchsy eschews the “Live Laugh Love” vibe of knickknacks commonly found on sites like Etsy in favor of art that is at once darkly nihilistic and lightheartedly funny, ranging in spirit from fiercely feminist to obscene just for the fun of it.

In its first year, Witchsy has sold about $200,000 worth of this art, paying its creators 80% of each transaction and managing to turn what Dwyer says is a small profit…

But along the way, Gazin and Dwyer had to come up with clever ways to overcome some of the more unexpected obstacles they faced. Some hurdles were overt: early on a web developer they brought on to help build the site tried to stealthily delete everything after Gazin declined to go on a date with him. But most of the obstacles were much more subtle.

After setting out to build Witchsy, it didn’t take long for them to notice a pattern: In many cases, the outside developers and graphic designers they enlisted to help often took a condescending tone over email. These collaborators, who were almost always male, were often short, slow to respond, and vaguely disrespectful in correspondence. In response to one request, a developer started an email with the words “Okay, girls…”

That’s when Gazin and Dwyer introduced a third cofounder: Keith Mann, an aptly named fictional character who could communicate with outsiders over email.

“It was like night and day,” says Dwyer. “It would take me days to get a response, but Keith could not only get a response and a status update, but also be asked if he wanted anything else or if there was anything else that Keith needed help with.”

«

The web developer! The collaborators! Good grief. Is it this bad in the UK or other countries? As some have pointed out, the premise here of needing the fake male is exactly the same as the TV series Remington Steele.
link to this extract

Google critic ousted from think tank funded by the tech giant • The New York Times

Kenneth Vogel:

»

not long after one of New America’s scholars posted a statement on the think tank’s website praising the European Union’s penalty against Google, Mr. Schmidt, who had chaired New America until 2016, communicated his displeasure with the statement to the group’s president, Anne-Marie Slaughter, according to the scholar.

The statement disappeared from New America’s website, only to be reposted without explanation a few hours later. But word of Mr. Schmidt’s displeasure rippled through New America, which employs more than 200 people, including dozens of researchers, writers and scholars, most of whom work in sleek Washington offices where the main conference room is called the “Eric Schmidt Ideas Lab.” The episode left some people concerned that Google intended to discontinue funding, while others worried whether the think tank could truly be independent if it had to worry about offending its donors.

Those worries seemed to be substantiated a couple of days later, when Ms. Slaughter summoned the scholar who wrote the critical statement, Barry Lynn, to her office. He ran a New America initiative called Open Markets that has led a growing chorus of liberal criticism of the market dominance of telecom and tech giants, including Google, which is now part of a larger corporate entity known as Alphabet, for which Mr. Schmidt serves as executive chairman.

Ms. Slaughter told Mr. Lynn that “the time has come for Open Markets and New America to part ways,” according to an email from Ms. Slaughter to Mr. Lynn. The email suggested that the entire Open Markets team — nearly 10 full-time employees and unpaid fellows — would be exiled from New America.

While she asserted in the email, which was reviewed by The New York Times, that the decision was “in no way based on the content of your work,” Ms. Slaughter accused Mr. Lynn of “imperiling the institution as a whole.”

Mr. Lynn, in an interview, charged that Ms. Slaughter caved to pressure from Mr. Schmidt and Google, and, in so doing, set the desires of a donor over the think tank’s intellectual integrity.

“Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling the strings,” Mr. Lynn said. “People are so afraid of Google now.”

Google rejected any suggestion that it played a role in New America’s split with Open Markets.

«

The Open Market comment said, inter alia,

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By requiring that Google give equal treatment to rival services instead of privileging its own, Vestager is protecting the free flow of information and commerce upon which all democracies depend. We call upon U.S. enforcers, including the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, and states attorneys general, to build upon this important precedent, both in respect to Google and to other dominant platform monopolists including Amazon.

«

New America’s CEO said that she has been working “for the past two months” to spin out Open Markets as an independent program, and responded that

»

“As I reiterated to [Lynn] in June, his repeated refusal to adhere to New America’s standards of openness and institutional collegiality meant that we could no longer work together as part of the same institution. I continued, however, to seek a cooperative solution with Barry; unfortunately, I have been unsuccessful.”

«

That phrase “institutional collegiality” is an interesting one, hinting at “not being part of the team”. Meanwhile, Open Markets has set up a campaign at Citizens Against Monopoly.
link to this extract

Google to comply with EU search demands to avoid more fines • Bloomberg

Aoife White and Mark Bergen:

»

Google will comply with Europe’s demands to change the way it runs its shopping search service, a rare instance of the internet giant bowing to regulatory pressure to avoid more fines.

The Alphabet Inc. unit faced a Tuesday deadline to tell the European Union how it planned to follow an order to stop discriminating against rival shopping search services in the region. A Google spokeswoman said it is sharing that plan with regulators before the deadline expires, but declined to comment further.

The EU fined Google a record 2.4bn euros ($2.7bn) in late June for breaking antitrust rules by skewing its general search results to unfairly favor its own shopping service over rival sites. The company had 60 days to propose how it would “stop its illegal content” and 90 days to make changes to how the company displays shopping results when users search for a product. Those changes need to be put in place by Sept. 28 to stave off a risk that the EU could fine the company 5% of daily revenue for each day it fails to comply.

“The obligation to comply is fully Google’s responsibility,” the European Commission said in an emailed statement, without elaborating on what the company must do to comply.

«

The question really is, how is it going to do this?
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How to escape a submerged car • Popular Mechanics

»

The good news is that you can escape a sinking vehicle. But you’ve got to be quick. According to The University of Manitoba’s Gordon Geisbrecht, who trains law enforcement officers and others on underwater-vehicle escape, a person has about a minute to get out alive. Here are his five rules of survival—and one caveat.

Rule 1. Don’t Call 911 until you’re out of the car. You’re going to need every second to get out of that vehicle. Worry about calling 911 once you’ve made it out alive, or, as in the case of the I-5 collapse, if your vehicle isn’t submerged. “Time is critical,” says Geisbrecht. “If you touch your cell phone you’re probably going to die.”

Rule 2. Unbuckle.

Rule 3. Don’t open the door! Roll down the windows instead. Opening the door is very difficult against the water pressure and it also allows so much water into the vehicle that it will speed up the sinking process.

You’ll have 30 seconds to a minute until the water rises to the bottom of the passenger windows. This is what Geisbrecht calls the floating period. After that, the water pressure will force the window against the doorframe, making it essentially impossible to roll down.

Caveat to Rule 3: Break that window. Since most vehicles these days have electronically controlled windows, the circuits probably will short before you have a chance to roll them down. In that case, you’ll need a tool to break the window open.

«

Click through for rules 4 and 5, of course. This is clearly a very dangerous situation; let’s hope you never find yourself in it, but that if you do you can remember at least a few of these. Prompted by the sad story of a family swept away in Houston’s floods.
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What we get wrong about technology • Tim Harford

»

Blade Runner (1982) is a magnificent film, but there’s something odd about it. The heroine, Rachael, seems to be a beautiful young woman. In reality, she’s a piece of technology — an organic robot designed by the Tyrell Corporation. She has a lifelike mind, imbued with memories extracted from a human being.  So sophisticated is Rachael that she is impossible to distinguish from a human without specialised equipment; she even believes herself to be human. Los Angeles police detective Rick Deckard knows otherwise; in Rachael, Deckard is faced with an artificial intelligence so beguiling, he finds himself falling in love. Yet when he wants to invite Rachael out for a drink, what does he do?

He calls her up from a payphone.

There is something revealing about the contrast between the two technologies — the biotech miracle that is Rachael, and the graffiti-scrawled videophone that Deckard uses to talk to her. It’s not simply that Blade Runner fumbled its futurism by failing to anticipate the smartphone. That’s a forgivable slip, and Blade Runner is hardly the only film to make it. It’s that, when asked to think about how new inventions might shape the future, our imaginations tend to leap to technologies that are sophisticated beyond comprehension. We readily imagine cracking the secrets of artificial life, and downloading and uploading a human mind. Yet when asked to picture how everyday life might look in a society sophisticated enough to build such biological androids, our imaginations falter.

«

Just as filmmakers fail, so do our planners. But we also don’t recognise the subtle needs for making lots of things consistently that underlie what happens. This is a great essay; Harford’s “Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy” would be a good Christmas present for the reader in your life.
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Misidentification and improvised rules – we lift the lid on the Met’s Notting Hill facial recognition operation • Liberty

Silkie Carlo was allowed to watch the Met’s facial recognition system trying to identify criminals at the Notting Hill Carnival in London:

»

The project leads explained they had constructed a “bespoke dataset” for the weekend – more than 500 images of people they were concerned might attend. Some police were seeking to arrest, others they were looking to apprehend if they were banned from attending.

I asked what kind of crimes those on the ‘arrest’ watch list could be wanted for. We weren’t given details, but were told it could be anything from sexual assault to non-payment of fines.

I watched the facial recognition screen in action for less than 10 minutes. In that short time, I witnessed the algorithm produce two ‘matches’ – both immediately obvious, to the human eye, as false positives. In fact both alerts had matched innocent women with wanted men.

The software couldn’t even differentiate sex. I was astonished.

The officers dismissed the alerts without a hint of self-reflection – they make their own analysis before stopping and arresting the identified person anyway, they said.

I wondered how much police time and taxpayer’s money this complex trial and the monitoring of false positives was taking – and for what benefit.

I asked how many false positives had been produced on Sunday – around 35, they told me. At least five of these they had pursued with interventions, stopping innocent members of the public who had, they discovered, been falsely identified.

There was no concern about this from the project leaders.

There was a palpable dark absurdity as we watched the screen, aghast, red boxes bobbing over the faces of a Hare Krishna troupe relentlessly spreading peace and love as people wearing Caribbean flags danced to tambourines.

“It is a top-of-the-range algorithm,” the project lead told us, as the false positive match of a young woman with a balding man hovered in the corner of the screen.

«

link to this extract

Uber faces investigation of possible foreign-bribery law violations • WSJ

Douglas MacMillan and Aruna Viswanatha:

»

Under former Chief Executive Travis Kalanick, the eight-year-old company spread rapidly to more than 70 countries around the world in part by giving regional teams authority to adapt to local markets and expand as quickly as possible, sometimes flouting local laws.

In South Korea and France, for example, it was found to violate transportation laws. In Singapore, local managers bought more than 1,000 defective cars last year and rented them out to drivers, only fixing the safety defect after one of the cars caught on fire, an investigation by The Wall Street Journal this month found. Uber said it has since added safety measures and fixed all the defective cars in Singapore.

News of the preliminary bribery probe comes as Uber plans to usher in a new chief executive, Expedia Inc. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, to replace Mr. Kalanick, who resigned in June following months of scandals, legal issues and an internal investigation into allegations of sexism. Mr. Khosrowshahi said Tuesday he plans to accept the job once his employment contract his ironed out.

As Mr. Khosrowshahi steps in, Uber faces growing pressure from U.S. authorities. The Justice Department is separately pursuing a criminal investigation into “Greyball,” a software tool employees used to evade law-enforcement officials, people familiar with the matter said in May. Uber hasn’t commented on the probe.

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Uber looks like the Augean stables just at the moment.
link to this extract

Researchers taught AI to write totally believable fake reviews, and the implications are terrifying • Business Insider

Rob Price:

»

there will soon be a major new threat to the world of online reviews: Fake reviews written automatically by artificial intelligence (AI).

Allowed to rise unchecked, they could irreparably tarnish the credibility of review sites — and the tech could have far broader (and more worrying) implications for society, trust, and fake news.

“In general, the threat is bigger. I think the threat towards society at large and really disillusioned users and to shake our belief in what is real and what is not, I think that’s going to be even more fundamental,” Ben Y. Zhao, a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, told Business Insider.

Fake reviews are undetectable — and considered reliable
Researchers from the University of Chicago (including Ben Zhao) have written a paper (“Automated Crowdturfing Attacks and Defenses in Online Review Systems“) that shows how AI can be used to develop sophisticated reviews that are not only undetectable using contemporary methods, but are also considered highly reliable by unwitting readers.

The paper will be presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security later this year.

Here’s one example of a synthesised review: “I love this place. I went with my brother and we had the vegetarian pasta and it was delicious. The beer was good and the service was amazing. I would definitely recommend this place to anyone looking for a great place to go for a great breakfast and a small spot with a great deal.”

There’s nothing immediately strange about this review. It gives some specific recommendations and believable backstory, and while the last phrase is a little odd (“a small spot with a great deal”), it’s still an entirely plausible human turn-of-phrase.

«

Based on this, we’re either going to need better ways to identify humans, or online reviews are going the way of the dinosaur.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

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Apple’s new campus, the likely site of its iPhone (and other) launch, almost surely on September 12. Photo by MarkGregory007 on Flickr.

Yeah, baby, we’re back. North Korea’s still firing missiles, Trump’s still president (CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY) and the tech world marches – well, ambles – on.

You can now 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. Consider yourself lucky. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

‘Alt-gov’ Twitter accounts pitch in to help Coast Guard and responders rescue hurricane victims • Raw Story

Sarah Burris:

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President Donald Trump has attacked career government staffers as “holdovers” from President Barack Obama’s administration and his department heads have pledged to root out such staffers. Trump also placed restrictions on scientists and staff to prevent them from publishing their taxpayer-funded research findings. The two incidents prompted a series of government employees to start secret Twitter accounts known as “alternatives” to the Trump government. While there is no evidence that some kind of coup d’etat exists nor is a cabal being coordinated by the former president, Trump continues to attack the employees.

The digital army of Alt-gov staff saw the aftermath of Harvey and recognized a desperate need to help survivors as soon as possible.

“There’s a massive gap in emergency rescue right now,” one staffer who wanted to remain anonymous told Raw Story.”The 911 system can’t handle this volume of rescue calls, and cities and federal agencies don’t yet have a system for responding to SOS calls on social media. So we created it for them.”

The @HarveyRelief account and HarveyRescue.com site pulls together a list of all of those begging for help on social media, who might not have been able to make it through the 911 backlog, busy signals and holds. Those sending out “SOS calls” and tagging them #HarveySOS are being curated into the map. Roughly 100 individuals have been helping first responders with boat rescues. It is their hope that the site can help save people’s lives by making searches and rescues more streamlined, telling boats where they need to go…

…The decision was made on Sunday when the Alt-Gov community members were talking about some of their team living in Texas.

“We were seeing that city, state and federal authorities were telling Houstonians to call 911 for rescue and not reach out via Twitter,” the staffer explained. “But there was a major disconnect – people couldn’t reach 911 and were pleading for rescue on social media.”

The staffer explained that most of those who run the Alt-Gov Twitter accounts are either current or former civil servants. They’re accustomed to seeing a problem and a need and working to fix it.

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Self-organising groups aren’t new; but in this form, from this source, they are.
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Apple to hold product launch event on Sept. 12 • WSJ

Tripp Mickle and Drew Fitzgerald:

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Apple has scheduled a product-announcement event on Sept. 12, according to people briefed on its plans, reinforcing expectations that the technology giant will release new iPhones and a smartwatch well ahead of the holiday shopping season.

The company is expected to unveil three iPhones, according to other people familiar with its plans. Those include a showcase iPhone to mark the product’s 10th anniversary that is larger and pricier and features an edge-to-edge display and facial-recognition technology, as well as updates to the two iPhone 7 models that started selling last year.

Analysts had widely reported in recent months that production glitches on the newest iPhone could cause it to be delayed. If the event proceeds on Sept. 12, its timing would be roughly consistent with iPhone launches in previous years, reassuring investors and customers that the device is on track.

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The date makes sense – the alternative was Sept 6, which seemed to close to the end of August. Aiming to use the new theatre on its new campus.

Expect phones, Watches, and a new Apple TV capable of HDR and 4K. Notable thing about the writers of this story: Mickle does lots of Apple stuff; Fitzgerald does lots of telecom and media stuff.
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Google launches ARCore SDK in preview: AR on Android phones, no extra hardware required • VentureBeat

Emil Protalinski:

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Google today launched a preview of ARCore, an Android software development kit (SDK) that brings augmented reality to existing and future Android phones without requiring additional sensors or hardware. Developers can download the SDK now and start creating new AR experiences on Android.

The ARCore preview currently supports the Google Pixel, Google Pixel XL, Samsung’s Galaxy S8, and Samsung’s Galaxy S8+. Android 7.0 Nougat or above is required. Google is hoping to have ARCore on 100 million devices by the end of the preview (no final release date was provided). Google is working with manufacturers like Samsung, Huawei, LG, ASUS, and others to make that happen “with a consistent bar for quality and high performance.”

Today’s launch is the next big step in Google’s plan to bring AR capabilities to more devices. ARCore is built on the work already done with Tango, the company’s augmented reality platform. Tango was first released in June 2014 and since then has only made it to a handful of devices, including just two commercial phones: Lenovo’s Phab 2 Pro in August 2016 and Asus’ Zenfone AR this month.

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In brief: Google has thrown Lenovo and Asus under the bus, realising that Apple’s moves in AR with ARKit (announced in June) were far more effective than Project Tango was ever going to be. This is a rush job, but Android has such scale that hitting 100m is entirely feasible. (Apple should be on about 500m by then, and might always be ahead in pure numbers until at least five years from now.)

If you don’t think this was a rush job by Google: why didn’t it announce it at Google I/O? Instead there was more about Project Tango, on which it seemed to be all-in.

There’s going to be some furious gnashing of teeth in the Lenovo and Asus boardrooms: committing to making those specialist phones will have been expensive investments, but Google has decided (sensibly) to go with the broader base – another example, as with Android after the iPhone launch, of successfully changing course at top speed to match Apple.
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Galaxy Note8 OLED Display Technology Shoot-Out • DisplayMate

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These are just some of the Galaxy Note8 Display Highlights that we will be covering in detail throughout the article:
 
· A new 3K Higher Resolution 2960 x 1440 display that fills almost the entire front face of the phone from edge-to-edge, resulting in a larger 6.3 inch display with a 15% taller height to width Aspect Ratio of 18.5 : 9 = 2.05 than the 16 : 9 = 1.78 on most Smartphones.
 
· A new and accurate full 100% DCI-P3 Color Gamut that is also used for 4K TVs. Plus it is certified by the UHD Alliance for Mobile HDR Premium, which allows it to play all of the latest content produced for 4K UHD Premium TVs.
 
· The Native Color Gamut of the Galaxy Note8 is even larger, the result of its new high saturation “Deep Red” OLED, resulting in a very impressive 112% of DCI-P3 and 141% of sRGB / Rec.709 Gamuts that also produces better on-screen Colors in High Ambient Light.
 
· The Galaxy Note8 provides up to 22% Higher Screen Brightness than the Galaxy S8, with a record Peak Display Brightness of over 1,200 nits.

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No doubt about it: Samsung is the world’s best at OLED screens.
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The Fitbit Ionic might be the smartwatch that unseats Apple • Gizmodo

Alex Cranz:

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After months of leaks and hints, Fibit has finally revealed its newest wrist wearable: The $300 Fitbit Ionic. Fitbit claims up to four days of battery life, a refined OS that pairs nicely with devices running iOS, Android, and Windows, and a brand new sensor for tracking your heart rate. This smartwatch, which visually calls to mind the lovechild of an Apple Watch and a Fitbit Surge, is a natural progression for the huge wearable company. Just last year, it snapped up notable smartwatch makers Pebble and Vector for a reported $38 million. And between the almost-perfect Surge and the incredibly unattractive Blaze, Fitbit has been interested in the smartwatch sector of the wearable market for a while. This is the culmination of that interest.

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Wow! you think. With that headline, can there be any problems? Read on:

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It’s profoundly ugly—like every Fitbit that’s come before, but it could be technologically cool enough that you might not care.

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A device that you wear on your wrist which is visible to everyone, where there are non-ugly (or less-ugly) alternatives? You’re not going to care that it’s “profoundly ugly”? Priced at $300 – same as an Apple Watch – this is going to have to attract Android users, but there’s little evidence they’re interested in smartwatches.
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Thousands of Android apps use phone without your permission: eZanga • CNBC

Michelle Castillo:

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That cute cat wallpaper for your Android phone or free photo-editing software app you downloaded may be using your phone without your permission and running up fraudulent ad views, according to a recent report from online marketing firm eZanga.

EZanga used its Anura ad fraud protection software to look at one module from a software development kit (otherwise known as an SDK) that hides in apps, then activates to run advertisements and play videos while the user is not on their phone. While the person may be sleeping, the malware chews up bandwidth and battery life.

The report estimated the top apps using this SDK module, one of which could have been downloaded up to 1 million times in the Google Play store, could cost advertisers anywhere between $2m to $10m daily in fraudulent ad traffic.

On June 7, they found 312 apps with the SDK module — 53 of which were in the Google Play store. A week after, the SDK module was in 750 apps, 300 of which were in the store. Two days after that, the number ballooned to 1,330 apps, and 317 were available for purchase in the store.

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A lot of online ad stuff feels like a house of cards, and yet no matter how many times we get this story it never seems to collapse.
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Offline Only • Chris Bolin

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You must go offline to view this page.

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And once you do, he has lots of points to make about how being offline (on a computer) is a boon to productivity. I certainly agree – closing Twitter has become essential to working for me.
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Sonos speaker gains far-field mics for voice control • Zatz Not Funny!

Dave Zatz:

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While the Sonos’ April FCC filing turns out to be rather pedestrian, a brand spanking new, though heavily redacted (until February 28th) FCC filing confirms one new connected speaker with integrated voice control:

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The EUT is 802.11 a/b/g/n (HT20) Client Device. Product model S13 is a high-performance all-in-one wireless smart speaker and part of Sonos’ home sound system. S13 adds integrated voice control functionality with far field microphones. Moreover, the device will support multiple voice platforms and music services, allowing customers to effortlessly control their music on Sonos.

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So, not only will Sonos be gaining voice control from Alexa-powered hardware and apps, the streaming pioneer will also bring native hardware integration. From the included imagery, there will obviously be a mic button (or, more likely, touchable surface like the Play:5) – on what I assume is the first refresh of their entire speaker line. But will the speaker(s) also provide always listening capability like Amazon, Google, and Apple?

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There’s going to be a Sonos event on October 4, surely to introduce these. People have meanwhile been getting completely bent out of shape over the update to Sonos’s privacy policy on this. (I own a number of Sonos speakers.) It says that if you don’t update to accept the potential use of your voice data, in just the same way that Apple and Google and Amazon do, then you can’t get a software update – even on your old kit which doesn’t have that same capability. What puzzles me is why people are troubled by the idea of accepting a policy that won’t and can’t affect them. Accept the update, buy Sonos kit that doesn’t have the voice ability. Problem solved.
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My week in Lucky House: the horror of Hong Kong’s coffin homes • The Guardian

Benjamin Haas goes to the place with “some of the poorest people in the most expensive city in the world”:

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When I enter my coffin for the first time, I immediately notice the strong musty smell. I imagine the other residents in their bunks, each one roughly 60cm (two feet) wide and 170cm (5 ft 7 in) long, with only enough space to sit up. Living in such a confining space takes a mental toll but my week pales in comparison to the other residents who have been living there for months, sometimes years.

At night I can hear everything happening around me: every punch, kick and scream from my neighbour’s kung fu movie; the smacking of lips eating barbecue meat with rice; a brief argument over who will use the sole shower next and, of course, a symphony of snoring.

The next morning the sound of a plastic travel alarm clock first wakes me up at 5.30am. But in my coffin, there is almost no sense of time. It could be any hour of the day, and no natural light would reach me. For that I would have to leave my bunk and walk to the sole window at the other end of the apartment.

When I finally leave my coffin around 7.:30am, one of my neighbours is already preparing his first dose of meth for the day. Hong Kong’s coffin homes have a reputation for danger and filth, sheltering convicted criminals and drug abusers, and in my short time I saw roughly a quarter of the people regularly using drugs.

But the residents of Lucky House were also some of the friendliest people I’ve met in Hong Kong, and almost instantly welcomed me, with one person in particular keen to show me the ropes of coffin living.

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Accidental ‘fake news’ experiment • Random Public Journal

Jason Michael tweeted a Photoshopped image of a shark in some water “by a flooded road in Houston”; it went enormously viral, to his amazement. But he wondered about the people responding to it:

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there were people like Rakesh Agrawal sending me pictures of him kissing his mother and calling me an “asshole.” I don’t know Rakesh from Adam. I thought I might have recognised his mum though. According to Twitter Rakesh founded SnapStream, “how the Daily Show gets its TV clips” apparently. He felt the need to swear at me for whatever it was about this tweet that got him upset. His annoyance was at me behaving like an “attention starved asshole,” but that he was hashtagging this abuse indicated he wanted some of that attention himself. Then I thought, wasn’t that exactly what BuzzFeed was doing, and then Mashable, the New York Times, and all the others who got on the slipstream being created by this fishy tweet?

No one really seemed to care about the victims. It was all about the attention and being able to get in for a slice of the action. Not one of the media outlets that picked up on my tweet mentioned how many people had been confirmed dead, how many were thought missing, or even provided emergency information for those affected or with family and friends in the Houston area. So far eight people have been confirmed dead. God rest them and comfort their loved ones.

This tweet, which I wish to hell I had never tweeted – truth be told, is instructive. No, I am not attempting to teach the wold a lesson. Trolling the whole of America has been a real pleasure. It has, but it is teaching me something about the power of fake news. At the time of writing it has 47,991 retweets, 68,958 likes, over four and a half thousand responses, and has reached 5,650,714 people. How did my Twitter account, with a following at the time of about 1,300 people – mainly in Scotland – do all of this in twelve hours?

Simple answer: People love this sort of sensation. They eat it up. It entertains them… Americans don’t want to hear about Trump sabre rattling with North Korea, or the possibility he might be in Putin’s pocket. So they pick up trifles that amuse them; things that are easy to understand.

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Uber’s new CEO • Stratechery

Ben Thompson has the best analysis of why the surprise choice for Uber’s new boss, formerly at Expedia, actually makes a great deal of sense:

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Most news stories are making the obvious point that Khosrowshahi is qualified because he is a CEO for a tech company in the travel industry. What is even more relevant, though, is that Khosrowshahi is the CEO of an aggregator…

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Khosrowshahi (journalists will probably build in a keyboard shortcut for his name) chose not to buy Booking.com because its margins were low, and Expedia at the time was attached to the high-margin merchant model:

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…Booking.com, unlike Expedia, had minimal transactions costs for customers and suppliers. Hotels could sign up for Booking.com on their own instead of having to negotiate a deal, which meant it was Booking.com that led the industry in growth for many years; the full payoff of owning discovery in a world of drastically reduced distribution and transaction costs comes not from extracting margin from a limited set of suppliers, but rather from expanding the market to the greatest extent possible, creating the conditions for a virtuous cycle of more customers -> more suppliers -> more customers.

To Khosrowshahi’s credit he learned this lesson: Expedia was in big trouble in the years after he took over, and one of the changes Khosrowshahi made was to add the agency model to Expedia’s properties (Expedia now has a hybrid approach). It is a lesson that will serve him well as Uber’s CEO; the fundamental mistake made in so much Uber analysis comes from believing that drivers are the key to the model. For example, there was a very popular piece of analysis some months ago premised on evaluating the cost of driving for Uber relative to driving for a traditional cab company. It was a classic example of getting the facts right and missing the point.

In fact, what makes Uber so valuable — and still so attractive, despite all of the recent troubles — is its position with riders. The more riders Uber has, the more drivers it will attract, even if the economics are worse relative to other services: driving at a worse rate is better than not driving at a better one.

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Thompson’s theory is that holding the choke point of aggregation systems is the way to get rich online. The problem is always figuring out whether you actually hold such a choke point. I’d love to know whether this thinking formed part of the Uber board’s decision-making.

Notable that the losing candidate, Meg Whitman, worked at eBay – another aggregator.
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Oct 2014: NYPD to use mobile devices loaded with Windows and Windows Phone to collar crooks • Phone Arena

“Alan F” in October 2014:

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New York’s finest will soon receive the latest in high-tech crime fighting equipment. All 35,000 officers belonging to the NYPD will be receiving a smartphone. In addition, 6000 NYPD patrol cars will be fitted with rugged tablets. It is all part of a $160m initiative designed to keep the police connected to a cellular network that gives them “expanded search capabilities.” With this feature, they can access the NYPD database on the go.

Having access to 911 calls in real time will help the officers be more prepared to answer a call, knowing exactly what they are facing. The press report indicates that the NYPD will be adding fingerprint scanners to their mobile equipment next year, in order to conduct identity checks while in the field.

Based on the tablet that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio held up during the press conference, it looks like the cops will be using a Panasonic Toughbook running Windows. In fact, it would appear that all of the devices that the NYPD will be using, employ Windows or Windows Phone. While the Windows Phone platform currently doesn’t have a handset with a fingerprint scanner, there is some speculation that we will see such a device next year. Last year, a test of this system used Android phones that ran a special NYPD app that could search for some one based on their name, or conduct a search based on an officer’s current position.

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The rollout completed in mid-April 2016, when officials were claiming that the system meant officers were responding “about a minute quicker”, or 12% faster, than a year before.

Fast-forward to August 2017:

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The NYPD has to scrap the 36,000 smartphones it gave cops over the past two years because they’re already obsolete and can’t be upgraded, The Post has learned.

The city bought Microsoft-based Nokia smartphones as part of a $160m NYPD Mobility Initiative that Mayor Bill de Blasio touted as “a huge step into the 21st century.”

But just months after the last phone was handed out, officials plan to begin replacing them all with brand-new iPhones by the end of the year, sources said. The move follows Microsoft’s recent decision to stop supporting the operating system that runs the NYPD’s devices and nearly a dozen custom-engineered apps.

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This is an interesting case of “nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft”; clearly it was an enterprise contract where the Windows deal on the back-end led to a Windows deal on the front end, and damn whether it was suitable. Someone’s likely to get fired here. Even when the contract would have been under consideration, Windows Phone had only about 3% installed base in the US, and was showing absolutely no signs of improvement.

And now Apple picks up the spoils. There must be a lesson somewhere in there.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified. What a cushy job being the Reader’s Editor here.

Typical commutes are about half an hour. What changes if transport speeds up? Photo by Ennev on Flickr

The Overspill is going on its summer (northern hemisphere) break. Daily posting will resume on August 30th, if we’re all spared.

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

How Google Analytics codes unearthed a network of South African fake news sites • bellingcat

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Last month, a group of South African journalists used this method to uncover a series of websites linked to a company in India and the billionaire Gupta family, who have been accused of running disinformation campaigns against South African news organizations for critical coverage of the Gupta family’s business operations. Summaries of this investigation carried out by a group of South African journalists, including from News24, the amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism, and the Daily Maverick‘s Scorpio investigative unit, can be found here and here.

The investigators found connections through WhoIs records, Google Analytics IDs, and AdSense IDs for ten websites, most of which directly target the veracity of the so-called Gupta Leaks and promoting the narrative of “white monopoly capital” (WMC). These sites, as listed by The South African, are: wmcleaks.com, wmcscams.com, dodgysaministers.com, wmc-scams.com, whitemonopolyafrica.com, whitemonopoly.com, fakeguptaleaks.com, publicopinion.co.za, southafricabuzz.co.za and whitemonopolycapital.com.

These sites put on the appearance of being grassroots South African news and investigative outlets, but are all apparently created by “CNET Infosystem,” a web design company based in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India and ran by a man named Kapil Garg.

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Political discourse is so susceptible to this sort of tactic. Fortunately, tracking it is still possible thanks to the need to be public about certain information.
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Internet Archive blocked in India • MediaNama

Nikhil Pahwa:

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In what is an inexplicable instance of censorship, India appears to have blocked access to the Internet Archive (also known as the Internet Wayback Machine). The block seems to be new, and is currently propagating. We checked, and on visiting web.archive.org via Airtel (Delhi, mobile) and MTNL (Delhi, wireline) connections, we’re getting the following boilerplate blocking message:

“Your requested URL has been blocked as per the directions received from the Department of Telecommunications, Government of India. Please contact administrator for more information.”

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The block seems to be about the UIDAI – the official Indian website for the organisation mandated to provide a 12-digit unique identifier for every Indian citizen. But quite why isn’t yet clear – though problems such as leaking of those identifiers via the UIDAI site could be part of it.
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BlackBerry makes its first wearable play with AR smartglasses • Wareable

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As we await AR to hit the big time, it’s finding its feet nicely in enterprise. Vuzix is one of the biggest names in this space right now, and it’s just found an ally… in BlackBerry.

The once-heavyweight of the smartphone world is in a new era where it’s licensing its software rather than developing in-house, and smartglasses are next on the agenda.

Vuzix, which has a lot of pedigree in the smart glasses space will be providing the hardware – the Vuzix M300 – while BlackBerry will be providing its UEM software to keep all the data secure.

Unless you’re in an industry where you might be donning one of these bad boys, this probably won’t matter to you. But it’s interesting to see BlackBerry finally edging into the wearable space.

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BlackBerry spent a billion dollars on BB10, and probably half that much on its abortive entry into the tablet market, for almost zero return. One has to hope for its sake that it’s not staking too much on this.
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Samsung Galaxy Note 8 to feature force touch • The Korea Investor

Lee Ji-yoon:

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Samsung Electronics’ upcoming Galaxy Note 8 has adopted force touch that allows the phone to read the amount of pressure applied to the screen, ET News reported on Aug. 9.

The bigger-screen Note phone will be unveiled on Aug. 23 in New York before its official Korean launch on Sept. 15. 

The force touch, also called 3-D touch, will use the same solution adopted for the current Galaxy S8 to replace all the functionality of a home button and open a hidden menu with shortcuts to different features.

The S8 has removed a physical home button to have a larger display screen, while a fingerprint scanner is relocated to the back of the device. The Note 8 is also expected to feature the “full-screen display” that covers almost the entire front body of the phone.

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So it’s taken two years to adopt this from Apple?
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Apple refuses to enable iPhone emergency settings that could save countless lives • The Next Web

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The majority of emergency calls today are made from cellphones, which has made location pinging increasingly more important for emergency services. There are many emergency apps and features in development, but the strength of Advanced Mobile Location (AML) is that it doesn’t require anything from the user — no downloads and no forethought; the process is completely automated.

With AML, smartphones running supporting operating systems will recognize when emergency calls are being made and turn on GNSS (global navigation satellite system) and Wi-Fi. The phone then automatically sends an SMS to emergency services, detailing the location of the caller. AML is up to 4,000 times more accurate than the current systems — pinpointing phones down from an entire city to a room in an apartment.

“In the past months, EENA has been travelling around Europe to raise awareness of AML in as many countries as possible. All these meetings brought up a recurring question that EENA had to reply to: ‘So, what about Apple?’” reads EENA’s statement.

If Apple would follow Google’s lead and activate the necessary features for AML, millions of people would be safer. However, Apple hasn’t shown any interest in doing so, according to EENA’s statement:

“For months, EENA has tried to establish contact with Apple to work on a solution that automatically provides accurate location derived from iPhones to emergency services and rescuers. Unfortunately, with no result.”

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The risks of Facebook’s video pivot • Tech.pinions

Jan Dawson:

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Facebook’s strategy here is fairly transparent: as consumption of content on Facebook has shifted from text to images to video, the content consumed has gone from being hosted on Facebook to being hosted elsewhere, notably YouTube. That, in turn, has meant that any ad revenue generated directly from the viewing of those videos has gone into Google’s coffers rather than Facebook’s. As such, it wants to shift that viewing and the associated ad revenue from YouTube to its own platform, much as its Instant Articles initiative has done that for news articles. In the process, it clearly hopes to increase time spent on content hosted on Facebook servers, and generate the higher CPMs that video ads command. That’s the theory.

However, there are a number of risks associated with this strategy, at least some of which stem from the decision to autoplay videos in the News Feed with the sound off. That, in turn, meant that ads could never run before videos as they do on YouTube, and mid-roll advertising was therefore the only viable option to monetize video on the platform. We’ve seen a push in that direction over recent months, and it’s the anecdotal evidence I’m seeing from that push that has me worried here. The chart below illustrates both the theory and the risks associated with this new video pivot:

The theory from the Facebook side is that total time spent will go up, and that the ads people see while watching video will generate higher CPMs. The risks are as follows:

• The time people do spend will shift from the News Feed to the Watch tab
• The nature of ads they will see will go from being native and non-interruptive to being non-native and extremely interruptive
• Facebook will go from ad formats where it keeps essentially all the revenue to models where it has to pass along much of the revenue to content owners and therefore generate lower margins, as Mark Zuckerberg confirmed on the company’s recent earnings call.

All told, there’s a significant risk here that instead of people spending more time on Facebook, people try spending some time in the new Watch tab, which Facebook will no doubt promote heavily as it has with the Marketplace and other recently added tabs, and then be put off by the mid-roll ads which will run in the videos they see there.

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With a quiz to comment, readers test their article comprehension • NRK Beta

Ståle Grut on the six months since the news site’s decision to make commenters take a quiz before being able to comment on stories:

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On average, there is a lot more attempts – both correct and wrong – than actual comments.

It seems many take the quiz to check how much they remember from the story – and not necessarily to leave a comment. Almost as a fun little game after reading.

Comments, correct and wrong answers to 14 quizzes Illustration: NRKbeta

A story that stand out is our explainer on how to like Facebook statuses with a rainbow in connection to pride. There were over a thousand wrong attempts to answer the quiz. Due to a human error, the right answer to one of the questions was not indicated. It made it impossible to pass the quiz. Hence the many logged wrong attempts.

On average, there is a staggering error rate of 72% on the quiz. We also suspect a lot of wrong answers coming from visitors of faraway lands. Most would have a hard time breaking our encryption made of solid Norwegian language.

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Scoop: Benchmark Capital sues Travis Kalanick for fraud • Axios

Dan Primack:

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Key paragraph, per the suit: “Kalanick, the former CEO of Uber, to entrench himself on Uber’s Board of Directors and increase his power over Uber for his own selfish ends. Kalanick’s overarching objective is to pack Uber’s Board with loyal allies in an effort to insulate his prior conduct from scrutiny and clear the path for his eventual return as CEO—all to the detriment of Uber’s stockholders, employees, driver-partners, and customers.”

Why it matters: If Benchmark’s suit is successful, Kalanick would be kicked off Uber’s board of directors — thus eliminating any faint hopes of him returning to the company in a substantial role.

What to know: Benchmark was an early investor in Uber, and has a seat on its board of directors. It also helped spearhead the move to have Kalanick resign in June, and tensions between the two have contributed, in part, to the slow pace of finding a replacement. Oh, and venture capital firms don’t usually sue fellow board members of their single most valuable investment.

The suit revolves around the June 2016 decision to expand the size of Uber’s board of voting directors from eight to 11, with Kalanick having the sole right to designate those seats. Kalanick would later name himself to one of those seats following his resignation, since his prior board seat was reserved for the company’s CEO. The other two seats remain unfilled. Benchmark argues that it never would have granted Kalanick those three extra seats had it known about his “gross mismanagement and other misconduct at Uber”.

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Wow.

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New Fitbit smartwatch pictures reveal heart rate shake-up • Wareable

Hugh Langley:

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There are three base colour variants of the watch: silver case with navy strap, rose gold case with blue strap, and a darker case with a black strap. The pictures reveal it will also have the same button configuration as the Fitbit Blaze – two on the right side, one on the left – and like on the Blaze the back of the watch protrudes, presumably to get a better lock on that optical heart rate sensor.

More interesting though is the sensor itself. Fitbit has, like many other wearable companies, traditionally used green optical sensors for tracking heart rate, but these new images reveal two red lights. If it’s also using infra-red, which that bottom blue optical could be, it suggests Fitbit’s smartwatch may have a pulse oximeter for measuring oxygen levels in the blood. It could also use red light technology to get a more accurate read on heart rate, heart rate variability, or other physiological parameters that green PPGs struggle with.

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It’s not beautiful, but those are renders, probably from internal work, rather than the object. Wareable says “a lot is resting on Fitbit delivering with its apps – something it was rumoured to be struggling with”, but I’d question exactly how many apps a smartwatch needs.
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Why even the Hyperloop probably wouldn’t change your commute time • The New York Times

Emily Badger points out that most people commute for about 30 minutes to reach their work:

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The general law of the 30-minute commute is known as Marchetti’s constant, named for the Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti, a mentor to Mr. Ausubel. Mr. Marchetti picked up the work of Yacov Zahavi, a transportation engineer who theorized in the 1970s and ’80s that people have a fixed travel-time budget. We allocate part of our day to getting around. And that amount, about an hour, Mr. Zahavi argued, holds steady no matter where we live or how we travel.

Mr. Marchetti noted supporting historical clues: Ancient Rome, Persepolis and Marrakesh were about five kilometers across, or the maximum distance most people can travel in an hour on foot. He diagramed the growth of Berlin, which appeared to expand concentrically as transportation advances enlarged the land people could cover. He found it not coincidental that modern-day prisons still allow inmates one humane concession — the freedom to pace for an hour outdoors.

“From our anthropological point of view, humans are territorial animals,” said Mr. Ausubel, who wrote numerous papers with Mr. Marchetti on the topic. “So they seek to maximize range, which equates with resources. And those resources can be jobs or education, or fields for rice or wheat, or social life.”

We’re hard-wired to roam farther, they argue, when more speed allows us to. (By this same theory, delays in the New York subway disturb something deeply embedded in the human mind.)

Researchers today are not universally sold on Marchetti’s constant. Some developing-world cities have monstrous commutes. Alex Anas, an economist who has modeled the future growth of cities like Chicago, finds that commute times stay relatively stable even as population and developed land area grow. But that’s because the distribution of jobs and the behavior of workers shift in response to congestion, he says. It’s not because humans have some innate hour-long travel budget. “Economists don’t buy that,” Mr. Anas said.

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How long is your commute? (There’s also the UK Travel Time map – linked here before, but always valuable.
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Apple code reveals iPhone 8’s virtual Home button secrets • Cult of Mac

Killian Bell:

»

All kinds of iPhone 8 details have been discovered in Apple’s HomePod firmware ahead of the handset’s official unveiling. We now know what the device will look like, and that it will boast features like facial recognition and tap to wake.

After further digging, developer Steve Troughton-Smith has uncovered more information about the iPhone 8’s virtual Home button. As expected, it will sit at the bottom of its edge-to-edge display in the same area as a physical Home button, but it will be customizable.

Apple’s code suggests that the button indicator will be resizable, and that we’ll have the option to hide it. There is no API that would allow developers to change its color to match the theme of their apps (yet), and apps won’t be able to extend into the Home button area.

Sadly, that means developers won’t be able to put toolbars, shortcuts, and other items in this area. Apple’s plans could change later, but for now, the space is reserved exclusively for the Home button when it isn’t hidden away, which means navigation buttons will remain at the top of the screen.

Fullscreen video will automatically hide the Home button indicator, but it’s not yet clear how videos will be adapted to the iPhone 8’s unique aspect ratio.

«

“Apps won’t be able to extend into the Home button area” – except for video? Apple has always had the potential to have a virtual home button, but denying apps the ability to extend into it seems strange. If you’re going to have a bigger screen, use it. (A side note: what a ton of info there is in that firmware release. Absolutely colossal; probably even the Apple insiders who were going to test the HomePod didn’t know about many of the features coming up in the phone.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: In yesterday’s story about Facebook’s system for spotting rising stars in the app world, I missed the point that it owns and uses Onavo, a VPN app, to do this. (John Gruber digs into this.) Another reason to be wary of VPN apps – but how would one know about this sort of use?

The right place for a new Foxconn plant – but is the price right? Photo by tbfurman on Flickr.

You can now 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The new copycats: how Facebook squashes competition from startups • WSJ

Betsy Morris and Deepa Seetharaman:

»

In February 2016, Mr. Rubin and Ms. Sistani launched Houseparty and began to demo it on college campuses. In May 2016, it briefly became the top social-networking app for the iPhone, according to app-research firm Sensor Tower.

Houseparty downloads went from 10,000 to 100,000 in one day and then crashed, unable to handle the load. The app was down for several hours and then glitchy through July, when the team decided it needed a major overhaul.

When Houseparty was at its most vulnerable, Facebook came knocking. Fidji Simo, head of Facebook’s video efforts, contacted Mr. Rubin, according to people familiar with the contact. She wanted to talk about live video, the people say. It was the first sign Facebook was scrutinizing Houseparty.

Mr. Zuckerberg is sensitive to anything that might disrupt Facebook, even the teeniest startup, say current and former executives and employees.

Facebook uses an internal database to track rivals, including young startups performing unusually well, people familiar with the system say. The database stems from Facebook’s 2013 acquisition of a Tel Aviv-based startup, Onavo, which had built an app that secures users’ privacy by routing their traffic through private servers. The app gives Facebook an unusually detailed look at what users collectively do on their phones, these people say.

The tool shaped Facebook’s decision to buy WhatsApp and informed its live-video strategy, they say. Facebook used Onavo to build its early-bird tool that tips it off to promising services and that helped Facebook home in on Houseparty.

«

Remember when it was all Apple and Microsoft accusing each other of copying features in their respective desktop operating systems, and doing the same to tiny companies (hence “Sherlocked“)? Nothing much different here.
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How to confirm a Google user’s specific email address (Bug Bounty Submission) • Tom Anthony

»

I’ve previously written about identifying whether a user is logged in to a certain social network, and this attack is a variation of that method (albeit more serious, IMHO).

Google login pages often pass a continue parameter in the URL that is used to redirect a user to their intended destination after they complete login. However, if you are already logged in then you just get redirected immediately to the URL specified in the continue parameter.

This fact can be abused to craft a URL that will redirect users who are logged in to an image file, and challenge users who are not logged in with a login page. If you now use this URL as the src element in an img tag, you can use the Javascript onload and onerror functions to determine whether the image loaded correctly or not.

If the image loaded, then the user is logged in, and if it errored then the user is not logged in. This is an known issue but has limited capacity to cause any sort of problem.

However, Google succumbs to a far more dangerous variation where the attacker can also supply an additional parameter specifying an email address. The redirect then fires if the email matches, but otherwise not.

At this point an attacker can just dynamically create loads of image tags (no need to even add them to the page, you can do it without attaching them to the DOM) with onload attributes and wait for a match. In my tests I could check about 1000 emails every 23-24 seconds or so. If a user is on your site for a couple of minutes then you could check many thousands of possible emails.

«

This is the demo page. It works. Reported to Google, but they say it’s “intended behaviour”. Still seems risky.
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We looked at Trump’s Twitter interactions for more than a year. A lot of them are suspicious • Media Matters

Nina Mast, Freedom Murphy and Natalie Martinez:

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President Donald Trump tweets … a lot. But along with his usual flurry of tweets attacking the media, lamenting fake news, or criticizing practically anyone who disagrees with him, Trump has another Twitter habit — quoting his supposed supporters’ tweets. A look at over a year of Trump’s retweets, quote tweets, and tweets in which he quoted another Twitter handle has left a lot of questions.

Using the Trump Twitter Archive, Media Matters audited the president’s Twitter handle, @RealDonaldTrump, between April 1, 2016, and July 31, 2017, focusing on retweets, quote tweets, and tweets where @RealDonaldTrump quoted another Twitter handle. We used that list to identify unverified accounts that he quoted or retweeted, which we then checked for the original tweet and suspicious or bot-like activity. If an account seemed suspicious (for example, it posted an unrealistic number of tweets or exclusively pro-Trump messages), we examined its tweeting habits during the weekend of the second presidential debate (October 6 to 10, 2016). Finally, if an account seemed like a bot, we reviewed its tweeting habits between August 2015 and January 2016.

Factors used to identify suspicious behavior included the date the handle was created; the number of tweets sent; the general frequency of tweets and use of hashtags and images; the content and frequency of tweets the weekend of the second debate; and what the account tweeted before the October 2015 primary season.

«

There is, certainly, something a bit odd about this. People are making money out of those retweets and quoted tweets. How are they chosen, though? That seems like the next stage. As I keep saying.
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We sent Alex Jones’ Infowars supplements to a lab. Here’s what’s in them • Buzzfeed

Charlie Warzel:

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Alex Jones’ wildly popular suite of Infowars supplements probably won’t kill you, but extensive tests provided to BuzzFeed News have shown that they’re little more than overpriced and ineffective blends of vitamins and minerals that have been sold in stores for ages.

The independent test results are the work of Labdoor, a San Francisco-based lab that tests and grades dietary supplements. Labdoor ran full tests on six popular Infowars supplements to determine the exact make-up of each supplement and screen for various dangerous and illegal chemicals. It also investigated a few of the products that “claimed incredible benefits for what seemed like could just be simple ingredients.”

“We tested samples in triplicate, and wherever possible, cross-checked those results with at least two independent analytical laboratories, so we have complete trust in our conclusions,” Brian Brandley, Labdoor’s Laboratory Director told BuzzFeed News.

All of the test results were largely the same: The products are — more or less — accurately advertised. They don’t contain significantly more or less of a particular ingredient than listed on the bottles, and there are no surprise ingredients. They’re also reasonably safe, meaning they passed heavy metal contaminant screenings and tested free of stimulants, depressants, and other prohibited drugs.

But just because the product’s ingredients matched their labels doesn’t mean they lived up to Jones’ claims.

«

I’m shocked, shocked to hear they don’t live up to Jones’s claims, whatever those are.
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Google reveals sites with ‘failing’ ads, including Forbes, LA Times • Digiday

Lucia Moses:

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On June 1, Google rolled out its Ad Experience Report, a tool it’s using to evaluate and score websites based on their ad creative and design. It provides screenshots and videos of ads that have been identified as annoying to users, such as pop-ups and autoplaying video ads with sound, and “prestitial” ads with countdown timers.

So far, Google has identified about 700 sites as warranting corrective action out of around 100,000 sites it’s reviewed so far. Half of the roughly 700 got a “failing” status and the other half a “warning.” Pop-ups were the most common problem Google found, accounting for 96% of violations on desktop and 54% on mobile.

Most of these sites are out of the mainstream, such as entertainment sites checkthesevideos.com and full-serie.biz. But a couple dozen are a who’s who of traditional media. Those listed as failing include Forbes; Tronc-owned Orlando Sentinel, Sun-Sentinel and Los Angeles Times; Bauer Xcel Media’s Life & Style and In Touch Weekly; The Wrap; Chicago Sun-Times; Tribune Broadcasting’s Fox 13 Now; and Sporting News.

A similar number of mainstream sites got warnings. They included Kiplinger, Gizmodo Media Group’s Lifehacker, The Jerusalem Post, The San Diego Union-Tribune, Cox Media Group’s WSB-TV in Atlanta, Tronc’s Baltimore Sun and Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, the U.K. Independent, The Daily Caller, Reader’s Digest, All You, Smithsonian, New York Daily News, Salt Lake Tribune and CBS News.

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Basically, warning them that if they don’t change, they’ll die once Chrome gets an adblocker.
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Wisconsin Senate Republican leader raises questions on Foxconn deal, says he doesn’t have votes yet • Milwaukee Sentinel

Patrick Marley, Lee Bergquist and Jason Stein:

»

[Scott] Fitzgerald said it was “striking” that a report issued this week by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau found that state taxpayers would not recoup their investment in Foxconn until 2043. The bureau described that timeline as the best-case scenario, with the Wisconsin plant fully operational and spawning job growth at suppliers and other companies that would come to the area.

“Is it going to be a good deal for taxpayers? A lot of that is going to be based on viability, on how this happens over the next 15, 25 years,” Fitzgerald said. “And what is the payback going to be? And it’s difficult to really measure that right now.”

For his part, Walker on Wednesday downplayed the report’s findings.

“We’ve known it all along,” Walker told Green Bay-area conservative radio host Jerry Bader when asked about the report. “We’ve known this was a big deal.”

Also Wednesday, the head of the state Department of Natural Resources said her agency has hired a coordinator to manage the DNR’s oversight of the massive project. 

Eric Ebersberger, a retired DNR attorney, was heavily involved in the agency’s review of Waukesha’s bid to tap Lake Michigan as a source of drinking water. That experience is relevant to the Foxconn plant, which would need large amounts of water from the lake to produce glass and other components of flat screens. 

DNR Secretary Cathy Stepp announced the move at a meeting of the agency board in Milwaukee, saying the DNR is preparing internally for Foxconn. 

«

It would take 26 years to pay back? The report notes that there would be a $3bn economic sweetener. There are all sorts of proposed exceptions to environmental regulations too.

I suspect though that given this would be a $10bn investment by Foxconn (per the report) employing more than 10,000 jobs every year, that it might happen.
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The end of typing: the next billion mobile users will rely on video and voice • WSJ

Eric Bellman:

»

Instead of typing searches and emails, a wave of newcomers—“the next billion,” the tech industry calls them—is avoiding text, using voice activation and communicating with images. They are a swath of the world’s less-educated, online for the first time thanks to low-end smartphones, cheap data plans and intuitive apps that let them navigate despite poor literacy.

Incumbent tech companies are finding they must rethink their products for these newcomers and face local competitors that have been quicker to figure them out. “We are seeing a new kind of internet user,” said Caesar Sengupta, who heads a group at Alphabet Inc.’s Google trying to adapt to the new wave. “The new users are very different from the first billion.”…

…Google has revamped the way certain searches look in India. Seek a local cricket star, and the top of the search is crowded with photos and videos instead of long lists of links. Google’s YouTube created apps in India to make it easier for users to share videos directly—helping them avoid data costs and circumvent slow internet speeds.

One five-person Google team took a long train ride through the western Indian state of Maharashtra recently to poll passengers. “How does he get new music?” asked project manager Scott Velicer through a translator. “Ask him if he has trouble getting to know the name of songs he hears on TV.”

The team showed passengers a “low-fidelity prototype,” basically phone screens printed on paper with different apps and instructions, asking what they would do if they saw one of the screens. The group later stood at the Lonavla Station and discussed what it learned. “People here don’t read the text,” so the icons need to be easy to understand, Mr. Velicer said.

Google has also benefited from the dominance of its Android operating system.

Apple has been upping its bet on India, contracting with a manufacturer to assemble handsets locally, rolling out a bigger retail network and investing to support developers of more apps aimed at Indians. It has begun offering Apple Music—available for Android phones—for a lower price than in the U.S.

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Misunderstanding Apple Services • Monday Note

Jean-Lois Gassée:

»

the biggest misunderstanding isn’t the theoretical placement [of the revenue from Apple Services] in the Fortune 100 list, or the comparisons to Facebook. It’s the consideration of Apple Services as a self-standing business. Remove “Apple” from “Apple Services”…would this stand-alone “Services” company enjoy the same success were it to service Android phones or Windows PCs?

Apple Services is an important member of the supporting cast that pushes the volume and margins for the main act: Apple Personal Computers. These come in three sizes, small (iPhone), medium (iPad), and large (Mac). If rumors of the addition of a cellular modem are true, we may even see the Watch, today an iPhone accessory, added to the cast as the newest and smallest performer.

Everything else that Apple offers has one raison d’être: fuelling the company’s main hardware act, without which Apple is nothing. As an example, headphones, earphones, loudspeaker sales, and music distribution revenue isn’t the goal (note the fall in music purchases on Horace’s chart above).

With Services, Apple enjoys the benefits of a virtuous circle: Hardware sales create Services revenue opportunities; Services makes hardware more attractive and “stickier”. Like Apple Stores, Services are part of the ecosystem. Such is the satisfying simplicity and robustness of Apple’s business model.

«

A lot of people are missing this point.
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Eager to burst his own bubble, a techie made apps to randomize his life • NPR

Alix Spiegel:

»

Max’s once beautiful routine suddenly seemed unfulfilling. He felt like he was growing closer to people in his own bubble and becoming isolated from those outside of it.

“There was something … that just made me feel trapped,” he says. “Like I was reading a story that I’d read before or I was playing out someone else’s script.”

How is it that two people can look at the same thing and see something completely different? Alix Spiegel and co-host Hanna Rosin tackle the notion of bubbles and follow two people making radical attempts to break out of them in the latest episode of Season 3 of the NPR podcast Invisibilia.
As any computer developer would do, Max turned to technology to craft his way out — a series of randomization applications.

Max started small, with an app that integrated Uber. It starts like a regular ride-hailing app: He would press a button in the app and a car would arrive. But then, a twist: He couldn’t select a drop-off location; the app would choose a spot within a range without disclosing it. The only thing the rider had to do was enjoy the journey — and hope for a good destination.

From there, Max’s applications became more complex. He built an app that used a Facebook search function for public events to find ones near him. Then the app would randomly choose which event Max would attend.

At first, he was nervous: What if people wouldn’t let him in? But, as a kind of unassuming white guy, he actually didn’t have this problem. (And Max acknowledges this privilege.) Once Max explained how and why he had arrived at these events, hosts usually welcomed him, often with only a few questions asked. Most of the time, people were taken by the idea of Max expanding his bubble.

One night, he got to drink white Russians with some Russians. Another, he attended acroyoga (as in, acrobatics + yoga). A community center pancake breakfast. A networking event for young professionals. The algorithm chose; Max attended.

Most of these events were something that the nonrandomized Max would never have thought to try.

«

Since you ask, Max doesn’t have children, no. But adding randomness into your life is a neat idea.
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Koch group, Craigslist founder come to Techdirt’s aid • Axios

David McCabe:

»

An eclectic group is financially backing TechDirt, a tech news site being sued for libel by the same lawyer who helped take down Gawker.

Who’s involved: The Charles Koch Foundation, Craigslist Founder Craig Newmark’s CraigConnects, Union Square Ventures, WordPress parent Automattic and the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The financial support is worth more than a quarter of a million dollars.

Why this matters: Their backing comes as some news organizations shy away from writing about a powerful or well-resourced person out of fear of a lawsuit — which some have called the Gawker Effect. This helps to chart a path for the types of publishers that can’t survive the kind of libel suits that are becoming more common in the post-Gawker age.

The details: The parent company for Techdirt is facing a libel suit filed by a man who claims he invented email, who is represented by the same lawyer who led the case that resulted in Gawker Media’s bankruptcy. The same person settled with Gawker in 2016. Techdirt’s founder, Mike Masnick, has said that the lawsuit has “already taken a massive toll on us and our ability to function and report.” To help the Techdirt weather the lawsuit, the group of philanthropies, companies and private individuals is funding a year of coverage on the site devoted to free speech issues.

«

Yes, the Charles Koch Foundation is linked to those Koch brothers. Strange to see them ranged against Thiel. But good to see Techdirt getting a serious backer.
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How to take down Kim Jong Un • POLITICO Magazine

Tom Malinowski was assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labo(u)r at the US State Department from 2014-2017:

»

Kim Jong Un, like all totalitarian leaders, wants above all to ensure his survival. He is convinced that a nuclear strike capability is necessary to deter the United States and South Korea from threatening his regime, and to extract concessions that might prolong its life. There is nothing crazy about this conviction. And because the matter is existential for Kim, more economic pressure will not change his mind. His regime survived a famine and can risk economic hardship. What he apparently will not risk is following the example of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qadhafi, who gave up nuclear programs and found themselves defenseless against foreign interventions that claimed their lives.

But there is an opportunity in Kim’s obsession with survival. While he assumes the United States would not start a catastrophic war to stop his nuclear program, he also knows that were he to start that war, the U.S. would have no reason to hold back. We could, and likely would, destroy his regime. This means that even if we can’t prevent North Korea from gaining the ability to hit us or our allies, we can deter it from actually doing so, and thus have time to pursue, by means more effective than sanctions and less dangerous than war, our ultimate goal of a reunified Korea that threatens no one.

«

Malinowski offers a number of suggestions for what those “more effective than sanctions” options are, though personally I find them unsatisfactory, in that they’re slow. (They’re all things the US and South Korea are doing anyway.) A nuclear North Korea has negotiating power, so the US should negotiate with it – because it can be sure that any opening of North Korea’s regime to outside trade and information will weaken it and eventually undermine it. (I made similar points in a Twitter thread.)

Overall? I think that the risk of actual war with North Korea is minimal, as long as the US keeps calm. (Thanks for the link to Tim Bajarin, who has previously pointed to similar thinking about Kim Jong-un.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

When women were the “computers”: what discouraged them? Photo by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center on Flickr.

You can now 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

‘iPhone 8’ to enter mass production in mid-Sept., launch alongside ‘iPhone 7s,’ come in 3 colours • Apple Insider

»

Rumors about an “iPhone 8” delay may have been unfounded, as analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities indicated on Tuesday that the flagship handset will launch on the same day as the “iPhone 7s” and “iPhone 7s Plus” —albeit in limited quantities and styles.

Kuo’s supply chain rumblings were shared in a research note obtained by AppleInsider. The KGI analyst, who has a strong track record in predicting Apple’s future product plans, indicated that the handset will come in just three colors: black, silver and gold.

Kuo said that all three new iPhones will be announced simultaneously in September, and will share the same launch date. However, he indicated that the so-called “iPhone 8” will be in extremely short supply at launch, with the supply chain expected to produce between 2 million and 4 million units this quarter.

According to Kuo, all of this fall’s new iPhone models will support fast charging. However, consumers may have to opt to spend extra on a Lighting-to-USB-C cable and wall adapter to utilize it —the same approach Apple already takes with the iPad Pro.

He expects production of the “iPhone 8,” which some have taken to calling an “iPhone Pro,” will ramp up quickly, reaching between 45 million and 50 million units this year.

«

What happened is that Kuo saw Apple’s forward guidance, as did everyone else, which forecasts a healthy few metric tonnes of iPhones being sold in the next quarter, and concluded that Apple is confident of getting the top-end OLED phone out with the other two LCD ones.

So that’s something to look forward to.
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When women stopped coding • Planet Money • NPR

Steve Henn:

»

Modern computer science is dominated by men. But it hasn’t always been this way.

A lot of computing pioneers — the people who programmed the first digital computers — were women. And for decades, the number of women studying computer science was growing faster than the number of men. But in 1984, something changed. The percentage of women in computer science flattened, and then plunged, even as the share of women in other technical and professional fields kept rising.

What happened?

We spent the past few weeks trying to answer this question, and there’s no clear, single answer.

But here’s a good starting place: The share of women in computer science started falling at roughly the same moment when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers…

…This idea that computers are for boys became a narrative. It became the story we told ourselves about the computing revolution. It helped define who geeks were, and it created techie culture.

Movies like Weird Science, Revenge of the Nerds and War Games all came out in the ’80s. And the plot summaries are almost interchangeable: awkward geek boy genius uses tech savvy to triumph over adversity and win the girl.

In the 1990s, researcher Jane Margolis interviewed hundreds of computer science students at Carnegie Mellon University, which had one of the top programs in the country. She found that families were much more likely to buy computers for boys than for girls — even when their girls were really interested in computers.

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Note to employees from CEO Sundar Pichai • Google blog

Pichai delayed his holiday to deal with the fallout from “that memo”:

»

Our job is to build great products for users that make a difference in their lives. To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK. It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct, which expects “each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination.”

The memo has clearly impacted our co-workers, some of whom are hurting and feel judged based on their gender. Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.”

«

The employee was fired because “portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”

I wrote about this for CNN:

»

Amid the furor around the Google “man-ifesto” — the male author of which, James Damore, has since left the company after his 10-page thinkpiece on why women aren’t that well suited for coding went viral — there’s one question that nobody seems to have asked.

Why haven’t we heard about any internal pro-diversity manifestos written by women within Google? Or within Uber? Or any of the scores of Silicon Valley companies?

They must exist. Google employs thousands of women, from its chief financial officer Ruth Porat down, and some of them must have thoughts about how to increase the pool of talent from which to draw its future managers and leaders. (Porat, one should acknowledge, was hired from outside.) So why haven’t we heard about them?

«

One other point: the case brought by the US Department of Labor seeking lots of data about Google’s pay to its staff has been reined in by the judge, who says the DoL demands were overbroad, intrusive and insufficiently focussed.
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Tablet screen size trend • ScientiaMobile

»

Two screen sizes segments clearly emerge from the tablet group:

1) full-size, larger tablets (over 9in diagonal screen size), and

2) smaller “mini” tablets (less than 9in diagonal screen size).

The full size segment is the largest market. In particular, the full-size 9.5in to 10in segment has grown from 46.6% in 2014 to 53.6% in 2017 Q2. The largest sizes – over 11in – have not grown. In fact, despite Apple iPad’s power in the market, the larger iPad Pro versions do not seem to have gained much market share.

Back in 2014, the 7-7.5″ was the largest portion of Mini tablet market. Now in 2017, the smaller “mini” segment has shifted away from the 7in to 7.5in size and is predominated by the 7.5in to 8in size. The 7.5in to 8in segment holds 31.8% of the traffic in 2017 Q2.

«

What’s surprising is how the “mini” (8in and below) section has remained roughly static as a share of the whole: about 40%. Apple is effectively discouraging people from buying the iPad mini (7.9in) through its pricing: you can now get a 9.7in iPad for less.
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How Trump fell for fake news • Yahoo News

Rick Newman and Jennifer Rogers:

»

Yahoo Finance ordered a flag from ProTrump45.com to see if it would arrive as promised in 7 to 10 days. The site took our money, through a PayPal account — $30 for the flag, $15 for shipping and $2.40 for tax, for a total of $47.40. But no flag ever arrived. We did get a notice, however, saying, “Your order is on its way,” along with a UPS tracking number. When we contacted UPS, a spokesman told us the tracking number was bogus and the order had been “stopped as fraud.” We did a “who is” search looking up registration details for the Web site and found it had been registered anonymously through a Florida company called Perfect Privacy, essentially masking the site’s real owners.

The emailed order confirmation from ProTrump45 did contain one curious clue, however: an email address that belonged to a student at St. Peter’s University, a small Jesuit school in Jersey City, N.J. An August 5 story on heavy.com, which first raised questions about whether Nicole Mincey was a real person, said the student had been a victim of identity theft who planned to file a police report. But in a phone conversation with Yahoo Finance, the student told us she had been involved with ProTrump45 web site as a blogger and had been recruited to the effort by two people, “Lorraine Elijah” and “Dr. William Byrd,” who followed her on Instagram and invited her to join the Web operation sometime this past spring.

“I joined a group of people online who supported Trump,” the student told Yahoo Finance. “We came up with this idea to make some money off of this. We bought advertising. We bought articles.” The way to make money was selling Trump merchandise on ProTrump45 — hats, T-shirts, flags. The Twitter account would drive traffic to the Web site. “I think Lorraine” — the web site operator who had recruited the student on Instagram — “bought followers for us,” the student said. “I don’t even have the Twitter app on my phone.”

Yahoo Finance chose not to identify the student, who says she has hopes for a successful business career and would suffer if negative publicity linking her to a suspicious Web site and twitter account were irrevocably published on the Internet. Her name is not Nicole Mincey, but there are similarities between the fake name and the real one. We have not been able to independently verify what the student told us.

«

It’s that last sentence that’s the killer. Can nobody get into a car or on a metro and head for New Jersey? Read on for another example of the same stuff.
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I found Nicole Mincey, Trump’s biggest Twitter fan. She isn’t a bot, but she has a ton of secrets • Daily Beast

Ben Collins used Twitter and Facebook to get in touch with the woman who Trump apparently retweeted; she offered to phone him back:

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About a half-hour later, Nicole Mincy [note the spelling; her real name] called me. The group, she said, was about “10 of us.” They were just called ProTrump45, “full of people with Republican opinions.”

The group reached out to Nicole in January through her Instagram, where she had been posting pro-Trump memes and the occasional picture of herself. It was a woman named Lorraine, specifically, who asked her to join ProTrump45’s blog. Lorraine, she said, was from Texas, and there was another guy named William. Lorraine was selling clothes and writing blogs on ProTrump45.com and they wanted Nicole to help.

“I was the one writing the blog posts. I wrote, like, the second most blogs,” she said.

Lex, the Twitter model from North Arlington? Not real. That’s Lorraine, she said. So is David from South Carolina. So is Chinami, the supposed legal immigrant.

All of @protrump45’s Twitter followers were entirely invented, except for her and a woman named Mary Mack, who went by @MtSaintMarys on Twitter, she said. That account is now suspended for using a stock photo.

Nicole doesn’t even have a Twitter account of her own, she said. Just an Instagram and a Facebook account.

That’s why she and Lorraine and William had a big falling out. They started using Nicole’s identity, and college address, for ProTrump45 business, she claimed.

«

What’s unsatisfactory about this is that even now, with all the hot takes, nobody has actually *met* this woman. Collins follows all the available leads; they’re all dead ends. In this situation, follow the money. Nobody seems to have done that with any success yet.
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No, smartphones are not destroying a generation • Psychology Today

Sarah Rose Cavanagh PhD:

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A recent article by psychologist Jean Twenge in the Atlantic warns that “the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever” and that “it’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.”

The articles has been scattered prolifically all over my Twitter and Facebook, with parents crowing, “I KNEW IT!” and popular newsmedia wringing their hands.

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She details why she disagrees, on three key points. And finally:

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Yes, we should practice (and preach to our children) moderation in all things, our digital lives included. Yes, we should conduct careful research studies into the effects of “screentime” on developing minds, and we should be open to what those data say. Yes, we should be concerned about adolescent depression and investigate its causes. Yes, we should put down our phones once in awhile and take a walk in the damn woods.

But my suspicion is that the kids are gonna be ok.

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As I said, I want to know what the effect on infants will be of mothers who ignore them for their black slabs.

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The man who wrote those password rules has a new tip: N3v$r M1^d! • WSJ

Robert McMillan spoke to Bill Burr, who wrote the 2003 advice on passwords – change regularly, use capitals and odd characters:

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“Much of what I did I now regret,” said Mr. Burr, 72 years old, who is now retired.

In June, Special Publication 800-63 got a thorough rewrite, jettisoning the worst of these password commandments. Paul Grassi, an NIST standards-and-technology adviser who led the two-year-long do-over, said the group thought at the outset the document would require only a light edit.

“We ended up starting from scratch,” Mr. Grassi said.

The new guidelines, which are already filtering through to the wider world, drop the password-expiration advice and the requirement for special characters, Mr. Grassi said. Those rules did little for security—they “actually had a negative impact on usability,” he said.

Long, easy-to-remember phrases now get the nod over crazy characters, and users should be forced to change passwords only if there is a sign they may have been stolen, says NIST, the federal agency that helps set industrial standards in the U.S.

Amy LaMere had long suspected she was wasting her time with the hour a month it takes to keep track of the hundreds of passwords she has to juggle for her job as a client-resources manager with a trade-show-display company in Minneapolis. “The rules make it harder for you to remember what your password is,” she said. “Then you have to reset it and it just makes it take longer.”

When informed that password advice is changing, however, she wasn’t outraged. Instead, she said it just made her feel better. “I’m right,” she said of the previous rules. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

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Rainbow tables will now have to include “correct horse battery staple”. It turns out too that Burr wrote the guidelines with minimal empirical evidence about what was and wasn’t hard to remember, and to crack.

Wonder how long it will take this advice to filter down, though. 10 years? 15?
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Researchers trick self-driving car cameras using stickers • CNet Roadshow

Andrew Krok:

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Researchers created two different sorts of attacks on a self-driving car’s systems, using a whole lot of math and a little bit of printing. It involves gaining access to a car’s classifier, a part within its vision system that tells the car what an object is and what it means to the vehicle. If the car’s cameras detect an object, it’s up to the classifier to determine how the car handles said object.

The first kind of attack involves printing out a life-size copy of a road sign and taping it over an existing one. A right-turn sign with a sort of grayed-out, pixelated arrow confused the system into believing it was either a stop sign or an added-lane sign, but not a right-turn sign. Thus, a confused vehicle may attempt to stop when it does not need to, causing additional confusion on the road.

The second kind of attack involved small stickers that give off a sort of abstract-art look. These rectangular stickers, in black and white, tricked the system into believing the stop sign was a 45-mph speed limit sign. It should be fairly obvious that nothing good can come from telling a car to hustle through an intersection at speed, as opposed to stopping like usual.

Of course, this all hinges on whether or not malicious parties have access to a vehicle system’s classifier, which may be the same across different automakers if they all purchase their systems from a single supplier.

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VPN provider accused of sharing customer traffic with online advertisers • Bleeping Computer

Catalin Cimpanu:

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On Monday, the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) — a US-based privacy group — filed a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accusing one of today’s top VPN providers of deceptive trade practices.

In a 14-page complaint, the CDT accuses AnchorFree — the company behind the Hotspot Shield VPN — of breaking promises it made to its users by sharing their private web traffic with online advertisers for the purpose of improving the ads shown to its users.

Currently, Hotspot Shield is offered as a free and paid product. The free product injects ads in users’ web traffic, and the elite version provides an ad-free VPN experience. The company has always been upfront with this policy, and in an interview with ZDNet last year, AnchorFree’s CEO said that 97% of its estimated 500,000 userbase is using his company’s free VPN service.

In its complaint to the FTC, the CDT is not accusing Anchor Free of secretly injecting ads, as users are well aware of this practice, but of not respecting promises made to its customers.

More specifically, the CDT says that AnchorFree does not respect a pledge made in marketing materials that it won’t track or sell customer information.

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Public works funding falls as infrastructure deteriorates • The New York Times

Binyamin Appelbaum:

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It’s basically the opposite of a major government infrastructure program.

Government spending on transportation and other public works is in decline as federal funding stagnates and state and local governments tighten their belts.

Such spending equaled 1.4% of the nation’s economic output in the second quarter of 2017, the lowest level on record, according to Census Bureau data.

In West Virginia, where President Trump on Thursday touted a vague $1 trillion infrastructure plan, public works spending has fallen for five straight years.

Nate Orders, who runs a construction company founded by his grandfather to build bridges for the state, said he had been forced to scramble for other kinds of business. Only three of the 15 projects on his current slate are bridges in West Virginia.

“My grandfather would not recognize the business we have today,” he said.

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Absolute spending is lower than in 2007 in 34 US states. The country is falling apart. And yet it’s hard to find workers because employment in general is at such a high level. And there’s nothing happening with the Trump budget on that front.
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Game of Thrones stars’ personal details leaked as HBO hackers demand ransom • The Guardian

Samuel Gibbs:

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In a five-minute video letter from somebody calling themselves “Mr Smith” to HBO chief executive Richard Plepler, the hackers told the company to pay within three days or they would put online the HBO shows and confidential corporate data they claim to have stolen.

The hackers claim to have taken 1.5TB of data – the equivalent to several TV series box sets or millions of documents – but HBO said that it doesn’t believe its email system as a whole has been compromised, although it did acknowledge the theft of “proprietary information”.

HBO said it is continuing to investigate and is working with police and cybersecurity experts.

The hackers demanded “our six-month salary in bitcoin”, claiming they earn $12m to $15m a year from blackmailing organisations whose networks they have breached. They said they would only deal directly with “Richard” and only send one “letter” detailing how to pay.

Along with the video, the hackers released 3.4GB of files. The dump contained technical data detailing HBO’s internal network and administrator passwords, draft scripts from five Game of Thrones episodes, including this week’s instalment, and a month’s worth of emails from HBO’s vice president for film programming, Leslie Cohen.

The hackers claim it took six months to break into HBO’s network, and that they spend $500,000 a year purchasing so called zero-day exploits that let them break into networks through holes not yet known to Microsoft and other software companies.

«

So professional hackers, as I said last week; but the addition of the ransom, which is new, changes the game somewhat. The problem for the organisation about ransomed digital data is: if you pay up, how do you know they won’t spread it anyway?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Teens have smartphones. What has that changed? Photo by Photoglovey on Flickr.

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

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

Have smartphones destroyed a generation? • The Atlantic

Jean Twenge is a sociologist, and says the arrival of smartphones has made a huge difference:

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Parenting styles continue to change, as do school curricula and culture, and these things matter. But the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy.

In the early 1970s, the photographer Bill Yates shot a series of portraits at the Sweetheart Roller Skating Rink in Tampa, Florida. In one, a shirtless teen stands with a large bottle of peppermint schnapps stuck in the waistband of his jeans. In another, a boy who looks no older than 12 poses with a cigarette in his mouth. The rink was a place where kids could get away from their parents and inhabit a world of their own, a world where they could drink, smoke, and make out in the backs of their cars. In stark black-and-white, the adolescent Boomers gaze at Yates’s camera with the self-confidence born of making your own choices—even if, perhaps especially if, your parents wouldn’t think they were the right ones.

Fifteen years later, during my own teenage years as a member of Generation X, smoking had lost some of its romance, but independence was definitely still in. My friends and I plotted to get our driver’s license as soon as we could, making DMV appointments for the day we turned 16 and using our newfound freedom to escape the confines of our suburban neighborhood. Asked by our parents, “When will you be home?,” we replied, “When do I have to be?”

But the allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today’s teens, who are less likely to leave the house without their parents. The shift is stunning: 12th-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009.

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I’d also love to hear whether any sociologists have begun studying the effects on infants of mothers who are more interested in a black rectangle they’re holding than the infant’s face. That’s the next “smartphone” generation.
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I am disappointed but unsurprised • Medium

Erica Joy:

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Saying yes to that question [the question being: “do we want this to be an environment where racists and sexists feel safe and supported to share their views?”] (and so it’s clear, choosing not to answer that question is the equivalent of saying yes to it) means a company should give up any notions of being diverse or inclusive. Saying “we want an environment that allows all opinions and a free exchange of ideas” to that question means a company has deemed racism and sexism viable opinions, worthy of being freely exchanged, instead of the hatred and bigotry that they are.

That message will be heard loud and clear by the targets of said hatred and bigotry, and will be antithetical to any other attempts at building a diverse and inclusive company. Employees will tell their friends (or the media in this case) about what the company is really about, and any efforts at improving diversity will be hampered. Inclusion will be a non-starter, since employees cannot feel included in an environment where their peers believe they aren’t worthy of being there and will say so, freely.

Employees cannot advance in a system that is built on peer evaluation if their peers believe them to be fundamentally subpar. Employees cannot feel a sense of belonging or, as Google itself told us, thrive in an environment when they do not feel psychologically safe.

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As was also pointed out elsewhere, if you have the broadest possible recruitment pool, then you increase your chance of getting the best candidates.
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The Apple ARKit proves the future of augmented reality will be on your phone • WIRED

Jason Tanz:

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much of the stuff built with ARKit seems downright banal. One app lets you see how a new throw pillow would look on your couch. A menu app shows the proferred food as it might appear on your table. Sure, some developers are filling rooms with virtual water or building portals into alternate dimensions, but it’s the close-to-the-ground stuff that’s generating the most enthusiastic response. One video, which garnered 12,000 likes on the popular @MadeWithARKit Twitter feed, merely shows a digital tape measure unspooling.

That modesty of vision isn’t a handicap. It’s precisely why ARKit apps are more likely to catch on where other, more ambitious approaches have failed. It’s easy to forget, amid all the overheated rhetoric and consciousness-expanding possibilities, but most people don’t want technology to usher them into an entirely new plane of existence. They just want it to solve problems and make their lives easier.
Call it the Inductive Theory of Platform Development—successful consumer technologies don’t start with grand ideas that trickle down into products. They begin as small solutions that expand to become grand ideas.

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This is absolutely correct, but I don’t think AR will begin and end on the phone. Glasses are such an obvious next move.
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Meet Alex, the Russian casino hacker who makes millions targeting slot machines • WIRED

Brendan Koerner:

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Alex’s life-changing introduction to slots came about a decade ago, while he was working as a freelance hacker. A Russian casino hired him to learn how to tweak machines manufactured by Novomatic, an Austrian company, so that their odds would favor the house more than usual: The machine had been programmed to pay out 90% of the money it took in, a figure that Alex’s client wanted him to adjust down to 50%.

In the course of reverse engineering Novomatic’s software, Alex encountered his first PRNG. He was instantly fascinated by the elegance of this sort of algorithm, which is designed to spew forth an endless series of results that appear impossible to forecast. It does this by taking an initial number, known as a seed, and then mashing it together with various hidden and shifting inputs—the time from a machine’s internal clock, for example. Writing such algorithms requires tremendous mathematical skill, since they’re supposed to produce an output that defies human comprehension; ideally, a PRNG should approximate the utter unpredictability of radioactive decay.

After wrapping up the casino gig, Alex spent six months teaching himself everything he could about PRNGs—in part because he admired their beauty but also because he knew that such expertise could prove profitable.“I mastered it to the point where I can develop such algorithms myself, on a level I am yet to see in a gambling machine,” says Alex, who will never be accused of lacking confidence. “It’s in my bloodstream now. I feel the numbers; I know how they move.”

In 2008 Alex unleashed his newfound mastery on the gambling world, hiring a small group of employees to “milk” Novomatic machines throughout eastern Europe. (Three years later, Novomatic became the first slots manufacturer to warn its customers that some of its PRNGs had been compromised.)

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Fascinating read. Nothing seems to be invulnerable apart from real radioactivity.
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John Lanchester reviews ‘The Attention Merchants’ by Tim Wu, ‘Chaos Monkeys’ by Antonio García Martínez and ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ by Jonathan Taplin · London Review of Books

John Lanchester:

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One man’s fake news is another’s truth-telling, and Facebook works hard at avoiding responsibility for the content on its site – except for sexual content, about which it is super-stringent. Nary a nipple on show. It’s a bizarre set of priorities, which only makes sense in an American context, where any whiff of explicit sexuality would immediately give the site a reputation for unwholesomeness. Photos of breastfeeding women are banned and rapidly get taken down. Lies and propaganda are fine.

The key to understanding this is to think about what advertisers want: they don’t want to appear next to pictures of breasts because it might damage their brands, but they don’t mind appearing alongside lies because the lies might be helping them find the consumers they’re trying to target. In Move Fast and Break Things, his polemic against the ‘digital-age robber barons’, Jonathan Taplin points to an analysis on Buzzfeed: ‘In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News and others.’ This doesn’t sound like a problem Facebook will be in any hurry to fix.

The fact is that fraudulent content, and stolen content, are rife on Facebook, and the company doesn’t really mind, because it isn’t in its interest to mind. Much of the video content on the site is stolen from the people who created it. An illuminating YouTube video from Kurzgesagt, a German outfit that makes high-quality short explanatory films, notes that in 2015, 725 of Facebook’s top one thousand most viewed videos were stolen. This is another area where Facebook’s interests contradict society’s. We may collectively have an interest in sustaining creative and imaginative work in many different forms and on many platforms. Facebook doesn’t. As Martínez explains in [the book] Chaos Monkeys, it has two goals: growth and monetisation.

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Long but definitely worth it, especially for the internet entrepreneur who describes one of the big internet firms as “scuzzy”. And for what Zuckerberg was studying for his other degree – the one not in computer science.
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First evidence that social bots play a major role in spreading fake news • MIT Technology Review

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How does fake news spread in the first place?

Today we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Chengcheng Shao and pals at Indiana University in Bloomington. For the first time, these guys have systematically studied how fake news spreads on Twitter and provide a unique window into this murky world. Their work suggests clear strategies for controlling this epidemic.

Diffusion network for the article titled “Spirit cooking: Clinton campaign chairman practices bizarre occult ritual,” published by the conspiracy site Infowars.com four days before the 2016 U.S. election.

At issue is the publication of news that is false or misleading. So widespread has this become that a number of independent fact-checking organizations have emerged to establish the veracity of online information. These include snopes.com, politifact.com, and factcheck.org.

These sites list 122 websites that routinely publish fake news. These fake news sites include infowars.com, breitbart.com, politicususa.com, and theonion.com. “We did not exclude satire because many fake-news sources label their content as satirical, making the distinction problematic,” say Shao and co…

…Having made a judgment on the ownership of each account, the team finally looked at the way humans and bots spread fake news and fact-checked news.

To do all this, the team developed two online platforms. The first, called Hoaxy, tracks fake news claims, and the second, Bolometer, works out whether a Twitter account is most likely run by a human or a bot.

The results of this work make for interesting reading. “Accounts that actively spread misinformation are significantly more likely to be bots,” say Shao and co. “Social bots play a key role in the spread of fake news.”

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The Kronos needle in the AlphaBay haystack • emptywheel

“emptywheel” (the site has multiple authors) points out that it’s odd how quickly the FBI alighted on the Kronos malware sale on AlphaBay, given how much else there was to look at:

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look at the overall numbers FBI boasted for AlphaBay when it announced its takedown on July 20, nine days after the indictment targeting Hutchins.

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AlphaBay reported that it serviced more than 200,000 users and 40,000 vendors. Around the time of takedown, the site had more than 250,000 listings for illegal drugs and toxic chemicals, and more than 100,000 listings for stolen and fraudulent identification documents, counterfeit goods, malware and other computer hacking tools, firearms, and fraudulent services. By comparison, the Silk Road dark market—the largest such enterprise of its kind before it was shut down in 2013—had approximately 14,000 listings.

The operation to seize AlphaBay’s servers was led by the FBI and involved the cooperative efforts of law enforcement agencies in Thailand, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France, along with the European law enforcement agency Europol.

“Conservatively, several hundred investigations across the globe were being conducted at the same time as a result of AlphaBay’s illegal activities,” Phirippidis said. “It really took an all-hands effort among law enforcement worldwide to deconflict and protect those ongoing investigations.”

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Of the 40,000 vendors charged within a month of takedown, of the 250K drug listings and the 100K fraudulent services listings, the guy who sold Kronos once for $2,000 (whom Tom Fox-Brewster thinks might be a guy named VinnyK) — and by virtue of American conspiracy laws, Hutchins — were among the first 20 or so known to be charged for using AlphaBay.

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All the indicators are that someone who was nabbed in the AlphaBay sting was somehow implicated in Kronos, and put Hutchins’s name forward as a co-conspirator. It’s a way to get the feds off your back.
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Financial Times returns to Apple’s App Store after six-year hiatus • WSJ

Jack Marshall:

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The company hopes its new app, available for iPhone and iPad, will help boost subscriber engagement with its content and in turn increase the revenue it is able to extract from its customers over the long term.

“We know that an engaged reader results in a larger lifetime value,” said Cait O’Riordan, the FT’s chief product and information officer. “We want to know if a native app can help drive that engagement number.”

Since 2011, Apple device users have only been able to access the FT’s full range of content via its mobile website. The FT decided to invest in its web offering rather than a “native” iOS app partly because of Apple’s requirement to be paid a 30% cut of any subscription revenue generated from apps in its App Store, according to people familiar with the matter.

The new iOS app will therefore only be accessible to existing FT subscribers. New readers won’t be able to purchase subscriptions from within the app itself, but must instead do so from the FT’s website before logging in.

This model means the FT can avoid giving Apple a cut of subscription revenue and will allow it to collect payment information and other valuable data directly from its subscribers. Spotify and other subscription-based services have taken a similar approach in recent years.

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The end-run around the subscription problem (Amazon does the same thing on Kindle books) seems like a suitable solution to the problem. One wonder why it took the FT six years to figure this out.

Also – minor point – shouldn’t the final word in the headline be “absence” rather than “hiatus”? The app was withdrawn. It didn’t pause.
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An everyday brush with disaster on Mumbai’s crowded railway • FT

Simon Mundy:

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Samir Zaveri pondered my bloodshot eye and stitched-up shin and shook his head at my good fortune. On a table between us was a sheath of documents detailing the casualties on Mumbai’s trains in recent years — police figures obtained by Zaveri under India’s Right to Information Act.

The statistics are a grim testament to the terrible safety record of the country’s transport network — even as this rising power pursues grand projects such as a $17bn high-speed rail link between Mumbai and Ahmedabad.

Mumbai’s trains are often described as the city’s “lifeline”, carrying 7m passengers a day — largely people from the sprawling suburbs who work in offices on the narrow peninsula of old Bombay. Yet last year alone, 3,202 people were killed on the system, while a further 3,363 suffered amputations or other serious injuries.

About a third of these casualties result from people walking over train tracks in the absence of boundary walls. Most others, Zaveri says, stem from overcrowding on a network that packs about 5,560 passengers on to each 12-car train in peak hours, against a rated safe capacity of 3,522.

Zaveri lost both legs aged 17 after slipping on the track. While sitting in a disabled carriage in 2006, looking around at others whose limbs were lost on the railways, he decided to act. The result was a series of court petitions, arguing that the railway authorities were breaching their constitutional duty to protect their passengers’ lives.

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This article’s intro (lede to Americans) deserves some sort of award. It reads:

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You gain a certain perspective on India’s safety challenges from lying on a Mumbai railway platform, under a surging crowd, while a moving train cuts into your lower leg.

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Overall, the article goes to show that driverless cars are only a small fraction of the problem.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified