In 2011, Facebook compared political ads on its site to – guess what? Photo by vijay chennupati on Flickr.

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A selection of 10 links for you. You can choose not to pay $1,000 for them. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

AI will soon identify protesters with their faces partly concealed • Motherboard

Louise Matsakis:

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A new paper to be presented at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (ICCVW) introduces a deep-learning algorithm—a subset of machine learning used to detect and model patterns in large heaps of data—that can identify an individual even when part of their face is obscured. The system was able to correctly identify a person concealed by a scarf 67% of the time when they were photographed against a “complex” background, which better resembles real-world conditions.

The deep-learning algorithm works in a novel way. The researchers, from Cambridge University, India’s National Institute of Technology, and the Indian Institute of Science, first outlined 14 key areas of the face, and then trained a deep-learning model to identify them. The algorithm connects the points into a “star-net structure,” and uses the angles between the points to identify a face. The algorithm can still identify those angles even when part of a person’s mug is obscured, by disguises including caps, scarves, and glasses.

The research has troubling implications for protestors and other dissidents, who often work to make sure they aren’t ID’d at protests and other demonstrations by covering their faces with scarves or by wearing sunglasses. “To be honest when I was trying to come up with this method, I was just trying to focus on criminals,” Amarjot Singh, one of the researchers behind the paper and a Ph.D student at Cambridge University, told me on a phone call.

Singh said he isn’t sure how to prevent the technology from being used by authoritarian regimes in the future.

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But note that this is a long way from reliability, or real-time, or anything that would stand up in court. 67% accuracy sounds a lot, but it leaves gigantic holes for doubt. That won’t stop authoritarian regimes using it, of course.

link to this extract

Your next phone will probably cost you $1,000 • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

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On Tuesday, Apple will introduce its latest top-of-the-line iPhone, and even the cheapest model is expected to cost about $1,000. A few days later, Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8 goes on sale for a comparable amount. The iPhone is expected to be made from glass and stainless steel, while the Note has an exceptionally large, bright screen with a metal-and-glass case. New features for the iPhone will include upgraded cameras and the ability to unlock your phone with a 3D scan of your face. All that stuff has pushed up prices, and there’s a risk that even many longtime early adopters will balk at laying out four figures, including tax.

“A thousand dollars is a line in the sand,” says Ramon Llamas, an analyst at researcher IDC. “There’s going to be a comparison of what $1,000 is to people’s everyday lives, and whether or not that purchase is justified. For some people, $1,000 represents a single paycheck. For others, it represents several weeks of groceries.”

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That’s the cheapest model of the top-of-the-line phone, and nobody is forcing you to buy that one. These articles are written as though people were being lined up at the point of bayonets and made to purchase them.

Nice graphic though. The reason why prices keep moving up: it’s where the profit margin is.
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Autonomous cars: the level 5 fallacy • Monday Note

Jean-Louis Gassée on the idea that cars will be completely self-driving (“Level 5”):

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In prior Monday Notes that discussed electric and autonomous cars, a subject of endless fascination, I evoked scenarios where SD cars can’t cope with circumstances that require human intervention. Today, I’ll offer the pedestrian crossing at the intersection of Hayes and Octavia in San Francisco:

Understandably, the Google Street View picture was taken in the early morning. Now, imagine the 1 pm Sunday scene with crowded sidewalks and sticky car traffic. In today’s world, pedestrians and drivers manage a peaceful if hiccuping coexistence. Through eye contact, nods, hand signals, and, yes, courteous restraint, pedestrians decide to sometimes forfeit their right-of-way and let a few cars come through. On the whole, drivers are equally patient and polite (an unceasing subject of amazement for Parisians walking the streets of San Francisco).

Can we “algorithmicize” eye contact and stuttering restraint? Can an SD car acknowledge a pedestrian’s nod, or negotiate “turning rights” with a conventional vehicle?

No, we can’t. And we don’t appear to have a path to overcome such “mundane” challenges.
But you don’t have to believe me, or think I’m not “with it”. We can listen to Chris Urmson, Google’s Director of Self-Driving Cars from 2013 to late 2016 (he had joined the team in 2009). In a SXSW talk in early 2016, Urmson gives a sobering yet helpful vision of the project’s future, summarized by Lee Gomes in an IEEE Spectrum article [as always, edits and emphasis mine]:

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“Not only might it take much longer to arrive than the company has ever indicated — as long as 30 years, said Urmson — but the early commercial versions might well be limited to certain geographies and weather conditions. Self-driving cars are much easier to engineer for sunny weather and wide-open roads, and Urmson suggested the cars might be sold for those markets first.”

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How to generate FiveThirtyEight graphs in Python • Dataquest

Alexandru Olteanu:

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If you read data science articles, you may have already stumbled upon FiveThirtyEight’s content. Naturally, you were impressed by their awesome visualizations. You wanted to make your own awesome visualizations and so asked Quora and Reddit how to do it. You received some answers, but they were rather vague. You still can’t get the graphs done yourself.

In this post, we’ll help you. Using Python’s matplotlib and pandas, we’ll see that it’s rather easy to replicate the core parts of any FiveThirtyEight (FTE) visualization.

We’ll start here:

And, at the end of the tutorial, arrive here:

To follow along, you’ll need at least some basic knowledge of Python. If you know what’s the difference between methods and attributes, then you’re good to go.

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If you’re into Python and graphs, this is what you want.
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Taxi medallions, once a safe investment, now drag owners into debt • The New York Times

Winnie Hu:

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Owning a yellow cab has left Issa Isac in deep debt and facing a precarious future.

It was not supposed to turn out this way when Mr. Isac slid behind the wheel in 2005. Soon he was earning $200 a night driving. Three years later, he borrowed $335,000 to buy a New York City taxi medallion, which gave him the right to operate his own cab.

But now Mr. Isac earns half of what he did when he started, as riders have defected to Uber and other competitors. He stopped making the $2,700-a-month loan payment on his medallion in February because he was broke. Last month, it was sold to help pay his debts.

“I see my future crashing down,” said Mr. Isac, 46, an immigrant from Burkina Faso. “I worry every day. Sometimes, I can’t sleep thinking about it. Everything changed overnight.”

Taxi ownership once seemed a guaranteed route to financial security, something that was more tangible and reliable than the stock market since people hailed cabs in good times and bad. Generations of new immigrants toiled away for years to earn enough to buy a coveted medallion. Those who had them took pride in them, and viewed them as their retirement fund.

Uber and other ride-hail apps have upended all that.

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The New York taxi medallion business is crashing, hard. Difficult not to see this as people who happened to be looking in the wrong direction when the articulated lorry of technological change came down the road.
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Our entire credit bureau system is broken • The Verge

Russell Brandom:

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It’s easy to point to Equifax [the credit reference agency which was thoroughly hacked] as the problem, and its poor handling of the breach (and possible insider trading) certainly doesn’t help. But the problem is bigger than any single company. In a world flooded with information, we’re still relying on a tiny set of sensitive data to protect us from fraud, and putting the burden on the average consumer when that data leaks out. We treat data as private when it’s already been exposed in breach after breach. This system has reached its breaking point. It’s time to burn it all down and start over.

In the most basic terms, credit bureaus work as a reputation service. You submit someone’s name and get back a report on all the money they’ve borrowed over the years and how it’s been repaid. That’s valuable information if you’re deciding whether to lend someone money, so businesses (or their customers) are often willing to pay for it. In that situation, the biggest risk to the lender is an impostor who runs up someone else’s tab and then skips town. So along the way, credit bureaus have become an identity service, too. Along with the potential client’s name, they ask for a Social Security number, and if those things don’t match, they know they’re dealing with fraud.

This is a terrible way to manage identity. From afar, a Social Security number looks kind of like a password. But you can change a password, and you shouldn’t use the same one with every service. To get slightly more technical, you can hash passwords, which lets services verify your identity without keeping your exact password easily available. Right now, I could count the number of places my Gmail password exists anywhere on one hand, whereas I’ve been writing my Social Security number on forms since I was 12. By now, hundreds of organizations have it, from old jobs to old dentists. That number was never going to be safe from scammers. The system was set up for failure from the very beginning.

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Powerful, and spot-on, piece.
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Massive genetic study shows how humans are evolving • Nature News & Comment

Bruno Martin:

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A huge genetic study that sought to pinpoint how the human genome is evolving suggests that natural selection is getting rid of harmful genetic mutations that shorten people’s lives. The work, published in PLoS Biology1, analysed DNA from 215,000 people and is one of the first attempts to probe directly how humans are evolving over one or two generations.

To identify which bits of the human genome might be evolving, researchers scoured large US and UK genetic databases for mutations whose prevalence changed across different age groups. For each person, the parents’ age of death was recorded as a measure of longevity, or their own age in some cases.

“If a genetic variant influences survival, its frequency should change with the age of the surviving individuals,” says Hakhamanesh Mostafavi, an evolutionary biologist at Columbia University in New York City who led the study. People who carry a harmful genetic variant die at a higher rate, so the variant becomes rarer in the older portion of the population.

Mostafavi and his colleagues tested more than 8 million common mutations, and found two that seemed to become less prevalent with age. A variant of the APOE gene, which is strongly linked to Alzheimer’s disease, was rarely found in women over 70. And a mutation in the CHRNA3 gene associated with heavy smoking in men petered out in the population starting in middle age. People without these mutations have a survival edge and are more likely to live longer, the researchers suggest.

This is not, by itself, evidence of evolution at work. In evolutionary terms, having a long life isn’t as important as having a reproductively fruitful one, with many children who survive into adulthood and birth their own offspring. So harmful mutations that exert their effects after reproductive age could be expected to be ‘neutral’ in the eyes of evolution, and not selected against.

But if that were the case, there would be plenty of such mutations still kicking around in the genome, the authors argue.

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link to this extract

Google appeals against EU’s €2.4bn fine over search engine results • The Guardian

Daniel Boffey:

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Google is appealing against the record €2.4bn (£2.2bn) fine imposed by the European Union for its abuse of its dominance of the search engine market in building its shopping comparison service.

The world’s most popular internet search engine has launched its appeal after it was fined by the European commission for what was described as an “old school” form of illegality.

The Luxembourg-based general court, Europe’s second-highest, is expected to take several years before ruling on Google’s appeal, which had been widely expected. The Silicon Valley giant had responded to the fine at the time of its announcement by saying that it “respectfully” disagreed with the legal argument being pursued.

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But still has to stop boosting its shopping service in contravention of EC rules; has until 28 September to comply. The EC is looking at its proposal on this, apparently.
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May 2011: Facebook: exempt us from federal election commission rules • POLITICO

Jennifer Epstein, in May 2011:

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Facebook, the company that has helped put so much of what was once private out in open on the web, is looking for a sort of corporate privacy setting of its own — the company is looking to ensure that it is exempt from federal election rules requiring campaign advertisements to include disclosures of who paid for them.

In a request to the Federal Election Commission made late last month, lawyers for the social networking powerhouse argued that the small ads on Facebook’s website should not have to include disclosures because of the limited amounts of room for text.

While it’s easy to include disclosures on a television ad, billboard or email, Facebook argues, it’s more difficult with the tiny ads posted along the side of its webpages. “With some mediums … – e.g. bumper stickers, buttons, pens, T-shirts, concert tickets, and text messages – it is inconvenient or impracticable to include a disclaimer,” three lawyers from the Washington office of the firm Perkins Coie write in their request for an advisory opinion from the FEC.

The company says it has made a conscious decision to keep the ads on its site small and less obtrusive to the user experience, and does not want to take away from that experience or penalize campaign advertisers. “Facebook gives a wide range of candidates and causes a voice where they would otherwise not be able to afford one through more traditional political advertising,” spokesman Andrew Noyes said in a statement to POLITICO. “We encourage the FEC to consider these benefits and other fundamental differences between some online ad formats and newspaper and TV advertising.”

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Facebook was in effect claiming that its ads – including the political ones – are the equivalent of skywriting (which doesn’t need disclosure about who paid for it). The FEC agreed. This, of course, turns out to have been a significant turning point, even though nobody saw it at the time.

Imagine if all the political ads on Facebook in the 2016 election had had to declare who bought them. The discourse around the company would be very different. (Twitter too have used this get-out, I believe.)
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A beginner’s guide to using My Get Me There • Medium

Susil Nash on “Manchester’s hilarious attempt at reinventing London’s Oyster” (the latter, for Americans, is an RFID system which can be used to pay contactlessly for trips on buses and underground; it’s worked, pretty much perfectly, since 2004:

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The first of the new system’s fun quirks is that My Get Me There isn’t just a card. It’s an app too. Now, you might think that’s to be expected — it’s a convenient way to manage your card, right? The two work together in harmony, right? Wrong. The app and the (presumably ironically-named) ‘Smart Card’ are two completely separate systems that work entirely independently of one another.

Your first decision is therefore whether to opt for the app, the Smart Card or, as will be the case for most travellers, both. The app is certainly less tricky to get hold of (more on that in a moment) but the significant downside is that it can only be used on Metrolink — Manchester’s tram network. Which means no smartphone fun for Team Bus or the vehicle-agnostics, but app-tastic news for all tram devotees.
Having said that, there are a couple of things that even you dedicated Metrolinkers should watch out for before ditching the paper tix. Firstly, know that you’ll need to make sure you’re not low on battery when heading out the door because, if your phone gives up mid-travels, you could be hit with a £100 fine. Secondly, you’ll need to remain online… ish. The reason for the ‘ish’ is that you don’t actually need web access to use the app once you’ve bought your ticket. However, any tickets on your phone will expire if that device “has not been connected to the internet for a long period” (that’s literally the timescale specified on their website).

So do make sure your phone has a plenty of juice and has been connected to the internet at least once in the most recent ‘long period’.

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Even worse: it’s not a top-up scheme. It’s a “specific tickets for specific journeys” system. And you have to be over 16. It’s as if they wanted to keep cash forever.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Hurricane Irma has caused devastation through the Caribbean – but been a boon for a walkie-talkie app. Photo by anttilipponen 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 14 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Video game influencers settle FTC complaint over endorsement • Rolling Stone

Brian Crecente:

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Two well-known social media influencers have reached a tentative agreement with the Federal Trade Commission over charges that they deceptively endorsed gambling site CSGOLotto – and paid others to do so – without disclosing that they owned the company itself.

CSGOLotto owners Trevor “TmarTn” Martin and Thomas “Syndicate” Cassel agreed to a deal in which they promise to report all of their activity to the FTC and disclose connections with endorsers. While the deal doesn’t require the two to admit any culpability nor does it include a fine, future infractions could cost more than $40,000 per violation, according to an FTC spokesperson who spoke with Glixel about the case.

Under the FTC Act, according to the spokesperson, the commission typically can’t assess civil penalties on the first violation. Today’s consent agreement will be subject to public comment until October 10th, at which point the commission will decide whether to make the order final…

…”The goal of the FTC isn’t to be a punitive or draconian agency,” FTC spokesman Mitchell J. Katz says. “We are here to educate consumers about new markets.”

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Come on. Does anyone seriously think these two believed it was all above board to do this? And as for the FTC: maybe rethink that mission statement. Especially when it comes to gambling – which can quickly turn into ruinously addictive behaviour – it’s entirely correct to be punitive and draconian. And when you have gambling mixed with deception, it’s hammer time.
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Is this research ethical? • Light Blue Touchpaper

Professor Ross Anderson:

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The Economist features face recognition on its front page, reporting that deep neural networks can now tell whether you’re straight or gay better than humans can just by looking at your face. The research they cite is a preprint, available here.

Its authors Kosinski and Wang downloaded thousands of photos from a dating site, ran them through a standard feature-extraction program, then classified gay vs straight using a standard statistical classifier, which they found could tell the men seeking men from the men seeking women. My students pretty well instantly called this out as selection bias; if gay men consider boyish faces to be cuter, then they will upload their most boyish photo. The paper authors suggest their finding may support a theory that sexuality is influenced by fetal testosterone levels, but when you don’t control for such biases your results may say more about social norms than about phenotypes.

Quite apart from the scientific value of the research, which is perhaps best assessed by specialists, I’m concerned with the ethics and privacy aspects. I am surprised that the paper doesn’t report having been through ethical review; the authors consider that photos on a dating website are public information and appear to assume that privacy issues simply do not arise.

Yet UK courts decided, in Campbell v Mirror, that privacy could be violated even by photos taken on the public street, and European courts have come to similar conclusions in I v Finland and elsewhere.

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Anderson, as ever, raises important questions. (The privacy topic will probably get ignored until someone – a famous model? – brings a big case. Then the boilerplate on the dating site or whatever will be changed to force you to give up your rights. Or the dating site will sue the maker of the AI for some of the profits.)
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London Underground Wifi tracking: here’s everything we learned from TfL’s official report • Gizmodo UK

James O’Malley on the findings from TfL’s Wi-Fi pilot tracking scheme:

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TfL was also able to see how disruptions impacted stations too: Apparently when mega-congested, the walk times increased from 3 minutes to more than ten minutes. Which creates a whole array of second-order problems for the poor staff on the ground trying to squeeze everyone in.

The wifi data also enables TfL to generate more accurate data on crowding in stations. The above graph compares the number of Oyster touch-ins with wireless device detections over the course of the day.

Previously, how busy a station was could only be measured using Oyster touch in data but there’s a fairly big flaw in using this: There’s a fairly hard limit on how many people can use a set of ticket barriers at any one time. So measuring it by touch-ins doesn’t account for hundreds or thousands of grumpy commuters in the queue.

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This is going to be enormously useful for planning. You can see how it might also be helpful for buses; offering free Wi-Fi on buses would serve some of the same purposes. (If you offered it at bus stops, though, you’d get people who didn’t intend to get on the bus..)
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Amazon was tricked by fake law firm into removing hot product, costing seller $200K • CNBC

Eugene Kim:

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Shortly before Amazon Prime Day in July, the owner of the Brushes4Less store on Amazon’s marketplace received a suspension notice for his best-selling product, a toothbrush head replacement.

The email that landed in his inbox said the product was being delisted from the site because of an intellectual property violation. In order to resolve the matter and get the product reinstated, the owner would have to contact the law firm that filed the complaint.

But there was one problem: the firm didn’t exist.

Brushes4Less was given the contact information for an entity named Wesley & McCain in Pittsburgh. The website wesleymccain.com has profiles for five lawyers. A Google image search shows that all five actually work for the law firm Brydon, Swearengen & England in Jefferson City, Missouri…

…The owner of Brushes4Less agreed to tell his story to CNBC but asked that we not use his name out of concern for his privacy. As far as he can tell, and based on what CNBC could confirm, Amazon was duped into shutting down the seller’s key product days before the site’s busiest shopping event ever.

“Just five minutes of detective work would have found this website is a fraud, but Amazon doesn’t seem to want to do any of that,” the owner said. “This is like the Wild Wild West of intellectual property complaints.”

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I’m hearing more and more complaints about how Amazon behaves, both here and through its promotions. Once more, the problem is: what alternative do you have?
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Tesla extended the range of some Florida vehicles for drivers to escape Hurricane Irma – The Verge

Andrew Liptak:

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As Hurricane Irma bears down on Florida, Tesla issued an over-the-air update to drivers in the state that unlocks the full battery capacity of its 60 and 70 kilowatt-hour Model S and X vehicles. The update provides those trying to escape the path of the storm with an additional 30 to 40 miles above the typical range of the vehicle, according to Electrek.

Tesla’s 60 and 60D vehicles offer a range of just above 200 miles on a charge. Faced with an order to leave, one Tesla owner contacted the company, saying that they needed an additional 30 miles of range to get out of the mandatory evacuation zone they were in. In response, the company issued an update to other drivers in the state, providing them with the full 75 kWh capacity of their vehicles through September 16th. One driver posted a screenshot of his app, which showed off the new extended range. A Tesla spokesperson confirmed that the company’s 70kWh vehicles also received the update.

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So what’s to stop someone trying to figure out what the software update does, and applying that to their battery firmware? (Maybe it’s signed with a Tesla cryptographic key?) This seems really strange – that the only difference is a few lines of code, and that the low-end car is intentionally hobbled not through physics but software. And what Tesla can give, it can take away. That’s scary too.
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As Hurricane Irma devastates, walkie talkie app Zello adds six million users in a week • Buzzfeed

Alex Kantrowitz:

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Zello is used almost exactly like a walkie talkie, except it relies on wifi and cell service, so it can support big groups of people in dispersed locations. When Harvey caused widespread devastation in and around Houston, volunteers leaned on Zello to coordinate search and rescue efforts. And people in the path of Irma seem to believe they can put the app to similar uses in this storm too.

Zello has added six million new registered users since Monday, the company’s CEO, Bill Moore, told BuzzFeed News, and is now the top free app on the iOS App Store. The app is supporting a few massive groups dedicated to Irma relief, including the 1,800+ member South Florida Hurricane Irma channel.

“With the crush of new users and emergency situations, most of the Zello team is working long days either maintaining capacity or helping with customer support,” Moore said.

As Zello’s usage grows, it risks getting overloaded and becoming less useful to rescuers. The South Florida group, for instance, seemed to contain a mixture of useful information and chaos Saturday evening. “We’re not Google, we’re not the National Weather Service,” one administrator told the group after a number of requests for weather updates.

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Question is, will anyone use it in a month’s time?
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Hurricane Irma and tax havens • Progressive Economics Group

Richard Murphy:

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Although it will take time for the full impact of Hurricane Irma to become apparent, it is clear that it will create significant damage in the British Overseas Territories of Anguilla, The British Virgin Islands and Turks and Caicos Islands. It has already done that on Antigua and Barbuda and may also do so to The Bahamas, both of which are Commonwealth states to which the UK has at least a moral obligation.

There is also risk to Bermuda and St Kitts and Nevis, which are also British Overseas Territories.  It is thought that well over half of all buildings in Barbuda have been subject to substantial hurricane inflicted damage.

It is beholden on the UK to provide all aid necessary to restore normal life in its Overseas Territories, without delay. There are good reasons for suggesting that it should provide similar assistance to affected Commonwealth States. That said, there is no reason why this support should be supplied unconditionally. 

All the places mentioned are secrecy jurisdictions (tax havens) as indicated by the Tax Justice Network’s influential Financial Secrecy Index. What this means is that these places, without exception, have deliberately created regulation for the primary benefit and use of people who are not resident in those islands, and knowing that that regulation in question will be used to undermine the legislation or regulation of another jurisdiction. 

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You can probably guess what comes next, but I won’t spoil the surprise.
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Partisanship, propaganda, and disinformation: online media and the 2016 US presidential election • Berkman Klein Center

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In this study, we analyze both mainstream and social media coverage of the 2016 United States presidential election. We document that the majority of mainstream media coverage was negative for both candidates, but largely followed Donald Trump’s agenda: when reporting on Hillary Clinton, coverage primarily focused on the various scandals related to the Clinton Foundation and emails. When focused on Trump, major substantive issues, primarily immigration, were prominent. Indeed, immigration emerged as a central issue in the campaign and served as a defining issue for the Trump campaign.

We find that the structure and composition of media on the right and left are quite different. The leading media on the right and left are rooted in different traditions and journalistic practices. On the conservative side, more attention was paid to pro-Trump, highly partisan media outlets. On the liberal side, by contrast, the center of gravity was made up largely of long-standing media organizations steeped in the traditions and practices of objective journalism.

Our data supports lines of research on polarization in American politics that focus on the asymmetric patterns between the left and the right, rather than studies that see polarization as a general historical phenomenon, driven by technology or other mechanisms that apply across the partisan divide.

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And yes, Facebook and Twitter are in there.
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Seriously, Equifax? Why the credit agency’s breach means regulation is needed • The New York Times

Farhad Manjoo is angry:

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If a bank lost everyone’s money, regulators might try to shut down the bank. If an accounting firm kept shoddy books, its licenses to practice accounting could be revoked. (See how Texas pulled Arthur Andersen’s license after the Enron debacle.)

So if a data-storage credit agency loses pretty much everyone’s data, why should it be allowed to store anyone’s data any longer?

Here’s one troubling reason: Because even after one of the gravest breaches in history, no one is really in a position to stop Equifax from continuing to do business as usual. And the problem is bigger than Equifax: We really have no good way, in public policy, to exact some existential punishment on companies that fail to safeguard our data. There will be hacks — and afterward, there will be more.

Experts said it was highly unlikely that any regulatory body would shut Equifax down over this breach. As one of the nation’s three major credit-reporting agencies, which store and analyze consumers’ financial history for credit decisions, it is likely to be considered too central to the American financial system; Equifax’s demise would both reduce competition in the industry and make each of the two survivors a bigger target. Raj Joshi, an analyst at Moody’s, said in a note to investors that Equifax was likely to be fine, as “the impact of the security breach will only modestly erode its solid credit metrics and liquidity.”

The two regulators that do have jurisdiction over Equifax, the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, declined to comment on any potential punishments over the credit agency’s breach.

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Too critical to fail. And you can’t stop Equifax from getting more of your data. This, and antitrust, are two examples where the law, and punishment, just isn’t up to the problems that can follow – which are outsourced to all the company’s users, instead of the company.
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Equifax breach response turns dumpster fire • Krebs On Security

Brian Krebs:

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Yesterday’s story here pointed out the gross conflict of interest in Equifax’s consumer remedy for this breach: Offering a year’s worth of free credit monitoring services to all Americans via its own in-house credit monitoring service.

This is particularly rich because a) why should anyone trust Equifax to do anything right security-wise after this debacle and b) these credit monitoring services typically hard-sell consumers to sign up for paid credit protection plans when the free coverage expires.

I have repeatedly urged readers to consider putting a security freeze on their accounts in lieu of or in addition to accepting these free credit monitoring offers, noting that credit monitoring services don’t protect you against identity theft (the most you can hope for is they alert you when ID thieves do steal your identity), while security freezes can prevent thieves from taking out new lines of credit in your name.

Several readers have written in to point out some legalese in the terms of service the Equifax requires all users to acknowledge before signing up for the service seems to include legal verbiage suggesting that those who do sign up for the free service will waive their rights to participate in future class action lawsuits against the company.

KrebsOnSecurity is still awaiting word from an actual lawyer who’s looking at this contract, but let me offer my own two cents on this.

Update, 9:45 p.m. ET: Equifax has updated their breach alert page to include the following response in regard to the unclear legalese:

“In response to consumer inquiries, we have made it clear that the arbitration clause and class action waiver included in the Equifax and TrustedID Premier terms of use does not apply to this cybersecurity incident.”

Original story:

Equifax will almost certainly see itself the target of multiple class action lawsuits as a result of this breach, but there is no guarantee those lawsuits will go the distance and result in a monetary windfall for affected consumers.

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U.S. spies think the FBI is botching the Kaspersky investigation • Cyberscoop

Patrick Howell O’Neill:

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U.S. spies believe FBI agents have mismanaged the ongoing counterintelligence investigation into Moscow-based cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab, current and former senior U.S. officials familiar with the matter tell CyberScoop.

Officials tell CyberScoop they believe the FBI has engaged in deliberate media leaks and overblown classified congressional briefings to build the case around Kaspersky. These officials also say the FBI should be more covert in its efforts to persuade private companies to uninstall Kaspersky software. A quieter operation would help avoid putting the rest of the intelligence community — especially agencies engaged in cyber-operations — in the crosshairs for retaliation, the officials say.

The FBI has briefed private sector companies across several industries, urging them to cut ties with Kaspersky on security grounds, CyberScoop reported last week. On some occasions, the FBI’s outreach efforts in the U.S. have been successful. At least one major American energy firm recently opted against signing a significant business deal with Kaspersky due in large part to the bureau’s briefings. Larger, brand-name technology giants have generally been less receptive and cooperative with the FBI.

The reaction from inside the U.S. intelligence community to the FBI’s work on Kaspersky has been mixed and, at times, disapproving. While there is general agreement among the intelligence agencies that Kaspersky is connected to and works with Russian spies, senior U.S. intelligence officials disapprove of the bureau’s handling of the years-long issue.

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The Kaspersky aspersions had passed me by, but this is pretty amazing. Kaspersky denies any connection with the Russian government.
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Samsung sees its best Note preorders with the new Galaxy Note8 • Samsung Newsroom

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Samsung Electronics America announced today [Sept 8] that more people in the US have purchased the Galaxy Note8 than previous Samsung Note phones during the same time period. Introduced on August 23, the Galaxy Note8 — featuring the largest ever screen in a Note device, an enhanced S Pen1, and the world’s first smartphone with two 12MP rear cameras with Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) on both the wide-angle and telephoto lenses — will be available in stores on September 15.

“We’re thrilled to see the strong consumer response to the next level Note,” said Tim Baxter, president and chief executive officer, Samsung Electronics North America. “Today’s consumers want to do bigger things in work and life, and Note helps make that possible. We built the Galaxy Note8 for people who desire a device that lets them be productive and allows for self-expression.”

«

The Note 7 was actually introduced a few days earlier last year, on August 19. You don’t have to think too hard to realise why the Note 8 would have record orders, though. Everyone who wanted to have a Note 7 last year couldn’t get one (or if they did get one, had to get it back). They’ve had to make do with something else, but they probably really wanted the Note 7, as indicated by the low defection rate from Samsung when it was recalled. So there’s a ton of wanted-to-be-Note-7 owners who will dump their existing phones for this.

And then there’s all the people who would have upgraded anyway; perhaps they own the Note 5, or something else, and would have been in line to get it (while in the alternative universe where the Note 7 didn’t catch fire, Note 7 owners hung on to their devices).

In other words, it would almost be surprising if there weren’t record orders for the Note 8; I’d expect this story to be repeated around the globe. It’s good news for Samsung, whose financials compared to last year will look Godzilla-like.
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Worldwide brand motherboard shipments continue to fall • Digitimes

Monica Chen and Joseph Tsai:

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Worldwide brand motherboard shipments are expected to reach only 45m units in 2017 and may drop further in 2018 as related demand continues shrinking, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.

Worldwide brand motherboard shipments were 75m units in 2013, but slipped below 50m units in 2016. Since motherboard demand from China, which had been the main growth driver in the past few years, is dropping significantly, shipments are expected to remain in decline in 2017.

Gigabyte Technology is also expected to see its motherboard shipments drop below 13m units in 2017. In addition to China’s weakening demand, competition from Asustek has also grown fiercer, the sources noted.

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These figures roughly track the decline in the overall PC market (2013: 315m; 2016: 261m), and are also a declining ratio of that number. Building your own PC was always a minority sport; now it looks endangered.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Winning nuclear standoffs mostly consists of not getting into nuclear standoffs. Photo by vaXzine 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. Satisfied? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How disreputable rehabs game Google to profit off patients • The Verge

Cat Ferguson:

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Leasha Ali had been drunk for the last two days, but she didn’t want to be anymore. The 39-year-old math teacher and mother of two was in a spiral familiar to anyone who’s struggled with addiction. A difficult event — a hospitalization, thanks to lingering symptoms from a birth defect — had stressed her to the breaking point, and then she’d gotten home and found herself alone in her house, depressed and unable to sleep. After a few days without drinking, she gave in, and spent the next 48 hours on a bender.

On the second night, January 8th of this year, she got an email from the hospital. Her liver enzymes had been dangerously high — even before the days of abuse. The birth defect that put her in the hospital had already left her with several damaged organs. Afraid of hurting another, she searched the test results in Google. Right there at the top was an ad for rehab.

“I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, even Google knows I need rehab,’” Ali told me.

It’s hard to say exactly who was on the other end, when, just before 11PM, Ali called the number in the ad. The 800 number was ephemeral. It’s missing from Yellow Pages listings, social media, and even sites for complaints about telemarketers and spam, and it was disconnected by the time I called it. The untraceability is frustrating, but not surprising. Google offers advertisers unique “tracking” phone numbers that forward to a company’s phones, so they can understand which ads are bringing in the most clients. The phone numbers only stay up as long as the ad does…

…Open another tab, and Google “alcohol rehab near me.” Take a look at the ads up top. (If you have an ad blocker, you’ll have to turn it off.)

If you’re in Arizona, and you click on the top ad, you’ll cost that advertiser around $221. If you’re in Colorado, that click costs the site $230. Sorry, New Yorkers, your click is only worth $43 — but if you searched “drug treatment centers,” you’d go for around $121. (These are estimated averages from April this year, provided to The Verge by advertising analytics company SEMrush.)

That’s assuming you don’t live in a city with a high percentage of Medicaid recipients. In New Jersey, the statewide cost for ads on “best alcohol rehab centers” searches is $190 per click, but that’s an average. Smart marketers tell Google they don’t want their ads showing up in any searches from Trenton, Camden, or other low-income cities. It’s also good practice, if you’re hoping to attract well-heeled (or at least well-insured) clients, to keep your ads away from searches with words like “free” and “Medicaid.”

Of course, there are other ways to prevent poor people from calling your hotline.

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A simple design flaw makes it astoundingly easy to hack Siri and Alexa • FastCo Design

Mark Wilson:

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Using a technique called the DolphinAttack, a team from Zhejiang University translated typical vocal commands into ultrasonic frequencies that are too high for the human ear to hear, but perfectly decipherable by the microphones and software powering our always-on voice assistants. This relatively simple translation process lets them take control of gadgets with just a few words uttered in frequencies none of us can hear.

The researchers didn’t just activate basic commands like “Hey Siri” or “Okay Google,” though. They could also tell an iPhone to “call 1234567890” or tell an iPad to FaceTime the number. They could force a Macbook or a Nexus 7 to open a malicious website. They could order an Amazon Echo to “open the backdoor” (a pin would also be required, an August spokesperson clarifies). Even an Audi Q3 could have its navigation system redirected to a new location. “Inaudible voice commands question the common design assumption that adversaries may at most try to manipulate a [voice assistant] vocally and can be detected by an alert user,” the research team writes in a paper just accepted to the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.

In other words, Silicon Valley has designed human-friendly UI with a huge security oversight. While we might not hear the bad guys talking, our computers clearly can. “From a UX point of view, it feels like a betrayal,” says Ame Elliott, design director at the nonprofit SimplySecure. “The premise of how you interact with the device is ‘tell it what to do,’ so the silent, surreptitious command is shocking.”

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We’ve had something similar previously, though that was in the audible spectrum. The problem is that some of these devices use ultrasonic frequencies for pairing.
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How to win a nuclear standoff • FiveThirtyEight

Oliver Roeder:

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Imagine you’re Trump or Kim Jong Un, essentially playing a game of chicken. You’re driving at high speed directly toward your opponent who’s also racing toward you. Neither of you wants to chicken out and veer away, but neither wants to die, either. Your best strategy? Rip off your steering wheel, make sure your opponent knows you’ve done so, and hit the gas.

That’s the terrifying thing about game theory: Sometimes the most rational choice can feel like the most dangerous. And that’s a problem when there are nukes involved. In the old days, if my country had better archers than yours, you’d keep that in mind when you felt like going to war with me. But nuclear weapons don’t work like archers. They decouple raw military strength from a state’s ability to win a war. That’s why North Korea, a country smaller than Mississippi with a GDP roughly equal to Wyoming’s, gets to compete alongside a superpower like the U.S. “What matters is if they can launch ICBMs to destroy Los Angeles or Chicago or Washington or wherever,” James Fearon, a political scientist at Stanford, told me.

Either you have nukes or you don’t. Either you use nukes or you don’t. It’s not a competition with arms or battlefields any more. It’s a competition in risk taking.

Fearon is the author of a 1995 paper called “Rationalist Explanations for War.” A modern classic in its field, it begins: “The central puzzle about war, and also the main reason why we study it, is that wars are costly but nonetheless wars recur.” In the paper, Fearon argues that there are two main reasons why wars break out. First, players have private information, and incentives to misrepresent that information. Second, the players have commitment problems.

Our $100 game [in which two players write a number from 0 to 100; the higher number wins, but the lower number is used to calculate the percentage risk that both players must burn $10,000 of their own money; so if you write 100 and your opponent 99, there’s a 99% chance you both burn the cash], which Fearon teaches to his undergraduates, revolves around those two ideas. My private information is my appetite for risk. How much of it am I willing to take on to try and win the $100? You have no idea, and vice versa. And neither of us can really commit to a peaceful or bellicose strategy and make the other side believe it. The secret envelope and our unceasing self-interest stops that. That’s a commitment problem.

In our $100 game and in nuclear standoff, there’s no easy way to rip out the steering wheel.

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Fearon says that with North Korea, people aren’t sure what its $100 would be. (People aren’t thinking hard enough. For North Korea, the $100 is easier trade.)
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TalkTalk plans to bail on mobile in major shake-up for beleaguered biz • The Register

Kat Hall:

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Beleaguered UK comms provider TalkTalk is set to go against the received “wisdom” of having multiple services to flog as it plans to pull out of the mobile market entirely.

The move is a fairly significant change of tack given that not so long ago it had targeted four million mobile customers. TalkTalk now has just 913,000 SIM customers. Chief exec Tristia Harrison said the company wants to refocus on its core strength as a “fixed-line business” and reassess its mobile strategy.

No doubt she hopes concentrating on broadband will help boost the company’s lacklustre results, with revenues continuing to decline by 3% to £1.7bn for the full-year 2016/17.

The plans are part of a shake-up following founder Charles Dunstone’s return as chair after chief exec Dido Harding resigned earlier this year.

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Likely buyer for those mobile customers is Three, the smallest of the UK carriers.
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India’s biometric database is a massive achievement and a dystopian nightmare • VICE News

David Gilbert:

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Seven years ago nearly 400 million people in India did not exist in the eyes of the government. They were “ghosts” who had no identity and no way of getting one, says Sahil Kini, one of the architects of India’s controversial Aadhaar database. In a country trying to modernize on the fly and take its place among the world’s superpowers, this massive yet unknown population presented a huge problem.

So the Indian government set out on an ambitious course to build Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric database, which would not only allow these people to participate more fully in society but also become a shining beacon of technological achievement for the rest of the world.

“What’s forgotten is that before Aadhaar was built there were 400 million people in India that did not have any form of identity; they were ghosts in the system,” Kini told VICE News. “So if you had to give them any kind of subsidy, you couldn’t, because they didn’t exist on paper.”

But as the database grew to include almost all of India’s 1.3 billion citizens, cracks began to appear, and in recent months those cracks have become chasms. Now more and more Indians say they worry that what the government actually created in Aadhaar is an all-seeing surveillance apparatus that has serious holes in its security and can be used to monitor all aspects of their lives.

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Remarkable piece of research and journalism. Aadhaar is the results of good intentions gone wrong.
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Donald Trump is the first white president • The Atlantic

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

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To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.

For Trump, it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black president, insulted him personally. The insult intensified when Obama and Seth Meyers publicly humiliated him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. But the bloody heirloom ensures the last laugh. Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own.

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Powerful essay. Trump is the anti-Obama, in so many ways.
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Google reportedly in final stages of buying HTC’s smartphone business • Digital Trends

Christian de Looper:

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The Google Pixel was one of the best-loved phones of 2016, and according to recent reports, it looks like the company could be set to seriously bolster its smartphone business. How? By buying someone else’s smartphone business. According to a recent report, from Commercial Times, Google and HTC have entered the final stages of discussions that could ultimately lead to Google buying out HTC’s smartphone business.

It’s important to note that Google won’t buy HTC as a whole — just its smartphone business. The HTC brand will still live on, and the report noted that the company may refocus its attention on virtual reality after selling off its mobile arm.

Of course, this isn’t the first time Google has made such a purchase. The company bought out Motorola back in 2012 for a whopping $12.5bn, and at the time it was suspected that the company could end up merging the Android and Motorola teams. In the end, that didn’t happen — and instead, a few years later, Google sold the Motorola brand to Lenovo at a pretty huge loss.

This time around, however, things could be different.

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Things will be different inasmuch as HTC is nowhere near as big as Motorola. Not mentioned: HTC made the first Android phone, the G1. Hard to see HTC being profitable on the VR side, though. Volumes too low, unit price too high, competition too fierce.
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When the truth is messy and hard • Context: By New America

Anne-Marie Slaughter, chief executive of New America, which …let go Barry Flynn and the Open Markets team after Flynn praised the EC’s fine of Google:

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We tell all of our donors that they cannot control the results of what they fund; we do not do contract research. But we also develop and maintain relationships with our donors as does any nonprofit institution.

So there’s the tension. In practice, with an employee who had already surprised his colleagues unpleasantly — and many would say dishonestly — in the past, it meant that I wanted to see a press release before it went out. That is the reason that the Open Markets statement went up and then was taken down. It was posted before I had a chance to give it a final review. Indeed, I was talking to Barry about it on the phone when it went up. I have never — nor would I ever — censor anything, but I might ask questions about accuracy or tone.

And, in this case, I wanted to give the funder a heads up that it was coming and send it over ourselves. That seems like a defensible minimum courtesy that an institution can offer its funders: we’re about to do something you are really not going to like, but at least we are telling you about it. I recognize that the best journalists operate on a different principle — notice seems to imply interference. But we are not a newspaper, yet we try to uphold the best journalistic standards in our writing.

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She’s wrong about the “notice seems to imply interference”. Journalists are generally obliged to put accusations or claims to organisations which are accused of things in news reports. (Hence how Slaughter was quoted in the NYT article about Lynn being dumped.) In opinion pieces, like Flynn’s, that’s not the case. That’s because they’re opinions. News organisations don’t send people who are about to be criticised in opinion pieces a copy seeking a response. Slaughter has it exactly backwards.
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A furious think-tank boss, Google, and an academic ‘fired’ for criticizing ads giant • The Register

Kieren McCarthy takes the above post to the ethical cleaners:

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Slaughter defends her right to see and sign off on public statements from employees before she defends their independence. And she paints Lynn’s failure to give her advance notice of his critical statement as a sign that he has breached loyalty.

She even makes it plain that she was prepared to insist on changes to Lynn’s statement before giving approval for publication – which no doubt is precisely why Lynn felt he needed to “publish and be damned,” knowing that any strong claim that the US authorities need to dig into Google’s businesses was liable to meet interference from Slaughter.

And that is almost the textbook definition of how soft power works: by ensuring self-censorship.

The fact is that if the financial relationship with Google and Schmidt wasn’t there, and if Slaughter wasn’t an old friend of Schmidt’s, there would not have been any concern over Lynn’s statement in the first place. It was, after all, a personal statement from a think tank: hardly draft legislation or anti-trust charges.

That Lynn felt the need to push his statement out without going through Slaughter, and the fact that she had such a strong reaction when he didn’t, combined with the virtual certainty that Schmidt called soon after to express his annoyance, is as clear an example of soft money influence as you will ever find.

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How Verrit’s “authentication codes” expose Peter Daou’s continuing ineptitude • Medium

Jon Hendren is unimpressed by Verrit, a site which has quotes with “authentication codes” and is the latest idea from Daou, who is a big noise in the US Democratic party:

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Let’s pretend for a minute that the concept of Verrit were a good one. No, really, just play along. If you must have a “code” to accompany a quote or a blurb, then the code should be something — anything — that can be used even in some small part outside of Verrit.com. Perhaps first, an identifier of the person or entity being quoted (Hillary would be #000001, obviously), a date code for when it was uttered, and a few more digits as an index in case the person said many quotable things that day. Now when I want to verify that Bernie (identifier #000666 perhaps) said “I’m going to give away ponies” on whatever-the-hell day — I can then look that up in a thousand places that aren’t a WordPress installation on Verrit.com. (Wait, I think I just invented sourcing one’s quotes.)

Or how about a checksum of the quote? Or if you want to get really fancy, do some steganography on those social images and build a validator so people can upload suspected images they found online to see if they are legitimately from Verrit and not from one of the thousands of people making fun of Verrit.

You can nerd this up in a number of ways that are actually useful, maybe. Hell, you want to validate a continuing series of accurate statements? Get the blockchain in here, that’s what it’s for.
I get what Daou and others believe they are marketing toward — there really is a population out there that is confused about how the content they are reading is created. There are certainly voters who don’t know how to tell real news from fake, and this authentication scheme is a grab at making those people feel a little better about what they read and share.

But when the authentication mechanism is meaningless, backed by nothing but a post on a WordPress blog, you very dangerously redefine what “authentic” means…

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link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

How long can HTC keep the Vive VR headset alive – or vice-versa? Photo by wuestenigel on Flickr.

A selection of 11 links for you. Facebook, Russians, that’s how it is sometimes. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook says it sold political ads to Russian company during 2016 election • The Washington Post

Carol D. Leonnig, Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman:

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Representatives of Facebook told congressional investigators Wednesday that it has discovered it sold ads during the U.S. presidential election to a shadowy Russian company seeking to target voters, according to several people familiar with the company’s findings.

Facebook officials reported that they traced the ad sales, totaling $100,000, to a Russian “troll farm” with a history of pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda, these people said.

A small portion of the ads, which began in the summer of 2015, directly named Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton, the people said. Most of the ads focused on pumping politically divisive issues such as gun rights and immigration fears, as well as gay rights and racial discrimination.

The acknowledgment by Facebook comes as congressional investigators and special counsel Robert Mueller are probing Russian interference in the U.S. election, including allegations that the Kremlin may have coordinated with the Trump campaign…

…Even though the ad spending from Russia is tiny relative to overall campaign costs, the report from Facebook that a Russian firm was able to target political messages is likely to fuel pointed questions from investigators about whether the Russians received guidance from people in the United States — a question some Democrats have been asking for months.

“I get the fact that the Russian intel services could figure out how to manipulate and use the bots. Whether they could know how to target states and levels of voters that the Democrats weren’t even aware really raises some questions. I think that’s a worthwhile area of inquiry,” Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said during a May airing of the podcast Pod Save America. “How did they know to go to that level of detail in those kinds of jurisdictions?”

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Facebook digital ads figures differ from census data: analyst • Reuters

David Ingram and Rama Venkat Raman:

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Figures Facebook gives advertisers about its potential reach differ from US census data, an investment analyst said on Tuesday, renewing questions about how tech companies verify the value of their digital marketing space.

Facebook, Alphabet Inc’s Google and other internet companies have faced persistent scrutiny from advertisers about how many people watch ads online and how to measure their views.

Facebook’s ad-buying website tells advertisers that the world’s largest social network has a potential reach of 41 million 18 to 24 year olds in the United States, whereas US census data shows that last year there were 31 million people living in the country between these ages, Brian Wieser, a Pivotal Research Group senior analyst, said in a note.

The gap persists for 25 to 34 year olds and is not widely known among ad agency executives, Wieser wrote in the client note, adding that the gap may cause large advertisers to step up demands for third-party measurement services.

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It is possible that people are lying fabulously about their age to Facebook. But 10 million of them? This is embarrassing for Facebook.
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IBM pitched Watson as a revolution in cancer care. It’s nowhere close • Stat News

Casey Ross and Ike Swetlitz:

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contrary to IBM’s depiction of Watson as a digital prodigy, the supercomputer’s abilities are limited.

Perhaps the most stunning overreach is in the company’s claim that Watson for Oncology, through artificial intelligence, can sift through reams of data to generate new insights and identify, as an IBM sales rep put it, “even new approaches” to cancer care. STAT found that the system doesn’t create new knowledge and is artificially intelligent only in the most rudimentary sense of the term.

While Watson became a household name by winning the TV game show “Jeopardy!”, its programming is akin to a different game-playing machine: the Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing robot of the 1700s, which dazzled audiences but hid a secret — a human operator shielded inside.

In the case of Watson for Oncology, those human operators are a couple dozen physicians at a single, though highly respected, U.S. hospital: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Doctors there are empowered to input their own recommendations into Watson, even when the evidence supporting those recommendations is thin.

The actual capabilities of Watson for Oncology are not well-understood by the public, and even by some of the hospitals that use it. It’s taken nearly six years of painstaking work by data engineers and doctors to train Watson in just seven types of cancer, and keep the system updated with the latest knowledge.

“It’s been a struggle to update, I’ll be honest,” said Dr. Mark Kris, Memorial Sloan Kettering’s lead Watson trainer. He noted that treatment guidelines for every metastatic lung cancer patient worldwide recently changed in the course of one week after a research presentation at a cancer conference. “Changing the system of cognitive computing doesn’t turn around on a dime like that,” he said. “You have to put in the literature, you have to put in cases.”

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Stat News does a great in-depth report.
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Worldwide shipments of AR/VR headsets maintain solid growth trajectory in the second quarter • IDC

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The worldwide market for Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) headsets grew 25.5% year over year in the second quarter of 2017 (2Q17) as shipments reached 2.1 million, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Augmented and Virtual Reality Headset Tracker. Volumes declined slightly from the prior quarter, but recent price cuts on existing products and announced plans for new products are expected to lay the groundwork for a successful holiday season.

“Growth in the VR market has been rather sluggish compared to other recently introduced technologies as the amount of investment and, more importantly, the need for end user education is extremely high for VR,” said Jitesh Ubrani senior research analyst for IDC’s Mobile Device Trackers. “Though the recent price cuts across all major platforms will help alleviate one of the barriers to adoption, providing consumers the opportunity to learn about products and try before they buy is still a significant hurdle faced by most companies.”

Virtual reality products once again made up more than 98% of shipments in the combined AR/VR market. On the VR side, screenless viewers accounted for over half of all the headset shipments during the quarter. Tethered VR headsets captured 43%, up from the 34% in the previous quarter, driven in large part to Sony’s ongoing success with the PlayStation VR and Oculus increasing shipment volumes thanks to price cuts.

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Of note: IDC reckons HTC was 5th largest, shipped 94,500 units, for a share of 4.4%. Its headset is pricier than rivals. In August, its revenues plummeted by 50% year-on-year to a 13-year monthly low. I don’t think HTC is long for this world, at least as an independent entity.
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North Korea: why the West freaks out but South Korea doesn’t • Lowy Institute

Robert Kelly, who is an American professor in South Korea:

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This current [South Korean] president, Moon Jae In, wanted to emphasise domestic issues such as corruption and social welfare, which elected him. Instead, North Korea has consumed his first four months in office.

By contrast, Americans seem to rediscover the North Korean threat whenever it pops up. US attention toward Asia is mixed at best. Elites care, but I doubt most regular Americans care much about the ‘pivot to Asia’ or North Korea, especially compared to the war on terror and the ‘clash of civilizations’ cultural anxieties it activates.

The upshot is that whenever North Korean bad behaviour spikes enough to make it international news, Americans suddenly pay attention. But in the interim, the South Koreans have also been paying attention. So they appear sanguine when Western journalists suddenly show up at those peaks.

Americans are curiously alarmist about their ‘thick security’. This is a point Stephen Walt has helpfully made again and again at his Foreign Policy blog. The United States is remarkably safe. Ensconced between two oceans and two weak neighbours and far from the tightly-packed Eurasian cauldron of competition, the US is one of the most secure great powers in history. Yet we Americans are prone to extraordinary outbursts of national security panic, most recently on display after 9/11. In response to approximately 3,000 fatalities, the US has killed orders of magnitude more people than that in so many wars in the Middle East that analysts now use terms like ‘forever war’ to describe our engagement there. Neoconservatism as a foreign policy posture is based on the notion that American security is constantly threatened, even in weak, far-away places like Yemen or Venezuela.

North Korea activates these impulses more than most rogues. America depicts North Korea in outlandish terms – video games and movies repeatedly depict North Korea invading the US, acquiring super-weapons, or otherwise as crazy. In my media experience, this has sunk in. I am regularly asked if the Kims are crazy, insane, war-mongers, and so on. They are not. They are just gangsters, not suicidal ideologues.

My own sense is that #2 is probably more causal. We are prone to threat-inflation, and North Korea is so easy to caricature.

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Kelly is the man made famous by his children busting in when he was giving a TV interview. But he lives there and knows what’s going on. The US is going batshit over Kim Jong-Un for no sensible reason at all.

Note well his observation: “Neoconservatism as a foreign policy posture is based on the notion that American security is constantly threatened, even in weak, far-away places like Yemen or Venezuela.” Very insightful.
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Apple’s refusal to approve India’s anti-spam app angers regulators • Bloomberg

Saritha Rai:

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The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has been trying unsuccessfully to get its Do Not Disturb software included in the App Store. The program lets people share spam call and text message logs with the agency, which uses the data to alert mobile operators to block the spammers. Apple has said the app violates its privacy policy, according to the regulator.

The standoff could impact Apple’s efforts to expand in India, where half a billion smartphones will be sold by 2020. The Cupertino, California-based company has been in discussions with India’s government to open retail stores and secure permission to sell used iPhones imported into the country. Apple has put forth a long list of demands, including tax breaks and other concessions, to set up manufacturing facilities. 

“Nobody’s asking Apple to violate its privacy policy,” said Ram Sewak Sharma, chairman of the Delhi-based telecom regulator. “It is a ridiculous situation, no company can be allowed to be the guardian of a user’s data.”

The regulator is currently seeking public and stakeholder comments on a consultative paper on users’ control over their personal information and rules on the flow of data through telecommunications networks. The process, scheduled to be completed in September, could eventually lead to new rules governing user data. That could also become part of the telecom licensing process, Sharma said.

Any new measures could affect not just Apple, but Facebook, Google and other technology companies that handle large amounts of private and personal information.

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link to this extract

Russians have hacked dozens of US energy companies, researchers say • Buzzfeed

Kevin Collier:

»

A hacker group linked to the Russian government has acquired an unprecedented level of access to companies that supply power to the US power grid, a cybersecurity firm says.

Symantec, a California-based firm that provides cybersecurity services and worldwide research against online threats, says the group, which it’s nicknamed Dragonfly 2.0, may have compromised more than a dozen American companies in recent months.

Dragonfly – also called Crouching Yeti, or Energetic Bear, depending on which researcher you talk to – was an established hacker group that attacked energy sector targets around the world from at least 2011 until 2014, when it went quiet after its tactics were exposed by public research. Researchers at Symantec have declined to specifically cite Russia as the culprit, though they do say it’s a state-sponsored attack. Researchers at other firms, like CrowdStrike and FireEye, have tied Dragonfly to the Russian government.

“This is the first time we’ve seen this scale, this aggressiveness, and this level of penetration in the US, for sure,” Eric Chien, technical director of Symantec’s Security Technology & Response Division, told BuzzFeed News.

“What we’re seeing is them getting into dozens, as far as we know, likely more, of organizations who are basically energy companies. We’re talking about organizations who are supplying power to the power grid,” Chien said.

«

Not “on-off” capability, but concerning even so.
link to this extract

Xiaomi partners with Google for Mi A1 smartphone, targeting developing markets • Forbes

Yue Wang:

»

Over the past three years, Xiaomi has entered as many as 40 countries across regions, selling its phones and smart devices at cost to compete with brands like Apple and Samsung as well as China’s own Huawei, OPPO and Vivo for the attention of users in countries like India and Russia. The pace of expansion accelerated dramatically this year, with Xiaomi breaking into a dozen countries including Greece, Indonesia, Paraguay and Poland for the very first time, confirmed the company’s Senior Vice President Wang Xiang in a recent interview with Forbes.

In addition to partnering with online marketplaces and physical distributors in new markets, Xiaomi is also linking arms with Google’s parent company, Alphabet, to beef up its appeal. The company announced on Tuesday its $230 Mi A1 smartphone that will run on Google’s Android One operating platform, which will be the first Xiaomi device that doesn’t use the company’s default MIUI system. The handset, initially available in 40 markets including India, Indonesia, Russia and Mexico, is aimed at attracting users who are more familiar with Google-provided services, according to Wang. He also said that Xiaomi and Google have agreed to share revenues, but declined to provide more details. The Mi A1 will be available for purchase on September 12.

«

Android One is back – except only with Xiaomi, seems like. Perhaps more will follow. But it doesn’t seem like a great plan to do revenue-sharing with Google, unless it’s on Play Store purchases and so on. China isn’t panning out as the stronghold Xiaomi thought it would be (OPPO and vivo are eating that up).
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Isle of Man firm to launch 250 million-pound Dubai property priced in bitcoin • Reuters

Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss:

»

The Knox Group of Companies, with headquarters in the Isle of Man, announced late on Tuesday it will launch a residential and commercial property development in Dubai valued at £250m ($325m), with residences that can be purchased in the digital currency bitcoin.

The company said the 2.4m-square-foot (22.3-hectare) property venture called Aston Plaza and Residences, consisting of two residential towers and a shopping mall, will be the first major real estate development that will accept bitcoin as payment.

The Dubai project is one step toward efforts to push bitcoin into the mainstream. Maligned and ridiculed in its early days, bitcoin hit a record high of $4,870 on Friday, surging more than 400% so far this year.

The whole project is expected to be completed by late 2019.

“This a great opportunity for the crypto-currency community to offload some of its significant gains, especially the early adopters, and actually deploy them in hard-core assets which I‘m building,” Knox’s chairman, Doug Barrowman, said in an interview with Reuters.

«

I think Barrowman is actually playing a different game: he’s wagering that if people buy now in bitcoin, he holds onto the payment, and bitcoin appreciates against the dollar, so he wins twice over.

Now we’re hoping for bitcoin to plummet, aren’t we?
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Huawei surpasses Apple to be summer’s second largest smartphone brand • Counterpoint Research

»

According to the latest research from Counterpoint’s Market Pulse for July 2017, Huawei has surpassed Apple in global smartphone sales consistently for June and July. With August sales looking strong for the Chinese vendor, a hat-trick for Huawei could be on the cards.

Discussing this key competitive development, Counterpoint’s Research Director Peter Richardson, notes, “This is a significant milestone for Huawei, the largest Chinese smartphone brand with a growing global presence. It speaks volumes for this primarily network infrastructure vendor on how far it has grown in the consumer mobile handset space in the last three to four years. The global scale Huawei has been able to achieve can be attributed to its consistent investment in R&D and manufacturing, coupled with aggressive marketing and sales channel expansion.”

Mr. Richardson adds, “While this streak could be temporary considering the annual iPhone refresh is just around the corner, it nevertheless underscores the rate at which Huawei has been growing. However, a weak presence in the South Asian, Indian and North American markets limits Huawei’s potential in the near-to mid-term to take a sustainable second place position behind Samsung.”

«

The official calendar quarters run from July to September, and Apple’s sales always dip in the summer months (when overall global sales are also lower), so there’s a little bit of cherry-picking here. But the point about Huawei’s size is fair. What we don’t know is whether it’s making any money at it. And in the end, that’s the point of being in business.
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Facebook offers hundreds of millions of dollars for music rights • Bloomberg

Lucas Shaw and Sarah Frier:

»

Facebook is offering major record labels and music publishers hundreds of millions of dollars so the users of its social network can legally include songs in videos they upload, according to people familiar with the matter.

The posting and viewing of video on Facebook has exploded in recent years, and many of the videos feature music to which Facebook doesn’t have the rights. Under current law, rights holders must ask Facebook to take down videos with infringing material.

Music owners have been negotiating with Facebook for months in search of a solution, and Facebook has promised to build a system to identify and tag music that infringes copyrights. Yet such a setup will take as long as two years to complete, which is too long for both sides to wait, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing details that aren’t public.

Facebook is eager to make a deal now so that it no longer frustrates users, by taking down their videos; partners, by hosting infringing material; or advertisers, with the prospect of legal headaches.

«

So it’s talking about building something just like ContentID, the system YouTube uses for identifying music. (Doesn’t it already exist, in Shazam’s system? Though it has to identify in noisy environments too.) This might be a way for the music business to play Facebook and YouTube off against each other, trying to ratchet up payments particularly from the latter – which music companies have always said are too low (because they’re monetised through ads).
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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.

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

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

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

“Worst-online-dater”:

»

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

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

«

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

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

Jan Nicolas:

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

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

»

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

Table of Contents

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

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

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

»

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

«

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

»

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

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

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A serf on Google’s farm • Talking Points Memo

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

»

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

Here’s an example.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

»

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

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

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

And now things have hit a new low.

«

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

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shelly Banjo:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walter Piecyk:

»

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

«

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

Foo Yun Chee:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Myanmar conflict: Fake photos inflame tension • BBC News

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

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

»

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

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

«

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

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

Mike Murphy:

»

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

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

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

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

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

Deepa Seetharaman:

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

iOS cropping • All this

Dr Drang:

»

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

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

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

«

I wasn’t particularly aware of this as an annoyance, but it clearly bugs him a lot. (Also, I don’t think it will change.)
link to this extract

Flat UI elements attract less attention and cause uncertainty • Nielsen-Norman Group

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

»

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

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

«

Even so, people are going to go with flat design, because it’s trendy. For a couple of years. Then it’ll be 3D buttons everywhere.
link to this extract

Paris Hilton backs an eyebrow-raising crypto project • FT Alphaville

Kadhim Shubber:

»

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

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

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

»

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

«

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

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

«

I think this is going to flop, because of the action taken in the next link.
link to this extract

China herds ICO cats • Bloomberg Gadfly

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

»

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

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

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

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

«

The ICO bubble is just astonishing. I really find it hard to believe that people are so credulous. But clearly some are.
link to this extract

Russian election hacking efforts, wider than previously known, draw little scrutiny • The New York Times

Nicole Perlroth, Michael Wines And Matthew Rosenberg:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

link to this extract

SharknAT&To • Nomotion Blog

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

»

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

«

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

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

Ben Regenspan:

»

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

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

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

«

link to this extract

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

Tom McKay:

»

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

Artem Russakovski:

»

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

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

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

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

«

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

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

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

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Not to be used for underground tests. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The fake-news fallacy • The New Yorker

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

»

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

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

«

link to this extract

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

“Caroline O”:

»

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

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

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

«

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

Eriq Gardner:

»

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

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

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

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

«

This would be a hell of a result for Spotify if it succeeds in this argument. Somehow I doubt it will, though.
link to this extract

Upgrade downturn: why are people holding on to their old phones? • The Guardian

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

»

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

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

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

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

«

link to this extract

Response to NY Post article • NYPD News

Deputy commissioner of Information & Technology Jessica Tisch:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Instead, she looks quite smart: for the cost of a few app rewrites, the NYPD doesn’t have to gamble on the mobile platform war.
link to this extract

Inside the black market where people pay thousands of dollars for Instagram verification • Mashable

Kerry Flynn:

»

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

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

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

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

«

link to this extract

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

Zach Sutton:

»

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

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

«

Lots more where that came from. Lesson: though many will, in any crowd there are people who won’t listen.
link to this extract

Leaked Surface Mini images provide a closer look at Microsoft’s canceled tablet • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

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

«

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

Navneet Alang:

»

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

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

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

«

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

Abhimanyu Ghoshal:

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

I think if there’s a dongle, it’s not a problem. If there isn’t, it could be a problem – but Bluetooth gets around a lot of things now.
link to this extract

Augmented Reality: iOS Human Interface Guidelines • Apple Developer

»

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

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

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

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

«

There are a couple more – safety, gradual introduction of motion, audio and haptic feedback – and then much more. One of the key ones is going to be “handling problems”. Not long to go now.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

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

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

»

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

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

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

«

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

link to this extract

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

John Shinal:

»

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

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

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

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

«

link to this extract

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

David Carnoy:

»

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

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

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

«

1) Terrible name

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

3) noise cancellation is nice, but not essential

4) pricier.
link to this extract

Fitbit well-positioned with new ionic smartwatch • Kantar Worldpanel

»

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

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

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

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

«

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

Wi-Fi Beacon Pollution • r1ch.net

Richard Stanway:

»

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

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

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

«

Stanway advises setting your router to support only 802.11n or 802.11ac if possible because the older standard generate more beacon frames which take up more radio airtime.
link to this extract

A tale of two industries: how programming languages differ between wealthy and developing countries • Stack Overflow Blog

David Robinson:

»

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

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

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

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

«

link to this extract

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

Andrew Shuman is corporate VP of Cortana Engineering:

»

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

«

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

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

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

»

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

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

«

It’s going to be niche at best.
link to this extract

Rethinking audio editing on mobile • Anchor app on Medium

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

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

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

David Kocieniewski and Caleb Melby:

»

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

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

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

link to this extract

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

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

»

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

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

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

«

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

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

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

The dumb fact of Google money • The Atlantic

Alexis Madrigal:

»

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

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

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

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

«

link to this extract

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

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

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

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

Joseph Cox:

»

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

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

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

But things got weirder.

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

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

«

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

»

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

«

Perhaps Russia really has been playing a long, long game.
link to this extract

Tech firms team up to take down ‘WireX’ Android DDoS botnet • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

»

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

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

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

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

«

Do not take a picture of your boarding pass and put it on social media. (Perhaps should have linked this before summer holidays, eh.)
link to this extract

Why we’re disabling comments on aljazeera.com • Al Jazeera English

»

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

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

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

«

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

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

John Paul Titlow:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

Kenneth Vogel:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

The Open Market comment said, inter alia,

»

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

«

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

»

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

«

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

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

Aoife White and Mark Bergen:

»

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

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

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

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

«

The question really is, how is it going to do this?
link to this extract

How to escape a submerged car • Popular Mechanics

»

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

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

Rule 2. Unbuckle.

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

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

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

«

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

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

He calls her up from a payphone.

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

«

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

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

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was no concern about this from the project leaders.

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

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

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

Douglas MacMillan and Aruna Viswanatha:

»

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

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

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

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

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Uber looks like the Augean stables just at the moment.
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Researchers taught AI to write totally believable fake reviews, and the implications are terrifying • Business Insider

Rob Price:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

Based on this, we’re either going to need better ways to identify humans, or online reviews are going the way of the dinosaur.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

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

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

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

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

A selection of 12 links for you. Consider yourself lucky. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

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

Sarah Burris:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Tripp Mickle and Drew Fitzgerald:

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

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

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

«

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

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

Emil Protalinski:

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

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

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

«

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

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

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

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

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

Alex Cranz:

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

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

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

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

Michelle Castillo:

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

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

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

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

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

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You must go offline to view this page.

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

Dave Zatz:

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

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

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

«

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Accidental ‘fake news’ experiment • Random Public Journal

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

»

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

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

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

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

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Uber’s new CEO • Stratechery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Alan F” in October 2014:

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

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

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

«

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

Fast-forward to August 2017:

»

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

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

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

«

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

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