China installed lots of green energy sources – but didn’t fix its grid to deal with them. Photo by PaulDCocker on Flickr.

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

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

Rise of the machines: who is the ‘internet of things’ good for? • The Guardian

Adam Greenfield:

»

In San Francisco, a young engineer hopes to “optimise” his life through sensors that track his heart rate, respiration and sleep cycle. In Copenhagen, a bus running two minutes behind schedule transmits its location and passenger count to the municipal traffic signal network, which extends the time of the green light at each of the next three intersections long enough for its driver to make up some time. In Davao City in the Philippines, an unsecured webcam overlooks the storeroom of a fast food stand, allowing anyone to peer in on all its comings and goings.

What links these wildly different circumstances is a vision of connected devices now being sold to us as the “internet of things”. The technologist Mike Kuniavsky, a pioneer of this idea, characterises it as a state of being in which “computation and data communication [are] embedded in, and distributed through, our entire environment”. I prefer to see it for what it is: the colonisation of everyday life by information processing.

Though it can often feel as if this colonisation proceeds of its own momentum, distinct ambitions are being served wherever and however the internet of things appears. The internet of things isn’t a single technology. About all that connects the various devices, services, vendors and efforts involved is the end goal they serve: capturing data that can then be used to measure and control the world around us.

«

Or just control us? A good (long) read.
link to this extract

The iPad takes a big step toward being the computer for everyone • The Verge

Vlad Savov:

»

One of these new 10.5in iPad Pros, with its reduced bezels and still vanishingly thin profile, is much easier to tote around than any MacBook Pro. Reducing the footprint of a device is much more impactful nowadays than shaving a few extra millimeters off its thickness, and I can envision a daily carry scenario for myself where an iPad Pro shrinks the size of bag I need to use. There are some really lovely and small camera bags — like the Domke F-803, for instance — that work really well with just an iPad slotted in, but struggle to fit a proper laptop. Well, now maybe I no longer need a proper laptop if I have something that’s close enough.

Getting to grips with the iOS 11-powered iPad Pro at Apple’s event yesterday, my colleague Jake Kastrenakes noted that he never felt like he could move quickly and efficiently around iOS before, but the new version is the first one that feels like it could change that. I’m on exactly the same page: iOS has always felt like a more leisurely way to use a mobile device, not quite the lean and mean productivity workhouse that I could sculpt together in macOS. But with more robust split-screen multitasking and the ability to float additional apps and picture-in-picture video on the screen, I foresee finally being able to get Real Work done on an iPad.

«

I’m sad to see the demise of the 9.7in iPad Pro, because it was a great machine – though it seems the new 10.5in ones are essentially the same physical size. The battery life, lightness, screen size, and capability (if you can do a little programming – Workflow and/or Pythonista, plus all the normal office apps) made it ideal in my view.

Though when I suggested you could do “real work” on an iPad a couple of years ago, Guardian readers – well, commenters – were furious. But essentially nothing (apart from some app twiddles) has changed.
link to this extract

Trump takes credit for Saudi move against Qatar, a US military partner • The New York Times

Mark Landler:

»

President Trump thrust himself into a bitter Persian Gulf dispute on Tuesday, claiming credit for Saudi Arabia’s move to isolate its smaller neighbor, Qatar, which is a major American military partner.

“During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology,” Mr. Trump said in a morning tweet. “Leaders pointed to Qatar — look!”

On Monday, Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen broke diplomatic and commercial ties with Qatar, citing its support for terrorist groups. Mr. Trump, who made the cutting of terrorist funding a centerpiece of his trip to Saudi Arabia in May, said he was responsible.

“So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off,” the president said on Twitter. “They said they would take a hard line on funding.”

Moments later, he added, “Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism!”

Qatar has long been accused of funneling arms and money to radical groups in Syria, Libya and other Arab countries. But so has Saudi Arabia. And Mr. Trump’s tweets have huge potential strategic consequences in the Middle East, where Qatar is a crucial military outpost for the United States.

«

I don’t think anyone is going to be keen for Trump to make any more foreign visits after this. One excursion and he has dangerously destabilised the Middle East (Qatar’s economy is going to collapse in short order, or it will be forced to kowtow to Saudi Arabia, which it will detest) and dumped on a climate agreement. And that was the first time he had been let out of the US.
link to this extract

Uber terminated about 20 people for misconduct • The Information

Amir Efrati:

»

Uber has fired around 20 people this year as a result of an internal investigation into workplace misconduct, such as discrimination, sexual harassment, bullying, retaliation and physical safety, company executives revealed to employees this morning, according to two people who listened to a briefing on the findings.

In addition, after about 200 investigations into possible wrongdoing, Uber issued more than 30 “remediations,” or counseling and training, to individuals at the company. More than half a dozen people were given final warnings, one of these people said.

The results come from Perkins Coie, which is one of two law firms hired by Uber to probe its workplace issues. A lead investigator from the firm spoke to Uber employees at the meeting organized to discuss the results. The results of a separate report by Covington & Burling, and led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, are due next Tuesday, Uber human resources chief Liane Hornsey told employees. She will view those results later this week.

«

In possibly unrelated news, Bozoma St John – the amazing woman who showed off Apple Music at WWDC 2016 (she ran iTunes global and consumer marketing) – is heading to Uber.
link to this extract

Apple’s HomePod could ignite huge Chinese market for smart connected devices • South China Morning Post

Bien Perez:

»

Sales of smart connected speakers on the mainland are estimated to exceed half a million units this year, according to Counterpoint Research.

“The entry of more players integrating AI and a range of smart solutions into speakers next year could drive [mainland] sales to a couple of million units from next year before recording sales of more than 10 million units per year by 2022,” said Neil Shah, a partner at Counterpoint.

“Out of close to half a billion households in China, at least 150 million households — based on affluence and high annual income — could potentially make up the total addressable market for smart speakers in the country.”

Chinese e-commerce giant JD. com was an early player in the domestic market for smart speakers with its LingLong DingDong, a device launched last year by its joint venture with local speech-recognition software specialist iFlytek.

“We estimate there is a brewing domestic ecosystem [for smart connected speakers] which could leverage AI developments at Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent,” Shah said.

«

I hadn’t thought about China when I blogged about where the HomePod stands relative to its competitors, but it makes sense that neither Amazon nor Google would be competitors there.
link to this extract

Wasted green power tests China’s energy leadership • Associated Press

Matthew Brown:

»

Thousands of new wind turbines and solar panels were installed in China’s remote provinces over the past several years as the country’s leaders sought to alleviate choking urban smog without slowing economic expansion. China now has more renewable power capacity than any other nation.

Two nagging problems have dampened that success, however, according to industry representatives and outside observers: China’s sprawling power grid has been unable to handle the influx of new electricity from wind and solar, while some provincial officials have retained a preference for coal.

In western China’s Gansu province, 43% of energy from wind went unused in 2016, a phenomenon known in the energy industry as “curtailment.” In the neighboring Xinjiang region, the curtailment figure was 38% and in northeast China’s Jilin province it was 30%. The nationwide figure, 17%, was described by Qiao’s organization as “shockingly high” after increasing for several years in a row.

The problem has improved some this year, according to the China Electricity Council. Power demand in general increased in the first quarter, giving a boost to renewables after the economy regained momentum from 2016’s slowdown.

«

All about infrastructure.
link to this extract

What will the UK election mean for online privacy? • The Conversation

Vladlena Benson read the manifestos so you don’t have to:

»

The recent cyber attack that crippled the NHS demonstrated why cyber-security is a vital issue and one that can affect an entire country. The recent terrorist attack in Manchester also reminded people what’s at stake when deciding what data gathering and surveillance powers the government should have.

So how are the main UK-wide political parties proposing to tackle online security and privacy after the 2017 general election?

«

The Tories (Conservatives) seem to be suggesting that there should be backdoors in end-to-end encrypted apps. That won’t happen, and they won’t be able to stop people from downloading apps from overseas. Labour, meanwhile, is just vague. The Lib Dems would roll back many of the Tories’ moves.
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How The Intercept outed Reality Winner • Errata Security

Rob Graham:

»

On Monday, The Intercept released documents on election tampering from an NSA leaker. Later, the arrest warrant request for an NSA contractor named “Reality Winner” was published, showing how they tracked her down because she had printed out the documents and sent them to The Intercept. The document posted by the Intercept isn’t the original PDF file, but a PDF containing the pictures of the printed version that was then later scanned in.

The problem is that most new printers print nearly invisibly yellow dots that track down exactly when and where documents, any document, is printed. Because the NSA logs all printing jobs on its printers, it can use this to match up precisely who printed the document.

In this post, I show how.

«

Microdots on the document – which The Intercept’s reporters shared with a government contact, because they wanted comment – identified it. The Intercept is being blamed up and down the internet. Yashar Ali has a thread on Twitter saying that really it’s Winner’s fault: don’t send actual content. Next time perhaps a photo, or something, would do. (But I expect cameraphones are banned.) Winner seems to have sent the document on the day of former FBI chief James Comey’s firing – probably as an angry reaction.
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The Harvard case shows a meme is never ‘just’ a meme • Motherboard

Whitney Phillips AND:

»

This week, Harvard decided to rescind ten admission offers after learning that the prospective students had been posting rape-apologist, pedophilic, and violently racist memes to an offshoot of the main Harvard Class of 2021 Facebook Memes group. Because it hinges on tensions between free expression and (what could be described as) “PC culture,” this case could be seen as a canary in the coal mine of 2017.

But it is much more than that. The case is a stand-in for the mine itself, along with the company, its miners, their tools, all of it. Culturally, this is where we are: an online environment in which sincere bigotry bleeds into satirical bigotry, irony is forwarded as both justification and argument, and accountability is so frequently sidestepped that just having to face consequences is news in itself.

Far more than being a story about a specific group of memes and a specific group of students, then, the Harvard dustup demonstrates how the fun and games of memes—along with the seeming separation between “the real world” and that somewhere-else place known as “the internet”—gives way to fully embodied, fully consequential ethics.

Some might be tempted to brush off these ethical consequences, arguing that the posting of even the most offensive content is no big deal. It’s just internet memes. It’s just incoming college kids trying to be as offensive as possible, for the lulz. It’s just—as the co-founder of a similar Facebook meme group at Yale suggested to Taylor Lorenz at Mic—another form of hazing.

…The problem is that the “just” framing (just joking, just a meme on the internet, just a new kind of hazing ritual) posits what we describe in our work as a fetishized gaze, one that obscures everything but the joke itself.

«

link to this extract

Apple HomePod: a first listen • CNet

Scott Stein had a listen in a quiet environment in a face-off – ear-off? – against Apple’s main rivals, the Amazon Echo and Sonos Play:3:

»

HomePod came off as bolder and more vivid than Sonos Play:3 in the experience I tried, and a lot better than Amazon Echo. I’d also say the music sounded consistently vivid and crisp in a quiet space, more so than the Sonos and Amazon comparisons on-hand. But the one thing I didn’t get to experience was how HomePod can listen, talk and suggest things. I couldn’t request music, or ask for the weather, or try any smart controls.

It’s hard to tell what any of this means right now, and a full review of the final product is the only way to determine any real meaningful thoughts on HomePod-as-home-audio-device. But, right out of the gate, Apple is clearly going for music over smart assistance as HomePod’s major draw. But as the most expensive speaker of the three – it costs almost double the price of the Echo – its superior sound quality is to be expected. It needs to earn that bigger price tag.

And remember that Amazon has Echo speakers that retail for as little as $50, while an entry-level Sonos Play:1 will run you $300 (£185, AU$300).

Still, the HomePod is a big step up from Apple’s last speaker product (remember 2006’s Apple Hi-Fi?). We’ll see if its Siri-powered smarts will measure up to its audio quality when the HomePod is released this fall.

«

link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Apple’s HomePod: a problem for Sonos and Amazon, or a niche for fans? Photo by nobihaya on Flickr from WWDC 2017.

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 13 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Why aren’t Google and Facebook enriching our lives? • Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

»

Let’s take Google as an example. Google knew that I was going to Moscow (itinerary emailed to my Gmail address). Google knew my schedule (Calendar). Google should know my various interests by now, from reading my Gmail messages and Docs content. Due to me being of such an advanced age that I still use email rather than text, Google definitely knows my real social network (the people with whom I correspond via email).

Why didn’t Google suggest to me a whole bunch of cultural events? People to meet? Groups to join? The stuff that Google tries to help with is stuff that was already pretty easy to do in the pre-Internet days, e.g., book a hotel or airline ticket. Even in those areas, Google is simply following the mid-1990s leaders such as Expedia.

I don’t think that one can argue that enriching lives is unprofitable and therefore these profit-seeking companies aren’t interested. Selling tickets to events should lead to commissions. Connecting people to meet in public places, such as restaurants or bars, should also lead to commissions. These could be a lot more lucrative than what Google gets from selling mouse clicks.

«

I think this is what Google is trying to do – but people don’t trust companies yet with this stuff, do they?
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Top-secret NSA report details Russian hacking effort days before 2016 election • The Intercept

Matthew Cole, Richard Esposito, Sam Biddle and Ryan Grim:

»

Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept.

The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very recently acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the U.S. election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light.

While the document provides a rare window into the NSA’s understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying “raw” intelligence on which the analysis is based. A U.S. intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive.

«

So it sorta was, or maybe not?
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WSJ ends Google users’ free ride, then fades in search results • Bloomberg

Gerry Smith:

»

After blocking Google users from reading free articles in February, the Wall Street Journal’s subscription business soared, with a fourfold increase in the rate of visitors converting into paying customers. But there was a trade-off: Traffic from Google plummeted 44 percent.

The reason: Google search results are based on an algorithm that scans the internet for free content. After the Journal’s free articles went behind a paywall, Google’s bot only saw the first few paragraphs and started ranking them lower, limiting the Journal’s viewership.

Executives at the Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., argue that Google’s policy is unfairly punishing them for trying to attract more digital subscribers. They want Google to treat their articles equally in search rankings, despite being behind a paywall.

“Any site like ours automatically doesn’t get the visibility in search that a free site would,” Suzi Watford, the Journal’s chief marketing officer, said in an interview. “You are definitely being discriminated against as a paid news site.”

The Journal’s experience could have implications across the news industry, where publishers are relying more on convincing readers to pay for their articles because tech giants like Google and Facebook are vacuuming up the lion’s share of online advertising.

«

link to this extract

Apple joins augmented reality fray with new app platform • FT

Tim Bradshaw:

»

Apple has jumped into the growing battle for the camera in Silicon Valley, with a new “augmented reality” app platform for developers that will face off against Facebook, Snapchat and Google.

The new “ARkit” capabilities being introduced in the next version of iOS will give Apple “overnight the largest AR platform in the world”, Craig Federighi, its software chief, told app makers at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday.

Demonstrations displayed at the event in San Jose showed an improved version of Pokémon Go, one of the biggest apps of last year. The ARkit toolset allows the game’s monsters to bounce around streets and parks in a more realistic fashion.

Apple framed its bid to bring digital images to the iPhone camera window’s view of the real world as a leap forward in user-interface design alongside the iPhone’s 10-year-old “multitouch” screen.

“With multitouch we’ve really changed the way that you interact with the world on the screen of your iPhone,” said Mr Federighi. “With the camera we’ve allowed you to capture the world around you. When you bring these together, the results can be profound.”

«

Coming in iOS 11, of course; the fact it’s a kit means it can be part of apps everywhere. And this will make iOS the world’s biggest AR platform within about a month of iOS 11’s release.
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Apple unveils HomePod, its Siri smart speaker • Engadget

Devindra Hardawar:

»

The HomePod’s small, vase-like case houses a four-inch woofer and seven tweeters. It’s powered by Apple’s A8 processor, just like the iPhone. HomePod features “real-time acoustic modeling,” which allows it to tweak music to suit its environment. Apple is also targeting Sonos as a competitor, which is a sign that the HomePod’s audio quality will be better than what we’ve seen from Amazon and Google.

Of course, you can use the HomePod to access Siri with voice commands. But on this device, Siri is more than just a virtual assistant — it’s a “musicologist” that will help you find new tunes on Apple Music. You can also tell Siri you like a certain song, and it’ll remember your tastes. What’s most unique is that you’ll be able to ask Siri specific questions like, “Who’s the guitarist on this song?”

HomePod is coming in December for $349, which is significantly more than the Amazon Echo, Google Home and Sonos’s $300 Play:3. It’ll be available in white and Apple’s usual space grey.

«

December?! I guess it gives Sonos plenty of time to get its advertising in line. It’s got its own page on Apple’s site.
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Huawei, Xiaomi perform weaker than expected in notebook market; will continue to push new models • Digitimes

Monica Chen and Joseph Tsai:

»

Despite worldwide PC demand having declined for five consecutive years, Samsung Electronics, Huawei and Xiaomi have returned to the notebook market because of milder competition compared to the smartphone market.

However, sources from the upstream supply chain pointed out that Xiaomi and Huawei, which were originally expected to achieve good shipments, did not perform as well as expected because demand remains weak for consumer notebooks. For its first year, Xiaomi shipped less than 500,000 units and Huawei 700,000 units.

At the same time, Asustek Computer has also not performed well and has begun a business reorganization, looking to regain its momentum. Asustek is expected to start seeing shipment growth in the second half of 2017.

Sources from the upstream supply chain noted that Xiaomi and Huawei originally hoped to quickly expand into the notebook market with their strong brand recognition, advantages in shipments, and familiarity to the China market, but have not achieved the results they wanted so far.

«

Xiaomi had apparently been targeting 2m units; it got a quarter of that. May be running out of ideas.
link to this extract

Fireball malware infects 20% of corporate networks worldwide • Infosecurity Magazine

Tara Seals:

»

A browser-hijacker called Fireball has ignited concern, having already infected more than 250 million computers worldwide, and 20% of corporate networks globally. 

According to Check Point, it takes over target web browsers, turning them into zombies. However, Fireball also can be turned into a fully functioning malware downloader, and is capable of executing any code on the victim machines. That means it can carry out a wide range of actions, including stealing credentials and loading ransomware.

For now, it seems focused on adware. Fireball manipulates victims’ browsers and turns their default search engines and home pages into fake search engines, which simply redirect the queries to either yahoo.com or Google.com to generate ad revenue. According to Alexa’s web traffic data, 14 of these fake search engines are among the top 10,000 websites, with some of them occasionally reaching the top 1,000.

Fireball also installs plug-ins and additional configurations to boost its advertisement activity.

“It’s run by a Chinese digital marketing agency, called Rafotech,” Check Point noted in an analysis. “Rafotech carefully walks along the edge of legitimacy, knowing that adware distribution is not considered a crime like malware distribution is. Many companies provide software or services for free, and make their profits by harvesting data or presenting advertisements. Once a client agrees to the install of extra features or software to his/her computer, it is hard to claim malicious intent on behalf of the provider.”

«

link to this extract

Amazon aims to put Fire Phone nightmare behind with ‘Ice’ smartphones • NDTV Gadgets360.com

Manish Singh:

»

Amazon plans to have another go at selling its own branded smartphones.

The ecommerce giant, which killed off its Fire Phone in 2015, is working on a new lineup of smartphones branded as “Ice”, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Unlike the Fire Phone — for which Amazon focused largely on the US and a couple of other western markets — the company is eyeing emerging markets like India for selling its new phones, said the sources.

Amazon’s upcoming smartphones run the latest version of Google’s Android operating system with Google Mobile Services (GMS) such as Gmail and Google Play, the people said.

Incorporating Google Mobile Services in its devices is a major change in strategy for Amazon, which currently offers a range of Android tablets without Google apps on them.

The smartphones are being referred to as ‘Ice’ internally, in what could be a move to distance itself from the disastrous Fire Phone brand, though it’s not clear if Amazon will eventually bring the devices under the Ice name. Amazon declined to comment.

«

If true, bad idea. It’s money down the drain.
link to this extract

Berkeley duo’s plan to solve traffic jams: hyper-fast lanes for self-driving cars • The Guardian

Benjamin Preston:

»

Hyperlane works a lot like existing dedicated commuter lanes, only instead of paying extra to use higher-speed, lower-congestion lanes in a human-driven vehicle, the separate lanes are only for autonomous vehicles. After entering an acceleration lane, Hyperlane’s central computer takes over the car’s functions and finds a slot for it in the already fast-moving traffic in the dedicated lanes. Barrs and Chen said vehicles would travel at speeds up to 120mph, and that the centralized computer control – which would be in constant communication with each vehicle using emerging 5G technology – would allow for a more tightly-packed traffic pattern.

“We liken the Hyperlane network to an air traffic control system,” Barrs said.

Sensors in the road would evaluate traffic density, weather hazards, accidents and other changes, prompting the system to adjust vehicle speed as necessary. Like Uber’s pricing structure, fees for Hyperlane would be based upon demand.

«

Hmm. Controlled by a central computer. No chance of that going wrong, and no risk with vehicles going at 120mph.
link to this extract

Giving up time as a parent • FlowingData

Nathan Yau:

»

One of the challenges of parenting is that you have to spend a lot of what was once your own time caring for your kids. This time must be taken from an existing activity. After all, there is a fixed number of minutes during the day. Where do parents usually draw from?

In the same spirit of looking at time use for working adults over all of adulthood, I counted the hours for people with one child under 18 in the house and compared the totals against those without a child in the house. For simplicity’s sake, I focused on employed people from age 25 to 43 (25 is the average age Americans have their first kid), and the comparison below shows differences for the same time span.

Between the age 18 to 43, a parent with one child spends 9,572 more hours caretaking than someone without a child in the house and 1,468 more hours on household work. These hours are pulled mostly from socializing, relaxing, and work.

«

Tell me about it. Great visualisation too.
link to this extract

Digital privacy is making antitrust exciting again • WIRED

Nitasha Tiku:

»

Relying on consumer prices to judge the openness of a market can also be misleading when regulating tech companies. “When more and more services are ‘free,’ you can see how that really renders antitrust feeble,” says Khan. After the rapid expansion in social networking and online search, it’s clear that financial power lies in data, not just price. “The Europeans hit on this,” says Stucke. “Data is the new lingua franca. That is the currency, and [tech platforms] can translate that data into dollars.”

This is evident in the European Union’s intensified scrutiny of how Silicon Valley tech platforms operate. Germany’s antitrust agency is investigating Facebook. The EU conducted an antitrust probe into Amazon’s e-books business deals (the company agreed to change its contract with publishers in May). Days before the Oxford conference, the EU fined Facebook $122m for making misleading privacy statements to the EU when it acquired WhatsApp for $19bn in 2014 about the ability to match Facebook and WhatsApp accounts. (The merger of the popular texting apps raised concerns that Facebook’s online advertising business could gain an unfair advantage.) Days before that, watchdogs in the Netherlands and France slapped Facebook on the wrist for privacy violations.

«

There’s a growing feeling that current US antitrust law isn’t able to cope with the emerging problems created by the big companies, particularly Facebook and Google.
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Intel CEO Krzanich: self-driving cars will double as security cameras • CNBC

Chantel McGee:

»

The benefits of having self-driving cars go far beyond automatic parking or fewer accidents, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich told CNBC on Thursday.

Among those other benefits: Driverless cars will double as security cameras, he said from the sidelines of the Code Conference in California.

“I always say that the cars are going to be out there looking, so the next time an Amber alert comes up and they’re looking for a license plate, the cars should be able to find that license plate quite rapidly,” said Krzanich.

The idea could bring up concerns about privacy, but Krzanich has already thought of how to minimize those worries.

“We’ll have to put limitations on it,” he said. “We’ll have to encrypt that data and make sure I can’t tell that it’s John’s [car] necessarily,” said Krzanich.

«

Mass surveillance without a warrant! How delightful.
link to this extract

Xiaomi and Apple tie for the top position as the wearables market swells 17.9% during the first quarter • IDC

»

The worldwide wearables market maintained its upward trajectory during the first quarter of 2017 (1Q17) with Xiaomi and Apple leading all companies and multiple products experiencing double- and triple-digit growth. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker, companies shipped a total of 24.7m wearable devices during 1Q17, up 17.9% from the 20.9m units shipped in 1Q16.

“Fitbit finds itself in the midst of a transformation as user tastes evolve from fitness bands to watches and other products,” noted Ramon Llamas, research manager for IDC’s Wearables team. “This allowed Xiaomi to throttle up on its inexpensive devices within the China market and for Apple to leverage its position as the leading smartwatch provider worldwide. Now that Xiaomi and Apple have supplanted Fitbit, the next question is whether they will be able to maintain their position.

“However, by no means should Fitbit be removed from the wearables conversation,” continued Llamas. “With a user base of 50 million, a strong presence within corporate wellness, and assets that keep it top of mind for digital health, Fitbit is well positioned to move into new segments and markets.”

«

Puts Apple and Xiaomi level at 3.6m, though Xiaomi’s are bargain-basement bracelet-style trackers, a form factor which I think has already peaked.

The top five players (Xiaomi, Apple, Fitbit, Samsung, Garmin) have just over half the market, and none is Android Wear. I suspect the latter is barely growing its user base now.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Guess how long it will take identity thieves to try to use your data online? Photo by mag3737 on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Yeah, we’re carrying on as usual. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The great reckoning in digital attention • ThinkGrowth.org

Andrew Motalenti:

»

The attention economy is broken… [and] consumers — you and me — are the ones footing the bill. We see increasingly slow page load times for publisher pages which are bloated with ad tech vendor code; increasingly invasive ads from brands who are desperate to catch a click; and, a media trend toward outrage, rather than thoughtful debate.

On this last point: it is outrage, not truth, that prevails in an Internet economy built around attention capture and auction, which is how our programmatic digital advertising ecosystem works.

This is because outrage — through a quirk of societal and brain evolution — is more effective at capturing our time. Indeed, as we’ve been learning, outrage decoupled from truth is one of the most engaging forms of content on the web.

“Fake news” isn’t a Russian conspiracy to undermine our democracy; it is, instead, the end-state of an unhealthy race-to-the-bottom for consumer attention.

And yes, we’ve hit the bottom.

Just think through where we are now: Google perpetually records your voice, your search queries, your location, and your browser history. Facebook has enough data on you, your friends, and your personality to persuade you emotionally and politically.

Meanwhile, the rest of the web is frantically trying to catch up. That is, thousands of companies and hundreds of thousands of sites are trying to catch up to a state of complete and total digital surveillance. Even though this milestone has already been achieved — on multi-billion-user scale — by the top two players.

The first step to a solution is to admit this much: we have a problem. I think we can all agree we need to send digital advertising to rehab.

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link to this extract

How the Tories are paying to push anti-Corbyn ads into your Facebook feed • Buzzfeed

Jim Waterson:

»

The Conservatives are using Facebook to bombard key target seats with paid-for adverts attacking Jeremy Corbyn, according to data obtained by BuzzFeed News that reveals for the first time the full extent of the party’s under-the-radar online campaign blitz.

Dozens of different variations of Tory ads, some of which have already been viewed by millions of people, have been spotted online. The vast majority feature starkly negative messages and focus on Corbyn’s leadership style, his supposed inability to lead Brexit negotiations, and claims that he is a security risk who would put up taxes.

Voters in crucial constituencies such as Wirral West, Bath, and Twickenham have been targeted by the anti-Corbyn adverts, which enable national spending to be diverted to support what are essentially local campaigns without breaking electoral spending laws.

Seats the Conservatives hope to gain – including Walsall North, Hampstead and Kilburn, and Brentford and Isleworth – have been targeted by videos warning the UK faces a Brexit disaster if Corbyn is allowed to carry out negotiations.

Meanwhile, voters in York Central, Normanton, and Ynys Mons – all traditional Labour-leaning areas – have been shown adverts in their Facebook feeds emphasising Theresa May’s leadership qualities.

Paid-for online advertising is remarkably difficult to track and it is difficult for journalists to monitor the reach of these adverts. Data provided to BuzzFeed News by users of the Who Targets Me service allows us for the first time to see a sample of who is being targeted by the Conservative campaign.

«

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How fast will identity thieves use stolen info? • FTC

Ari Lazarus:

»

If you’ve been affected by a data breach, or otherwise had your information hacked or stolen, you’ve probably asked yourself, “What happens when my stolen information is made public?” At the FTC’s Identity Theft workshop this morning, our Office of Technology staff reported on research they did to find out.

First, they created a database of information about 100 fake consumers. To make the information realistic, they used popular names based on Census data, addresses from across the country, email addresses that used common email address naming conventions, phone numbers that corresponded to the addresses, and one of three types of payment information (an online payment service, a bitcoin wallet or a credit card).

They then posted the data on two different occasions on a website that hackers and others use to make stolen credentials public. The criminals were quick to pounce. After the second posting, it took only nine minutes before crooks tried to access the information.

«

The research slides really repay some reading: attempted credit card purchases running to thousands of dollars.
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Alex Honnold climbs Yosemite’s El Capitan without a rope • National Geographic

Mark Synnott:

»

It’s hard to overstate the physical and mental difficulties of a free solo ascent of the peak, which is considered by many to be the epicenter of the rock climbing world. It is a vertical expanse stretching more than a half mile up—higher than the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. From the meadow at the foot of El Capitan, climbers on the peak’s upper reaches are practically invisible to the naked eye.

“This is the ‘moon landing’ of free soloing,” said Tommy Caldwell, who made his own history in 2015 with his ascent of the Dawn Wall, El Capitan’s most difficult climb, on which he and his partner Kevin Jorgeson used ropes and other equipment only for safety, not to aid their progress.

(What Caldwell and Jorgeson did is called free climbing, which means climbers use no gear to help them move up the mountain and are attached to ropes only to catch them if they fall. Free soloing is when a climber is alone and uses no ropes or any other equipment that aids or protects him as he climbs, leaving no margin of error.)

Climbers have been speculating for years about a possible free solo of El Capitan, but there have only been two other people who have publicly said they seriously considered it. One was Michael Reardon, a free soloist who drowned in 2007 after being swept from a ledge below a sea cliff in Ireland. The other was Dean Potter, who died in a base jumping accident in Yosemite in 2015.

«

I used to like soloing. Then I took a 30-foot fall onto solid ground. I recovered, but my enjoyment of soloing didn’t. I’m glad Honnold survived. There are some pictures if you want a vicarious moment of terror.
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Spigen accuses Andy Rubin’s company Essential Products of trademark infringement • Android Police

Scott Scrivens:

»

Andy Rubin has only just announced his much-anticipated new smartphone, but his company may already be in legal hot water over the infringement of intellectual property. It’s been brought to our attention that Spigen, the US case and accessory maker, already has a trademark for the term “Essential” and has written to Rubin’s organization to contest its use. The letter firmly compels Rubin’s fledgling company to “cease and desist from any and all uses of marks including the term “Essential”.”

Spigen, Inc. successfully registered the trademark (Reg. No. 5014095) as early as August 2016. It’s an International Class. 9 mark, the category which relates to computers and scientific devices, including smartphones and accessories. The trademark itself is incredibly broad, and Spigen seemingly only uses the designation for a range of battery packs and chargers, as well as some bluetooth headphones. Despite the vagueness, Essential’s use of the name still presents potential confusion for consumers, which is exactly what Spigen is alleging.

[Rubin’s] Essential had its own registration for the “Essential” term refused on the basis of likely confusion with Spigen’s trademark.

«

Seems like Rubin is trying to emulate Steve Jobs (who launched the iPhone when Cisco already owned the name) in another way. He might (almost surely will) be able to buy the trademark, but it’s an expense that could have been foregone.
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‘Blame the internet’ is just not a good enough response, Theresa May • The Guardian

I wrote about Theresa May’s response to the London Bridge attack:

»

“The kneejerk ‘blame the internet’ that comes after every act of terrorism is so blatant as to be embarrassing,” commented Paul Bernal, a law lecturer at the University of East Anglia who has worked with the police. The pressure, he says, comes from the politicians. For an example look no further than John Mann, MP for Bassetlaw since 2001, who this morning said: “I repeat, yet again, my call for the internet companies who terrorists have again used to communicate to be held legally liable for content.”

Perhaps he has forgotten the 1970s, when in the pre-mobile phone era the IRA would use phones to organise its attacks – without anyone calling for (nor were there online social networks to “radicalise” would-be IRA members, but still they joined). The authoritarian sweep of Mann’s idea is chilling: since legal liability is meant to deter, the companies would need people to monitor every word you wrote, every video you watched, and compare it against some manual of dissent. It’s like a playbook for the dystopia of Gilead, in The Handmaid’s Tale (which, weirdly enough, most resembles Islamic State’s framework for living).

The problem is this: things can be done, but they open a Pandora’s box.

«

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‘Sensitive’ UK terror funding inquiry may never be published • The Guardian

Jessica Elgot:

»

An investigation into the foreign funding and support of jihadi groups that was authorised by David Cameron may never be published, the Home Office has admitted.

The inquiry into revenue streams for extremist groups operating in the UK was commissioned by the former prime minister and is thought to focus on Saudi Arabia, which has repeatedly been highlighted by European leaders as a funding source for Islamist jihadis.

The investigation was launched as part of a deal with the Liberal Democrats in exchange for the party supporting the extension of British airstrikes against Islamic State into Syria in December 2015.

Tom Brake, the Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman, has written to the prime minister asking her to confirm that the investigation will not be shelved.

The Observer reported in January last year that the Home Office’s extremism analysis unit had been directed by Downing Street to investigate overseas funding of extremist groups in the UK, with findings to be shown to Theresa May, then home secretary, and Cameron.

«

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2011: Anatomy of a crushing • Pinboard blog

Maciej Ceglowski in March 2011 recalls what happened the previous time Delicious got closed – or as good as closed:

»

A number of people asked about the technical aspects of the great Delicious exodus of 2010, and I’ve finally had some time to write it up. Note that times on all the graphs are UTC.

On December 16th Yahoo held an all-hands meeting to rally the troops after a big round of layoffs. Around 11 AM someone at this meeting showed a slide with a couple of Yahoo properties grouped into three categories, one of which was ominously called “sunset”. The most prominent logo in the group belonged to Delicious, our main competitor. Milliseconds later, the slide was on the web, and there was an ominous thundering sound as every Delicious user in North America raced for the exit. [*]

I got the message just as I was starting work for the day. My Twitter client, normally a place where I might see ten or twenty daily mentions of Pinboard, had turned into a nonstop blur of updates. My inbox was making a kind of sustained pealing sound I had never heard before. It was going to be an interesting afternoon.

Before this moment, our relationship to Delicious had been that of a tick to an elephant. We were a niche site and in the course of eighteen months had siphoned off about six thousand users from our massive competitor, a pace I was was very happy with and hoped to sustain through 2011. But now the Senior Vice President for Bad Decisions at Yahoo had decided to give us a little help.

I’ve previously posted this graph of Pinboard web traffic on the days immediately before and after the Delicious announcement. That small blue bar at bottom shows normal traffic levels from the week before. The two teal mountain peaks correspond to midday traffic on December 16 and 17th.

«

There’s lot of great detail for anyone who designs web databases for a living, or even amusement. And I think that Yahoo at that time had multiple Senior Vice Presidents for Bad Decisions.
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Eric Schmidt publicly defends Jared Kushner. Next day, Trump shutting DoL division investigating Google • Pando

Sarah Lacy:

»

What, you might wonder (and Google staff certainly did) would Schmidt or any Silicon Valley leader stand to gain from being one of the only on the record sources defending Kushner [in a New York Times article] just as the Russia scandal was engulfing the President’s son in law?

That’s a good question.

Because the very next day this stunning news broke:

»

The Trump administration is planning to disband the Labor Department division that has policed discrimination among federal contractors for four decades, according to the White House’s newly proposed budget, part of wider efforts to rein in government programs that promote civil rights.

«

That’s right: As luck would have it, three days after the Department of Labor reminded Google that compliance with its anti-discrimination investigation was the price of being a government contractor, and just hours after Eric Schmidt issues his bizarre public defense of Jared Kushner, news broke that the Trump administration was planning to disband the organization doing the investigation…

…It is not a coincidence that many of the most powerful women in tech – Marissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg, Wojcicki – all built their careers and names at Google.

And yet, many of these same women have told me that Google wasn’t this way because of the founders or the male senior leadership. It was this way because it employed senior women early on, who advocated for other women. Google does this better than many companies, but there are still scores of stories of harassment, stealing credit from female employees, unwanted advances and discrimination.

«

I’m willing to think that Schmidt was just buttering up the utterly useless Kushner because buttering up people in powerful offices is what Schmidt does. But I also think that he might have previously let slip to Kushner – or people who actually do have some clout – that this Department of Labor investigation was such an obstacle to getting things done, and, well, he’d love for Google to be helping out with building the wall/opening coal plants/whatever, but… *turns up hands*.

And the White House, meanwhile, has blocked the release of who visits and how often, so you don’t know if Schmidt has been lobbying hard for this.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Google plans to make adblocking a default in Chrome next year. Photo by Mr Exploding 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. Hey, is it getting warmer in here? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Notes from an emergency • Idlewords

Maciej Ceglowski, in a transcript of a speech given in Berlin on May 10:

»

Facebook is the dominant social network in Europe, with 349 million monthly active users. Google has something like 94% of market share for search in Germany. The servers of Europe are littered with the bodies of dead and dying social media sites. The few holdouts that still exist, like Xing, are being crushed by their American rivals.

In their online life, Europeans have become completely dependent on companies headquartered in the United States.

And so Trump is in charge in America, and America has all your data. This leaves you in a very exposed position. US residents enjoy some measure of legal protection against the American government. Even if you think our intelligence agencies are evil, they’re a lawful evil. They have to follow laws and procedures, and the people in those agencies take them seriously.

But there are no such protections for non-Americans outside the United States. The NSA would have to go to court to spy on me; they can spy on you anytime they feel like it.

This is an astonishing state of affairs. I can’t imagine a world where Europe would let itself become reliant on American cheese, or where Germans could only drink Coors Light.

In the past, Europe has shown that it’s capable of identifying a vital interest and moving to protect it. When American aerospace companies were on the point of driving foreign rivals out of business, European governments formed the Airbus consortium, which now successfully competes with Boeing.

A giant part of the EU budget goes to subsidize farming, not because farming is the best use of resources in a first-world economy, but because farms are important to national security, to the landscape, to national identity, social stability, and a shared sense of who we are.

But when it comes to the Internet, Europe doesn’t put up a fight. It has ceded the ground entirely to American corporations. And now those corporations have to deal with Trump. How hard do you think they’ll work to defend European interests?

«

As ever with his talks, you should read it all. He says things you hadn’t realised, crystallises them until you can almost hold them in your hand. (And he has also bought Delicious – the bookmarking site which was bought for millions by Yahoo, dumped, given millions in VC funds, and left to go dark – for just $35,000. Hilarious triumph over the foolishness of big money.)
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Here’s how to track the smartphone apps that are tracking you • Fast Company

Glenn Fleishman:

»

The ReCon project publishes some data derived from a few hundred early users, listing apps, the kind of data they passed, a severity score, whether a developer was notified, and when misbehavior was fixed (if indeed it was).

For those who have installed the app, ReCon has a web-based console that allows users to block or modify information that’s sent. For instance, a user can block all examples of a given kind of PII, or block all location data sent from a given app. However, because some apps fail without location coordinates, the team is looking into coarsening GPS information instead of blocking it entirely. An app’s backend still gets relevant information, “but other parties aren’t able to pin down where you are to a few meters,” Choffnes notes.

Of course, examining a flow of data from users itself raises massive privacy red flags, which is part of the evolution of ReCon. Its creators don’t ask for passwords, try to avoid storing the values sent, and check only to see whether, say, a password is obviously being passed without encryption. The group ultimately wants to perform distributed machine learning without users disclosing private or secret information, such as domains they’re visiting.

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Identity manager OneLogin has suffered a nasty looking data breach • Motherboard

Joseph Cox: On Wednesday,

»

OneLogin—a company that allows users to manage logins to multiple sites and apps all at once—announced it had suffered some form of breach. Although it’s not clear exactly what data has been taken, OneLogin says that all customers served by the company’s US data centre are impacted, and has quietly issued a set of serious steps for affected customers to take.

“Today we detected unauthorized access to OneLogin data in our US region,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Notably, the public blog post omitted certain details that OneLogin mentioned to customers in an email; namely that hackers have stolen customer information.

“Customer data was compromised, including the ability to decrypt encrypted data,” according to a message OneLogin sent to customers. Multiple OneLogin customers provided Motherboard with a copy of the message.

The message also directed customers to a list of required steps to minimize any damage from the breach, which in turn gave an indication of just how serious this episode might be.

According to copies of those steps, users are being told to generate new API keys and OAuth tokens (OAuth being a system for logging into accounts); create new security certificates as well as credentials; recycle any secrets stored in OneLogin’s Secure Notes feature; have end-users update their passwords, and more.

“Dealing with aftermath,” one customer told Motherboard. “This is a massive leak.”

«

Go to OneLogin’s main page and see how long it takes you to find the announcement. Note also Cieglowski’s talk about castles of data, and the temptation they breed.
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Google will help publishers prepare for a Chrome ad blocker coming next year • WSJ

Jack Marshall:

»

Google has told publishers it will give them at least six months to prepare for a new ad-blocking tool the company is planning to introduce in its Chrome web browser next year, according to people familiar with the company’s plans.

The new setting, which is expected to be switched on by default within the desktop and mobile versions of Chrome, will prevent all ads from appearing on websites that are deemed to provide a bad advertising experience for users.

To help publishers prepare, Google will provide a self-service tool called “Ad Experience Reports,” which will alert them to offending ads on their sites and explain how to fix the issues. The tool will be provided before the Chrome ad blocker goes live, the people familiar with the plans say…

…Unacceptable ad types include those identified by the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group made up of various trade bodies and online advertising-related companies that says it aims to improve consumers’ experience with online advertising.

The group’s initial list of unacceptable ad types, released in March, included pop-ups, auto-playing video ads with sound and “prestitial” ads that count down before displaying content. Google is a member of the group, alongside fellow ad giant Facebook , and Wall Street Journal parent News Corp .

«

This is antitrust territory. Dominant search engine; dominant browser; a dominant advertising supplier. What’s the harm to the consumer? The lack of choice in what they see, and the inability to decide what ads they do and don’t see. I hope Margrethe Vestager is on this preemptively; I’m sure publishers in Europe will be at her door.
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Postscript: Frank Deford • The New Yorker

Nicholas Dawidoff on the sports writer who died last weekend aged 78:

»

Deford’s most celebrated pieces were all “bonuses,” the bonus being the coveted slot at the back of the Sports Illustrated reserved for the week’s long feature. Soon after I met him, Deford explained his theory of how to structure the bonus—a variation of Chekhov’s rifle. The Russian famously ordained that if in the first chapter (or act) a rifle is on the wall, before the end it must be brought down and fired. The man from Baltimore said that in a bonus, you began by telling the reader something that made him interested. Then, once the reader was completely engaged, you moved on to other matters, to the point where the reader forgot the first thing. Then, toward the end, you brought it up again. The act of forming, breaking, and reforming the chemical bond, he said, deepened the reading experience. I was in my early twenties at the time, and the notion that the magazine’s revered figure was sharing his sweetest science with me made me almost overwhelmed with gratitude. You could be good and also, well, good.

Several years later, we drove together in his car from New York City to his family’s home in Connecticut. Deford was as excited as I ever saw him, owing to something new. We would not need to stop, wait in a long line, and pay a toll at a booth along the highway, he said, because of a recent traffic innovation. There was now an electronic pass keyed to a collection sensor that enabled a driver to pay the toll by simply driving through the booth. It was hardly necessary even to slow down. I didn’t believe it? Just wait! Soon, he had me beyond excited in anticipation of such impossible, magical, laser-age technology.

«

Dawidoff, en route to a neat payoff. Deford inspired me: I used to type out his pieces and analyse them to try to understand why they worked so well. It turned out to be a combination of great reporting and clever construction. If you remember tennis’s 1985 US Open, this is a pretty good description of it. And it’s pretty good even if you don’t.
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How to fight the bloatware of AI • Medium

Peter Sweeney is an entrepreneur and inventor of AI technologies, and he takes issue with the idea that we need a human-like AI. What we need, he argues, is one which narrowly does the rational part we’ve only recently learned to do:

»

it’s only within the past few centuries, beginning with the scientific revolution, that humans began making consistent, predictable progress through the creation of good knowledge. Earlier humans produced a wealth of bad knowledge, most of it long forgotten.

This isn’t to say humans were incapable of producing good knowledge. The point is that good knowledge creation was exceedingly rare. We wouldn’t model flight using a bird that failed to fly at such a spectacular rate. As a model for machine intelligence, shouldn’t humans be subject to the same standard of criticism?

We can further hone our expectations for good knowledge to scientific disciplines. According to Gary Marcus, “What society most needs is automated scientific discovery.” Demis Hassabis [founder and CEO of Google’s DeepMind] holds similar ambitions. “I’ve always hoped that A.I. could help us discover completely new ideas in complex scientific domains.”

We expect machines to embody superhuman intelligence. Only scientific progress embodies the sort of revolutionary knowledge creation that we imagine for our machines. It’s knowledge that arrives in conjectural leaps, defies our past experiences, and redefines what’s possible.
This process of knowledge creation is a human invention, not a natural phenomenon. Yet on closer inspection, our knowledge of how scientific knowledge is created is younger still! It was only in the 20th century, with Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, that there emerged a strong consensus of how scientific knowledge is created.

Naturally irrational humans are deeply flawed knowledge creation machines. We’ve only recently acquired the skills we need from machines and our knowledge of how we do it has not been broadly disseminated. Nature doesn’t provide a model of what we want from intelligent machines, namely revolutionary scientific knowledge, nor is the process that humans use to create this knowledge a naturally occurring phenomenon.

«

Or as Lewis Wolpert used to put it, “science isn’t common sense. It’s usually the direct opposite.” (Think of Earth revolving around the sun, or the reason for gravity. Common sense doesn’t predict them.)
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How to lose $8k worth of bitcoin in 15 minutes with Verizon and Coinbase.com • Medium

Cody Brown had his phone account, and then his email, and then his bitcoin wallets hacked:

»

Before we begin, its worth mentioning that yes, yesssssssssssssssssssss, I did not have enough protection around my Gmail account. I’ve used Google Authenticator before, for my personal account and for various work emails, but I stopped using it at a certain point out of convenience. I deeply regret doing so and you can certainly say, “HA, YOU HAD THIS COMING TO YOU DUDE, MY BITCOIN IS ON AN ENCRYPTED THUMBDRIVE IN A SECRET UNDERGROUND LOCKBOX COLD STORAGE FACILITY.” But there are many coin spectators out there with a similar vulnerability and, as more novices join, this vulnerability will only become more of a problem.

Of all the things that went down in the factors that lead to this hack, Verizon Wireless is what I was massively unprepared for. After talking at length with customer service reps, I learned that the hacker did not need to give them my pin number or my social security number and was able to get approval to takeover my cell phone number with simple billing information. This blew my mind and seemed negligent beyond all possible reason but it’s what they do. The main thing that struck me by the hack was the extraction speed possible in the current cryptocurrency ecosystem. $8,000 in 15 minutes is faster and more lucrative than robbing a suburban bank.

«

The key failing (besides his lack of two-factor non-SMS authentication on his Gmail account) was Verizon letting someone in effect take over his SIM. He had SMS authentication on his account. Guess what happened when the hackers tried to log in to his account? They could reset the password and get an SMS sent to “his” number. Cue disaster.

Coinbase (which has become a target for such hacks) is not above a lot of criticism either.
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The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure • Bloomberg

Noah Smith:

»

There is reason to suspect that high US costs are part of a deeper problem. For example, construction seems to take a lot longer in the US than in other countries. In China, a 30-story building can be completed in only 15 days. In Japan, giant sinkholes get fully repaired in one week. Even in the US of a century ago, construction was pretty fast – the Empire State Building went up in 410 days.

Yet today, it takes the US many years to spend the money that Congress allocates for infrastructure. New buildings seem to linger half-built for months or years, with construction workers often nowhere to be found. Subways can take decades. Even in the private sector, there are problems – productivity in the homebuilding sector has fallen in recent decades.

That suggests that US costs are high due to general inefficiency – inefficient project management, an inefficient government contracting process, and inefficient regulation. It suggests that construction, like health care or asset management or education, is an area where Americans have simply ponied up more and more cash over the years while ignoring the fact that they were getting less and less for their money. To fix the problems choking US construction, reformers are going to have to go through the system and rip out the inefficiencies root and branch.

Unfortunately, this is going to be hard, given all the vested interests and institutional inertia blocking deep reform of the construction sector. As [Matt] Yglesias ruefully notes, a study by the Government Accountability Office looking into the problem of high train-construction costs was recently killed by Congress, with no explanation given.

«

Before you kneejerk, the article goes through possible culprits (salaries; unions; land acquisition costs; geography) and finds none explains it. A side-by-side comparison of two projects, one in the US and one elsewhere, would be educative. But it seems the GAO has been told not to look into this either.
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Keeping your company data safe with new security updates to Gmail • Google Blog

Andy Wen is senior product manager for Counter abuse technology:

»

Machine learning helps Gmail block sneaky spam and phishing messages from showing up in your inbox with over 99.9% accuracy. This is huge, given that 50-70% of messages that Gmail receives are spam. We’re continuing to improve spam detection accuracy with early phishing detection, a dedicated machine learning model that selectively delays messages (less than 0.05% of messages on average) to perform rigorous phishing analysis and further protect user data from compromise.

Our detection models integrate with Google Safe Browsing machine learning technologies for finding and flagging phishy and suspicious URLs. These new models combine a variety of techniques such as reputation and similarity analysis on URLs, allowing us to generate new URL click-time warnings for phishing and malware links. As we find new patterns, our models adapt more quickly than manual systems ever could, and get better with time.

«

I see very, very few phishing emails on my Gmail account. I see a fairly constant amount of spam on it, though, despite marking the stuff (always claiming to be from department stores, and not being addressed to my ur-address) as junk consistently.

That spam hasn’t become a bigger, or even overwhelming slice of email is a success for all the organisations such as Spamhaus fighting it.
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About Newcastle libraries’ data • Newcastle City Council

»

In Newcastle Libraries we are endeavouring to open up as much of our data as possible. As library workers sharing and facilitating access to knowledge and information is part of our role; here we apply this principle to the information we collect about your library service. We believe that we are only the custodians of this information, and by publishing it in the public domain (under Creative Commons Licence 0) we are simply giving it back to you.

«

Newcastle Libraries has better open data policies than the US White House. Let that sink in.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Twitter doesn’t have a business incentive to get rid of bots – and that’s a problem for the rest of us. Photo by Rog01 on Flickr.

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

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

Apple is manufacturing a Siri speaker to outdo Google and Amazon • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman and Alex Webb:

»

Apple is already in your pocket, on your desk and underneath your television. Soon, a device embossed with “Designed by Apple in California” may be on your nightstand or kitchen counter as well.

The iPhone-maker has started manufacturing a long-in-the-works Siri-controlled smart speaker, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple could debut the speaker as soon as its annual developer conference in June, but the device will not be ready to ship until later in the year, the people said. 

The device will differ from Amazon.com’s Echo and Alphabet’s Google Home speakers by offering virtual surround sound technology and deep integration with Apple’s product lineup, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss products that aren’t yet public.

Introducing a speaker would serve two main purposes: providing a hub to automate appliances and lights via Apple’s HomeKit system, and establishing a bulwark inside the home to lock customers more tightly into Apple’s network of services. That would help combat the competitive threat from Google’s and Amazon’s connected speakers: the Home and Echo mostly don’t support services from Apple. Without compatible hardware, users may be more likely to opt for the Echo or Home, and therefore use streaming music offerings such as Spotify, Amazon Prime Music or Google Play rather than Apple Music.

«

“Started manufacturing” would suggest an autumn release. Still waiting for the really persuasive reason to use these things. (Might be the sort of thing that would work for people who don’t have an Apple Watch, I guess.)
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Windows 10 on Snapdragon 835: a promising demo • Mobile Geeks

Myriam Joire:

»

Today at Computex 2017, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 835 Mobile PC Platform to help with Microsoft’s effort to bring Windows 10 to ARM-based devices. In addition, ASUS, HP, and Lenovo have committed to launching Snapdragon 835-based Windows 10 products in the next few months. These will be sleek, fanless, and always connected 2-in-1 mobile PCs with all day battery life aimed squarely at the productivity market.

In case you forgot, Microsoft recently announced that Windows 10 now features an emulation layer that lets users seamlessly run x86 apps on ARM devices. With the Snapdragon 835, Qualcomm already offers a powerful, efficient, tiny (10nm process), and always connected (Gigabit LTE) platform for standalone VR/MR headsets and flagship smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Essential Phone, so it’s a no-brainer to extend support to mobile PCs running Windows 10.

In other words, Snapdragon 835 is eating the world.

«

Interesting little challenge for Apple here. Second time around for Microsoft, but seems to be getting the pieces right this time – and ARM, as an architecture, has come a long way.
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All thumbs: why reach navigation should replace the navbar in iOS design • Medium

Brad Ellis:

»

Oh my gosh, so many great reasons to use a navbar in your project. Except, damn! It’s hard to get your thumb up there now.

That being the case, let’s talk some Navbar cons:

• It’s harder to go back. You can swipe from the edge, as long as the view you’re on doesn’t have anything that scrolls horizontally, but if it does then you’re in stretch-town.
• Naming all the views is a pain. Not all screens need a persistent title, and some require labels too long to fit. Leaving a blank navigation area wastes screen space and looks barren.
• Navigating requires two hands. If you can hold a device in one hand, you should be able to operate the device with one hand. It feels better, and it’s more convenient in a world full of shopping carts to push, and babies to carry.
• Simple apps become more complex than necessary. Navbars tend to lead to information architecture that runs deep. It’s easy to develop for horizontal progressive disclosure, which means it can be a battle to expand inline or use a sheet.

All right. Now we know how navbars can be crap. So what are we doing?

«

Design is evolving quite rapidly, though it feels like this should have been obvious a couple of years ago.
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The autonomous vehicle ‘trolley problem’ will be solved by lawyers, not ethicists • WIRED

Aarian Marshall:

»

In a paper published in Northwestern University Law Review, Stanford University researcher Bryan Casey deems the trolley problem irrelevant. He argues that it’s already been solved—not by ethicists or engineers, but by the law. The companies building these cars will “less concerned with esoteric questions of right and wrong than with concrete questions of predictive legal liability,” he writes. Meaning, lawyers and lawmakers will sort things out.

“The trolley problem presents already solved issues—and we solve them democratically through a combination of legal liability and consumer psychology,” says Casey. “Profit maximizing firms look to those incentivizing mechanisms to choose the best behavior in all kinds of contexts.” In other words: Engineers will take their cues not from ethicists, but from the limits of the technology, tort law, and consumers’ tolerance for risk.

Casey cites Tesla as an example. Drivers of those Muskian brainchildren can switch on Autopilot and let the car drive itself down the highway. Tesla engineers could have programmed the cars to go slowly, upping safety. Or they could have programmed them to go fast, the better to get you where you need to be. Instead, they programmed the cars to follow the speed limit, minimizing Tesla’s risk of liability show something go awry.

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link to this extract

Twitter has a serious problem—and it’s actually a bigger deal than people realise • Mother Jones

AJ Vicens:

»

Bots make it easy to spread a given message, but that also creates a problem: Twitter followers often don’t know they’re retweeting or forwarding deliberately false information from unknown sources, which can then potentially further polarize the populace and overstate a message or a candidate’s actual support. In his opening statement to the committee, Clint Watts, a former FBI special agent, explained the influence campaign was part of a yearslong Russian effort to undermine US institutions. “Tailored news feeds from social media platforms have created information bubbles where voters see only stories and opinions suiting their preferences and biases,” he said, “ripe conditions for Russian disinformation campaigns.”

Whatever the source of the bots, it seems unlikely that the state-sponsored disinformation variety will be stopped anytime soon. Twitter didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. But Nu Wexler, a former public policy spokesperson for Twitter, tells Mother Jones that as long as users aren’t violating Twitter’s content rules, they’re not going to be censored.

“Twitter’s agnostic when it comes to political content and nationality,” Wexler said. “Accounts in compliance with the Twitter Rules are allowed to stay up, whether they’re in France, Mexico, or Russia. Suspending pro-Trump bots and allowing anti-Trump bots would just invite charges of political bias.”

«

Perverse incentive in the business model: showing adverts to bots generates money just like showing them to humans. Therefore no business reason to remove bots.
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Lexmark patent racket busted by Supremes • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

Patent law grants patent holders a limited monopoly on their goods for the duration of the patent. But when the goods are sold, patent rights are said to be exhausted, which allows third parties to resell the items without obtaining a license from the patent holder.

Lexmark wanted to prevent competitors from buying used ink cartridges, refurbishing them, and selling them to its printer customers – presumably because it would make more money by controlling that market.

So the company imposed contractual terms to limit resale of ink cartridges obtained through its cartridge Return Program in the US. What’s more, it tried to prevent ink cartridges obtained abroad from being resold in the US through claimed patent rights.

In 2010, the printer maker began filing a series of lawsuits in Ohio to enforce its claims against ink cartridge recyclers who acquired cartridges outside the US. Most of the defendants in those cases chose to settle, agreeing not to obtain Lexmark cartridges abroad.

In 2013, Lexmark sued Impression Products, based in Charleston, West Virginia, for violating its patent rights by reselling contractually controlled Return Program cartridges and by reselling ink cartridges bought abroad.

In 2016, the Federal Circuit Court agreed with Lexmark’s position.

The Supreme Court, however, has overturned that decision. It ruled that while Lexmark may have an enforceable claim under contract law for Return Program ink cartridges acquired in the US and resold there, the company may not make a patent claim.

«

I thought that this might have some reading on Apple’s patent row with Qualcomm, but people on Twitter are telling me no. Even so, this is momentous.
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The addicts next door • The New Yorker

Margaret Talbot with a hugely detailed look at the place in the US with the highest ratio of opioid deaths:

»

Recently, Martinsburg has begun to treat the heroin crisis more openly as a public-health problem. The police chief, a Chicago transplant named Maurice Richards, had devised a progressive-sounding plan called the Martinsburg Initiative, which would direct support services toward children who appeared to be at risk for addiction, because their families were struggling socially or emotionally. In December, Tina Stride and several other local citizens stood up at a zoning meeting to proclaim the need for a detox center. They countered several residents who testified that such a center would bring more addicts, and more heroin, to their neighborhoods. “I’m here to say that’s already here,” a woman in favor of the proposal said. “It’s in your neighbor’s house, in the bathroom at Wendy’s, in our schools.” She added, “We’re talking about making America great again? Well, it starts here.”

That night, the Board of Zoning Appeals voted to allow a detox center, run by Peter Callahan, the psychotherapist, to occupy an unused commercial building in town. People in the hearing room cheered and cried and hugged one another. The facility will have only sixteen beds and won’t be ready for patients until December, but the Hope Dealer women were thrilled about it. Now they wouldn’t have to drive halfway across the state every time an addict called them up.

John Aldis, who was sitting next to me during the vote, breathed a sigh of relief. He said later, “It’s like that Winston Churchill quote: ‘This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’ ”

«

One notable quote is about making Narcan (which can bring people out of an opioid coma) free: there’s some opposition from people who blame addicts for their problems.
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Apple registers new Macs and iPads in Eurasia ahead of WWDC on June 5 • Macrumors

Tim Hardwick:

»

Just five days ahead of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, where it is widely expected to announce new Macs, French website Consomac has discovered a new Russian-language regulatory filing, in the Eurasian Economic Commission database, that points towards at least five new models running macOS Sierra launching soon.

The five new Macs, identified only with the model numbers A1289, A1347, A1418, A1419, and A1481, are likely to be new 13in and 15in MacBook Pros alongside a new 12in MacBook, with the outside chance of a new upgraded MacBook Air also in the frame. At the same time, it’s worth noting that these numbers differ from the AXX prefixes attributed to current MacBook models, so nothing is completely certain until Apple makes its announcements.

As well as spare parts for the Macs, the discovered numbers also include a possible new wireless keyboard (model A1843) and four numbers classified under iOS 10 (A1671, A1709, A1670, and A1701), pointing to the possible launch of a rumored new iPad Pro model.

«

All good to hear; wireless keyboard even more interesting. Would it have TouchID (as on the MacBook Pros) and how would that be implemented?
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Crispr causes many unwanted mutations, small study suggests • New Scientist

NAME:

»

Most studies have found few if any unwanted mutations with [the amazing new gene editing technique] CRISPR. However, almost all of these studies looked for off-target changes by predicting what these were likely to be, and then seeing if they could find them.

Stephen Tsang of Columbia University Medical Center and his team have now used a more extensive method, sequencing the whole genomes of two CRISPR-edited mice, and comparing these with a non-edited control. In this way, they identified more than a thousand common mutations in the two edited mice that they think were caused by CRISPR.

This is a very small study, and we don’t know yet if other teams will get similar findings when they use the same technique.

Even if the results are replicated, the issue could turn out to be with the specific way that CRISPR was used in this instance. But if further experiments suggest there is a problem with CRISPR in general, this should still be solvable. Other teams have already modified the CRISPR/Cas9 system to reduce the risk of off-target changes, and there are many potential alternative proteins to try using with CRISPR which might turn out to have fewer unwanted effects.

«

But it’s not quite what we wanted to hear, even so.
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American retail’s fast, furious decline • National Review

Kevin D. Williamson:

»

The migration of retail out of shops and onto the Internet has been significant — last year saw online retail pass a symbolically important milestone, accounting for 51% of all purchases — but it wasn’t radical or unexpected. In fact, the retail building boom really kicked off at the same time as the rise of online commerce: in the middle to late 1990s. Which is to say, the retail-space bubble inflated in parallel with two other important bubbles: the dot-com bubble and the much more significant housing bubble.

When housing prices were skyrocketing around the turn of the century, Americans did not use all that new wealth to pay down household debt or start high-tech enterprises in their garages or anything like that: They monetized that equity and bought gigantic televisions. They bought new furniture and clothes and shoes, and the consumer-goods market began to look like another one of those can’t-miss propositions that come along and cause trouble every few years. Retailers and developers responded by building new shops and strip malls, taking advantage of millennial-era cheap money to leverage the hell out of themselves in the quest for growth and volume. They loaded themselves up with debt that is perfectly bearable when profit margins are 11% but deadly when they’re 7%.

In addition to cheap money, they also took advantage of a lot of free money: Note that even as it struggles with a zombie mall and high vacancy rates in nearby retail centers, Midwest City is using tax dollars to subsidize the development of yet more retail space on the other side of town, the world of Panera and Starbucks. More retail space means more sales-tax revenue, and if you take a short-term and relatively narrow view — the typical political view — then spending a few million dollars to make sure that whatever new conglomeration of Pei Wei, HomeGoods, and Lane Bryant is getting built gets built in your taxing jurisdiction rather than the one next door looks like a pretty good investment. Which it is.

Until it isn’t.

«

Again, the collapse of US retail is going to be one of the stories that will come upon people gradually, and then suddenly, and the economic effects have a wide blast radius. People lose jobs. Cities lose tax revenue from people and retailers. You don’t have to pull on that thread for long to see bad effects.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A curry house in London has been the target of fake news which could shut it down. Photo (of a generic curry) by thomasstache on Flickr.

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

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

Eli Pariser predicted the future. now he can’t escape it • Backchannel

Jesse Hempel:

»

Pariser’s work has led him to believe that blaming fake news for fractured discourse is a red herring. Yes, no doubt, social media is pushing stories that are just plain false. But what most people encounter online isn’t news at all. “The thing that wins now mostly has always won, and is not even news at all,” he says. “The thing that wins now is some guy surfing off his roof into a garbage container.”

The problem with online distribution, Pariser believes, is that specific, true information can’t compete with that guy surfing off his roof. “Is the truth loud enough?” he asks. “If the problem is that the truth isn’t loud enough, it points in very different directions than if the problem is that fake news is misleading people.” I caught up with Pariser last week to discuss how his notion of the filter bubble has evolved.

«

It’s a worthwhile interview. Such as this answer:

»

After the election, I felt gratified that the idea that I had put out in the world was useful to people, but also worried that people were taking it a little too far. The filter bubble explains a lot about how liberals didn’t see Trump coming, but not very much about how he won the election. I think even if you’re talking about the conservative media ecosystem, my guess is that talk-radio, local news, and Fox are a much more important piece of that story than random conservative fake news.

«

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Why I started Essential • Essential blog

Andy Rubin:

»

For all the good Android has done to help bring technology to nearly everyone it has also helped create this weird new world where people are forced to fight with the very technology that was supposed to simplify their lives. Was this what we had intended? Was this the best we could do?

I left that night reflecting deeply on what was great and what was frustrating with the current state of technology today. After another long talk with my friend we decided that I needed to start a new kind of company using 21st century methods to build products for the way people want to live in the 21st century.

The result is Essential, and this is what we believe:

• Devices are your personal property. We won’t force you to have anything on them you don’t want to have.
• We will always play well with others. Closed ecosystems are divisive and outdated.
• Premium materials and true craftsmanship shouldn’t be just for the few.
• Devices shouldn’t become outdated every year. They should evolve with you.
• Technology should assist you so that you can get on with enjoying your life.
• Simple is always better.

«

Sounds great. Reality: bezel-less screen (this year’s must-have), $699 price (or so), home thing (for the ecosystem). Overall, it could be a niche hit, but there’s nothing so far that suggests this is going to blow the world away.

That was sort of true with Sidekick and Android originally, but they seemed like crazy ideas. This one just seems blah.
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Uber fires former Google engineer at heart of self-driving dispute • The New York Times

Mike Isaac:

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Uber has fired Anthony Levandowski, a vice president of technology and the star engineer leading the company’s self-driving automobile efforts, according to an internal email sent to employees on Tuesday.

Mr. Levandowski’s termination, effective immediately, comes as a result of his involvement in a legal battle between Uber and Waymo, the self-driving technology unit spun out of Google last year. Waymo claims that Uber is using trade secrets stolen from Google to develop Uber’s self-driving vehicles, a plan aided by Mr. Levandowski, a former longtime Google employee.

Uber has long denied the accusations. But when Mr. Levandowski was ordered by a federal judge to hand over evidence and testimony to that end, he asserted his Fifth Amendment rights, seeking to avoid possible criminal charges, according to his lawyers. Uber has been unable to convince Mr. Levandowski to cooperate.

«

The soap opera continues.
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Android malware Judy’ hits as many as 36.5 million phones • Fortune.com

David Morris:

»

While the actual extent of the malicious code’s spread is unknown, Checkpoint says it may have reached as many as 36.5 million users, making it potentially the most widely-spread malware yet found on Google Play. Google removed the apps after being notified by Checkpoint.

The malicious apps primarily included a series of casual cooking and fashion games under the “Judy” brand, a name borrowed for the malware itself. The nefarious nature of the programs went unnoticed in large part, according to Checkpoint, because its malware payload was downloaded from a non-Google server after the programs were installed. The code would then use the infected phone to click on Google ads, generating fraudulent revenue for the attacker.

The infection may have spread even more widely than Checkpoint’s estimates, since not all of the extensive line of “Judy” apps are included on Checkpoint’s tally – it’s missing Fashion Judy: Magic Girl Style and Fashion Judy: Masquerade Style, among others. All installments of the series do appear to have been pulled from Google Play.

The “Judy” apps were published by an apparently Korean entity known as ENISTUDIO. However, iterations of the same attack were found on a handful of apps from other publishers.

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Coming off a slow 2016, smartphone shipment volume expected to recover in 2017 and gain momentum into 2018 • IDC

»

According to a new forecast from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, worldwide smartphone shipments are expected to rebound slightly in 2017 with expected growth of 3.0% over the previous year. In 2016, year-over-year growth was 2.5%, marking the lowest growth the industry has ever experienced. With several major devices entering the market this year, IDC anticipates shipment volumes will grow to 1.52 billion in 2017. And IDC expects this momentum to carry into 2018, when smartphone shipments are forecast to grow 4.5% year over year, fueled by improved economic conditions in many emerging markets and a full year of new iPhone shipments from Apple.

«

It’s kinda “meh”. Forecast total sales for 2017: 1.5bn. Forecast total sales for 2021: 1.74bn. That’s just 3.4% compound; the smartphone world caught fire, and now we have embers. (Also note that IDC used to be very optimistic about PC sales; then smartphones came along. Never rule out the unexpected.)
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People are creating their own fake news stories and they’re going viral • Buzzfeed

Craig Silverman and Sara Spary:

»

Shrina Begum couldn’t understand why people were calling her Indian restaurant to accuse it of selling human meat. The calls started on May 11, and by the next day Begum says she and her staff had answered hundreds of them.

“Both of our phone lines went off and people starting screaming, ‘Why are you selling human meat?’” she told BuzzFeed News.

Business at Karri Twist, her restaurant in London, soon dropped by half. Begum had to reduce hours for some staff, and she feared the business might not survive the false rumor. “During one of the calls, [my employee] managed to calm a person down to find out where they’d seen this, and they were like, it’s been sent to them via Facebook. I just couldn’t believe it whatsoever.”

Begum eventually tracked down the origin of the false rumor: A website called Channel23news.com had published a story claiming that her restaurant, Karri Twist, was caught selling human meat and that its owner had been arrested. The completely fake report, replete with spelling mistakes and the wrong name of the owner, featured a picture of Karri Twist and said nine bodies had been found on the premises in the freezer.

The story looked like any other news report when shared on Facebook, and it quickly spread on the site, as well as on Twitter and WhatsApp. People who clicked on the link were brought to a page with the story, and beside it was text that read, “You’ve Been Pranked! Now Create A Story & Trick Your Friends!” Channel23News.com’s homepage is in fact a form that enables anyone to create a fake news story, add an image, and instantly share it on Facebook…

…Channel23news.com isn’t an isolated make-your-own-fake-news site. Using domain registration records, BuzzFeed News identified two separate networks that together own at least 30 nearly identical “prank” news sites and that published more than 3,000 fake articles in six languages over the past 12 months. They’re also generating significant engagement on Facebook: The sites collectively earned more than 13 million shares, reactions, and comments on the social network in the last 12 months.

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And money. Don’t forget the money. Now view this story in the light of the following one.
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Facebook concerned over German plan to tackle fake news • Business Insider

Sam Shead:

»

In March, the German government proposed legislation to fine social media companies if they fail to remove slanderous or threatening online postings quickly. The plans were approved by Germany’s cabinet in April but they are yet to come into force.

Now Facebook has responded to the new law, which is being referred to as the “Network Enforcement Act” or “Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz” in German (NetzDG, for short).

The Californian tech giant issued a statement over the weekend explaining why the draft law “is not suitable to combat hate speech and false news.”

In the statement, Facebook says: “The draft law provides an incentive to delete content that is not clearly illegal when social networks face such a disproportionate threat of fines.”

The company added: “It would have the effect of transferring responsibility for complex legal decisions from public authorities to private companies. And several legal experts have assessed the draft law as being against the German constitution and non-compliant with EU law. Facebook is committed to working in partnership with governments and civil society on solutions that will make this draft law unnecessary.”

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Apple is working on a dedicated chip to power AI on devices • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

»

Apple devices currently handle complex artificial intelligence processes with two different chips: the main processor and the graphics chip. The new chip would let Apple offload those tasks onto a dedicated module designed specifically for demanding artificial intelligence processing, allowing Apple to improve battery performance.

Should Apple bring the chip out of testing and development, it would follow other semiconductor makers that have already introduced dedicated AI chips. Qualcomm Inc.’s latest Snapdragon chip for smartphones has a module for handling artificial intelligence tasks, while Google announced its first chip, called the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), in 2016. That chip worked in Google’s data centers to power search results and image-recognition. At its I/O conference this year, Google announced a new version that will be available to clients of its cloud business. Nvidia Corp. also sells a similar chip to cloud customers.

The Apple AI chip is designed to make significant improvements to Apple’s hardware over time, and the company plans to eventually integrate the chip into many of its devices, including the iPhone and iPad, according to the person with knowledge of the matter. Apple has tested prototypes of future iPhones with the chip, the person said, adding that it’s unclear if the component will be ready this year.

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Gurman says it’s known internally as the “Apple Neural Engine”. Makes perfect sense to put it on the phone – leave the GPU and CPU alone where possible.
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AppsFlyer helps mobile advertisers beat back ad fraud via machine learning • VentureBeat

Dean Takahashi:

»

AppsFlyer is helping mobile game and app developers deal with the severe problem of fraudulent advertising responses via third-party ad networks. In doing so, the company said it has already saved brands tens of millions of dollars since 2016.

Today, the San Francisco-based maker of mobile attribution and marketing analytics is launching Active Fraud Insights 2.0, hoping to set a new marketing industry standard for detecting fraud. The platform leverages metadata from 98% of the world’s mobile devices, and it uses proprietary advances in big data and machine learning. Ad fraud is causing an estimated $7.2 billion to $16.4 billion losses a year.

AppsFlyer’s tool can review ad network partners in an effort to combat mobile fraud, where an ad network or other party creates a fake user that tricks the advertiser into believing that a real human is downloading or using an app or game.

«

The scale of this is probably a lot bigger than we think.
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India cancels mega plans to build coal power stations due to falling solar energy prices • Indiatimes.com

Shreya Kalra:

»

13.7GW of planned coal power projects have been cancelled so far this month and this goes to show the rate of change regarding solar energy.

In January 2016, Fortum, a Finnish company, got on board to generate electricity in Rajasthan at record low prices.

The Director of energy finance studies at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis said, “For the first time solar is cheaper than coal in India and the implications this has for transforming global energy markets is profound.

“Measures taken by the Indian Government to improve energy efficiency coupled with ambitious renewable energy targets and the plummeting cost of solar has had an impact on existing as well as proposed coal fired power plants, rendering an increasing number as financially unviable.

“India’s solar tariffs have literally been free falling in recent months.” According to him investors from the world over are interested in India’s fast-growing solar market.

«

Lots of debate in the comments about how useful solar really is to satisfy base load. But nobody expects it to be base load.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Flying toasters: great screensaver (which by definition makes it hard to photograph them). Photo by calamity_sal on Flickr.

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

A selection of 8 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The lost joys of the screen saver • The Paris Review

Zack Hatfield:

»

When I first encountered Jorge Luis Borges’s “The House of Asterion,” a short story whose narrator runs with madness through an endless labyrinth, a remote feeling of déjà vu eased into one of bizarre, welcome recognition. The house’s infinite doors, its emptiness, the dizzy futility—Borges seemed to be describing a popular screen saver from the nineties. Surely you know the one, the Windows maze, that redbrick warren of untold pivots summoned by the computer monitor when no one was around.

The ending of Borges’s story, wherein the narrator is revealed as the slain minotaur of Greek mythology, only reinforced the connection; to me, screen savers have always afforded some tenuous connection to the afterlife. The first one I can remember, on my family’s household desktop, featured a crimson psychedelia that overtook the screen’s blackness, a kaleidoscope of paisleys and helixes forever in a state of irresolution. Late at night, I’d prepare an unhealthy snack and sit patiently in front of the monitor to watch it, a child beseeching death. How fitting would it be, I thought then, if we all ended up trapped behind a pane of glass roiling with pixels?

My instinct was only reaffirmed by a childhood friend’s widowed grandmother, who held onto the conviction that her husband was trying to communicate to her through her Dell’s wispy screen saver. She spent her evenings careful not to disturb the cursor, basking in her lover’s strange séance.

If screen savers still have an eschatological tinge for me, it’s also because of their own demise…

…Visually mesmerizing, intellectually engaging, and nearly decommodified, the best screen savers achieve the virtues of multiple art movements. They even make a damning statement: the faintest human touch breaks their spell. Websites like ScreenSaverGallery circumvent institutional gatekeepers by encouraging users to download a new artwork in the form of a screen saver each month. I enjoy downloading these screen savers despite their poetic futility: today, any laptop that runs a screen saver is burning more energy than it’s saving.

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A wonderful excursion through a topic that you thought you’d forgotten.
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Tesla Autopilot Review: Bikers will die • Medium

Heather Knight is a Stanford postdoc in robotics, which she will be teaching from autumn at Oregon State University:

»

C [USER-SET TARGET VELOCITY] — dangerous: autopilot seeks to achieve the cruise-control set speed as long as there is not an obstacle. this works fine on the a consistent street like a highway, but we discovered the hard way when we exited the highway onto a country road, switched autopilot on, and it tried to go from 30 to 65mph at maximum acceleration. expert users would be familiar with this, but we think tesla can do better.

A+ [SITUATION AWARENESS DISPLAY] — this display helps the human drivers have a mental model of what the car sees. I’d estimate that Autopilot classified ~30% of other cars, and 1% of bicyclists. Not being able to classify objects doesn’t mean the tesla doesn’t see that something is there, but given the lives at stake, we recommend that people NEVER USE TESLA AUTOPILOT AROUND BICYCLISTS!

C [GIANT TOUCHSCREEN] — hire UX designers, tesla!! yes, it’s a big screen. now make it intuitive to find things… it took us 5 screens to turn off the car. From a usability perspective this is a system for experts not novices.

«

She and her fellow tester also managed to lock themselves out of the car when they stepped outside to take a photo. They’d have been stuffed if they hadn’t had a phone, and service, and a friend back at base who had used the car the day before and so could unlock it remotely.

Also, the thing about cyclists. Though you’d be unlikely to engage the autopilot in a space where there are lots of (comparatively slow-moving) cyclists, would you?
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How should I vote to stop a destructive Brexit? • InFacts

»

Put your constituency in our search engine to find the candidate to vote for to stop a destructive Brexit. Don’t know the name of your constituency? Search by postcode here. We have also explained the methodology behind our recommendations.

«

Notable how there’s now a broadly available methodology for deciding how to vote tactically. In some constituencies, it’s just possible this could make a difference.
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Revealed: how Facebook chief, Sheryl Sandberg, lobbied Taoiseach Enda Kenny over data protection role and taxation • Independent.ie

Brian Carroll:

»

The documents released under the Freedom of Information Act cover 11 months of correspondence between the Taoiseach, his officials and Sheryl Sandberg [chief operating officer of Facebook].

Beginning on January 3 2014, the Taoiseach’s officials set up a one-to-one meeting between the Taoiseach and Ms Sandberg in meeting room ME22 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The meeting was to take place at 11am sharp on January 23. The correspondence reveals that Ms Sandberg sets the time of the meeting and confines it to 15 minutes because of her ‘tight schedule’.

At the meeting, Ms Sandberg lobbies Mr Kenny on taxation and on the spies issue, specifically advancing Facebook’s position in relation to proposed European Data Protection regulations. Later that evening Ms Sandberg ‘dropped by’ an IDA dinner at Davos.

Two days after the Davos meeting Ms Sandberg writes to Mr Kenny, and is sure to warn how changes to taxation or privacy laws might lead Facebook to consider ‘different options for future investment and growth in Europe’.

«

FOI is such a marvellous tool.
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How to ask the right questions when reporting on political Facebook ads • Tom Davenport

Davenport on the story in The Observer about Labour ads apparently being pushed out by Conservative ones:

»

here’s a few thoughts on how the Conservatives might have genuinely pushed out the Labour ads.

Look at the engagement numbers just above the comments in this picture.

2.5k reactions. 987 shares. 1k comments.

That’s huge engagement. And almost certainly not all from people in one location. The Conservatives will have been running this ad across the country.

High engagement, wherever it comes from, is proof to Facebook that an ad has clout. All the Conservatives then need to do is run ads across the country, turn off the weaker ads, and keep directing the ‘good’ ads to new audiences.

There’s a key technical point here. They’re not just duplicating the ad and running it to a new audience, because that would wipe the engagement every time.

They’re running the /same/ ad, with the same ID number, but to a new audience. This keeps the engagement from before, and gives it an unfair advantage with the new audience.

«

(Disclosure: Davenport helped me set up the Mailchimp email feed for The Overspill.)
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What’s that drone flying in over the horizon? It’s a scout from Islamic State • LA Times

Nabih Bulos:

»

Islamic State now has air power. It’s not the equivalent of the 2,250-pound unmanned aerial vehicles that have become a lethal mainstay for the U.S. Air Force. Instead, the extremist group is deploying simple, commercially available drones — like the one that was hovering over the Ghazlani neighborhood of Mosul in March — on missions that are subtly changing the dynamics of the war in Iraq.

Camera-equipped drones can scout out targets for mortar strikes. Small, lightweight explosives can now be delivered by air. Some Islamic State units have used drones to shoot propaganda footage.

“It’s the job of the troops in the back of the column to keep watch for drones,” said Staff Maj. Ammar Ubaidi, a member of Iraq’s elite Counter-Terrorism Service.

“They relay the specifications and ask headquarters if it’s a friendly drone. If it’s not, they warn the units in the front and start shooting.”

A member of the Iraqi Special Forces shoots his machine gun at an Islamic State militant drone in the al-Barid district in Mosul on Dec. 18, 2016. (Manu Brabo / Associated Press)
Islamic State, along with other militant factions like the former Al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, began using drones in 2014 to take footage of operations in Iraq and Syria for propaganda.

But it was Islamic State that developed their use further: According to internal documents from the group recovered in Mosul and published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, Islamic State established the Baraa bin Malek Brigade, a dedicated cadre of drone pilots that is subordinate to the group’s Committee of Military Manufacturing and Development, its R&D section.

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It is quite weird to think that small commercial drones are being battle-proven – literally. But this is what they’re really ideal for: as disposable surveillance.
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AMOLED to become mainstream smartphone panels • Digitimes Research

Jen-Chieh Yang:

»

AMOLED panels, due to superiority in color saturation, thinness and power consumption over TFT-LCD panels, have seen increasing adopted for smartphones and will eventually become mainstream smartphone, as well as a dominate solution for VR head-mounted devices (HMD), according to Digitimes Resaerch.

Global AMOLED shipments are forecast to increase from 370 million units in 2016 to 452 million in 2017 and 1.127 billion in 2021, with the corresponding penetration of smartphones to rise from 24.3% to 27.6% and 53.0%, Digitimes Research indicated.

It has so far been difficult for AMOLED panels to replace TFT-LCD units for use in smartphones because smartphone vendors except Samsung Electronics are worried about Samsung Display dominating global supply of AMOLED panels. However, China-based makers have begun producing AMOLED panels and poised to break Samsung Display’s dominance, making smartphone vendors more willing to adopt AMOLED panels for even mid-range and entry-level models. AMOLED panels based on plastic substrates also enable more flexible design for smartphones.

«

The expectation is that Apple is going to join this bunch, so it’s a safe bet.
link to this extract

“Yes, it was entertaining”: A twisted tale of Twitter trolls and fake terror victims • New Statesman

Amelia Tait:

»

When I reach out to Sam to ask why she stole the image of a 19-year-old Minnesotan man to post on her Twitter account, the first thing she says is: “Am I getting paid?” The day after the Manchester Arena bombing, Sam took the profile picture of a man named Abdulfatah and posted it alongside a 137-character tweet. “Please retweet to help find Abdul,” she wrote. “He has chemo and we’re very worried. We last heard from him before Ariana’s concert”. She rounded it off with a hashtag. #PrayForManchester.

“Please retweet to help find Abdul. He has chemo and we’re very worried. We last heard from him before Ariana’s concert #PrayForManchester pic.twitter.com/LZa91mnOtZ” — sam (@skrrtskrtt) May 23, 2017

Abdulfatah was not a victim of the Manchester bombing and nor was he at Ariana’s concert, as he has been living in Cairo for the last year. Sam’s tweet was a lie that generated (at the time of writing) 1,280 retweets, mostly from people simply trying to help after a tragic terrorist attack. Over the last few years, trolls have responded to terrorism and other catastrophes by opportunistically pretending that their friends and family are among the victims of attacks. After the Manchester bombing, a handful of accounts continued this trend – for varied reasons.

“I had no aim,” is Sam’s simple response to being asked why she posted her tweet.

Sam explains that she wants me to pay her so she can “feed [her] team”, who she says are called the Halal Gang. After explaining that I cannot ethically pay for her interview, she concedes to speak when I say that I will link to her twitter account…

«

This quickly becomes much too complex for Tait to handle without meeting any of these people face-to-face – and quite a few won’t even answer a phone, won’t provide anything that might prove their identity. It feels like 4chan playing someone for the lolz – which is roughly what one of the psychologists tells Tait, in a roundabout way.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Now you can be hacked via subtitles. Yes, really. Photo by froussecarton on Flickr.

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

A selection of 12 links for you. May contain traces of anonymous sources. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How terrorists slip beheading videos past YouTube’s censors • Motherboard

Rita Katz:

»

as I’ve stated before, terrorist propaganda comprises a lot more than the gory execution videos which detection technologies may seek to find. And, just as troublingly, terrorist groups have repeatedly found ways to bypass unwanted attention from non-supporting users and administrators.

For instance, in order to prevent users from flagging explicit or inflammatory extremist videos, terrorist media groups and disseminators like The Upload Knights and AQ’s As-Sahab Media Foundation often label YouTube videos as “unlisted,” meaning that the videos cannot be searched—only accessed if you are given the link. This feature works well to keep a video somewhat contained to supporters and prospects. They are also just as easy as any other link to find on the messaging service Telegram, though, after which they can be further disseminated on social media.

IS video (left) and AQAP video (right) uploaded to YouTube and marked as unlisted. Image: SITE

Terrorist groups also upload videos that are not the actual videos they are advertised to be. Instead, audio plays over a still image with a message at the bottom directing users to alternative links provided in the description section. Take an April 26 video from IS’ Ninawa Province for example: the image in the video reads, “The link is in the video description,” where another YouTube link is provided.

In the comments section of this YouTube upload, which was eventually removed, were several more links, making the YouTube page look a lot like a password-protected jihadi forum or private Telegram chat group.

«

Google has a really big problem on its hands, which mean we all have a big problem. And as Katz points out, it’s not just about Muslim extremists.
link to this extract

A Time to Kill iTunes • 500ish Words

MG Siegler on the news that Apple is going to make iTunes available for the Windows Store to run on Windows 10S:

»

at this point, it’s old hat to rag on iTunes. It has been so bad, for so long, that the joke is stale. And yet, somehow Apple doesn’t seem to be in on the joke. Because if they were, surely iTunes would no longer exist.

Yeah, yeah, I know such software has to exist for a huge number of users. Mainly those who still want to sync their music (and/or files) from their computer hard drives without using the cloud. It is 2017. And yet this is still a thing. And it is a thing for many people.

But there’s no reason that such software has to be iTunes. Apple could easily make a more svelte piece of software that handles the syncing tasks. And they should. Because iTunes is a bloated piece of junk.

Most of the time when I listen to music these days, I do it through my iPhone. This is true even if I happen to be using my computer. It’s just so much easier and better to play music through my device than through my desktop. Earlier this week, I found myself loading iTunes for the first time in a while to try to listen through my MacBook and it was a comedy of errors.

Pop-up alerts galore. Sign in screens. TOS updates. Then came the automatic downloads. iTunes decided I might want to download all six seasons of Lost in HD right then and there. And a bunch of other old shows. Like a terabyte of data. Even more beachballs.

«

This isn’t my experience; and iTunes is only doing what he told it to do with the downloads. The real argument about iTunes is whether it should be a single program, or many. If it were many, you’d have to sign into each one, and you’d hate it. Instead you have a single one, and it can be unwieldy. That’s why it has a search field..
link to this extract

While Android leaps forward, Samsung’s software still has trouble catching up to its hardware • XDA Developers

Daniel Marchena:

»

While everyone’s baseline for what is acceptable is different, it is hard to deny that bloated options like the Samsung Experience have a detrimental effect on device performance. I am jealous every time I watch a video showing off the HTC U11 or Google Pixel; they are just so instantaneously responsive, something my S8 cannot match even on its best days.

It’s not just the amount of added applications and services, it is also the optimization of them that matters. On your Galaxy S8 right now, there are dozens of services running that simply do not need to be there for most users, that are taking up valuable system resources, and even if the impact of them is low it is still something running that simply does not perceptibly or substantially add to our experience. These running services take up your available RAM, but more importantly are using valuable CPU time and attention. Have you ever used the the Samsung DeX system? Well, its software is running on your S8. Ever used Samsung’s woefully broken and useless “Connect” or “Bixby” services? Well, those services are running right now on your S8. Even if you have never applied a theme to your phone, there are at least two themes services that are running that have no need to be, because if disabled, your phone works exactly as it did prior to disabling them; I know, I have them disabled. If you have ever used GearVR, the Oculus suite is installed and stays running at all times, even if you haven’t used your headset in days or weeks or since a reboot. Normally most users won’t even notice one or two of these services running in the background, but when those services add up to dozens of unneeded running tasks, it quickly becomes a problem. 

Samsung’s insistence on adding a growing amount of limited use and poorly-optimized software adds little more than a bullet point during an announcement and some usefulness to a small subset of users. Inversely, its negative impact affects all users of the device even if they never use the services or even know it exists. There is a reason why one of the most common comments in Galaxy S8 reviews was the skepticism over if the device will remain responsive, because the Galaxy S6 and S7 have not aged as gracefully as their less-bloated brothers from other manufacturers, and it’s not because the S7’s Snapdragon 820 magically got slower over time.

«

link to this extract

Nintendo ramping up Switch production • Financial Times

Leo Lewis and Kana Inagaki:

»

People involved in Nintendo’s hardware supply chain say the Kyoto-based games maker is now targeting Switch hardware production of 18m units for the 12 months ending March 2018.

According to people close to the company, the production increase reflects fears of “customer tantrums” as Nintendo prepares to release its flagship Mario Odyssey game in November.

Nintendo denied that it had plans to boost production to that level, sticking to its official hardware shipment target of 10m for the console that was launched in March. But analysts have assumed for months that the company would substantially exceed that number.

Some, such as Hirotoshi Murakami at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley, believe that Nintendo is being intentionally conservative in its guidance and predicts that it will produce as many as 20m consoles by the end of the financial year.

But the company may be constrained in its effort to ramp up production by the availability of key components such as liquid crystal display screens.

The difficulty of obtaining a Switch in Japan has created a side market based on the way that some retailers offer free guaranteed bookings of product delivery on a specific date. People who have managed to secure those guarantees have found they can sell the consoles online to desperate gamers: the market price for a guaranteed Switch delivery in July, for example, has been pushed to about ¥14,000 ($126).

«

The Switch won’t be as big as the Wii (100m units lifetime) because of two differences: it doesn’t appeal to non-gamers as the Wii did, and everyone has smartphones now. But it is doing very good business for a games console.
link to this extract

As Trump’s problems mount, Breitbart’s numbers are cratering • Vanity Fair

Tina Nguyen:

»

Measuring web traffic is an inexact act, but other web-analytics companies reflect a similar, unusually steep decline in Breitbart’s traffic. ComScore estimated that Breitbart had nearly 23 million unique visitors during the month of November 2016, but only drew 10.7 million in April 2017, a 53% drop. Last month, the site had fewer visitors than it did in April 2016, when 12.3 million people visited the site. In contrast, the four sites that Breitbart benchmarked itself against saw nowhere near that drop—and, in the case of both Fox News and Buzzfeed, saw small increases in traffic since the November election…

…Other conservative media sites have also experienced declines in traffic in recent months, but none as pronounced as Breitbart’s. According to Alexa data, National Review Online, Infowars.com, The Daily Caller, and Drudge Report all saw slumps in their rankings. Over the last week, as Trump was engulfed in the Comey scandal, Fox News’s viewership dropped to third place behind CNN and MSNBC for the first time in 17 years.

At the most basic level, Trump’s struggles are producing a passion gap among news consumers. “If you’re anti-Trump, there’s never been a better time to read news. It’s like Christmas every morning,” an editor at another conservative media outlet told me. “So every time you open the newspaper or open Twitter or turn on Facebook, you get to enjoy the fact that there are a lot of other people who don’t like Trump and there’s a lot of news stories that show Trump in a negative light. Whereas if you’re Breitbart, you’re scrambling to explain or defend or continue to back the guy that you backed throughout the election. And eventually, if your posture continues to just simply be reactive and trying to explain away things that are happening to or by the president, I think people slowly become sort of disheartened by politics.”

«

The two theories pinging around social media: this one; or that it was all just bots 🙄. In the absence of conflict, Breitbart is just what it always was: a repository of the absurd which is easily contradicted and put into perspective by stepping outside the door.
link to this extract

Hacked in Translation: from subtitles to complete takeover • Check Point Blog

»

Our research reveals a new possible attack vector, using a completely overlooked technique in which the cyberattack is delivered when movie subtitles are loaded by the user’s media player. These subtitles repositories are, in practice, treated as a trusted source by the user or media player; our research also reveals that those repositories can be manipulated and be made to award the attacker’s malicious subtitles a high score, which results in those specific subtitles being served to the user. This method requires little or no deliberate action on the part of the user, making it all the more dangerous.

Unlike traditional attack vectors, which security firms and users are widely aware of, movie subtitles are perceived as nothing more than benign text files. This means users, Anti-Virus software, and other security solutions vet them without trying to assess their real nature, leaving millions of users exposed to this risk.

The attack vector relies heavily on the poor state of security in the way various media players process subtitle files and the large number of subtitle formats. To begin with, there are over 25 subtitle formats in use, each with unique features and capabilities. Media players often need to parse together multiple subtitle formats to ensure coverage and provide a better user experience, with each media player using a different method. Like other, similar situations which involve fragmented software, this results in numerous distinct vulnerabilities… To date, we tested and found vulnerabilities in four of the most prominent media players: VLC, Kodi, Popcorn Time and Stremio

«

Check Point puts the number potentially at risk in the “hundreds of millions”. There’s a video too:

A long time ago, the then video producer for Nine Inch Nails showed me how he had written a firmware hack so that playing a DVD video single (that’s how long ago it was) would load a program that would take over your DVD. But he never distributed it, because the record company pointed out they could all be done for hacking. Nowadays, of course, you download your own destruction.
link to this extract

Accused of underpaying women, Google says it’s too expensive to get wage data • The Guardian

Sam Levin:

»

Google argued that it was too financially burdensome and logistically challenging to compile and hand over salary records that the government has requested, sparking a strong rebuke from the US Department of Labor (DoL), which has accused the Silicon Valley firm of underpaying women.

Google officials testified in federal court on Friday that it would have to spend up to 500 hours of work and $100,000 to comply with investigators’ ongoing demands for wage data that the DoL believes will help explain why the technology corporation appears to be systematically discriminating against women.

Noting Google’s nearly $28bn annual income as one of the most profitable companies in the US, DoL attorney Ian Eliasoph scoffed at the company’s defense, saying, “Google would be able to absorb the cost as easy as a dry kitchen sponge could absorb a single drop of water.”

The tense exchanges in a small San Francisco courtroom emerged in the final day of testimony in the most high-profile government trial to date surrounding the intensifying debate about the wage gap and gender discrimination in the tech industry.

The DoL first publicly accused Google of “systemic compensation disparities” during a hearing in April, saying a preliminary inquiry had found that the Mountain View tech firm underpays women across positions.

«

Amazing that Google is still taking this approach, especially in view of this:

»

In one revealing exchange, Frank Wagner, the company’s director of compensation, admitted in court that if women are paid less than men in the same positions, those salary disparities can persist even if the employees perform at the same level.

Asked about a hypothetical, Wagner explained that if a female employee starts at a lower salary than a male colleague in the same job at Google, she may continue to make less even if they both excel in their first year and score the same on evaluations.

Wagner claimed that eventually, their wages would likely be adjusted to match each other: “There would be convergence over time.”

«

Is that in the same way the sun will absorb the Earth “over time”? The longer this goes on, the more Google looks like it’s covering up. The principle is weak here.
link to this extract

Qualcomm says BlackBerry award doesn’t affect legal battle with Apple • The Motley Fool

Evan Niu on the news that Qualcomm is paying $815m, plus some legal fees (which could be substantial) to BlackBerry:

»

The arbitration decision would seem to imply that there are situations where Qualcomm has been overcharging for royalties, as the decision sided with BlackBerry and the Canadian company will now receive a refund for those overpayments. That could suggest that Apple [which is suing Qualcomm over standard essential patent fees] has more of a case, if another licensee has won its own fight over royalty overpayments. However, Qualcomm reminded investors that these two cases are not related.

In its statement, Qualcomm noted: “The arbitration decision was limited to prepayment provisions unique to BlackBerry’s license agreement with Qualcomm and has no impact on agreements with any other licensee.” Qualcomm likely anticipated that there could be a tendency to connect BlackBerry’s win to Apple’s current lawsuits. The mobile chip giant said that the BlackBerry case revolved around a single issue on whether Qualcomm’s voluntary per-unit royalty cap applied to BlackBerry’s non-refundable royalty prepayments for subscriber units between 2010 and 2015.

«

If I’m reading this correctly, BlackBerry had to pay upfront back in 2010 for the number of devices it thought it was going to sell. It sold far fewer than it expected (hello BlackBerry collapse!), and so it argued that Qualcomm owed it a rebate.

This is, as Qualcomm says, an entirely different matter from whether it has been charging Apple and its suppliers too much for the licences on its standards-essential patents (SEPs). Though I wouldn’t take it as a great sign if I were Qualcomm.
link to this extract

A year of Google Maps & Apple Maps • Justin O’Beirne

»

Shortly after I published my Cartography Comparison last June, I noticed Google updating some of the areas we had focused on:

Coincidence or not, it was interesting. And it made me wonder what else would change, if we kept watching. Would Google keep adding detail? And would Apple, like Google, also start making changes?

So I wrote a script that takes monthly screenshots of Google and Apple Maps [default maps only, no personalisation]. And 13 months later, we now have a year’s worth of images:

«

The inference seems to be that Google is adding places and altering its icons, so that it looks increasingly like Apple’s – except it has more detail about places. If you like design, you’ll like this analysis.
link to this extract

The atomic bomb considered as Hungarian high school science fair project • Slate Star Codex

Scott Alexander:

»

A group of Manhattan Project physicists created a tongue-in-cheek mythology where superintelligent Martian scouts landed in Budapest in the late 19th century and stayed for about a generation, after which they decided the planet was unsuitable for their needs and disappeared. The only clue to their existence were the children they had with local women.

The joke was that this explained why the Manhattan Project was led by a group of Hungarian supergeniuses, all born in Budapest between 1890 and 1920. These included Manhattan Project founder Leo Szilard, H-bomb creator Edward Teller, Nobel-Prize-winning quantum physicist Eugene Wigner, and legendary polymath John von Neumann, namesake of the List Of Things Named After John Von Neumann.

The coincidences actually pile up beyond this. Von Neumann, Wigner, and possibly Teller all went to the same central Budapest high school at about the same time, leading a friend to joke about the atomic bomb being basically a Hungarian high school science fair project.

But maybe we shouldn’t be joking about this so much.

«

This is an amazing post, which will lead you through teaching, the Manhattan Project, genetic disease, ghettos, to an amazing conclusion, and then a coda that will leave you slightly aghast. You can find backing for his conclusion in the location of much of the startup energy in the west outside America; his coda isn’t necessarily the end.

Other material to read: Steven Pinker on a similar topic; Adam Rutherford giving his opinion on this piece (an example of Twitter at its best).
link to this extract

Sony to discontinue ‘Premium Standard’ smartphones; don’t expect a successor to Xperia X and X Compact • Xperia Blog

“XB”:

»

Sony Mobile has confirmed plans to drop the ‘Premium Standard’ segment from its future smartphone portfolio. Devices launched under this tier included the Xperia X and Xperia X Compact in 2016 – they were designed to offer a reasonable price point with an almost flagship specification.

When details of these phones were announced, many of you bemoaned the fact that these weren’t flagship devices, and it looks like this apathy translated into lacklustre sales. Whilst in Japan, these models hit 85% of its intended volume targets for the year, outside of Japan this number fell to a paltry 31%. It’s fair to say that volumes fell spectacularly short of targets – the lack of resonance outside Japan led to the company only hitting 43% of its targets in this segment globally.

Sony confirmed the news at its 2017 Investor Day, along with the fact that it will now only focus on flagship and mid-range models going forward.

«

Yes, but look at the slide from the investor day:

Basically, anything outside Japan was a bust. As the slide shows, Sony sold 14.6m units in the whole financial year, when it was hoping for 20m. Compared to Samsung, Apple, Huawei, Oppo, Vivo and even LG, It’s a sideshow – albeit the only Android OEM besides Samsung which is demonstrably profitable. (We just don’t know about Huawei, Oppo or Vivo.)
link to this extract

The world is running out of sand • New Yorker

David Owen (not the political one) with an amazing excursion through the difficulty of getting the right sort of sand for all sorts of applications:

»

One engineer I spoke to told me that transporting sand and stone for ordinary construction becomes uneconomical after about 60 miles, and that builders usually make do with whatever is available within that radius, even if it means settling for materials that aren’t ideal. In some places, though, there are no usable alternatives. Florida lies on top of a vast limestone formation, but most of the stone is too soft to be used in construction. “The whole Gulf Coast is starved for aggregate,” William Langer, the research geologist, told me. “So they import limestone from Mexico, from a quarry in the Yucatán, and haul it by freighter across the Caribbean.” Even that stone is wrong for some uses. “You can build most of a road with limestone from Mexico,” he continued, “but it doesn’t have much skid resistance. So to get that they have to use granitic rock, which they ship down the East Coast from quarries in Nova Scotia or haul by train from places like inland Georgia.” When Denver International Airport was being built, in the nineteen-nineties, local quarries were unable to supply crushed stone as rapidly as it was needed, so vast quantities were brought from a quarry in Wyoming whose principal product was stone ballast for railroad tracks. The crushed stone was delivered by a freight train that ran in a continuous loop between the quarry and the work site.

Deposits of sand, gravel, and stone can be found all over the United States, but many of them are untouchable, because they’re covered by houses, shopping malls, or protected land. Regulatory approval for new quarries is more and more difficult to obtain: people don’t want to live near big, noisy holes, even if their lives are effectively fabricated from the products of those holes. The scarcity of alternatives makes existing quarries increasingly valuable. The Connecticut quarry I visited is one of a number owned by Stanley’s company, and like many in the United States it’s in operation today only because it predates current mining regulations.

«

This is an amazing piece. Beach volleyball sand? Specialised. Desert sand? No use to anyone (grains too round). And plenty more.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

It probably got your heart rate correct, but the calories could be iffy. Photo by unexxx on Flickr.

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

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

Apple’s App Store is creating twice as many million-dollar publishers as Google Play • Sensortower

Randy Nelson of Sensortower:

»

When it comes to building a successful business, Sensor Tower’s Store Intelligence data reveals that more app publishers are achieving an important milestone on Apple’s App Store than on Google Play. Based on our analysis of in-app revenue—not inclusive of advertising revenue—nearly double the number of publishers made their first $1m in annual revenue last year on the U.S. App Store compared to Google Play. In all, 66 publishers met or surpassed this benchmark figure on Apple’s store in 2016, which was 1.7 times more than the 39 that managed the same degree of success on Google’s platform.

What’s more, as you can see in the chart above, the number of publishers who had their first $1m or greater year on the US App Store in 2016 nearly doubled over 2015, when 34 surpassed that mark in terms of annual US revenue.

While it still trails behind the App Store by this measure, Google Play grew its number of equivalent publishers on its US store considerably more than Apple’s platform in 2016, by nearly 2.8 times from 14 in 2015. This is a promising figure for Google, which, when combined with the impressive year-over-year revenue growth we’ve witnessed from its platform over the past few quarters, signals that developers are enjoying a growing measure of success monetizing on Google Play.

«

That “not inclusive of advertising revenue” could be significant. Note too that these are first-time million-dollar earners (47% on iOS and 75% on Android are games). This goes against the general narrative that you can’t make any money from apps. But this isn’t a lot of organisations – 105, if there’s no overlap.
link to this extract

MH17: a darker truth • Medium

Mark Zee:

»

This will be uncomfortable reading, but [MH-17 being shot down over Ukraine] was a preventable tragedy.

As industry experts, we’ve comforted ourselves knowing that “Nobody considered that civil aircraft, at cruising altitude, were at risk” (Dutch Safety Board report). When fingers were pointed at Malaysia Airlines for overflying a war zone, we were quick to tell the public “Not fair. Everybody else did as well”.

We were all apparently operating under the same misguided reassurance that this was a war going on underneath the airways, and that cruising at 33,000 over the top of it would be just fine. As an airline pilot at the time, I did the same as everyone else using the eastern Ukraine routes, and monitored the conflict beneath us with interest on each flight, but without concern.
But what if we could have known — what if the risk information was actually there, but for some reason we weren’t seeing it?

Well, it was.

International aviation uses a simple system to tell pilots essential flight information: NOTAMS. Notices to Airmen. An average 3 hour flight will have 20 pages of them, and they look like this:

«

It is, as he clearly explains, a case where complexity has run away from comprehensibility – with potentially disastrous results.
link to this extract

China’s Lenovo to reboot after losing PC crown to HP • WSJ

Kathy Chu:

»

Lenovo has axed at least 2,000 U.S. jobs since buying Motorola. The company continues to lose talent because some employees are unsure about the company’s direction, said a handful of insiders, who declined to be named because they aren’t authorized to speak publicly.

A Lenovo spokesman said that the company’s attrition rates are in line with the industry and Lenovo has been adding new talent, signs that “morale has improved and that Motorola continues to be a place where technology-loving employees want to work.”

Kitty Fok, IDC’s managing director for China, cautioned against reading too much into Lenovo losing its No. 1 position in the PC market to HP. The first calendar quarter is traditionally Lenovo’s weakest quarter, so this slide may only be temporary, Ms. Fok said.

Meanwhile, even though Lenovo’s smartphone business is still not profitable, its global shipments are stabilizing, according to Strategy Analytics executive director Neil Mawston. Lenovo holds only a 1% market share in China, but is growing rapidly in India, where its market share has risen to 9% from 7% in the past year, according to the research firm.

“For Lenovo at the moment, China is a dark cloud, the U.S. is a gray cloud, while India is a sunny day,” said Mr. Mawston.

The analyst said that if Lenovo can cut costs further and continue to expand in India, its smartphone business could return to profitability by 2018.

«

Since Lenovo acquired Motorola in October 2014, smartphone profitability has always been just six months away. Meanwhile that division has had eight straight quarters of operating losses.
link to this extract

May 2012: Post-traumatic life expectancy of phone vendors • Asymco

Horace Dediu, back in May 2012:

»

RIM [since renamed to BlackBerry] has just entered what I call the Post-traumatic period of a phone maker’s life. This period is defined as beginning with a loss-making quarter and ending  with the company’s exit from the business. These post-traumatic periods were visualized first here and the pattern was first discussed about a year ago here.

I’ve updated the chart with the current data and added the bar chart below to illustrated the “post-traumatic life expectancy” for the companies shown. Companies still operating are shown with bars without color while companies that have exited are shown with solid color bars.

The pattern may be that companies either have short post-trauma lives of about two to three years or relatively long post-trauma lives lasting 4 to 5 years. What determines this life expectancy and how long do RIM, Nokia and LG have?

There is precious little data, but perhaps one hypothesis I could offer could be that the bigger the commitment to the industry (in terms of having no fall-back options) the longer the post-traumatic period lasts. In other words, as there is no easy way out, the fight lasts longer.

This can also be interpreted using Porter’s “barriers to exit” force analysis where companies which can liquidate a division see it as a low cost of exit whereas companies that need to restructure (usually more than once) and then seek either a buyout or rescue may interpret exit as a very costly endeavor.

«

Nokia and RIM both exited; Motorola was acquired and sold and acquired; Sony bought out Ericsson; the stubborn one, in that respect, is LG, which first fell into loss at Q4 2009, and is still going (with losses).
link to this extract

Land ownership map • Who owns England?

»

Who owns land is one of England’s most closely-guarded secrets. This map is a first attempt to display major landowners in England, combining public data with Freedom of Information requests. To follow the investigation and help us fill in the gaps, visit the Who Owns England? blog.

The map also displays some data for Wales and Scotland, where landowners’ data includes this; our project is focused on England. Investigation by Guy Shrubsole, map by Anna Powell-Smith.

«

But of course Powell-Smith would be involved – she does great mapping/data stuff. “Overseas companies” own nearly a quarter of a million acres, in some very odd places.
link to this extract

China censored Google’s AlphaGo match against world’s best Go player • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

»

DeepMind’s board game-playing AI, AlphaGo, may well have won its first game against the Go world number one, Ke Jie, from China – but but most Chinese viewers could not watch the match live.

The Chinese government had issued a censorship notice to broadcasters and online publishers, warning them against livestreaming Tuesday’s game, according to China Digital Times, a site that regularly posts such notices in the name of transparency.

“Regarding the go match between Ke Jie and AlphaGo, no website, without exception, may carry a livestream,” the notice read. “If one has been announced in advance, please immediately withdraw it.” The ban did not just cover video footage: outlets were banned from covering the match live in any way, including text commentary, social media, or push notifications.

It appears the government was concerned that 19-year-old Ke, who lost the first of three scheduled games by a razor-thin half-point margin, might have suffered a more damaging defeat that would hurt the national pride of a state which holds Go close to its heart.

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Bet they found out anyway. AlphaGo won the second match as well, even though Ke played the first 50 moves “perfectly” – in AlphaGo’s judgement, at least. I expect playing against it is something like Kasparov found against Deep Blue: you can expect a human to err under pressure, but there’s no emotion on the other side of the board, which pushes that liability of mistiming a move back onto you, the human.
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Bitcoin surges 11% to all-time high above $2,700 • CNBC

Evelyn Cheng:

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At Thursday’s record, Bitcoin has now gained more than 45% since last Thursday and more than 180% for the year so far.

“There is no question that we are in the middle of a price frenzy,” said Brian Kelly of BKCM LLC and a CNBC contributor, in a note to clients Thursday. “There will be a correction and it could be severe, but it’s unclear if that correction will start from current prices of $2700 or from some place much higher.”

Kelly manages a hedge fund focused on digital currencies.

The globally, 24-hour traded asset swept past $2,400 and $2,500 on Wednesday Eastern Time, following a late Tuesday announcement that brought some resolution to a heated debate about the future development of the digital currency. The Digital Currency Group said in an online Medium post that 83% of bitcoin miners supported a “Bitcoin Scaling Agreement” for a specific technological upgrade.

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This is all quite bonkers; it seems untethered by any rational explanation. So maybe we just treat it as an irrational speculative product.
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Fitness trackers accurately measure heart rate but not calories burned • Stanford Medicine

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Millions of people wear some kind of wristband activity tracker and use the device to monitor their own exercise and health, often sharing the data with their physician. But is the data accurate?

Such people can take heart in knowing that if the device measures heart rate, it’s probably doing a good job, a team of researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine reports. But if it measures energy expenditure, it’s probably off by a significant amount.

An evaluation of seven devices in a diverse group of 60 volunteers showed that six of the devices measured heart rate with an error rate of less than 5%. The team evaluated the Apple Watch, Basis Peak, Fitbit Surge, Microsoft Band, Mio Alpha 2, PulseOn and the Samsung Gear S2. Some devices were more accurate than others, and factors such as skin color and body mass index affected the measurements.

In contrast, none of the seven devices measured energy expenditure accurately, the study found. Even the most accurate device was off by an average of 27%. And the least accurate was off by 93%.

“People are basing life decisions on the data provided by these devices,” said Euan Ashley, DPhil, FRCP, professor of cardiovascular medicine, of genetics and of biomedical data science at Stanford. But consumer devices aren’t held to the same standards as medical-grade devices, and it’s hard for doctors to know what to make of heart-rate data and other data from a patient’s wearable device, he said.

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Here’s the graphic on energy expenditure (which was measured using oxygen consumption). Fitbit Surge did best, followed by Microsoft Band, and then Apple Watch – though the researchers say overall “of the devices tested, the Apple Watch had the most favorable error profile while the Samsung Gear S2 had the least favorable error profile”.

Why the variability? The researchers note that “10,000 steps have been observed to represent between 400 kilocalories and 800 kilocalories depending on a person’s height and weight”. That’s a lot of variation in how our bodies burn energy.
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Gatwick Airport launches indoor navigation system to help passengers find their way • The Next Web

Matthew Hughes:

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Serving the London region, Gatwick Airport is the UK’s second busiest airport, after London Heathrow. As you’d expect, it’s a gargantuan place, and getting around its two massive terminals can be a nightmare.

To ameliorate this, Gatwick has taken the unusual step of installing 2,000 bluetooth-powered beacons that tell passengers where they are in the airport’s two terminals.

The beacons are the product of a collaboration with London startup Pointr, and are accurate to three meters — so pretty damn accurate.

The first incarnation of the system shows travelers where they are on a digital map, with their location visualized as a blue dot. Gatwick eventually intends to introduce an augmented reality system that guides users with turn-by-turn directions, using real-world visual data.

At first, Gatwick plans to integrate this network of beacons into its own app, and is in talks with airlines about sharing access to the data.

Conceivably, this could be used to tell passengers that they’re running late, or help the airline to figure out whether to offload luggage if a late passenger is far away.

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Your basic augmented reality (AR) implementation.
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New Penn research assesses financial viability of municipal fiber networks • Penn Law

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Using industry standard financial analysis tools on five years of official data, the study finds that 11 out of the 20 fiber networks assessed do not generate enough cash to cover their current operating costs and only two out of the 20 are on track to recover their total project costs during their 30-40 years of expected useful life. Key findings include:

• 11 of 20 projects studied are cash-flow negative, many substantially so.
• 5 of the 9 cash-flow positive projects are generating returns that are so small that it would take more than a century to recover project costs.
• 2 of the 9 cash-flow positive projects would have a recovery period of 61-65 years, beyond the expected useful life of a fiber network.
• Only 2 of the 20 projects studied earned enough to expect to cover their project costs during the useful life of the networks, one of which is an outlier that serves an industrial city with few residents.
• The analysis also models the returns for a hypothetical project, finding it would take over 100 years to recover expected project costs. 

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That’s all reasonable enough within itself (this is only municipally-funded, ie debt-funded, networks, not Google Fiber et al). But I wonder if it’s not too shallow in that the full report ignores positive externalities that might arise. Many of these are in low-density population areas: it could be that having high-speed internet preserves the population base (which is important in other ways to a municipality), or even serves to attract businesses and others to the area, which would create a positive feedback effect. In the short term, high-speed broadband (especially if there’s a delta compared to a neighbouring area) can even shore up property prices. So it’s not just about the obvious bottom line. (The report’s author told me by email that he hoped the findings so far would feed into Ofcom assessments; and that a further study comparing similar areas which did and didn’t go for superfast broadband could be worth doing.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified