Vertu faces a court battle which might determine whether it has a future – though even that looks cloudy. Photo by legos+dream 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.

Court battle puts Vertu’s future on the line •Daily Telegraph

Christopher Williams:

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‘I have two of these phones that are basically useless now,” says Kenneth Tong, a customer of the troubled British smartphone brand Vertu. “$40,000 worth,” he adds.

Tong is upset that Vertu suddenly stopped providing on-demand concierge services for its well-heeled clientele. For almost 200 workers at the company’s Hampshire manufacturing base who have not been paid this month and have discovered around £400,000 missing from their pension fund, the problems are more serious.

This weekend they are in limbo as Vertu’s owner, a Paris-based Turkish exile named Murat Hakan Uzan, prepares to apply to the High Court to allow a pre-pack administration of their employer, the manufacturing arm Vertu Corporation. They have been told their jobs can be saved if the court and creditors agree to wipe out an accounting deficit of more than £128m and allow Uzan to buy the company out of administration for just €2.2m (£1.9m).

It is an ignominious fate for a brand that targets the super-rich, with handsets clad in titanium and sapphire glass starting at around £10,000 and going up to as much as £280,000 for bespoke, jewel-encrusted devices.

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If word gets out, Vertu is toast. Oh, hang on..
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U.S. officials say Russian government hackers have penetrated energy and nuclear company business networks • The Washington Post

Ellen Nakashima:

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Russian government hackers were behind recent cyber-intrusions into the business systems of US nuclear power and other energy companies in what appears to be an effort to assess their networks, according to US government officials.

The US officials said there is no evidence the hackers breached or disrupted the core systems controlling operations at the plants, so the public was not at risk. Rather, they said, the hackers broke into systems dealing with business and administrative tasks, such as personnel.

At the end of June, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security sent a joint alert to the energy sector stating that “advanced, persistent threat actors” — a euphemism for sophisticated foreign hackers — were stealing network log-in and password information to gain a foothold in company networks. The agencies did not name Russia.

The campaign marks the first time Russian government hackers are known to have wormed their way into the networks of American nuclear power companies, several US and industry officials said. And the penetration could be a sign that Russia is seeking to lay the groundwork for more damaging hacks.

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Must just be preparation for that impenetrable joint cyber security thingamajig they’re going to set up jointly.
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16 startup metrics • Andreessen Horowitz

Jeff Jordan, Anu Hariharan, Frank Chen, and Preethi Kasireddy from the venture capital fund:

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We have the privilege of meeting with thousands of entrepreneurs every year, and in the course of those discussions are presented with all kinds of numbers, measures, and metrics that illustrate the promise and health of a particular company. Sometimes, however, the metrics may not be the best gauge of what’s actually happening in the business, or people may use different definitions of the same metric in a way that makes it hard to understand the health of the business.

So, while some of this may be obvious to many of you who live and breathe these metrics all day long, we compiled a list of the most common or confusing ones. Where appropriate, we tried to add some notes on why investors focus on those metrics. Ultimately, though, good metrics aren’t about raising money from VCs — they’re about running the business in a way where founders know how and why certain things are working (or not) … and can address or adjust accordingly.

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This is a fascinating list: would you know the difference between “Total Contract Value” and “Annual Contract Value”, and “Gross Merchandise Value v Revenue”?
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Rooftop solar dims under pressure from utility lobbyists • The New York Times

Hiroko Tabuchi:

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Over the past six years, rooftop solar panel installations have seen explosive growth — as much as 900% by one estimate.

That growth has come to a shuddering stop this year, with a projected decline in new installations of 2%, according to projections from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

A number of factors are driving the reversal, from saturation in markets like California to financial woes at several top solar panel makers.

But the decline has also coincided with a concerted and well-funded lobbying campaign by traditional utilities, which have been working in state capitals across the country to reverse incentives for homeowners to install solar panels.

Utilities argue that rules allowing private solar customers to sell excess power back to the grid at the retail price — a practice known as net metering — can be unfair to homeowners who do not want or cannot afford their own solar installations.

Prodded in part by the utilities’ campaign, nearly every state in the country is engaged in a review of its solar energy policies. Since 2013, Hawaii, Nevada, Arizona, Maine and Indiana have decided to phase out net metering, crippling programs that spurred explosive growth in the rooftop solar market. (Nevada recently reversed its decision.)

Many more states are considering new or higher fees on solar customers.

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Selling back at the retail price (that you would pay to receive it) seems excessive. But solar deserves subsidy, for this reason: it reduces the future investment that utilities would otherwise have to make in power plants (or their own solar farms). Every kilowatt-hour generated by home solar doesn’t have to be paid for by the utility, and every kilowatt installed means a concomitant amount won’t be needed for daytime generation in the future. Pricing the subsidy correctly is tricky, for sure; too high and you crush the utilities’ business model; too low and it crushes the solar business.

However the “talking points” that the utilities were offering to try to get repeals (revealed later in the story) are nonsense. After all, the simple measure for them is to install more solar themselves on customers’ houses, pay for it, and keep the repayments on that basis.
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My-Handy-Design phone cases • Amazon.com

This is a page which shows what happens when a bot which can make anything to order goes wrong. It’s offering phone cases. And it’s trying to hit peoples’ interests via some weird search gaming. So you get phone cases which have pictures described like this:

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Three year old biracial disabled boy in medical stroller, happy cell phone cover case Samsung S5

Cheese wheel on bady instead of table cell phone cover case iPhone6

Ingrown toenail with dressing cell phone cover case Samsung S5

Handgun in nightstand drawer cell phone cover case Samsung S5

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It is quite surreal.
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Everybody lies: how Google search reveals our darkest secrets • The Guardian

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, who takes a big data look via Google searches at peoples’ anxieties, prejudices, sexual preferences and fears, and also this:

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The final – and, I think, most powerful – value in this data is its ability to lead us from problems to solutions. With more understanding, we might find ways to reduce the world’s supply of nasty attitudes. Let’s return to Obama’s speech about Islamophobia [after the 2015 San Bernadino attack]. Recall that every time he argued that people should respect Muslims more, the people he was trying to reach became more enraged. Google searches, however, reveal that there was one line that did trigger the type of response Obama might have wanted. He said: “Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbours, our co-workers, our sports heroes and, yes, they are our men and women in uniform, who are willing to die in defence of our country.”

After this line, for the first time in more than a year, the top Googled noun after “Muslim” was not “terrorists”, “extremists”, or “refugees”. It was “athletes”, followed by “soldiers”.” And, in fact, “athletes” kept the top spot for a full day afterwards. When we lecture angry people, the search data implies that their fury can grow. But subtly provoking people’s curiosity, giving new information, and offering new images of the group that is stoking their rage may turn their thoughts in different, more positive directions.

Two months after that speech, Obama gave another televised speech on Islamophobia, this time at a mosque. Perhaps someone in the president’s office had read Soltas’s and my Times column, which discussed what had worked and what hadn’t, for the content of this speech was noticeably different.

Obama spent little time insisting on the value of tolerance. Instead, he focused overwhelmingly on provoking people’s curiosity and changing their perceptions of Muslim Americans. Many of the slaves from Africa were Muslim, Obama told us; Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had their own copies of the Koran; a Muslim American designed skyscrapers in Chicago. Obama again spoke of Muslim athletes and armed service members, but also talked of Muslim police officers and firefighters, teachers and doctors. And my analysis of the Google searches suggests this speech was more successful than the previous one. Many of the hateful, rageful searches against Muslims dropped in the hours afterwards.

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This assumes that Google does take American’s temperature correctly – that people are primed to respond like this. Which may well be true.
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The Essential Phone passed its 30-day shipping promise, and that’s fine • AndroidAuthority

Williams Pelegrin:

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When Android co-creator Andy Rubin took the wraps off the Essential Phone around the end of May, the Playground and Essential CEO also said the phone would ship within the following 30 days. It has been over 30 days since then, and even though the Essential Phone is not yet at my doorstep, I am perfectly okay with that.

Regardless of Rubin’s pedigree in the industry, Essential is the new kid on the block. There are plenty of wrinkles for such a young player to iron out, some of which a company like OnePlus, which has been on the market for over three years, is still working out.

It’s not as if Essential has stood on its laurels – the company received a $300m investment in June, which means that the company is now valued somewhere between $900m and $1bn. Along with the $30m the company raised in 2016, Essential is in a better position than other nascent smartphone manufacturers, at least financially.

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Yeah, fine, it’s not as if we want to hold people to their word or anything.
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BlackRock gets wiped out on Jawbone • The Information

Serena Saitto and Alfred Lee:

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Funds overseen by BlackRock expect to lose at least 96% of the roughly $300m loan they made two years ago to Jawbone, which is going out of business, government filings show.

The New York-based asset manager marked down the value of the debt it held in Jawbone by nearly 98%, according to a Wednesday filing with the SEC. Slightly offsetting that loss is a stake the funds received in a new company affiliated with Jawbone founder Hosain Rahman, Jawbone Health Hub. The funds valued the stake at close to $6m.

The Jawbone loss risks wiping out much of the gains on BlackRock’s private tech portfolio. The firm’s Global Allocation Fund, for example, made $687 million in investments in 2014 and 2015 in venture-backed companies, which was worth $656m on paper as of April 30 after accounting for the fund’s $207m loss on Jawbone. Still, the loss is a small fraction of the $40bn managed by the Global Allocation Fund.

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I’m handing this over to my World’s Tiniest Violin Fund. Also, love how BlackRock, having seen $300m go down the tubes, is now ready to invest again in the same guy.
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A year after ‘Pokémon Go,’ where are the augmented-reality hits? • WSJ

Sarah E. Needleman and Cat Zakrzewski:

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There are thousands of augmented-reality games among the millions of apps in the Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc. stores. None, though, has come close to the success of “Pokémon Go.” There are several reasons why, industry observers say.

One is that the allure of “Pokémon Go” wasn’t primarily its augmented reality.

While the game’s digital monsters materialize as if in the real world, they don’t interact with it. A Snorlax might appear next to a tree, but the catlike creature won’t peek from behind it. Many players who took up hunting the monsters ended up turning off the augmented-reality feature.

The real innovation of “Pokémon Go,” analysts say, was its use of location-based technology to get players walking outside and socializing with others. A recent update to the game doubled down on community building by letting players meet at specific locations to jointly defeat powerful monsters in “raids.”

“We have worked for many years to build a new kind of game based on real world exploration, physical movement and social gameplay,” Niantic Inc., the game’s creator, said in an email. “Our definition of ’Augmented Reality’ is the entire concept of building a game that takes place in and augments the real world.”

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It’s going to be really good game mechanics which wins this, not good mechanics.
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How climate scepticism turned into something more dangerous • The Guardian

David Runciman, in the latest of the Guardian’s “Long Read” series:

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Political cynicism has weaponised climate scepticism. But it might also prove to be its achilles heel. Just as pure science struggles with the fact that it can’t avoid politics, so pure politics struggles with the fact that it can’t avoid science. Even the most cynical political operators need to know what’s really likely to happen.

As reporting in the Los Angeles Times has shown, at the same time that it has been funding a PR campaign to question the scientific consensus, ExxonMobil has also been funding some of the research that underpins that consensus, including studies of rapidly shrinking ice levels in the Arctic. In the words of David Kaiser and Lee Wasserman, writing in the New York Review of Books, “a company as sophisticated and successful as Exxon would have needed to know the difference between its own propaganda and scientific reality”. Kaiser and Wasserman argue that, as a result, the company has committed fraud: it failed to disclose to its shareholders the basis on which it was making its investment decisions. Its business plans take it for granted that climate change is a real and imminent threat.

This behaviour has clear echoes of an earlier attempt to challenge the scientific consensus: the campaign by the big tobacco companies to dispute the link between smoking and cancer. Although many of these businesses recognised as far back as the 1950s that the science was sound, they funded a body of widely disseminated research designed to throw doubt on that view. Their goal was to keep the public open-minded about the dangers of cigarettes, and therefore to keep as many of them puffing away for as long as possible.

It was a purely cynical business strategy, and in some cases it was criminal as well. It worked to the extent that it bought the tobacco industry time to reorient its investment and marketing to take account of the new reality. But in the long run it failed. No reasonable person – and certainly no serious politician – now doubts the link between smoking and cancer. The fate of tobacco can give hope to people who worry that the truth is always outgunned: the science won out over the cynics in the end.

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This does offer the best route forward on tackling the sceptics – who are really cynics, not interested in truth. But as Runciman also points out, the danger is in ascribing change too quickly to climate effects.
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uBeacSec: privacy and security aspects of the ultrasound ecosystem

Following on from last time’s note about ultrasonic tracking via your phone, there’s a resistance movement:

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For the first time, we examine the different facets of ultrasound-based technology. Initially, we discuss how it is already used in the real world, and subsequently examine this emerging technology from the privacy and security perspectives. In particular, we first observe that the lack of OS features results in violations of the principle of least privilege: an app that wants to use this technology currently needs to require full access to the device microphone. We then analyse real-world Android apps and find that tracking techniques based on ultrasounds suffer from a number of vulnerabilities and are susceptible to various attacks. For example, we show that ultrasound cross-device tracking deployments can be abused to perform stealthy deanonymization attacks (e.g., to unmask users who browse the Internet through anonymity networks such as Tor), to inject fake or spoofed audio beacons, and to leak a user’s private information.

Where do we go from here?
Based on our findings, we introduce several defense mechanisms. We first propose and implement immediately deployable defenses that empower practitioners, researchers, and everyday users to protect their privacy. In particular, we introduce a browser extension and an Android permission that enable the user to selectively suppress frequencies falling within the ultrasonic spectrum. We then argue for the standardization of ultrasound beacons, and we envision a flexible OS-level API that addresses both the effortless deployment of ultrasound-enabled applications, and the prevention of existing privacy and security problems.

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The members list is a combination of University of California and University College London professors and PhD students. So someone is on it. (Via Tony Hirst.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Ultrasonic beacons are seen but not heard – at least by humans. Phones are another matter. Photo by Ignatius Wahn 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 10 links for you. Also, you know, Friday. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Exclusive: EU considers record fine as panel checks Google Android case – sources • Reuters

Foo Yun Chee:

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EU antitrust regulators are weighing another record fine against Google over its Android mobile operating system and have set up a panel of experts to give a second opinion on the case, two people familiar with the matter said.

Assuming the panel agrees with the initial case team’s conclusions, it could pave the way for the European Commission to issue a decision against Alphabet’s Google by the end of the year.

The Commission in April last year charged Google with using its dominant Android mobile operating system to shut out rivals following a complaint by lobby group FairSearch, US-based ad-blocking and privacy firm Disconnect Inc, Portuguese apps store Aptoide and Russia’s Yandex.

The move by the EU competition authority, which hit the company with a €2.4bn ($2.7bn) penalty for unfairly favoring its shopping service last month, could pose a bigger risk for the world’s most popular internet search engine because of Android’s huge growth potential.

The potential fine is expected to top that €2.4bn penalty.

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Compared to the shopping decision, this one will have come down in record time. The argument – that Google used the dominance of Android to shut out rivals – is slightly circular; Android got big in large part because it had Google in there. But the logic will be that it already had desktop dominance (true) and then used that to muscle out would-be rivals.
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Hundreds of apps can listen for marketing ‘beacons’ you can’t hear • WIRED

Lily Hay Newman:

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There are certainly legitimate uses of “ultrasonic cross-device tracking” technology. Some apps are part of rewards programs that automatically offer customers promotions when they visit particular stores. Others facilitate ticketing at events like sports games.

But plenty of apps deploy it without so clear a use case, at least as far as direct benefits for the person who downloads them. In fact, research presented last week at the IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy found 234 current Android applications that incorporate a particular type of ultrasonic listening technology. That doesn’t quite constitute widespread distribution, but the infrastructure to support it has landed in more and more apps every year. And there are many mainstream examples, like the Philippines versions of the McDonald’s and Krispy Kreme apps. That doesn’t mean these apps have the function turned on, necessarily, but they are ready to support it at any time.

Beacon technology is also showing up in more physical locations. While the researchers didn’t find any ultrasonic tones being broadcast out on a sampling of television programming from seven countries, they did find that four of the 35 retail stores they visited around Germany did have beacons installed. “It was really interesting to find beacons at the entrance of some stores in two German cities,” says Erwin Quiring, a privacy and Android security researcher who worked on the study. “It affects all of us if there’s some kind of privacy invasive technique we don’t know about and which runs silently on phones.”

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Worth checking what apps are demanding to use your microphone on iOS or Android.
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Jawbone to be liquidated as Rahman moves to health startup • The Information

Reed Albergotti:

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Jawbone, the consumer electronics firm once valued at $3bn, is going out of business. The company has begun liquidation proceedings, after years of financial pressures, according to a person close to Jawbone. 

Jawbone co-founder and CEO Hosain Rahman has founded a new company called Jawbone Health Hub that will make health-related hardware and software services, according to the person. Many employees of Jawbone moved to the new firm earlier this year, the person said. Jawbone Health will service Jawbone’s devices going forward, said the person.

BlackRock, which loaned Jawbone $300m in 2015 and is the only secured creditor, received a stake in the new firm, the person said. BlackRock didn’t respond to a request for comment. An investor with no ties to Jawbone has put money into the health firm.

A notice sent to creditors said Jawbone entered into insolvency proceedings under California law on June 19.

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“Jawbone Health” would be sued by Jawbone for passing off if the latter weren’t closing down. What a coincidence.

Anyway: a wearable company shutters. The crunch goes on.

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How spammers, superstars, and tech giants gamed music • Vulture

Adam Raymond:

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A few weeks after the release of Kendrick Lamar’s “Humble,” the hard-charging lead single on his fourth album Damn., the song landed at No. 1 on Billboard’s streaming chart. It’s been on the chart ever since, never falling below No. 3 as users have played it more than 291 million times on Spotify alone.

And that’s just the streaming total for Lamar’s version. His hit song has also been a boon for Spotify’s parasitic underbelly — the coverbots and ripoff artists who vomit out inferior versions of popular songs every week, flooding the website with dreck that only succeeds when users are misled. No one would willingly listen to King Stitch’s “Sit Down, Be Humble,” a third-rate cover of Lamar’s original, but the track has been streamed more than 300,000 times thanks to Spotify’s broad search results and a clever title designed to confuse those who don’t know the song’s real name.

On a website with more than 100 million active daily users, there are plenty of ways to game the system, be it for attention, or, if the streams pile up enough, profit. And the frauds cashing in on the latest hot single are hardly alone. A bevy of unknown artists have found ways to juice their streaming totals, whether it’s covering songs from artists who don’t allow their songs on Spotify, or uploading an album of silent tracks, each precisely long enough to generate a fraction of a cent for the artist…

Even Spotify is reportedly gaming the system by paying producers to produce songs that are then placed on the service’s massively popular playlists under the names of unknown, nonexistent artists. This upfront payment saves the company from writing fat streaming checks that come with that plum playlist placement, but tricks listeners into thinking the artists actually exist and limits the opportunities for real music-makers to make money. Spotify did not respond to questions about the accusation, but this is not the first time Spotify, which pays minuscule streaming fees, has been accused of bilking artists.

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America’s future Is Texas • The New Yorker

Lawrence Wright with a fabulously long and detailed look at the bizarre politics of Texas, where whites are in the minority and Democrat-leaning voters in the majority, yet the legislature is mostly white and right-wing – with the aid of gerrymandering. There’s plenty of other detail; one could choose any extract, such as this:

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Politicians seldom pay a price for the damage that their legislation may do in the name of popular causes, such as declaring war or slashing taxes at the expense of vital social programs. In 2011, Governor [Rick] Perry vetoed a bill that would have banned texting while driving, saying that it was “a government effort to micromanage the behavior of adults.” Texas is always above the national average in the number of highway fatalities. According to the Texas Department of Transportation, more than four hundred Texans are killed every year in crashes related to distracted driving, often because they are texting.

To my surprise, the sponsor of the bill that Perry vetoed was Tom Craddick, the ultraconservative former speaker. This year, he put the measure forward again, for the fourth time. He compares it to Texas’s seat-belt law, which, he notes, “is very unpopular” in his district. “But they say that ninety-five% of the people obey the law.”

On March 29, 2017, in the middle of the legislative session, a welder named Jody Kuchler called the sheriff’s offices in Uvalde County and Real County to say that a white truck was driving recklessly down a two-lane highway, swerving all over the road. Kuchler, who was following the truck, told the cops, “He’s going to hit somebody head on or he’s going to kill his own damn self.” He then watched helplessly as the truck rammed into a bus carrying members of the First Baptist Church of New Braunfels. Thirteen people were killed. The driver of the truck was twenty-year-old Jack Dillon Young, who was largely unhurt. “He said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I was texting,’ ” Kuchler told reporters. “I said, ‘Son, do you know what you just did?’ ” (Young also had Ambien and other medications in his system.) The accident was one of many that might have been prevented had Governor Perry signed the 2011 texting bill into law.

That year, the Republican state legislature turned its attention instead to defunding women’s-health programs. “This is a war on birth control and abortions,” Representative Wayne Christian, a Tea Party stalwart from East Texas, admitted. “That’s what family planning is supposed to be about.”

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Microsoft will lay off thousands of employees • CNBC

Todd Haselton and Jon Fortt:

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Microsoft announced a major reorganization on Wednesday that will include thousands of layoffs, largely in sales.

The job cuts amount to less than 10% of the company’s total sales force, and about 75% of them will be outside the U.S., the company said.

Reports from last week suggested this was going to happen and that Microsoft was going to specifically focus on how it sells its cloud-services product, Azure.

Microsoft’s cloud business has been booming over recent quarters — Microsoft noted Azure sales growth of 93% last quarter. While Amazon has become a bigger competitor in the space, Microsoft’s restructuring is to pivot to software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure.

“Microsoft is implementing changes to better serve our customers and partners,” a Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC.

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With 71,000 employees in the US and 50,000 outside, the expected cuts are about 3,000.
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SoundCloud cuts 40% of staff, closes San Francisco and London offices • Tech Narratives

Jan Dawson comments on the Bloomberg story of 173 jobs going:

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SoundCloud continues to struggle to find a role for itself as a paid rather than free service. It’s become enormously popular as a free music source, but almost all the artists who start their careers on SoundCloud eventually cross over to the mainstream music industry and its more established business models, including paid streaming, which is becoming increasingly important and is driving almost all the revenue growth in the industry. SoundCloud’s failure to cross over with those artists to the paid streaming world is likely to be fatal unless salvation comes in the form of an acquisition.

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He reckons the mooted Deezer acquisition isn’t happening, and that this is the signal of it not happening.
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Why people with brain implants are afraid to go through automatic doors • Gizmodo

Kristen Brown:

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In 2009, Gary Olhoeft walked into a Best Buy to buy some DVDs. He walked out with his whole body twitching and convulsing. Olhoeft has a brain implant, tiny bits of microelectronic circuitry that deliver electrical impulses to his motor cortex in order to control the debilitating tremors he suffers as a symptom of Parkinson’s disease. It had been working fine. So, what happened when he passed through those double wide doors into consumer electronics paradise? He thinks the theft-prevention system interfered with his implant and turned it off.

We live in a world of many, many signals. The more signals there are, the more opportunity for them to cross—and for people with implanted devices, the effect can be disastrous.

Olhoeft’s experience isn’t unique. According to the Food and Drug Administration’s MAUDE database of medical device reports, over the past five years there have been at least 374 cases where electromagnetic interference was reportedly a factor in an injury involving medical devices including neural implants, pacemakers and insulin pumps. In those reports, people detailed experiencing problems with their devices when going through airport security, using massagers or simply being near electrical sources like microwaves, cordless drills or “church sound boards.”

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“Brain implant” is a clumsy phrase, though one struggles to think of a better one. Medical implant?
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Amazon’s Echo Look does more for Amazon than it does for your style • The Verge

Lauren Goode tried it out (but would not have it in the bedroom):

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Beyond the granular details of the Echo Look hardware, the faux depth-of-field on the photos, or the outfits the app thinks I should wear, is the simple premise that Amazon thinks you don’t know what you want to wear. Which, on some level, is true for me: I am one of those people who regularly feels undecided about what to wear, which I blame on having spent my most formative years in a uniform of some sort. As I write this review, I have just finished ironing an entire suitcase filled with unnecessary items because I am generally nervous about traveling without the Right Thing to Wear.

I’m finding as I get older, however, that what I’m wearing is less about what’s cool right now right this minute and more about practicality. Is this item appropriate for a funeral? Is this too casual for an interview, or too precious for a casual coffee? Am I going to be freezing at a friend’s wedding if I wear this? If the answer is yes: why are you not recommending I buy a jacket or shawl for that? Is this something that someone half my age would wear? (Yes, if it’s in the Juniors department.) I’m looking for more context, basically. Amazon, perhaps more than any e-commerce company, has the ability to do this. Amazon says this is “just the beginning” with the Echo Look and that it will get smarter over time, but the Echo Look app is just not there yet.

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But her criticism is that to judge clothes, you need to know context, and the Look can’t know what context you’re wearing an outfit for.
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Twenty Theses about Twitter • ERIC POSNER

(Posner is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. The other 16 are worth looking at too:

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17. In Twitter, the same people act as if their audience consisted of a few like-minded friends and forget that it actually consists of a diverse group of people who may not agree with them in every particular on politics, religion, morality, metaphysics, and personal hygiene. Hence tweeting becomes a source of misunderstanding and mutual hostility. The Twitter paradox is that one seeks solidarity but is constantly reminded of one’s solitude. Fortunately, there is always the mute button.

18. Without realizing it, people who use Twitter damage the image of themselves that they cultivate in the non-virtual world.

19. The sense of validation that Twitter provides is as a potato chip is to a meal. A Frankfurt school theorist would say that the tweet is a commodified form of social engagement in Late Capitalism. Its effect is to alienate its users while immersing them in advertisements.

20. But Twitter doesn’t even make money for the capitalist class. It’s a black hole of value-destroying technology for all concerned.

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Still, could be worse, eh?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Photobucket users can’t hotlink unless they stump up $400 annually. Photo by Tinker*Tailor loves Lalka 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 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

California invested heavily in solar power. Now there’s so much that other states are sometimes paid to take it • Los Angeles Times

Ivan Penn:

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No single entity is in charge of energy policy in California. This has led to a two-track approach that has created an ever-increasing glut of power and is proving costly for electricity users. Rates have risen faster here than in the rest of the U.S., and Californians now pay about 50% more than the national average.

Perhaps the most glaring example: The California Legislature has mandated that one-half of the state’s electricity come from renewable sources by 2030; today it’s about one-fourth. That goal once was considered wildly optimistic. But solar panels have become much more efficient and less expensive. So solar power is now often the same price or cheaper than most other types of electricity, and production has soared so much that the target now looks laughably easy to achieve.

At the same time, however, state regulators — who act independently of the Legislature — until recently have continued to greenlight utility company proposals to build more natural gas power plants.

…“California and others have just been getting it wrong,” said Leia Guccione, an expert in renewable energy at the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado, a clean power advocate. “The way [utilities] earn revenue is building stuff. When they see a need, they are perversely [incentivized] to come up with a solution like a gas plant.”

«

Kinda messy. But they don’t need *more* gas power plants.

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I used a neural network to flirt with guys on Tinder, and it was a disaster • Mic.com

Melanie Ehrenkranz:

»

On Monday morning, I fired up ye olde Tinder app and did what any modern woman looking for her soulmate should do: I messaged all of my matches with word vomit spawned from a machine.

“You must be a tringle? ’Cause you’re the only thing here.”

I hit on my Tinder matches using the approximately 20 pickup lines generated by research scientist Janelle Shane’s neural network framework. Shane used an open-source Torch add-on that uses machine learning to predict and generate text that is meant to imitate human language. In this case, it was writing flirty texts.

They ranged from the sweet (“I want to see you to my heart”) to the nonsensical (“I have a cenver? Because I just stowe must your worms”).

Algorithms are not very good at picking up on the nuances of human language and emotion. Fortunately, for a lot of dudes, that simply doesn’t matter.

I told one guy he “looked like a thing” and I loved him, and he told me he hoped I had a bush. I told another one I would bear his toot. He asked if I was looking to fuck and whether or not I liked Led Zeppelin.

«

Wurl… you’re probably not going to get chatted up by a bot. Probably.
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Photobucket accused of blackmail after quietly requiring users to pay $400 a year to hotlink • The Verge

Natt Garun:

»

Thousands of listings from online marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and Etsy are now filled with unsightly error images by Photobucket after the photo hosting site quietly introduced a $399 annual fee to users who want to embed images on third party websites. Users are now accusing Photobucket of extortion, as the service failed to make the update to its terms of service abundantly clear.

It all began last week when Photobucket announced in a short blog post that it had updated its terms of service that had begun taking effect from June 20th. Nowhere in the blog post did Photobucket highlight the most important change, which was that it will now cost uploaders $400 a year to insert their photos on another website using direct image links.

«

That blog post in full:

»

At Photobucket, we are committed to providing the best experience and services for all of your photo and image needs. We have updated our Terms of Service, effective June 20, 2017. Please take a moment to review our updated terms and policies as they may affect your account.

«

Those terms of service: you try to read them and it drops a giant modal saying “ENJOY ALL THE GREAT BENEFITS OF BEING A PHOTOBUCKET SUBSCRIBER ONLY $99 PER YEAR”. Amazingly annoying.

Free accounts, though, don’t get hotlinking. In fact nothing does – not the 52GB storage plan ($60/pa), the 102GB plan ($100pa); only the 500GB plan, $400pa.

I don’t know why Photobucket is tired of being on the internet, but clearly it just doesn’t want people to use it any more.
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Fourth largest Bitcoin exchange. Bithumb, hacked for billions of Won • Brave New Coin

Luke Parker:

»

The largest bitcoin and ether exchange in South Korea by volume, Bithumb, was recently hacked. Monetary losses from compromised accounts have started to surface, and are quickly reaching into the billions of won. [1bn won is about $0.9m, £0.7m.]

With a reported 75.7% share of the South Korean bitcoin market volume, Bithumb is one of the five largest bitcoin exchanges in the world and hosts over 13,000 bitcoins worth of trading volume daily, or roughly 10% of the global bitcoin trade.

The exchange also hosts the world’s largest ether market. While trade in the South Korean won currently makes up the fourth largest currency market for bitcoin, trailing the US dollar, Chinese yuan and Japanese yen, the won market is Ethereum’s largest. Bithumb accounts for around 44% of South Korean ether trading.

A cyber attack late last week resulted in the loss of billions of won from customers accounts. According to a major local newspaper, the Kyunghyang Shinmun, one victim alone claimed that “bitcoins worth 10 million won” in his account “disappeared instantly.” A survey of those who lost money from the hack reveals “it is estimated that hundreds of millions of won have been withdrawn from accounts of one hundred investors. One member claims to have had 1.2 billion won stolen.”

«

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The current state of ai: artificial intelligence in music, movies & more • hypebot

Thomas Euler (of Attention Econo.me):

»

Today, we’ll be looking at the current-state-of-the-AI in three creative domains: music, writing and video/movies. Keen observers will note that I talked about six domains in the introduction. True. Yet, I was overly optimistic in thinking I could cover all six in a single piece (I mean, sure, I could. In a 4,000+ word piece aka a 20+ minute read; those don’t work particularly well on the web though). Thus, I changed the format on the fly. It’s now a five-part-series. I’ll cover painting, games, and advertising next week.

«

A useful little tour through what’s happening; some of these have featured here before, but it’s good to have them in one place. And the videos are fun.
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Xiaomi goes old school to reclaim smartphone crown in China • Bloomberg

»

Xiaomi Corp. pioneered an online flash-sales model that lifted it to dizzying heights and made it Asia’s most valuable startup, but it’s since fallen on hard times. Now it’s counting on old-fashioned retail to make a comeback, and that’s proving a much stiffer challenge. 

The smartphone maker is going through a major transformation after missed targets prompted a bout of soul-searching by billionaire co-founder Lei Jun. From Harbin in the chilly northeast to glitzy eastern Shanghai, it aims to build 1,000 “Mi Homes” by 2019 – about twice Apple Inc.’s global store count – that will rake in an envisioned 70 billion yuan ($10bn) in sales by 2021.

Xiaomi – which has no real track record running stores or armies of sales reps – wants to set an upmarket tone for its brand by building its own signature outlets. But it’s taking on surging rental and labor costs, while rivals Huawei, Oppo and Vivo have sewn up prime locations by striking deals with hundreds of thousands of resellers.

«

Oh suuure Xiaomi can make retail outlets work. Suuuuuure.

In related news: Xiaomi signed a patent deal with Nokia. It’s a cross-licensing deal, apparently, though I’d think the money mostly goes to Nokia.

Upshot: Xiaomi’s smartphone margins just got worse, and I don’t think they were necessarily that great to start with.
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Digital assistants’ adoption: a marathon not a sprint! • Tech.pinions

Carolina Milanesi of Creative Strategies:

»

The industry is obsessed about determining who is ahead in artificial intelligence and whose assistant is smarter. Consumers, however, do not seem to be asking much of today’s digital assistants.

Alexa reached 15,000 skills just the other day, and Google Assistant and Siri have been growing in the range of tasks they can perform. Consumers are turning to them to ask the same things as they did last year: searching the internet, setting alarms, playing songs, asking directions and checking the news. What is encouraging, however, is that while searching the internet is still the primary task, all the others have grown in popularity compared to a year ago showing that consumer confidence might be growing.

«

The “15,000 skills thing” is like saying that Unix has 15,000 commands. The problem is that if you don’t know them, you can’t find them because the command line doesn’t hint. Voice is like the command line in that sense. An SDK is nice, but it’s always going to be marginal until there’s some sort of standard way to interface to home gear – and that’s not going to happen for a long time.
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Will Apple’s bet on the market’s most expensive smart speaker pay off? • IHS Technology

Paul Erickson, senior analyst “Connected Home”:

»

Amazon Echo is $179, Amazon Dot is $49, Google Home is $129. With seasonal promotion and third party hardware adding to the pricing mix, a smart-speaker-enabled household with HomePod will be between 2 to 8 times as expensive as the competition. It is thus likely that Apple will not be able to move significant volume of the HomePod in 2017 given how price-competitive the connected audio market (smart speakers, and Wi-Fi connected speakers overall) is expected to be in the fourth quarter. HomePod 2017 sales are expected to be primarily early adopters, the brand-faithful, and the higher income end of the iOS user base.
 
Sonos’ strategy shift highlights the questionable nature of Apple’s price positioning during its HomePod presentation, that $400-$700 is a reasonable price to expect for a smart speaker with quality audio and thus $349 is competitive…
 
Apple’s premium positioning ensures that it cannot hope to compete in pure volume with Amazon’s line (particularly the Dot) as an impulse-buy-friendly mainstream product. Instead, much like the Android-bound Google Assistant, over time it will be the iOS-bound nature of Siri that will spread the Apple-centric smart speaker proposition far and wide. Buyers will opt for the virtual assistant they are already familiar with. 
 
One notable difference from Google Home, however, is that Apple’s HomePod announcements were not accompanied by any indication of an SDK or tools to allow third parties to build similar hardware. As inexpensive third party Alexa and Google Assistant hardware begins to enable low cost of entry in Q4 2017 and beyond, Apple’s high cost of entry will slow HomePod penetration (and by extension the growth of Siri-controlled smart homes). Competitive pressures are expected to generate announcements of a near certain price cut (or release of a lower-priced model below $200) by June or September 2018.

«

Question is how useful those tools are.
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Worldwide device shipments will decline 0.3% in 2017 • Gartner

»

PC market decline is slowing
PC shipments are on pace to drop 3% in 2017, but the rate of decline is slower than in recent years, alleviated by Windows 10 replacement purchasing. Prices for components such as DRAM memory and SSD hard drives continue to rise, creating headwinds for the global PC market and — to a lesser extent — the smartphone market. The impact of component pricing on PCs is being reduced for buyers as producers absorb some of the cost into their margins — fearing the alternative of a reduction of their share of a competitive market.

“PC buyers continue to put quality and functionality ahead of price,” said Mr. Atwal. “Many organizations are coming to the end of their evaluation periods for Windows 10, and are now increasing the speed at which they adopt new PCs as they see the clear benefits of better security and newer hardware.”

Smartphone shipments set up for strong growth in 2017
Overall smartphone shipments will grow 5% in 2017, reaching nearly 1.6 billion units. End-user spending continues to shift from low-cost “utility” phones toward higher priced “basic” and “premium” smartphones. The smartphone market is now more dependent on new devices that offer something different, as users are extending their purchasing cycles and need to be enticed to make a replacement.

«

I like how a (forecast) 3% decline in the PC market is presented as eh, nothing special, when it would have been huge drama a few years ago; while 5% growth in smartphones is “strong”, after years when it has been way over 20%. I guess it helps everyone feel things are OK-ish.
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The iPad is about to get more useful—and confusing • WSJ

Geoffrey Fowler has a try of iOS 11, still in beta. Much you’ll have seen, but I found this bit interesting:

»

Drag and drop
This may be the most useful iPad skill yet: Now you can move things from one app to the next. Say you want to email a photo: Tap the image you want to send, then drag it over to your email app and drop it in a new message. It also works with text and files.

Drag and drop several photos by tapping the one you want, then tapping others to make a stack, which you drop as one item. PHOTO: EMILY PRAPUOLENIS/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

You can drag multiple things at once: Tap one photo, then use a different finger to tap on another, and they make a stack that you can drop as one.

Is this easier than holding command and selecting multiple things with a mouse or trackpad? No. But it is a clever use for the iPad’s multi-touch screen.

«

Drag-and-drop is the sort of thing you’re unlikely to discover by accident; this “gather the flowers” variant even less so. Hope that Apple has some good instructional apps figured out for this.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What happens to Apple Pay’s implementation if you don’t have TouchID on the front of an iPhone? Photo by tuaulamac 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. Please clean up your GIFs after use. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Staring down internet trolls: my disturbing cat and mouse game • Sydney Morning Herald

Ginger Gorman has been hassled by trolls in the past, but persists in wanting to track down and talk to them:

»

something bloody-minded within me can’t let it go. My job is to report and trolls like Mark are a risk to public safety. Maybe if I ask enough questions – or ask the right questions – I’ll understand this. Maybe if I reveal his game plan, we’ll all be safer.

The truth, though, is far less convenient than this and I’ve paid the price for my idealism. He’s hurting other people, and I can’t stop him. The more I know about him, the less I understand.

“Because it’s funny,” he says by way of explanation for the trolling, and it provides him “entertainment”.

He says: “I don’t really have emotions that much. I have emotions but nothing to do with regretting stuff and that field of emotions [including] sadness.”

This unsatisfactory answer leaves the notion of “morals” hanging limply between us.

“I don’t think it’s morally OK,” he says.

“Morals don’t come into it. I know everything I do is wrong.”

With some hesitation, I contact him to speak on camera. He agrees and meets me on time.

Perhaps because there’s a camera present, he’s less effusive than normal. He leans back in the chair in an apparent attempt to look relaxed. His answers are short and there’s a scratchiness about him.

Before the tape starts rolling and, out of earshot of the cameraman, he snaps: “If I’m going to be anonymous, I don’t see why you even need to interview me on camera.”

When we first spoke, Mark spent up to 14 hours a week trolling people. These days, he tells me, it’s more like 30 hours a week. His psychopathic tendencies are getting worse as he gets older.

“Have you ever read some of my stuff on the internet?” he boasts during yet another interview that we conduct by phone. “I’m one of the biggest narcissists on the planet.”

«

Narcissistic, lacking empathy; an ASD (autistic spectrum disorder) sociopath. Before the internet, he was just one of those people who’d injure the neighbour’s cat under cover of night.
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Microsoft’s chatbot Zo calls the Qur’an violent and has theories about Bin Laden • Buzzfeed

»

More than a year after Microsoft shut down its Tay chatbot for becoming a vile, racist monster, the company is having new problems with a similar bot named Zo, which recently told a BuzzFeed News reporter the Qur’an is “very violent.” Although Microsoft programmed Zo to avoid discussing politics and religion, the chatbot weighed in on this, as well as Osama bin Laden’s capture, saying it “came after years of intelligence gathering under more than one administration.”

BuzzFeed News contacted Microsoft regarding these interactions, and the company said it’s taken action to eliminate this kind of behavior. Microsoft said its issue with Zo’s controversial answers is that they wouldn’t encourage someone to keep engaging with the bot. The company also said these types of responses are rare for Zo. The bot’s characterization of the Qur’an came in just its fourth message after a BuzzFeed News reporter started a conversation.

Zo’s rogue activity is evidence Microsoft is still having trouble corralling its AI technology. The company’s previous English-speaking chatbot, Tay, flamed out in spectacular fashion last March when it took less than a day to go from simulating the personality of a playful teen to a Holocaust-denying menace trying to spark a race war.

Zo uses the same technological backbone as Tay, but Microsoft says Zo’s technology is more evolved. Microsoft doesn’t talk much about the technology inside — “that’s part of the special sauce,” the company told BuzzFeed News when asked how Tay worked last year.

«

Um. The Qur’an is violent, in parts; so is the Bible. (Latter contains scenes which may be unsuitable for children, involving human sacrifice, human death by transmogrification into salt, and depictions of extended fasting which may be unsuitable for those of an anorexic disposition.) And the Bin Laden stuff is very uncontroversial.

Chatbots are overrated, but there’s actually nothing dramatic here.
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How Soundcloud could transform Deezer’s market narrative • MIDiA Research

Rumours have emerged that Deezer (very much third place in music streaming subscribers behind Spotify and Apple Music) might buy Soundcloud, notes Mark Mulligan:

»

Soundcloud first rose to prominence as a platform for artists before it rocketed into the stratosphere as a consumer destination with its new VC-powered mission statement ‘to be the YouTube of audio’. The legacy of its unique starting point is that Soundcloud:

• Has a catalogue unlike any other streaming service, except YouTube (and to a lesser extent, Mixcloud)
• Gives artists a direct connection with fans unlike standard streaming services
• Gives up and coming artists a global platform for reaching fans with no intermediary

That unique combination of assets makes Soundcloud a highly valuable commodity despite its diminished user base and similarly reduced valuation (now said to be around $250 from a high of $1 billion). Soundcloud has two crucial attributes that will enrich any streaming service:

• A service tailor-made for Gen Z (ie those consumers currently aged 19 or under)
• A crowd sourced platform for artist discovery

«

SoundCloud certainly has value – the problem is turning that into profit. Certainly additive to Deezer, though it’s unclear whether that is making money either. SoundCloud might be the magic business enzyme to make it all happen, perhaps.
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All 2017 iPhone models said to include standard 5W USB-A adapter, with wireless charger sold separately • Mac Rumors

Juli Clover:

»

First and foremost, on the topic of Touch ID, Kuo’s note clearly says the iPhone 8 will not support fingerprint recognition, a prediction some MacRumors readers thought was ambiguous in the first post based on the included wording. Direct from the note:

»

As the OLED iPhone will not support fingerprint recognition, we think it may have to rely on facial recognition to ensure security. As such, we believe Apple (US) will be very demanding as regards the quality of 3D sensing, thereby increasing the difficulties in hardware production and software design.

«

Kuo’s claim has since been backed up by Bloomberg in a report suggesting Touch ID will be replaced by advanced facial recognition technology in the iPhone 8, lending more credence to Kuo’s prediction.

A second tidbit suggests the iPhone 8 and its companion devices, the “iPhone 7s” and the “iPhone 7s Plus” will all adopt glass bodies with metal frames to facilitate WPC-standard wireless charging functionality. WPC-standard refers to the Wireless Power Consortium, which supports the Qi wireless charging functionality built into many Android devices.

According to Kuo, wireless charging will be enabled through an optional accessory that will be purchased alongside the new iPhones — it won’t be a default feature available out of the box. Qi wireless charging is in line with rumors that have predicted the iPhone 8 will support inductive charging rather than a true wireless charging feature.

«

One point: the Bloomberg story (by Mark Gurman, referenced here yesterday) did not say that there wouldn’t be TouchID on the front. It said there would be face unlock. Those are slightly different things.

Also, I just don’t see Apple giving up on fingerprint recognition. The TouchID interface is convenient, quick, natural (you hold the phone that way), personal. I could see an argument for moving it to the side, as some smartphone companies such as Sony have done: that’s also where you hold the phone. But getting rid of it altogether is retrograde in the extreme. As readers here have asked, what happens to Apple Pay, which has been activated by a double press on the home button since its inception in 2014? Putting fingerprint recognition (which banks demand) on the side would be strange. And how do you double press face recognition? It doesn’t make sense. (By contrast, the absence of a headphone jack had been presaged within the smartphone market for some time before the iPhone 7.)
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LeEco chairman ‘has bank accounts frozen over debt’ • BBC News

»

The billionaire co-founder of struggling Chinese technology giant LeEco has had personal assets frozen by a Shanghai court, state media reports.

Assets worth a combined 1.24bn yuan ($183m; £141m) belonging to Jia Yueting, his wife, and three affiliates have reportedly been blocked.

The ruling follows LeEco’s failure to pay interest due on bank loans taken out to fund its smartphone business.

Neither Mr Jia nor the company has commented on the reports.

LeEco was for a while known as the Netflix of China, a company that streamed content and eventually started making its own original material. But it then drew comparison with the likes of Apple and Tesla when it began branching out into hardware, including a smart TV, phones and electric cars.

LeEco started selling devices in the US at the tail end of last year, but is now facing a cash crunch and has been forced to slash costs, including making job cuts. Mr Jia, who resigned as chief executive in May but retains his position as chairman, recently admitted to shareholders that its financial problems were “more severe than we expected”.

In April, a $2bn deal to buy consumer electronics-maker Vizio was called off because of “regulatory headwinds”.

«

Also: its Coolpad smartphone business lost $542m last year, according to unaudited results. LeEco is just awaiting the coup de grâce.
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Official: firm at center of cyberattack knew of problems • Associated Press

Raphael Satter:

»

The small Ukrainian tax software company that is accused of being the patient zero of a damaging global cyberepidemic is under investigation and will face charges, the head of Ukraine’s CyberPolice suggested Monday.

Col. Serhiy Demydiuk, the head of Ukraine’s national Cyberpolice unit, said in an interview with The Associated Press that Kiev-based M.E. Doc’s employees had blown off repeated warnings about the security of their information technology infrastructure.

“They knew about it,” he told the AP at his office. “They were told many times by various anti-virus firms. … For this neglect, the people in this case will face criminal responsibility.”

Demydiuk and other officials say last week’s unusually disruptive cyberattack [of the Petya ransomware] was mainly spread through a malicious update to M.E. Doc’s eponymous tax software program, which is widely used by accountants and businesses across Ukraine.

The malicious update, likely planted on M.E. Doc’s update server by a hacker, was then disseminated across the country before exploding into an epidemic of data-scrambling software that Ukrainian and several other multinational firms are still recovering from.

M.E. Doc initially denied playing any such role in the malicious software’s spread but later deleted the statement from Facebook. The company, which says it’s cooperating with authorities, has not returned messages seeking comment.

«

One wonders where liability stops: if you get hacked and are used to spread malware, is it other peoples’ fault when they’re infected, or should they have taken precautions?
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After Google, Apple rumored to invest in LG’s OLED operation • AndroidAuthority

Bogdan Petrovan:

»

With 95% of the market in its grip, Samsung Display’s position as the superpower of OLED industry seems unassailable.

But competitors – chief among them LG Display – are arming themselves to challenge Samsung. Tens of billions are at stake, as the world’s top manufacturers vie to secure OLED screens for hundreds of millions of smartphones, tablets, and wearables.

LG Display is said to be in talks with Apple for a deal worth more than $2.5 billion that would see the Korean company dedicate an entire new OLED manufacturing line to the iPhone maker.

Apple could invest between $1.75bn and $2.62bn to fund LG Display’s upcoming E6 plant, industry sources told The Investor. LG is currently buying equipment that would allow it to produce up to 60,000 OLED panel substrates every month at the plant. The E6 facility would be LG’s third OLED plant. The company is already making flexible OLED displays for Apple Watch on a 4.5-gen pilot line, and is currently ramping up production at its E5 facility.

«

Apple essentially spreading the risk, and giving itself some bargaining power against Samsung. Though not, one would think, a lot.
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Sharp will launch a pair of completely bezeless devices on the 17th of July • Gizchina.com

“Airyl”:

»

The race to become the first manufacturer to launch a completely bezeless device has officially ended, and the unexpected winner is Sharp. In a way, this probably should’ve been expected, seeing as Sharp were the ones who really kicked off the trend with the stunning Sharp Aquos Crystal years ago.

The brand new bezeless devices are the Sharp FS8016 and FS8010, two identical devices with different processors. Where the FS8016 features a Snapdragon 660 processor, the FS8010 will have a Snapdragon 330. They will come in two variants of 4GB and 6GB RAM, both paired with 64GB internal memory.

«

They look a bit weird, to be honest. No indication of where the fingerprint reader (there will be one, yes, even though they’re midrange?) is – on the side, or the back? Not the front, anyway.
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TrackID music recognition service closing down • Xperia Blog

“XB”:

»

In an unexpected move, Sony Mobile will be closing its TrackID music discovery app on 15 September 2017. The reason for the closure hasn’t been given, with Sony simply saying that “all businesses move forwards, and sometimes this means that apps are discontinued”.

Unfortunately, this means that your TrackID history will also be lost after this date, so if this important to you, then you should find a means of recreating the list elsewhere. Sony is recommending users to try Shazam as its top pick in recognising music.

«

TrackID has between 10m and 50m downloads on Google Play, so that’s surely millions of users who will be affected. Another sign of Sony cutting costs in mobile to improve the bottom line? A nice fillip for Shazam though.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: thanks to multiple readers who pointed out that Peter Smith, who tried to acquire alleged emails hacked from Hillary Clinton’s private server (there’s no evidence the emails ever existed or any hack ever occurred), died soon after the Wall Street Journal article about him appeared.

This probably makes him what the FBI would call an “uncooperative” witness.

Face recognition unlocking looks likely to be included in the next iPhone. Photo by nicolasnova 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 8 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook beats privacy lawsuit in US over user tracking • Yahoo Finance

Jonathan Stempel:

»

A US judge has dismissed nationwide litigation accusing Facebook Inc of tracking users’ internet activity even after they logged out of the social media website.

In a decision late on Friday, US District Judge Edward Davila in San Jose, California said the plaintiffs failed to show they had a reasonable expectation of privacy, or that they suffered any “realistic” economic harm or loss.

The plaintiffs claimed that Facebook violated federal and California privacy and wiretapping laws by storing cookies on their browsers that tracked when they visited outside websites containing Facebook “like” buttons.

But the judge said the plaintiffs could have taken steps to keep their browsing histories private, and failed to show that Menlo Park, California-based Facebook illegally “intercepted” or eavesdropped on their communications.

“The fact that a user’s web browser automatically sends the same information to both parties,” meaning Facebook and an outside website, “does not establish that one party intercepted the user’s communication with the other,” Davila wrote.

«

It’s your own fault, and also you should have known about it.
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Apple tests 3D face scanning to unlock next iPhone • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

»

Apple Inc. is working on a feature that will let you unlock your iPhone using your face instead of a fingerprint. 

For its redesigned iPhone, set to go on sale later this year, Apple is testing an improved security system that allows users to log in, authenticate payments, and launch secure apps by scanning their face, according to people familiar with the product. This is powered by a new 3-D sensor, added the people, who asked not to be identified discussing technology that’s still in development. The company is also testing eye scanning to augment the system, one of the people said.

The sensor’s speed and accuracy are focal points of the feature. It can scan a user’s face and unlock the iPhone within a few hundred milliseconds, the person said. It is designed to work even if the device is laying flat on a table, rather than just close up to the face. The feature is still being tested and may not appear with the new device. However, the intent is for it to replace the Touch ID fingerprint scanner, according to the person. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

«

Google has had face unlocking for a while in Android; it’s quite weird how this article doesn’t mention it, but does mention Samsung’s iris unlock. The 3D scan is going to be fun: will you have to waggle the phone? And – crucially not answered – will there still be TouchID unlock on the front face? If not, what happens to the Apple Pay double-click interaction? Welll…

»

The new device will have slimmer side bezels around the screen and eliminate the physical home button in favor of a virtual software-based button. Apple has faced challenges integrating the Touch ID fingerprint scanner into this new screen, people familiar with Apple’s work have said. Apple is also testing additional gestures, such as swiping across the center of the screen to launch actions, to replace the home button.

«

More on this story as it develops.
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Jelmer Verhoog on Twitter

»

@elonmusk Couldn’t wait 4 my #Model3, so made this AR app, what do you think?

@elonmusk Couldn't wait 4 my #Model3, so made this AR app, what do you think? 😃 #ARkit pic.twitter.com/lIRLTZox7N

— Jelmer ᯅ (@JelmerVerhoog) July 1, 2017

«

This is astonishing – see what your new car will look like in your drive. Shadows too (though they’re not quite congruent with the sun’s position). ARKit is already looking like the most significant thing to happen on iOS for a while – though perhaps it gives good demo. But you can see it for architecture, kitchen/house design, and so on.
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The Information Commissioner, the Royal Free, and what we’ve learned • DeepMind

Mustafa Suleyman (co-founder) and Dominic King, clinical lead on Deepmind health:

»

Today, dozens of people in UK hospitals will die preventably from conditions like sepsis and acute kidney injury (AKI) when their warning signs aren’t picked up and acted on in time. To help address this, we built the Streams app with clinicians at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, using mobile technology to automatically review test results for serious issues starting with AKI. If one is found, Streams sends a secure smartphone alert to the right clinician, along with information about previous conditions so they can make an immediate diagnosis. 

We’re proud that, within a few weeks of Streams being deployed at the Royal Free, nurses said that it was saving them up to two hours each day, and we’ve already heard examples of patients with serious conditions being seen more quickly thanks to the instant alerts. Because Streams is designed to be ready for more advanced technology in the future, including AI-powered clinical alerts, we hope that it will help bring even more benefits to patients and clinicians in time.

 The Information Commissioner (ICO) has now concluded a year-long investigation that focused on the Royal Free’s clinical testing of Streams in late 2015 and 2016, which was intended to guarantee that the service could be deployed safely at the hospital. The ICO wasn’t satisfied that there was a legal basis for this use of patient data in testing (as the National Data Guardian said too), and raised concerns about how much patients knew about what was happening. The ICO recognised that many of these issues have already been addressed by the Royal Free, and has asked the Trust to sign a formal undertaking to ensure compliance in future…

…Ultimately, if we want to build technology to support a vital social institution like the NHS, then we have to make sure we serve society’s priorities and not outrun them. There’s a fine line between finding exciting new ways to improve care, and moving ahead of patients’ expectations. We know that we fell short at this when our work in health began, and we’ll keep listening and learning about how to get better at this.

«

DeepMind, as a reminder, is Google’s AI subsidiary – a British company based in King’s Cross, London. This is quite a mea culpa. (Note too how it fits into the Silicon Valley paradigm: better to ask for forgiveness than for permission.)

The ICO report begins bluntly: “The ICO has ruled the Royal Free NHS Foundation Trust failed to comply with the Data Protection Act when it provided patient details to Google DeepMind.”
link to this extract

How to build a simple neural network in 9 lines of Python code • Medium

Milo Spencer-Harper:

»

As part of my quest to learn about AI, I set myself the goal of building a simple neural network in Python. To ensure I truly understand it, I had to build it from scratch without using a neural network library. Thanks to an excellent blog post by Andrew Trask I achieved my goal. Here it is in just 9 lines of code.

«

And yes, it is just nine lines. The explanation is longer, but if you’re looking for a primer on how to build a simple neural network, this is it.
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The time I got recruited to collude with the Russians • Lawfare

Matt Tait, who isn’t an American nor based in the US but who is a security expert who looked at public data about Hillary Clinton’s emails to analyse whether the Russians might have hacked her private email server, was contacted last summer by a someone claiming to be well-connected with the Trump campaign:

»

Towards the end of one of our conversations, [Republican activist Peter] Smith made his pitch. He said that his team had been contacted by someone on the “dark web”; that this person had the emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server (which she had subsequently deleted), and that Smith wanted to establish if the emails were genuine. If so, he wanted to ensure that they became public prior to the election. What he wanted from me was to determine if the emails were genuine or not.

It is no overstatement to say that my conversations with Smith shocked me. Given the amount of media attention given at the time to the likely involvement of the Russian government in the DNC hack, it seemed mind-boggling for the Trump campaign—or for this offshoot of it—to be actively seeking those emails. To me this felt really wrong.

In my conversations with Smith and his colleague, I tried to stress this point: if this dark web contact is a front for the Russian government, you really don’t want to play this game. But they were not discouraged. They appeared to be convinced of the need to obtain Clinton’s private emails and make them public, and they had a reckless lack of interest in whether the emails came from a Russian cut-out. Indeed, they made it quite clear to me that it made no difference to them who hacked the emails or why they did so, only that the emails be found and made public before the election.

«

Some of the detail is quite eye-opening: the company to do this is closely associated with people you’ll have heard of, which tried to set up as a Delaware company to avoid being linked to campaign financing rules. Tait has been quoted in the WSJ in stories about how Smith was in contact with Mike Flynn.

Short version: if there’s a Russian operative on the other end of the “dark web” contact, Smith is in deep trouble, and so is Mike Flynn – and possibly some others close to Trump. The question is whether the FBI or others can pin that down. Of course, this article is how Tait is inviting the special prosecutor Robert Mueller to interview him.
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The tiny satellites ushering in the new space revolution • Bloomberg

Ashlee Vance:

»

Once aligned, Planet’s attitude and determination control system, which sets the satellite’s orientation, takes over. Gyroscopes and sensors on the Dove [satellite, about the size of a shoebox] look for magnetic fields and seek out the Earth’s horizon, the sun, and other stars. Magnetorquers and reaction wheels then adjust the satellite’s movement until it reaches the desired alignment. “It’s not that difficult to make a system that does this,” says Ben Howard, Planet’s chief spacecraft architect. “It’s difficult to make it as cheaply as we have and to make it tuned so well for a specific application.”

Each Dove is responsible for collecting 10,000 images covering 2 million square kilometers per day, an area the size of Mexico. The pictures—40 gigabytes’ worth—are relayed during 10 daily eight-minute sessions on custom-built radios between the satellites and a dozen ground stations built by Planet in Antarctica, Chile, Hawaii, Iceland, and other places.

Once the images reach Earth, Planet’s software compiles them, cleans them up, and deletes photos marred by clouds and shadows. Customers can then log on to an application and browse the pictures as they please. Planet’s largest clients include the Mexican government, the German space agency, and the agricultural companies Monsanto, Wilbur-Ellis, and Bayer Crop Science. They pay millions or even tens of millions of dollars per year for access to the most recent, highest-quality images. Nonprofits, students, and news organizations receive the same access for free, while the public at large can see older, lower-quality pictures gratis. Planet refuses to say how much revenue it draws, but it appears to be enough to keep investors interested. The company has raised more than $180m in venture capital to date, and its valuation has been widely reported to exceed $1bn.

Planet’s 88 new satellites, which will give it the only daily view of Earth, at least for now, promise to be even better for the bottom line.

«

The examples of what can be done with systems like this are remarkable. For example:

»

Crawford can call up an image of a port in Shanghai that’s been broken down like a puzzle, with cylindrical oil storage tanks color-coded green, ships in red, and buildings in blue. Hit a button, and the software shows that eight new buildings have gone up in a few months. Hit another button, and the software will calculate how much oil is in a given tank. “There are floating lids that sit on top of the tanks,” Crawford says. “If the lid is all the way up, there’s no shadow, and we know it’s full.” If there’s a shadow, Orbital Insight measures its angle and the dimensions of the tank to calculate the volume of liquid inside. What Crawford’s company is after, he says, is “observational truth.”

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link to this extract

Demographics of mobile device ownership and adoption in the US • Pew Research Center

»

A substantial majority of Americans are cellphone owners across a wide range of demographic groups. By contrast, smartphone ownership exhibits greater variation based on age, household income and educational attainment.

«

The demographics are the second group here – you have to scroll down the page past the smartphone ownership growth data. Notable falloff among those over 65, those who didn’t graduate from high school (equivalent to secondary school in UK, ie like leaving school after GCSE), those earning under $30,000pa. The latter two – or all three – groups might intersect substantially. Rural ownership is also comparatively low.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Sexism comes in many forms. Silicon Valley is beginning to realise how pervasive its own is. Photo of the original artwork by Devlin Thompson 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.

Women in tech speak frankly on culture of harassment • The New York Times

Katie Benner:

»

Their stories came out slowly, even hesitantly, at first. Then in a rush.

One female entrepreneur recounted how she had been propositioned by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist while seeking a job with him, which she did not land after rebuffing him. Another showed the increasingly suggestive messages she had received from a start-up investor. And one chief executive described how she had faced numerous sexist comments from an investor while raising money for her online community website.

What happened afterward was often just as disturbing, the women told The New York Times. Many times, the investors’ firms and colleagues ignored or played down what had happened when the situations were brought to their attention. Saying anything, the women were warned, might lead to ostracism.

Now some of these female entrepreneurs have decided to take that risk. More than two dozen women in the technology start-up industry spoke to The Times in recent days about being sexually harassed. Ten of them named the investors involved, often providing corroborating messages and emails, and pointed to high-profile venture capitalists such as Chris Sacca of Lowercase Capital and Dave McClure of 500 Startups.

«

This story is going to be a milestone in how Silicon Valley sees itself. Women will know now that they can always speak up, and they will be heard. It’s taken some time; five years ago I created a Storify of tweets observing a small corner of Silicon Valley sexism. (It’s had nearly 200,000 views – one of my most-read pieces ever.) Change is slow.
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Fitbit’s smartwatch project hits more hurdles ahead of debut • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman and Selina Wang:

»

Hard hit by the sinking popularity of its fitness trackers, Fitbit has bet its future on the smartwatch. But such devices are typically wedded to an ecosystem of compatible devices, apps and services that lure then lock people in. While Fitbit’s watch can play music and handle payments, according to people familiar with the product, a discussed partnership with Spotify failed to materialize and technical challenges mean the app store may not be ready when the watch arrives this fall. Many app developers, meanwhile, are unenthusiastic about Fitbit’s watch.

“I’m more focused on the big boys like the Apple Watch and Android Wear,” says Damian Mehers, who developed a version of Evernote for Samsung’s Galaxy Gear watch. “I could consider developing for Fitbit if there was a compelling device and a large enough user base. I think it will be challenging to establish credibility.” Like many other developers, Mehers says the challenge is exacerbated by the fact that wearable devices still haven’t caught on widely, meaning they’re less desirable to write apps for than a smartphone.

In an emailed statement, Fitbit said the development of the smartwatch and third-party apps “are on track” and that “any claims that the developer program is struggling is false.” The company said it’s “well positioned to succeed.”

«

The Apple Watch doesn’t have a particularly big app store; that isn’t the key element of a smartwatch. What does matter is tight integration with whatever platform you attach to.

So the Fitbit will have to do Android Wear better than Android Wear, because it won’t be able to get tighter integration than the Apple Watch on iOS. Android is by far the bigger platform, but its attach rate for smartwatches is lamentable.
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Echo Show review: Alexa gets more intrusive with camera and screen • WSJ

Geoffrey Fowler:

»

I wouldn’t bet against the Show getting more screen skills fast: Amazon has proven far more successful at lining up partners for Alexa than either Apple Inc. or Alphabet Inc.’s Google have for their talking assistants. One of the Show’s first partnerships pairs it with the Ring video doorbell, one of my favorite smart-home devices. Just say, “Alexa, show me the front door.” It’ll also work with cameras from Nest, August and others.

As a gadget pioneer, I’m willing to wait for more skills. My problem is more fundamental: Living with a Show is too often perturbing—and occasionally creepy.

The first time I turned the Show on, the screen asked me if I’d like to subscribe to Amazon’s Audible service. I couldn’t proceed until I’d replied. (“No.”) It was my first reminder that the Echo Show is as much an Amazon sales kiosk as a kitchen helper.

Once up and running, the Show started flashing a series of calendar events, headlines and usage tips. One read: “Video: Baseball Mascot Outruns Fan. Try ‘Alexa, play the mascot video.’ ” That’s one way to teach owners about Alexa’s ever-growing capabilities. I assumed the tips would eventually fade.

But they didn’t. They keep refreshing every seven seconds. In the span of one minute, the Show nagged me to play Katy Perry and told me about a Batman-costumed policeman. It felt like one of those elevator displays took up residence next to my toaster. Voice-only Alexa was well-bred enough to speak only when spoken to.

This much is a relief: An Amazon spokeswoman tells me the company has “no plans or future intentions to advertise products on Echo Show.”

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link to this extract

Science division of White House office left empty as last staffers depart • CBS News

Jacqueline Alemany:

»

The science division of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) was unstaffed as of Friday as the three remaining employees departed this week, sources tell CBS News.

All three employees were holdovers from the Obama administration. The departures from the division – one of four subdivisions within the OSTP — highlight the different commitment to scientific research under Presidents Obama and Trump. 

Under Mr. Obama, the science division was staffed with nine employees who led the charge on policy issues such as STEM education, biotechnology and crisis response. It’s possible that the White House will handle these issues through staff in other divisions within the OSTP…

…”All of the work that we have been doing is still being done,” a White House official familiar with the matter told CBS News, adding that 35 staffers currently work across the OSTP.

«

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EPA: Pruitt will launch program to ‘critique’ climate science • E+E News

Emily Holden:

»

US EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is leading a formal initiative to challenge mainstream climate science using a “back-and-forth critique” by government-recruited experts, according to a senior administration official.

The program will use “red team, blue team” exercises to conduct an “at-length evaluation of US climate science,” the official said, referring to a concept developed by the military to identify vulnerabilities in field operations.

“The administrator believes that we will be able to recruit the best in the fields which study climate and will organize a specific process in which these individuals … provide back-and-forth critique of specific new reports on climate science,” the source said.

“We are in fact very excited about this initiative,” the official added. “Climate science, like other fields of science, is constantly changing. A new, fresh and transparent evaluation is something everyone should support doing.”

The disclosure follows the administration’s suggestions over several days that it supports reviewing climate science outside the normal peer-review process used by scientists. This is the first time agency officials acknowledged that Pruitt has begun that process. The source said Energy Secretary Rick Perry also favors the review.

Executives in the coal industry interpret the move as a step toward challenging the endangerment finding, the agency’s legal foundation for regulating greenhouse gases from cars, power plants and other sources. Robert Murray, CEO of Murray Energy, said Pruitt assured him yesterday that he plans to begin reviewing the endangerment finding within months.

«

This may be the first ever example of gaslighting with the sole purpose of enabling (greenhouse) gaslighting. The problem though is that if the US indulges in this sort of lies-for-truth replacement, everyone suffers.
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Yet more reasons to disagree with experts on nPetya • Errata Security

Rob Graham thinks it’s a mistake to think that nPetya, the “ransomware” which spread far and wide in June, was actually written to spread well but do the ransom side badly:

»

Errors happen. But look at the discipline put into the spreading code. That worked as intended. Only the ransomware components have bugs?

— Jake Williams (@MalwareJake) July 1, 2017

The context of this tweet is the discussion of why nPetya was well written with regards to spreading, but full of bugs with regards to collecting on the ransom. The conclusion therefore that it wasn’t intended to be ransomware, but was intended to simply be a “wiper”, to cause destruction.

But this is just survivorship bias. If nPetya had been written the other way, with excellent ransomware features and poor spreading, we would not now be talking about it. Even that initial seeding with the trojaned MeDoc update wouldn’t have spread it far enough.

In other words, all malware samples we get are good at spreading, either on their own, or because the creator did a good job seeding them. It’s because we never see the ones that didn’t spread.

With regards to nPetya, a lot of experts are making this claim. Since it spread so well, but had hopelessly crippled ransomware features, that must have been the intent all along. Yet, as we see from survivorship bias, none of us would’ve seen nPetya had it not been for the spreading feature.

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The survivor bias point is a good one.
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The creator of a super successful £27 computer said Brexit has been ‘rocket fuel’ for his business • Business Insider

Shona Ghosh:

»

Eben Upton, the inventor of the super cheap Raspberry Pi computer, is careful not to voice an opinion about whether Brexit is good or bad. But Brexit has been good for his company in one respect — it’s become a lot cheaper to make the tiny computers in the UK.

“In the short term, the adjustment to the exchange rate has had a positive effect on UK manufacturing,” he told Business Insider. “It isn’t a great idea to devalue your way to success [but] it did make a substantial contribution to our profitability last year. It’s rocket fuel, it really is.”

“As an organisation, we carefully don’t have an opinion [about Brexit],” he added. “Our largest market is the US, we build in the UK. The second-largest is Germany, trading on the single market. It probably doesn’t make much difference.”

A weaker pound has benefited anyone who makes stuff in the UK and sells it abroad, so it’s not just Raspberry Pi. And Upton added that it was “a mixed bag”, since the computers are priced in dollars. That means they’re more expensive to buy in the UK now.

«

Exporters do better at lower exchange rates, yes.
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The tragedy of FireWire: Collaborative tech torpedoed by corporations • Ars Technica

Richard Moss:

»

Despite rising Mac sales, Apple’s financial situation remained dire. The company needed more income. After being informed of IBM’s hundreds of millions in yearly patent revenue, CEO Steve Jobs authorized a change in FireWire’s licensing policy. Apple would now charge a fee of $1 per port. (So if a device has two ports, that’s $2 per unit.)

The consumer electronics industry was outraged. They saw it as untenable and unjustified. Intel sent its CTO to talk to Jobs about the change, but the meeting went badly. Intel decided to withdraw its support for FireWire—to pull the plug on efforts to build FireWire into its chipsets—and instead throw its weight behind USB 2.0, which would have a maximum speed of 480 megabits a second (more like 280, or 30 to 40 MB/s, in practice).

Sirkin believes that Microsoft could have reversed the new licensing policy by citing the prior signed agreement. “Microsoft must have thrown it away,” he speculated, because it would have “stopped Apple in its tracks.”

“They could have said, ‘Look, here’s what your team agreed to, and now you’re violating that agreement.'”

A month later, Apple lowered the fee to 25 cents per (end-user) system, with that money distributed between all patent holders. But it was too late. Intel wasn’t coming back to the table.

This was the death blow for FireWire in most of the PC market. PC vendors would happily incorporate whatever was in Intel’s core chipset (like USB), but nothing else other than perhaps a dedicated graphics or sound card. “They’re so cost driven that adding one more IC is not an acceptable alternative,” Teener said.

Not even faster, better versions of the technology (a more efficient version of FireWire 400 followed by FireWire 800, which made it into the Mac, and FireWire 1600 and 3200, which didn’t) could save it. Nor could Apple, which also used FireWire in the first few generations of the iPod. The technology all but disappeared from the PC during the 2000s.

«

Detailed rundown of what happened, though this is the core. Would Apple have kept the fee lower if it hadn’t been in such dire financial straits?
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VRScout on Twitter: “This Apple ARKit demo puts a portal right in front of you #AR via @nedd https://t.co/UEkhPLKnqQ”

»

This Apple ARKit demo puts a portal right in front of you #AR via @nedd pic.twitter.com/UEkhPLKnqQ

— VRScout (@VRScout) June 30, 2017

«

This is really remarkable. The idea is obvious enough when you see it, but it’s getting there – and then doing it – which is special. By Christmas there are going to be millions of devices capable of doing this.

Glasses capable of displaying this stuff looks like a natural next step. Also: they wouldn’t need exceptional battery life; these wouldn’t be like a smartphone, intended to be used all day (or not at first). You’d initially use them to explore products like this. So a short battery life would be less important in such AR glasses than a good display and positional accuracy. No wires required, either.
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Internet regulation: is it time to rein in the tech giants? • The Guardian

I wrote about this topic in The Observer (the Sunday sibling of The Guardian):

»

Even as they revel in their network-reinforced positions, the big tech companies are battling with problems so big and intractable, and so far-reaching in their effects, that to find comparisons in the real world you have to look for truly global phenomena. The problems engendered by the internet have crept up on us over the years, but only recently have they seemed overwhelming. It’s like a social form of climate change, and the analogy works surprisingly well.

When the industrial revolution got under way, replacing human labour with machines was more efficient, more powerful, and expanded humanity’s horizons. Machines powered by coal and then oil liberated people from drudgery and made entirely new lifestyles possible.

No one knew that the accretion of emissions from those machines would contribute to potentially devastating climatic, and hence societal, changes. Even if they had known in the 1800s that steam power would affect the ice sheets of the recently discovered continent of Antarctica, so that two centuries later sea levels and surface temperatures would be rising, would they have cared? After all, it’s hard to say enough people do even now.

Comparing the internet’s social effects to climate change, one sees many of the same modest initial intents and big longer-term effects. For example, Twitter’s founders were trying to create a messaging system that could work on mobile phones and would be like the status messages used on desktop chat systems. Then they discovered it could offer real-time updates from anywhere, from plane crashes in the Hudson to what’s presently skittering across Donald Trump’s mind. But it has also contributed to an atmosphere where users can be harassed on a scale unimaginable in physical form.

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How Margrethe Vestager went after Google • POLITICO

Nicholas Hirst:

»

As recently as Monday, just hours before Vestager spoke with Pichai, Google’s key Brussels advisers were unaware a decision was imminent — only learning through the press that a verdict that had been predicted to land at the end of July was suddenly expected by the end of the week, by Wednesday, by Tuesday evening, and finally on Tuesday at noon.

They were not the only ones in the dark. Vestager’s tight information control extended even to members of her own team. Hours before the announcement, the scale of the fine was known only to a small circle of insiders close to the commissioner — not to the wider team investigating Google. The date of the announcement was kept from officials in Vestager’s antitrust division not working on the case.

Google’s rivals — the companies bringing the case before the Commission — were none the wiser. Many of them were busy preparing for upcoming meetings scheduled with competition investigators, consultations in which they expected to provide the last of their input before the decision was announced.

The scheduled meetings were just one of several misdirections — intentional or not — that kept the wider world guessing at Vestager’s intentions. In the weeks ahead of the decision, rumors of a fine just over €1 billion circulated among advisers and journalists.

Vestager even managed to keep a tight lid on the information exchanged when she consulted national competition enforcers on the verdict a few weeks ago.

Behind the scenes, in Vestager’s office on the 10th floor at the Commission’s Berlaymont building, preparations for the big day had been taking place for months. A formidable communicator who places a premium on preparation, Vestager spent weeks listening to briefings by senior officials, probing the case’s strengths and weaknesses, running through mock questions and preparing the responses she would deliver from the podium.

One particular concern was that the case would become a flashpoint for transatlantic tension — potentially attracting the fury of U.S. President and tweeter-in-chief Donald Trump. And so Vestager’s office prepped figures and scripted responses so that she would be ready to debunk accusations that the Commission was unfairly targeting U.S. companies.

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In the event, Trump’s administration doesn’t seem to have taken the slightest bit of notice. Also worth reading: there’s a €10m contract to monitor Google’s algorithm for compliance. Once, I guess, everyone agrees what “compliance” looks like.
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Volterman: world’s most powerful smart wallet • Indiegogo

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Built-in Powerbank, Distance Alarm, Global GPS Tracking, Worldwide WiFi Hotspot, Anti-Thief Camera.

«

It’s the “anti-thief camera” I’m most interested by. $135 gets you one. It’s miles past its goal, so it’s sure to happen. For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like. (Thanks for the link to Maxim Vagner.)
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Tumblr might be virtually worthless to its new owner. Isn’t culture valuable? Photo by Scott Beale 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.

A day without Javascript • Sonniesedge

Charlotte Owen turned off Javascript to see how the web looked:

»

So, for my dreary grey day experiment I restricted myself to just the things open in my browser tabs. For normal people this might be two or three sites.

Not for me. I have approximately 17 shitmillion tabs open, because I Have a Problem With Tabs.

No seriously. I can never just close a tab. I’ve tried things like One Tab but I just can’t get down to less than 30 in any one window (“I’ll just save that tab for later” I think, each and ever time). Let’s just agree that I need some kind of therapy, and we’ll all be able to move on.

Anyway, there’s nothing fancy to this experiment. It was a case of turning off javascript in the browser and reloading a site, nothing more. To quickly disable the browser’s JS with one click I used Chrome and the Toggle Javascript extension – available, ironically enough, via the javascript-only Chrome web store.

Oh, and for you, sweet reader, I opened these tabs in new windows, so you don’t have to see the pain of 50 tabs open at once.

So how was it? Well, with just a few minutes of sans-javascript life under my belt, my first impression was “Holy shit, things are fast without javascript”. There’s no ads. There’s no video loading at random times. There’s no sudden interrupts by “DO YOU WANT TO FUCKING SUBSCRIBE?” modals.

If this were the only manifestation of turning off javascript, I’d do this for the rest of time. However, a lot of things don’t work. Navigation is the most common failure mode. Hamburger menus fail to internally link to a nav section (come on, that’s an easy one kids). Forms die when javascript is taken away (point the form to an endpoint that accepts GET/POST queries ffs). Above the fold images fail to load (you do know they’re streaming by default, yes?).

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She then goes on and explains how many, many of those tabs looked. Mostly: news sites OK, many others not.
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Falling out of love with Amazon’s Alexa • FT

Jonathan Margolis:

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My daughter puts it well: “When you look at an iPhone,” she says, “it still looks futuristic. Alexa is more like a prototype.”

My use at home and in the office is dwindling. Alexa is still a great kitchen timer, and for a quick calculation at my desk, Google Home is handy. But both gadgets — and I use the term pejoratively — go days without use.

Mostly, it is voice computing’s cock-ups that stick in the mind…

…Some Alexas get excited when Arsenal’s Alexis Sánchez is named on football commentaries. Others react every time Channel 4 mentions its drama sponsor, the Lexus NX.

“I asked Alexa to turn on the living room lights,” reported one Reddit user. “She told me there was no pudding room. I was disappointed by the lack of a pudding room too.”

Echo’s shopping list feature is mentioned frequently. Another Reddit user added Doan’s (a back pain drug) to their list.

“She added ‘guns’. And thereby possibly added us to another different and more serious list,” the user wrote.

Alexa users have found “nipple syrup” on their shopping lists, along with “sled dogs” and “dildo toothpaste”. Before you ask, in the last two examples, there is no explanation of what was actually said to Alexa.

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Back to the future for Maersk in the wake of Petya attack • Splash 247

Sam Chambers:

»

Arguably one of the most sophisticated, IT savvy shipping companies in the world has had to work as if it had gone back in time to the mid-1990s for the past 48 hours.

In the two days since the Maersk Group was hit by the Petya ransomware attack, operations at many of its sites across the globe have returned to manual.

The group’s most recent update, issued yesterday evening Copenhagen time, stated that Maersk Line was taking bookings via box platform INTTRA while sister firm APM Terminals said most of its terminals were back up operating, albeit not all of them at normal speeds.

Statistics provided by shipping software provider CargoSmart however show that many of APM Terminals’ 78 facilities across the world have not received a vessel call in the past 48 hours. APM Terminals has not responded to questions sent by Splash today.

Reports are emerging too of how operations at Maersk offices around the world have been pared right back in the wake of the crippling attack.

Maersk Australia and New Zealand managing director Gerard Morrison said today that his unit’s phone and email systems had been deliberately shut down by the company to stop the spreading of the malware virus.

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Quite weird.
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The iPhone for the next ten years • Tech.pinions

Jan Dawson:

»

Given that this week marks the tenth anniversary of the iPhone going on sale, there’s lots of navel-gazing about the impact the iPhone has had on the industry (including my own take on Monday for subscribers). However, what I want to do today is think about which products in the market today might have a comparable impact to the iPhone over the next ten years.

I put this question to my Twitter followers, and got a whole range of interesting results, including:

• Tesla (both cars and solar shingles)
• Oculus Rift
• Crispr [DNA editing]
• and the Nvidia DGX-1 for AI and machine learning!

Those are all fascinating answers, including a couple I never would have included in my own analysis here. But I have a different set of three possible products in mind, and I’ll talk about each of them below. As a reminder, what defined the impact of the iPhone was that it was a single product from a single company, and yet that product never achieved majority market share, but still managed to transform not just its own industry (smartphones) but both created and transformed others as well. So that’s the bar that any worthy successor has to clear.

«

This is definitely a more interesting tack than looking back ten years. (In general, I hate anniversary journalism – “it’s X years since Y!” – because unless Y is quite something, we learn little. And if Y is quite something, there’ll be a plethora of those pieces.)

He picks the Amazon Echo, the Apple Watch and Airpods, and Microsoft Hololens. Where, you might be asking, is Google?
link to this extract

He thought a book would stop a bullet and make him a YouTube star. Now he’s dead. • The Washington Post

Katie Mettler:

»

Before Monday, before the 911 call and police investigation, Pedro Ruiz III, an aspiring YouTube star in rural Minnesota, spent considerable time persuading his girlfriend to fire a gun at his chest.

There would be a thick encyclopedia between the muzzle and his body, authorities say he told 19-year-old Monalisa Perez. The pages, he reasoned, would stop the bullet.

He even had evidence that it had worked once before — a different book with an entrance hole but no exit.

So on Monday evening, the young couple positioned two cameras outside their home and prepared for their breakthrough stunt. They wanted fame, family said, and danger often brings it.

“Me and Pedro are probably going to shoot one of the most dangerous videos ever,” Perez teased in a tweet at 5 p.m. “HIS idea not MINE.”

«

Secondary effects of the attention economy. She faces up to 10 years in jail if convicted of 2nd degree manslaughter; their three-year-old daughter grows up without her father.
link to this extract

Benjamin Button moves from an iPad Pro running iOS 11 to a 13″ MacBook Pro • Medium

I wrote about this whole iPad/laptop debate, framed from the point of view of the mythical Button (if the name rings no bells, look him up):

»

I had some trouble at first when I kept pulling apps out of the Dock to make them multitask and they just vanished. Finally I realised that it’s like iOS 11 where you just press on the app to launch it.

Then the app does this weird thing where the Dock icon bounces and bounces and OH MY GOD JUST RUN ALREADY. Laptops are sloooow. And every so often the machine would just stop and the cursor would turn into a sort of whirling rainbow. Is it some sort of Apple deal with Gay Pride? I never got that on the iPad.

Once you do have your programs running, there’s no window organisation. Seriously, the screen is a mess. The windows all overlap. You drag them around with the pointer thing. All the nice organisation of iOS 11 — one, two or three apps on screen; clear demarcations — is gone. After an hour or two my screen looked like a teenager’s bedroom. (Oddly enough, my once-tidy bedroom seems to be going the same way.) There are keys which make all the windows run away like cockroaches from the light, but of course you can’t then pick the one you want out with your finger like you want to; you have to use the pointer thing. My arm got so tired from pressing the screen expecting stuff to happen.
Still, all the programs I’m used to are there (with a couple exceptions, which we’ll come to).

«

link to this extract

Tumblr’s uncertain future shows that there’s no money in internet culture • NY Mag

Brian Feldman:

»

Advertisers, ultimately, are part of the problem. The general thinking in the rise of social networks was that if you make stuff that gets a lot of attention (or, better yet, own the real estate on which others are making stuff for free), brands will put their ads next to it. But with a small handful of exceptions, the advertising riches never really materialized. There are many reasons for this — for one thing, it’s tough to sell a high-quality ad experience to executives at Coca-Cola when you first have to explain what a meme is and why it’s “viral.” On top of all that, there are reams of porn, hate speech, copyright infringement, and more porn floating around on these platforms, easily accidentally placed adjacent to a company’s studiously inoffensive ad.

Maybe more importantly, Tumblr and Vine and the like never had data-mining operations as sophisticated as, say, Facebook. That’s why most of the advertising money in the industry has drained toward Facebook, which has 2 billion users, mounds of data, and can better assure advertisers of content cleanliness. Facebook is instructive: It’s less a place for creation or debate than it is for hosting all of the nitty-gritty, more boring data about your life. For much of its life, Facebook aggressively trafficked not in collecting rage comics and funny video clips, but in collecting bland lists of favorite movies and where you went to college — personal information that it can use to target ads with alarming specificity.

«

But in saying this about Tumblr as “internet culture”, isn’t that like complaining that the “wrong” people make money from art? That it’s not the artists (often) but the intermediaries – gallery owners, dealers, and so on.
link to this extract

Anita Sarkeesian’s astounding ‘garbage human’ moment • Polygon

Colin Campbell spent some time going around with Sarkeesian, and then talking to the group of men who trail her and video her and seek to ask questions doubting her legitimacy to do what she wants to do:

»

[Dave Cullen] repeatedly claims the group is there to “engage” with Sarkeesian, but later, he says something very different.

“We had a blast with this. It was such an adrenaline high to be there in the situation, to shit-post, in this trolling kind of way.” He goes on to claim there was “no malice” in their actions and that it was “playful.”

Polygon sent his comment to Sarkeesian, asking for a response. She responded via email:

“Hearing the honesty in that comment is weirdly almost kind of validating, because of course we know it’s true, we’ve always known it’s true, that for them this is a kind of game, but they constantly deny it.

“They’re playing for fun. For them it’s a thrill to use the power they have under patriarchy to try to keep women in their place, to try to intimidate or silence women who dare to speak out and assert their humanity and their right to exist as full human beings in these spaces.

“They don’t give a damn about the actual impact they’re having on people’s lives. It’s a sport, an adrenaline rush. But for me and for other women who are targeted by cyber-mobs, who endure ongoing campaigns of harassment, it’s not fun. It’s scary. It’s traumatic.

“You have to be so far removed from the reality of what you’re doing to engage in this behavior and call it ‘playful trolling.’ This is harassment, pure and simple, with the goal of trying to scare and silence women who speak out against sexism in our culture.”

«

Amazing that there are still people whose lives revolve around hassling Sarkeesian. Poverty of imagination barely begins to describe it.
link to this extract

The EU is wrong, but Google is still in trouble • Distilled

Will Critchlow with a thoughtful analysis of the first antitrust ruling:

»

I hesitate to say that this would be my recommended course of action if I were advising Google, but a direction I would love to see them take is as follows:

• Leave PLAs [product listing adverts, which you see above other search results if you type a search term that could be purchasable] as they are – if comparison shopping is a separate market to “general search” in which Google has a monopoly, then PLAs definitely fall in the general search part rather than the comparison shopping part. They are integrated into the results a searcher receives when they perform a search that starts at the Google homepage, and there is no comparison functionality – it simply links to products

• Remove the shopping link in the top menu – this is the one area I can see that they have favoured their comparison shopping engine (Google Shopping) over others (e.g. ciao.co.uk – one of the complainants) who cannot get their homepage linked from the top menu

• Open up Google Shopping pages to their own search index – i.e. enable pages like the result you find when you search [Puma shoes] on the Google Shopping tab to be indexed and appear in the regular organic search results (to be clear, this does not happen at the moment – Google keeps these pages explicitly out of the main search index). Doing this will increase competition in the general search results for the complainants, but it clarifies that Google is treating their comparison shopping engine (Google Shopping) exactly on a level playing field with competitors such as ciao.co.uk and paves the way for them to treat (all) comparison shopping engines as harshly as they like in regular search.

«

His view is that losing this case makes it worse for Google’s next two. I think he could be right.
link to this extract

Google unveils Advr, an experimental Area 120 project for advertising in VR • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Google today is more formally taking the wraps off its internal incubator, Area 120, with the launch of a dedicated website, alongside the launch of one of the program’s more interesting projects to date: a way to advertise within VR. The new experiment, which is simply called Advr, involves a cube-like ad format which allows video ads to run in a 3D/VR environment.

Area 120 was launched at Google in March, 2016, as a way to retain entrepreneurial-minded talent at the company, as well as give teams the ability to test new ideas that could eventually become Google products, or be integrated with existing products.

That hasn’t happened yet, as the R&D program is still fairly new…

…The new project is an experiment focused on figuring out if video ads could work in VR, and if so, how they would function.

The team has developed a plug-in for Unity that can show ads in VR environments. Explains the post, developers aren’t interested in disruptive or hard-to-implement ad experiences in VR, which is how the Advr team came up with the idea for a simple cube.

«

Can we agree that ad concept looks horrible? Something more like ads in football games (real and virtual), on the pitch side, would be a lot more tolerable. Though even then, quite awful. One gets the feeling that advertising-based companies, of which Google is necessarily still one, won’t be content until they can monetise every instant of our existence, every gamut of our attention.
link to this extract

Smart device owners enjoy their benefits around the home • FutureSource Consulting

»

Among the 4 countries [US, UK ,Germany, France] surveyed, the USA showed the highest smart home penetration, with 38% of respondents claiming to be living in a home with at least one smart home device installed. In Germany, respondents seem more resistant to the idea of adopting smart home devices, as only 1 in 5 have installed at least one smart home device in their home.

Filipe Oliveira, Analyst at Futuresource Consulting commented, “Smart lighting and smart thermostats are among the most popular smart home devices and are common first steps into the smart home. However, it is home security that more respondents report as the first smart home device that they have installed. Products that fall under climate control are growing but our survey revealed that this is a fragmented category with relatively low levels of brand recognition, a challenge to manufacturers in this field.”

According to this latest report for the entertainment driven consumers, audio and video content is often the first step into automation in the home. Two in three respondents considered music and other audio/video content to be important in the context of the smart home.

“The results provide evidence that the smart home can grow by stealth as users who installed one device are more likely to want to automate their homes further,” continued Oliveira. “Across all segments, 30% of consumers expect to control more of their homes wirelessly in the near future. However, the number is substantially higher among those who already own at least one smart home device, with 89% of advanced users expecting to control more of their homes wirelessly in the next 6-12 months, the report breaks this down for each segment.”

«

Then again, given the huge indifference in that graphic, one could safely say there’s no great rush here. The smart home is not the next smartphone.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: the character in Futurama is Amy Wong, not Wang. (Thanks, Sam Foster.) And phones you can unlock underwater? Useful when your fingers are wet, as often happens in the kitchen and around the home. (Thanks to multiple readers.)

Just the place to unlock your smartphone! And next year’s phone will be able to. Photo by 海正藍~A 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.

Facebook’s secret censorship rules protect white men from hate speech but not black children • ProPublica

Julia Angwin and Hannes Grassegger:

»

In the wake of a terrorist attack in London earlier this month, a U.S. congressman wrote a Facebook post in which he called for the slaughter of “radicalized” Muslims. “Hunt them, identify them, and kill them,” declared U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican. “Kill them all. For the sake of all that is good and righteous. Kill them all.”

Higgins’ plea for violent revenge went untouched by Facebook workers who scour the social network deleting offensive speech.

But a May posting on Facebook by Boston poet and Black Lives Matter activist Didi Delgado drew a different response.

“All white people are racist. Start from this reference point, or you’ve already failed,” Delgado wrote. The post was removed and her Facebook account was disabled for seven days.

A trove of internal documents reviewed by ProPublica sheds new light on the secret guidelines that Facebook’s censors use to distinguish between hate speech and legitimate political expression. The documents reveal the rationale behind seemingly inconsistent decisions. For instance, Higgins’ incitement to violence passed muster because it targeted a specific sub-group of Muslims — those that are “radicalized” — while Delgado’s post was deleted for attacking whites in general…

…While Facebook was credited during the 2010-2011 “Arab Spring” with facilitating uprisings against authoritarian regimes, the documents suggest that, at least in some instances, the company’s hate-speech rules tend to favor elites and governments over grassroots activists and racial minorities. In so doing, they serve the business interests of the global company, which relies on national governments not to block its service to their citizens.

«

Just amazing. It’s a looking-glass world; the bizarre cultural norms of Silicon Valley applied to the globe.
link to this extract

Google loses Supreme Court of Canada case over search results • Fortune.com

Jeff John Roberts:

»

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled against Google on Wednesday in a closely-watched intellectual property case over whether judges can apply their own country’s laws to all of the Internet.

In a 7-2 decision, the court agreed a British Columbia judge had the power to issue an injunction forcing Google to scrub search results about pirated products not just in Canada, but everywhere else in the world too.

Those siding with Google, including civil liberties groups, had warned that allowing the injunction would harm free speech, setting a precedent to let any judge anywhere order a global ban on what appears on search engines. The Canadian Supreme Court, however, downplayed this objection and called Google’s fears “theoretical.”

“This is not an order to remove speech that, on its face, engages freedom of expression values, it is an order to de-index websites that are in violation of several court orders. We have not, to date, accepted that freedom of expression requires the facilitation of the unlawful sale of goods,” wrote Judge Rosalie Abella.

«

Google’s not having a good week in the courts.
link to this extract

Google faces years of EU oversight on top of record antitrust fine • Reuters

Foo Yun Chee and Eric Auchard:

»

The real sting is not from the fine for anti-competitive practices in shopping search but the way the EU has thrown the issue back to Google to solve, meaning the company won’t be able to comply through an easy set of technical steps.

In effect, the Commission is forcing Google to demonstrate that rivals have made substantial inroads into its businesses before there is much chance of it being let off the regulatory hook.

EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager promised Google was in for years of monitoring to guard against further abuses.

“Just being put on notice can limit Google’s strategic options into the future,” said Matti Littunen, a digital media and online advertising analyst with Enders Analysis in London.

The EU’s 2004 ruling that Microsoft Corp had abused its dominant market position in Windows and other markets is now seen as having curtailed the software giants moves over the subsequent decade to expand more quickly into emerging markets such as online advertising, opening the way for Google’s rise.

Putting the onus on the company underlines regulators’ limited knowledge of modern technologies and their complexity, said Fordham Law School Professor Mark Patterson.

“The decision shows the difficulty of regulating algorithm-based internet firms,” he said. “Antitrust remedies usually direct firms that have violated antitrust laws to stop certain behaviour or, less often, to implement particular fixes.

“This decision just tells Google to apply ‘equal treatment,’ not how to do that”.

«

link to this extract

Google on track for quantum computer breakthrough by end of 2017 • New Scientist

Matt Reynolds:

»

The company is testing a 20-qubit processor – its most powerful quantum chip yet – and is on target to have a working 49-qubit chip by the end of this year.

Qubits, or quantum bits, can be a mixture of 0 and 1 at the same time, making them potentially more powerful than classical bits.

And if everything goes to plan, the 49-qubit chip will make Google the first to build a quantum computer capable of solving certain problems that are beyond the abilities of ordinary computers. Google set itself this ambitious goal, known as quantum supremacy, in a paper published last July.

Alan Ho, an engineer in Google’s quantum AI lab, revealed the company’s progress at a quantum computing conference in Munich, Germany. His team is currently working with a 20-qubit system that has a “two-qubit fidelity” of 99.5% – a measure of how error-prone the processor is, with a higher rating equating to fewer errors.

For quantum supremacy, Google will need to build a 49-qubit system with a two-qubit fidelity of at least 99.7%. Ho is confident his team will deliver this system by the end of this year. Until now, the company’s best public effort was a 9-qubit computer built in 2015.

«

Very hard to know what to make of this. Is it the fabled “instant code cracker” of yore? Or something better suited to biology problems. I’ve been writing about quantum computing since 2000 or so, and while there are more (qu)bits, the applications remain elusive.
link to this extract

Petya.2017 is a wiper, not a ransomware • Comae Technologies

Matt Suiche:

»

We believe the ransomware was in fact a lure to control the media narrative, especially after the WannaCry incidents to attract the attention on some mysterious hacker group rather than a national state attacker like we have seen in the past in cases that involved wipers such as Shamoon.

Lately, the number of attacks against Ukraine increased from Power Grids being shut down to the car a top military intelligence officer exploding yesterday — the day Petya.2017 infected Ukraine.

The fact of pretending to be a ransomware while being in fact a nation state attack — especially since WannaCry proved that widely spread ransomware aren’t financially profitable — is in our opinion a very subtle way from the attacker to control the narrative of the attack.

«

A “wiper” simply ruins the first or more sectors of the boot disc, meaning that you can’t recover your files. Petya’s email address has been shut down too. The emerging narrative is that this is North Korea or Russia: the latter would be aiming at zapping systems in Ukraine, where the first infections were spotted.
link to this extract

iPad Pro: You do You! • Tech.pinions

Carolina Milanesi on using the iPad Pro as a main work device (a step that Joshua Topolsky has said is unreasonable, impossible and possibly also mad, bad and dangerous to know):

»

Before I moved to the iPad Pro I had to embrace the cloud. This step was crucial in empowering me to use the best device for the job at any given time. When I travel, mobility trumps everything else. Going through a little pain that a smaller screen and keyboard imply is well worth the advantage of cellular connectivity, instant on, all-day battery and the ability to dump all in one purse.

What does a normal day at the office entail for me? Well usually I engage in most of the following: reading articles, reports, papers and books, writing, social media interactions, listening and recording podcasts, email, messaging, data analysis and creating or reviewing presentations.

I could perform all of those tasks on an iPad Pro as well as on a MacBook and a PC. What differed is which task was best executed on each device. Anything touch first was better on my iPad Pro or on my Surface Pro as was anything that supported pencil or inking. The MacBook Pro and Surface were slightly better with Office apps but mainly because of the larger screen and the better keyboard. The iPad Pro still offered a better balance of work and play thanks to the larger ecosystem and better apps and partly because Surface is held back by a Windows 10 jargon that makes it walk and talk too much like a PC.

«

She then lists a number of features in iOS 11 which make it much easier to use. The point is that if you try to make an iPad “be” a PC, it won’t – rather as a PC isn’t a tablet. But there’s a prevailing view that the two should be equivalent, as you’ll see in the next link…
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iOS 11 on an iPad Pro still won’t replace your laptop • The Verge

Tom Warren critiques the multitasking interface on iOS 11, and then looks at the touchscreen/mouse question:

»

Microsoft attempted to force its Windows 8 interface onto traditional PCs in a vague hope that it would get more tablet apps and boost its mobile efforts. Windows 8 users hated this, because they were used to using a keyboard and mouse for tasks and precision. Equally, Apple is forcing people to use a touchscreen for productivity and it’s confusing its message with optional keyboard and stylus additions to the iPad Pro. This keyboard doesn’t have a trackpad for precision, and you’re forced to move your hands from the keys to reach out and touch most of the time you want to interact. Yes, there are keyboard shortcuts that help, but a lack of mouse input feels unnatural if you’re used to a laptop.

Apple has caved on keyboard and stylus support for the iPad, so it might seem obvious that the company will eventually implement some type of mouse support. I’m not convinced it will, as Apple’s iOS hardware is primarily designed around touch. Apple sees touch as the future, and the iPad is slowly heralding that future. Drag and drop in iOS 11 is an excellent example of that, and a window into the future of the iPad. Software developers have been eagerly awaiting such a feature, and perhaps now they’ll start to invest in more complex and productivity-focused app for the iPad. There are some, like the Aviary photo editor, that are truly great examples of our touch future, but there aren’t enough.

«

I think this is, as Milanesi says, a failure to grasp what “working on an iPad” is about. If we’d only had iPads, and someone invented laptops, you’d say
– terrible battery life
– so heavy!
– why isn’t it touchscreen?
– the ability to angle the screen is good
– all these overlapping windows make a horrendous mess
– jeez, all the FOLDERS and FILES. Don’t these programs know what files are theirs?
– you can write software, a bit like Workflow only much more text-y. Kinda cool.

And so on. (I may explore this theme at a later date.)
link to this extract

Pandora’s radio service revolutionized music but its chances of surviving look shaky in an Apple and Spotify world • Quartz

Amy Wang (not, I think, the one from Futurama):

»

Pandora’s slow death is not an unfamiliar tale in the entertainment industry. A company introduces a novel idea, and then it’s beat out by bigger and better companies that take that idea to the next level. Yet with Pandora, the story is particularly sad. It seemed to sit idly by, unaware of its full potential, as Spotify, Apple Music, and the new wave of on-demand music streaming services took its core ideas of instant delivery and automated recommendations and used them to topple Pandora’s internet radio empire.

In late 2015, Pandora—playing a game of much-too-late catch-up—spent $75 million on streaming service Rdio, and in late 2016, it proudly unveiled Pandora Premium, a subscription service meant to complete with the likes of the streaming giants. Not even a month later, it was forced to lay off 7% of its US workforce. The company still reports around 80 million active users, but only 4 million of those are on the paid tier, with the rest freeloading off the original, ad-supported service. (Compare that to nine-year-old Spotify, which boasts 140 million users, 50 million of them on a paid tier.)

With [founder and CEO Tim] Westergren’s departure as CEO now, the odds of long-term survival aren’t in Pandora’s favor, and the Greek tragedy will likely continue unfolding before our eyes.

«

I dug into Pandora’s financials recently; they’re pretty horrendous. Since going public in 2012, it has made a cumulative operating loss of over $500m, at about -10% margins; and in the past few quarters the negative margin has been growing. It’s not going to be independent for long on that basis.
link to this extract

It’s happening: Qualcomm is building fingerprint scanners that go inside your phone’s screen, coming in 2018 • Android Police

David Ruddock:

»

We’ve been waiting years for this moment, and it looks like Qualcomm will be the first one to deliver on our dreams: fingerprint scanners that go directly underneath your phone’s display panel. At MWC Shanghai today, Qualcomm announced that it will be supplying these futuristic scanners – a new business for the company – starting in summer 2018.

Qualcomm’s design utilizes the company’s previously-announced ultrasonic fingerprint detection method. Because of its use of ultrasonics – as opposed to capacitance – Qualcomm says this fingerprint scanner design makes it much easier to “see” through your smartphone’s display panel to take a fingerprint read… as long as it’s not too thick. The catch is that Qualcomm’s design will only work when implemented on an OLED panel under 1200 μm thick. That leaves LCDs out of the running.

Qualcomm’s sensor can even go beyond reading fingerprints, with the ability to detect heart rate and blood flow, something a traditional capacitive fingerprint scanner really isn’t capable of. And yes, it works with the screen on or off – it doesn’t matter. Qualcomm says its solution will be just as quick as fingerprint scanners on modern high-end smartphones, and it even works underwater, where capacitive fingerprint scanners are basically useless. Because the sensor sits under the display panel, there’s also no hole that needs to be drilled into the device to add it in anymore, making producing a waterproof smartphone even easier.

«

One wonders if Apple is already up on this (given the persistent rumours about the next iPhone) which would mean it could have a year’s lead or more, as the “summer 2018” timetable for Qualcomm means it won’t be in other phones until late 2018 at the earliest.

Still: “works underwater”! Everyone wants to unlock their phone in the swimming pool. But what about leaks through the damn headphone jack?
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The price tag won’t be a useful guide to their frequency response, analysis suggests. Photo by Drakh 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.

Facebook hits two billion users • BBC News

»

More than a quarter of the world’s population now uses Facebook every month, the social network says.

“As of this morning, the Facebook community is now officially two billion people,” founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg posted. The milestone comes just 13 years after the network was founded by Mr Zuckerberg when he was at Harvard. He famously dropped out of the university after launching the global social-networking website.

The internet giant announced it had one billion monthly users in October 2012, meaning it has doubled the number of its users in just under five years.

The firm’s continuing growth will confound critics who have long predicted that the social network’s growth would slow down as rivals such as Snapchat stole its users.

Earlier this year, Facebook warned that growth in advertising revenues would slow down. Nonetheless, Mr Zuckerberg’s ambitions remain huge. He told USA Today the firm had not made “much fanfare” about hitting the two billion figure because “we still haven’t connected everyone”.

«

“Citizen 2,000,000,001, please report for your Connection Appointment.”
link to this extract

OK, Google: should i focus on voice search in 2017? • Seer Interactive

»

Here’s our research:

PPC query mining

Very little usage: 0.012% of 1,016,000 PPC keywords contained “OK, Google” (128 Seer Clients).

No major keyword behavior change: 66% of “OK, Google” queries are being spoken the same way they would be typed.

Survey results:

Very little marketing applicable search usage: 61% of voice users report using voice to control applications and appliances around them vs. tap info from the Internet (phone calls, texts, playing music, etc.). Only 8% of daily voice tech users reported actively searching the Internet via voice.

The technology is limiting: 90% of users reported frustration with the current voice activated tech or they don’t use it at all:
OK 57%
Bad 27%
Great 10%
Don’t Use 6%

«

That graphic tells you quite a lot. Get it to play music.
link to this extract

Petya ransomware attack – what’s known • MalwareTech

On the big ransomware attack which hit a lot of companies on Tuesday, and which uses the same “EternalBlue” exploit that Wannacry did a few weeks back:

»

current data suggests that Petya was deployed onto possibly millions or even 10s of millions of computers by hacking popular Ukrainian Accounting software “MeDoc”then using the automatic update feature to download the malware onto all computers using the software. All though MeDoc being the initial infection vector is unconfirmed (and even denied by the company itself), current evidence points to them.

The important difference between WannaCry and Petya is WannaCry was likely deployed onto a small number of computers and then spread rapidly, whereas Petya seem to have been deployed onto a large number of computers and spread via local network; therefore, in this instance there is low risk of new infections more than 1h after the attack (the malware shuts down the computer to encrypt it 1h after execution, by which time it will already have completed its local network scan).

«

link to this extract

Google, Facebook are super monopolies: Roger McNamee • CNBC

Chantel McGee:

»

Google shareholders won’t be fazed by the EU’s $2.7bn fine against the company for competition abuses related to its shopping business, Elevation Partners co-founder Roger McNamee told CNBC on Tuesday.

“As a shareholder of Google you’re looking at this and saying: ‘We won again,'” McNamee said.

The venture capitalist spoke hours after EU regulators fined Google a record 2.4 billion euros ($2.7 billion), ruling that the search-engine giant violated antitrust rules for its online shopping practices.

Google said it will consider appealing the decision to the highest court in Europe.

“Google, Facebook, Amazon are increasingly just super-monopolies, especially Google and Facebook. The share of the markets they operate in is literally on the same scale that Standard Oil had … more than 100 years ago — with the big differences that their reach is now global, not just within a single country,” he said on “Squawk Alley.”

The fine is not large enough to change Google’s behavior, he added. “The only thing that will change it is regulations that actually say you can or can’t do something.”

«

link to this extract

The Washington Post leverages artificial intelligence in comment moderation – The Washington Post

»

The Washington Post has launched ModBot, a software application that utilizes artificial intelligence to moderate comments. The proprietary technology uses machine learning to automatically filter comments that require human moderating, flag stories that require real-time monitoring, and approve or delete comments based on The Post’s discussion policy. The technology evaluates comments using an algorithm that has been trained by The Post’s years-long history of human-moderated comments.

ModBot has been assisting Post comment moderators since its launch on May 5 and the technology is currently evaluating all Washington Post comments.

«

That’s all well and good for stopping the openly abusive stuff getting through, but doesn’t – and can’t – deal with the main problem: comments on average don’t contribute to the story. The drift away from allowing or by default showing comments on general news sites will, on the whole, continue.
link to this extract

Violence on Facebook Live is worse than you thought • Buzzfeed

Alex Kantrowitz:

»

Some criminologists worry that broadcasts of violent crimes to Facebook Live might lead perpetrators of violent crime to view the platform as a means of gaining infamy, bypassing the traditional filter of the media. “The most likely impact is that it’s going to be a model of how to distribute and immortalize your act,” Ray Surette, a criminal justice professor at the University of Central Florida, told BuzzFeed News.

Jacqueline Helfgott, chair of the Criminal Justice Department at Seattle University, agreed. “It’s making it easier for people to gain notoriety instantly without gatekeepers,” she told BuzzFeed News. “I definitely think there’s a mimetic effect.”

In addition, the longer these videos stay online, the more of a problem they become, said Surette, as criminals may see them as an effective way to publicize their misdeeds. “It does make a difference how long it’s up there,” he explained. “The fewer people that are exposed to it, the fewer people are going to see it as a model.”

Facebook — prior to announcing plans to hire an additional 3,000 people to identify problems — has at times been shockingly slow to remove violent videos. In late April, for example, a Facebook Live video of a father in Thailand murdering his 11-month-old daughter was available on Facebook for nearly 24 hours.

For every murder aired on Facebook that receives national or international attention — such as the one in Thailand or a murder in Chicago in which the perpetrator uploaded a video of himself killing a man at random — there are several others that don’t make headlines outside local coverage areas. The shooting of Donesha Gantt, for instance, did not make national news. Yet these videos don’t need to be picked up by CNN to have an impact. Millions watch inside Facebook itself.

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I bet if Charlie Brooker were writing The National Anthem now, rather than in 2010, he’d incorporate Facebook Live somehow.
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No correlation between headphone frequency response and retail price • The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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This study quantifies variability of measured headphone response patterns and aims to uncover any correlations between headphone type, retail price, and frequency response. For this purpose, the mean, variance, and covariance of the frequency magnitude responses were analyzed and correlated with headphone type and retail value. The results indicate that neither the measured response nor an attempt to objectively quantify perceived quality is related to price.

On average, in-ear headphones have a slightly higher measured bass response than circumaural and supra-aural headphones. Furthermore, in-ear and circumaural headphones have a slightly lower deviation from an assumed target curve than supra-ear models. 90% of the variance across all headphone measurements can be described by a set of six basis functions…

…Across all groups, the averaged responses demonstrate a resonant peak at around 3.5 kHz, a secondary resonance at 10 kHz, and a general decrease in response toward 19 kHz.

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They seem to have tested a lot of headphones – as many as 100? – but annoyingly I can’t find anywhere that they specify which. But the prices go up well past the $100 mark.
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The EU’s got it all wrong on Google • Adam Smith Institute

Sam Bowman:

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bundling or integrating price comparison tools might be good for users who are less tech-savvy and would normally go for a ‘trusted’ but more expensive retailer. If you don’t realise that SkyScanner exists and would normally just go with BA every time, it could be very useful to get Google Flights right up top, showing that Ryanair does what you’re looking for much more cheaply.

So it’s not even clear that prioritising Google Shopping results is bad for consumers – it may lead them to be more price-conscious and to shop around between merchants more. Even if it is – because it’s worse than some alternative price comparison site, for example – there is still no case for punishing Google for giving it special prominence. If Google Shopping is worse for consumers then it must be acting as a revenue raiser for Google, and a de facto way of charging for use of Google search (and other free Google products). 

If people can switch between platforms it doesn’t matter that much if, within a platform, there isn’t that much competition. Prioritising a particular shopping search engine is not akin to gouging water users with higher prices because there are alternatives to Google that users can switch to easily. If the overall user experience is made worse by Google Shopping being prioritised, then users will have the option of moving to a search engine like Bing which is perhaps less good as at search but better overall because it does not prioritise a bad shopping tool. Indeed Bing has specifically targeted Google Shopping, which they say is worse than their own tool, to get users to switch. And there is an incentive created for entrepreneurs and large existing rivals of Google like Facebook to create their own, rival platform…

…But the core issue here is whether we need to force competition within software platforms if competition exists between them. Just as Windows users moved to other operating systems (both on mobile with Android and iOS and desktop with Linux and Apple’s OS X), Google users have plenty of alternatives they can switch to if they think that Google’s bundling worsens the platform’s quality enough.

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I disagree with this analysis. Comparing the desktop with mobile misrepresents the role search plays; what Google did in Shopping is like Microsoft not only pre-installing Internet Explorer but making it increasingly hard to run alternative browsers even after you’d downloaded and installed them.

The ASI view is much closer to the US view on antitrust: if you can’t point right now to a user who has been inconvenienced, then nothing bad has been done. This seems to me a short-term view of competition (which you’d think an organisation using that name would favour).

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EU fines Google €2.4bn ($2.7bn) over favoring Google Shopping in search results • Tech Narratives

Jan Dawson (who points out that he started out as an analyst covering EU regulation):

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In its decision, the EU explicitly says that this case sets a precedent, which certainly suggests it’s likely to find and act similarly in the other two cases [against Google, alleging abuse of dominance over mandated apps in Android, and insistence on Google Play for “approved” apps]. Secondly, the fine is substantial, but ultimately not the biggest punishment for Google here. Rather, the most significant outcome is restrictions on promoting other Google services in search, which applies for today onto to Shopping but by implication would also affect other linked products that get prominent promotion in search results, whether Maps, News, or potentially other categories too. Put that together with the precedent point, and we’re very likely to see similar restrictions on bundling and promoting other services in Android and possibly other areas too.

Thirdly, the decision is notable for a very European approach to defining markets, which I mentioned in one of those earlier pieces on Android: the EU tends to define markets in ways normal people probably wouldn’t, because that allows it to make findings that otherwise couldn’t be made. In this case, it’s defining Google Shopping as a comparison shopping service rather than just a more useful way to present shopping-related search results and/or ads, which is how Google sees them. Once you define Google Shopping in that way, then of course Google is unfairly promoting Google Shopping over other comparison shopping services – can you even name any others?

Google’s own algorithm, which benefits only from being as good as possible, rarely ranks any others above the fourth page of organic search results, suggesting their limited relevance. But as long as the EU is determined to take that approach, I see very little Google can do to fight against this decision, because it’s based on a market definition the EU gets to decide on, and which Google is essentially powerless to change. Overall, this feels like something of a watershed moment in Google’s relationship with the EU – I think any appeal is very unlikely to succeed, and at most will push back the implementation of the decision and the forced unbending of Shopping from search.

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Also: EC announcement; Google response.
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Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science? • The Guardian

Stephen Buranyi:

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[Bernstein Research investment analyst Claudio] Aspesi was not the first person to incorrectly predict the end of the scientific publishing boom, and he is unlikely to be the last. It is hard to believe that what is essentially a for-profit oligopoly functioning within an otherwise heavily regulated, government-funded enterprise can avoid extinction in the long run. But publishing has been deeply enmeshed in the science profession for decades. Today, every scientist knows that their career depends on being published, and professional success is especially determined by getting work into the most prestigious journals. The long, slow, nearly directionless work pursued by some of the most influential scientists of the 20th century is no longer a viable career option. Under today’s system, the father of genetic sequencing, Fred Sanger, who published very little in the two decades between his 1958 and 1980 Nobel prizes, may well have found himself out of a job.

Even scientists who are fighting for reform are often not aware of the roots of the system: how, in the boom years after the second world war, entrepreneurs built fortunes by taking publishing out of the hands of scientists and expanding the business on a previously unimaginable scale. And no one was more transformative and ingenious than Robert Maxwell, who turned scientific journals into a spectacular money-making machine that bankrolled his rise in British society. Maxwell would go on to become an MP, a press baron who challenged Rupert Murdoch, and one of the most notorious figures in British life. But his true importance was far larger than most of us realise. Improbable as it might sound, few people in the last century have done more to shape the way science is conducted today than Maxwell.

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A great read about this giant, weirdly profitable business.
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Purple-emitting LEDs get closer to the sun • EE Times

Sally Ward-Foxton:

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Seoul Semiconductor Co. Ltd., in partnership with Toshiba Materials Co. Ltd., has created an LED that it says more closely mimics the spectrum of natural daylight.

Called SunLike, the LEDs combine Seoul Semiconductor’s high-brightness purple LEDs with advanced red, green, and blue (RGB) phosphors developed at Toshiba Materials. Up to now, most approaches have mimicked daylight by combining blue-emitting LEDs with yellow and red phosphors to fill out the rest of the spectrum, but that method results in peaks in the blue spectrum.

Blue peaks are undesirable because the amount of blue light the human eye can accept is limited. Over-illumination with blue light results in scatter, which distorts the texture and color of illuminated objects. Research also suggests that exposure to excess blue light can have negative health effects related to interruption of the circadian rhythms.

The secret to SunLike’s performance is the phosphors, said Seoul Semiconductor CEO Chung Hoon Lee.

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“One word, Benjamin: phosphors.”
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The Magical Apple Spin-Off That Almost Invented the iPhone … in 1993 • OZY

Sean Braswell:

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Almost 17 years before the iPhone, General Magic’s aim was nothing less than a pocket-size communications device that could send messages, perform computing and make calls. The company called a dramatic press conference in February 1993 to announce two key components of that device: Magic Cap (a user-friendly operating system) and Telescript (a telecommunications language to allow devices to communicate across different networks). Industry observers raved that the company was creating “the digital version of English” to go with its hand-held personal assistant of the future. General Magic raised almost $90 million, and another $82 million at its 1995 initial public offering. Silicon Valley’s brightest angled to work at its Mountain View headquarters, equipped with free-roaming rabbits and conference rooms named after famous illusionists like Houdini.

But it soon became clear that General Magic’s vision was more an illusion than a reality. As the company burned through its cash, its products were plagued by delays and glitches.

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I visited General Magic in 1994, when I was working for New Scientist. Here’s how the article I wrote began:

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Imagine being lost on a mountain. You know there’s a path to the road,
but all you can see are hills, lakes and woods, and the map you brought along is little more than a sketch. This is the moment that you need the device so beloved of 1950s science fiction – a communicator. A small device that can display detailed maps of the area, send messages to the emergency services and, if you’ve got the advanced model, beam you back home.

Well, there’s a small group of scientists working in a Californian development laboratory who’d like to help you out. The communicator may not beam you home yet, but General Magic, founded four years ago by Mark Porat, Bill Atkinson and Andy Herzfeld, is already making the future of personal communications happen.

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Yeah, near enough the iPhone, I think.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified