Turns out you really shouldn’t make phone calls using your left hand. There’s science and everything. Photo by Viewminder 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 13 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Sex toys and the Internet of Things collide—what could go wrong? • Ars Technica

David Kravets:

»

It was only a matter of time before the Internet of Things caught up with sex toys and led to products like apps that remotely control vibrators from an Apple or Android device via a Bluetooth connection.

And now, one of those apps is accused of being a little too connected to its users.

Standard Innovation—the maker of the We-Vibe vibrator and accompanying app—is the subject of a federal privacy lawsuit. The suit, which seeks class-action status, claims the We-Vibe vibrator app chronicles how often and how long consumers use the sex toy and sends that data to the company’s Canadian servers. The suit says that the app also monitors “the selected vibration settings,” the vibrator’s battery life, and the vibrator’s “temperature” with consumer consent. The data, along with the person’s e-mail address, is stored on the vibrator-maker’s Canadian servers, according to the lawsuit. (PDF)

«

What. The. Actual.
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This girl isn’t real, and it’s proof that CGI isn’t creepy anymore

Juan Buis:

»

Japanese artists Teruyuki Ishikawa & Yuka Ishikawa — otherwise known as Telyuka — started a project in 2015 to create an extremely realistic computer-generated schoolgirl. Her name is Saya, and she has been improved on since then.

This is the 2016 version:

And now 2015:

«

It is quite weird. Only static photos – but very convincing ones.

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The cost of scaling… • OUseful.Info, the blog…

Tony Hirst picked up on a former Google Reader product manager’s Twitter musings on how he had failed to get it to “Google scale” – that is, 100 million users:

»

As a service, Google Reader allowed users to curate their own long form content stream by subscribing to web feeds (RSS, Atom). When it shut down, I moved my subscriptions over to feedly.com, where I still read them every day.

If, as the [Twitter] thread above suggests, Google isn’t interested in “free”, “public” services with less than 100m – 100 million – active users, it means that “useful for some”, even if that “some” counts in the tens of millions, just won’t cut it.

Such are the economics of scale, I guess…

«

link to this extract

Adblock Plus finds the end-game of its business model: selling ads • Ars Technica

Joe Mullin:

»

Eyeo GmbH, the company that makes the popular Adblock Plus software, will today start selling the very thing many of its users hate—advertisements. Today, the company is launching a self-service platform to sell “pre-whitelisted” ads that meet its “acceptable ads” criteria. The new system will let online publishers drag and drop advertisements that meet Eyeo’s expectations for size and labeling.

“The Acceptable Ads Platform helps publishers who want to show an alternative, nonintrusive ad experience to users with ad blockers by providing them with a tool that lets them implement Acceptable Ads themselves,” said Till Faida, co-founder of Adblock Plus.

Publishers who place the ads will do so knowing that they won’t be blocked by most of the 100 million Adblock Plus users. The software extension’s default setting allows for “acceptable ads” to be shown, and more than 90% of its users don’t change that default setting.

«

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
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Someone is learning how to take down the internet • Schneier on Security

Bruce Schneier:

»

Recently, some of the major companies that provide the basic infrastructure that makes the Internet work have seen an increase in DDoS attacks against them. Moreover, they have seen a certain profile of attacks. These attacks are significantly larger than the ones they’re used to seeing. They last longer. They’re more sophisticated. And they look like probing. One week, the attack would start at a particular level of attack and slowly ramp up before stopping. The next week, it would start at that higher point and continue. And so on, along those lines, as if the attacker were looking for the exact point of failure.

The attacks are also configured in such a way as to see what the company’s total defenses are. There are many different ways to launch a DDoS attacks. The more attack vectors you employ simultaneously, the more different defenses the defender has to counter with. These companies are seeing more attacks using three or four different vectors. This means that the companies have to use everything they’ve got to defend themselves. They can’t hold anything back. They’re forced to demonstrate their defense capabilities for the attacker.

I am unable to give details, because these companies spoke with me under condition of anonymity.

«

If Bruce is concerned, we all should be concerned.
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British AI start-up Weave becomes Silicon Valley target • FT.com

Madhumita Murgia:

»

Silicon Valley is once again raiding British expertise in artificial intelligence, with early stage start-up Weave.ai the latest target of takeover talks for US tech groups.

Founded last year in London, Weave.ai has only eight employees and has raised just $200,000 to date, from seed investors including start-up accelerator Techstars. Its team includes four AI engineers, whose goal is to build a system that makes smartphone assistants like Siri or Google Assistant more human-like.

British AI talent has been particularly attractive to the world’s biggest companies, including Google, Microsoft and Apple. In 2014, Google paid $400m for DeepMind, a London start-up that did not have a product for sale at the time, but is now arguably a world leader in AI, with a team of more than 250 academic experts. Last year, Apple acquired UK-based speech technology start-up VocalIQ.

Microsoft paid $250m in February this year for Swiftkey, the London-based maker of a predictive keyboard. In June, Twitter paid $150m to acquire London-based Magic Pony, a 14-person start-up that had only raised seed funding.

Weave.ai is in discussions with “multiple parties” on the US west coast to close a deal imminently, according to sources close to the talks.

Last year, Weave, which is still in undercover “stealth” mode, demonstrated a beta service that could analyse messages on a smartphone and provide contextual assistance. For instance, a tweet about the Age of Ultron film brought up links to buy tickets at a cinema chain and information about the film — very similar to Google’s Now on Tap feature.

«

link to this extract

Why Apple needed 10 days to respond to the Pegasus hack • Fortune

Jeff John Roberts:

»

Apple has a terrific reputation when it comes to security. That’s why it was such a shock to learn last month that hackers found a way to break in to the company’s famous iPhones, and even take over the camera and microphone features without a user even knowing it.

Apple released a software patch on Aug. 25 that users could download to protect their iPhones from the sinister spyware known as “Pegasus.” The patch process, however, took the company a full 10 days to finish after security researchers tipped off the company about the problem. Given the gravity of the situation, did Apple drag its feet?

«

Whaaaaat?? Only someone with no knowledge of programming, security or quality assurance could honestly write a sentence like that. To find, fix, verify and roll out a patch for a system vulnerability in that time strikes me as impressive – but then again, that’s just my impression. It can take me a day to debug a few lines of code.

But guess what? The piece doesn’t ask how quickly other phone platforms have reacted to similar infiltrations, never even whether those have been spotted. How has Android fared with Stagefright? Have there been vulnerabilities for Windows Phone or BB10? You’ll never find out from pieces like this.
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Samsung’s quick fix for Galaxy Note 7 is no full recharge • Associated Press

Youkyung Lee:

»

Samsung plans to issue a software update for its recalled Galaxy Note 7 smartphones that will prevent them from overheating by limiting battery recharges to 60%.

The front page of the Seoul Shinmun, a South Korean newspaper, carried a Samsung advertisement on Tuesday announcing the software update for any users of the Note 7 who may be disregarding its recall notice and continuing to use the smartphone.

“It is a measure to put consumer safety first but we apologize for causing inconvenience,” the advertisement by Samsung Electronics said. The update for South Korean users will start Sept. 20, it said.

«

And Bloomberg has the cause of the problem:

»

The Korean company outlined the preliminary findings in a report to the country’s technology standards agency that hasn’t previously been released. Initial conclusions indicate an error in production that placed pressure on plates contained within battery cells. That in turn brought negative and positive poles into contact, triggering excessive heat. Samsung however stressed that it needed to carry out a more thorough analysis to determine “the exact cause” of battery damage.

«

link to this extract

A Galaxy Note 7 didn’t explode in a child’s hands after all • AndroidAuthority

Jimmy Westenberg on the story from the weekend about an injury caused by an exploding phone:

»

As it turns out, that exploding smartphone wasn’t a Galaxy Note 7 after all – it was a Samsung Galaxy Core Prime. In an interview with NBC New York, John Lewis, the six-year-old boy’s grandfather, said the entire family has Samsung phones and initially told reporters the exploding phone was, in fact, a Galaxy Note 7. The boy’s mother later clarified that the exploding phone was a Galaxy Core Prime, not the recalled Note 7.

This certainly isn’t good news for Samsung, nor does it take away what happened to the Lewis family. Still, this is an important detail. The Galaxy Core Prime has a removable battery and basically no history of battery problems. And while all the details are still trickling in, it’s important to note that there seems to be no relation between the exploding Galaxy Core Prime and the Note 7.

«

What’s not clear is whether this is good or bad news for Samsung. It’s still a Samsung phone that burnt someone. But was it a Samsung battery?

Even if it wasn’t, the Note 7 has (it turns out) had more than 70 “overheating” incidents in the US alone. This is more than a trivial recall.

Edgy element to all this is that Apple has used Samsung’s SDI subsidiary for some batteries. And SDI made the Note 7 batteries. If.. well, let’s just wait and see.
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iOS 10: the Pixel Envy review • Pixel Envy

Nick Heer:

»

Let’s get something out of the way upfront: iOS 10 is a big release. It’s not big in an iOS 7 way, with a full-system redesign, nor does it introduce quite so many new APIs and features for developers as iOS 8 did. But it’s a terrific combination of those two sides of the spectrum, with a bunch of bug fixes tossed in for some zest.

«

This is a very, very thorough review. One to read while your device downloads and updates, perhaps.
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Poking at Apple’s updated Photos app • WriteKay

Kay Yin:

»

Photos app recognises and distinguishes the following 7 facial expressions. Expressions are distinguished after forming a “faceprint”. These distinction are used for searching. They are also rated and indexed for generation Memories and montages.

»

Greedy, Disgust, Neutral, Scream, Smiling, Surprise, Suspicious

«

Photos app will generate Memories that falls within the following 33 categories. Default name of the memory will be automatically generated using metadata from the photos and tags from analysis of photos.

»

Memories from areas of interest, Best of past memories, Memories that break out of routine, Celebration in history, Contextual memories, Crowd, Day in history, Holiday in history, Location of interest, Nearby, New contextual memories, New memories, Person’s Birthdays, Person’s memories, Recent events (calendar, crowd, holiday, people, person, social, trip, weekend), Region of interest, Social group memories, Sometime memories, Special memories, Favourited, Trips, Week in history, Weekend, Year summary, Last week, Last Weekend

«

Photos app supports detecting 4,432 different scenes and objects. These scenes or objects can be searched for in all languages.

«

Put like that, not bad.
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Your smartphone performs better in one hand than the other • Quartz

Akshat Rathi:

»

If you’ve got an iPhone, you’re likely to get better reception if you hold it in your right hand (and right ear) during a call. That’s the conclusion of a report (pdf), commissioned by the Nordic Council of Ministers, that analyzed how effectively different smartphones caught and sent radio signals.

To many of us, our black slabs are nothing but magical devices. They catch and send invisible signals, let us browse the internet and keep in touch with our friends and family. The radio signals that enable these devices to work wirelessly are caught and sent by antennas which, in the modern incarnation of smartphones, have been hidden inside the body.

However, hiding them inside comes with a usability cost. The users of these smartphones have no idea where the antenna is and thus they cannot knowingly keep it clear of obstructions. Phone companies won’t always reveal where they are and taking one apart doesn’t help, because each manufacturer puts the antenna in a different place. The result is that holding your phone in a certain hand can have a large impact on how effectively your phone’s antenna works.

«

The report makes interesting reading, and also looks at how good various phones and tablets are for data downloads. Overall the message seems to be: use headphones to make your phone call. Now, wired or wireless headphones..?
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Turn off location services? Go ahead, says Google, we’ll still track you • The Register

Kieren McCarthy:

»

Google, it seems, is very, very interested in knowing where you are at all times.

Users have been reporting battery life issues with the latest Android build, with many pointing the finger at Google Play – Google’s app store – and its persistent, almost obsessive need to check where you are.

It’s not clear why Google would insist on its app store having constant access to your location, but the company is very determined about it. Following reports earlier this year that the Google Play app was interfering with other apps’ ability to use GPS, Google has updated the software and now makes it impossible to turn off location tracking.

The same is true of Google Maps. Although it makes far more sense for Maps to have access to your location, the latest build doesn’t give you the option of turning it off. To do that, you have to turn off GPS on your phone altogether.

In effect, if you use either of Google’s two most popular apps – which come pre-loaded with Google’s flavor of Android – the company has permanent access to your location.

«

link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Looks innocent, but it could kill your computer. Photo by FotoDB.de on Flickr.

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A selection of 12 links for you. Minimal risk of explosion. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Spotify conversions accelerate as it passes 39m subscribers • Musically

Stuart Dredge:

»Spotify’s last official figure for its subscribers total was 30m in March 2016.

Now we have a new figure – 39m Spotify subscribers – courtesy of the company’s new global head of creator services Troy Carter. He let the figure slip in an interview with Billboard yesterday.

It’s a significant statistic, because it shows that Spotify has accelerated its subscription growth. It took the company just over nine months to move from 20m to 30m subscribers, adding roughly 1.1m a month.

Now it has added another 9m subscribers in just five months since March, at a rate of 1.8m a month.

«

“Let slip”, hmm, sure. Compare to Apple’s just-announced 17m: together they’re carving up the space (they’ve together added 36m users since June 2015, which is more than Spotify had then), but there’s now an expectation that Amazon and Pandora (in the US) will try to offer cheaper subscriptions to capture users.
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Editorial: Apple’s AirPods, iPhone 7, Series 2 Watch out… journalists • Apple Insider

Daniel Eran Dilger is quite annoyed with The Meeja in general, but this stuff about Motorola and Samsung had passed me by:

»Apple introduced a new product—a pair of wireless headphones in a charging case—that stoked “outrage” in that the product is small enough to misplace or lose. This was an entirely new epiphany the tech media—and meme authors at Reddit—collectively appreciated in common.

Never before had small electronic devices posed such an obvious loss threat to affluent consumers. Certainly not this summer when Motorola introduced its more expensive and even smaller (but poorly reviewed) VerveOnes+; nor when Samsung unveiled its similarly more expensive Gear IconX buds, which aren’t standard Bluetooth buds and won’t work with iOS devices.

Did you even notice that Apple’s AirPod pricing was about 20% less than similar offerings from Motorola and Samsung? No journalists seemed to. Apple’s also appear to work better, and they can function as standard Bluetooth devices with Android and Windows, albeit lacking the special sauce magic that enhances the experience on Apple Watch, iOS and Macs.

Apple’s Bluetooth headset for the 2007 iPhone. Familiar, huh?

This LossGate issue also wasn’t a thing way back in 2007 when Steve Jobs introduced Apple’s similarly sized Bluetooth headset for the original iPhone. Suddenly, however, almost ten years later we have devolved into a society of buffoons who can’t manage to hold onto anything, at least if its something that’s sold by Apple.

«

He’s right: the Motorola VerveOnes+ cost at least $182, and Samsung’s Gear IconX are priced at over £200 in the UK. Compare the AirPods, which are $159/£159 (*grinds teeth*).
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This new USB stick that anyone can buy destroys almost anything it is plugged into • Inc.com

Joseph Steinberg:

»When the USB Killer is inserted into a USB port of a laptop, television, printer, or any other USB-enabled piece of electronics, it rapidly charges small capacitors within it from the USB power source to which it is connected. When the capacitors are fully charged (which can take less than a second), the device quickly discharges the power over its data lines – thereby sending an unexpected surge of power into the device to which it is connected. The USB Killer repeats this cycle as long as it is plugged in – but even the first discharge is likely to damage many electronic devices. (Note: The USB Killer website seems to be going down periodically – perhaps someone is trying to prevent the device from being sold.)

Security experts have long been cautioning about the danger to electronic devices posed by leaving USB ports uncapped. In the past we have focused primarily on the risk of someone sticking into a computer some USB device infected with malware — and the resulting risk to information security – but, now, the physical risk once considered small other than in the case of highly sensitive systems targeted by advanced attackers, may become widespread.

The makers of the USB Killer claim that their device can kill 95% of devices with USB ports – but Apple laptops are not included in the 95%. Apple, they say, has already implemented technology to protect its products – a security move that is certainly commendable.

«

Or courageous. Buy one now. Or just get a USB-C cable. That’ll fry something for sure.
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Facebook fails to halt legal bid over nude teenager photo • BBC News

»Facebook has failed in a bid to halt legal action over a naked photograph of a 14-year-old Northern Ireland girl being posted on the site.

Lawyers for the child claim the picture was blackmailed from her and repeatedly published online as a form of revenge.

The girl is taking legal action against Facebook and the man who posted the photo in what is believed to be the first case of its kind in the world.

A judge in Belfast refused Facebook’s bid to end proceedings.

The case will now advance to full trial at a later date.

«

You can see how this would make an algorithm fizz to complete meltdown. “Naked nine-year-old girl OK? Naked 14-year-old girl bad? WHYYYYY??”
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What will the iPhone 8 be made of? • Quora

Brian Roemmele’s reckons it will be a zirconia-alumina ceramic, and goes through lots of reasons why (such as: its new top-end Watch is made of that):

»One can see Apple is using a Zirconia powder with Alumina. This is for color but also for heat transference. As mentioned above this coincides with what I mentioned above about increasing thermal conductivity of Zirconia ceramics.

Apple Watch Edition Series 2 has replaced the solid gold original Watch Edition that sold for $17,000. Apple Watch Edition Series 2 sells for about $1,200 and is now the premium level for the device. Apple is suggesting luxury with the use of this material at this point.

One could argue that the premium price could signal that the iPhone made of Zirconia ceramic would be more costly based on this example. However in my analysis the production cost of high yield Zirconia ceramic in sufficient quantities to produce a unibody in the form factor of the current iPhone 7 would actually be less costly than the current manufacturing, milling and CNC machining of the unibody in Aluminum for the iPhone 7, in high production.

Thus we have the basis for the next generation of the iPhone, but perhaps all Apple devices including the iPad, MacBook Pro and other others. The reasoning is very simple: the benefits of Zirconia ceramic are especially useful for any modern computer device.

«

Strong but, crucially, transparent to radio of all flavours, good for heat dissipation, scratch resistant. Not sure about ease of manufacture, though. A good one for the rumour mill, and so soon after the latest release..
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This is why Apple got rid of the headphone jack on the iPhone 7 • New Scientist

Frank Swain:

»Ditching the headphone jack allows the iPhone 7 to shrink even slimmer, and losing a hole makes the phone more water resistant. But this is also the latest case of Apple using its flagship product to bring a tech trend to the masses – get ready for “hearables” doing battle for the ownership of your ears.

I’ve been using similar technology since 2014, when Apple paired with Starkey Hearing Technologies to produce the world’s first set of smartphone-connected hearing aids, the Starkey Halo. The software means I can take calls and listen to music directly via my hearing aids. The codec that Apple developed for these devices, which allowed audio streaming over low-energy Bluetooth for the first time, now appears in the AirPods.

A handful of start-ups have released devices that aim to take hearables even further. New York firm Doppler Labs offers the Here One, a pair of outsized earplugs that auto-tune your environment to play you a more aesthetically pleasing version. And German company Bragi has the Dash, a wireless “smart earphone” that incorporates a music player, pedometer, pulse rate monitor, and much more.

«

“Hearables” has a sort of ring to it. Neat that this was in accessibility systems first, then made more widely available.
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Arizona fell hard for Theranos’ bluff • tucson.com

Tim Steller was there as it happened, because he was shadowing the Arizona House Speaker, David Gowan, for the day:

»She arrived in a huge black SUV accompanied by several bodyguards and the requisite local lobbyists. It was an impressive show.

By that time, the outline of her story was well-known. Holmes, now 32, had dropped out of Stanford at 19 to pursue an idea: Medical information for the masses without the need of a doctor’s order. Her key technology was a device called Edison that allowed complete blood testing taken from a finger stick and a few drops rather than the multiple vials patients normally must give.

In the conference room next to Gowan’s office last March, Holmes reeled off the names of some members of her politically illustrious board — former secretaries of state George Shultz and Henry Kissinger among them. She told the dozen or so legislators and aides present that her goal was to “create free-market competition to drive prices down and increase transparency.”

At that, Gowan perked up and said, “You’re talking to free-market-minded people here, so you’re talking in the right tone.”

She also reeled out a personal story that she must have told thousands of times. Her uncle, whom she grew up adoring, had gotten skin cancer, which quickly turned to brain cancer, and then he died. Even then it struck me that the catch in her voice as she told the story might have been deliberate, though I dismissed my doubts as too cynical.

“We want to build operations here that can serve as a national model,” she said.

The bill she was supporting, HB 2645, sponsored by Rep. Heather Carter, opened up the laboratory testing business, so that individuals could get tests without a doctor’s order. The idea is, abstractly speaking, a noble one: People might get a diagnosis earlier if they can access labs themselves, before symptoms show. Already, though, the state health department allowed patients to get a limited number of tests on their own.

«

As Steller points out, there was one crucial question that the legislators omitted to ask in their zeal for free-market-mindedness. And have they learnt from that omission? Have they hell.
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HP is buying Samsung’s printer business for $1.05bn • TechCrunch

Jon Russell:

»HP is buying Samsung’s printer business for $1.05 billion in a move aimed at “disrupting” the dusty and stale printing industry.

The deal will see Samsung’s Printing Business Unit spun out independently, with HP picking up full 100% ownership in the business. The companies estimate it will take one year to close, pending the usual regulatory scrutiny, and, upon doing so, Samsung will make a reciprocal investment of between $100 million and $300 million into HP’s business.

Samsung’s printer divisions employs around 6,000 people — around 1,300 of whom are in R&D — with 50 sales offices across the world and a production base that is located in China. In addition to that business, which recorded nearly $1.8 billion in revenue last year, HP will also get its hands on a “compelling” portfolio of around 6,500 printing patents.

«

Nice that HP still thinks the printer business isn’t being disrupted. Though at the A3 paper size level, perhaps it isn’t. (Samsung’s printer business is part of its Consumer Electronics division, not its IT and Mobile division.)
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Recalled Samsung phone explodes in little boy’s hands • New York Post

C.J. Sullivan, Shawn Cohen and Tom Wilson:

»A six-year-old Brooklyn boy suffered burns when one of Samsung’s recalled Galaxy Note 7 smartphones exploded in his hands — and his grandmother says he’s too scared to go near any other devices.

The boy was using the phone at home in East Flatbush Saturday night when it suddenly burst into flames, his grandmother said Sunday.

“The child was watching videos on the phone when the battery exploded,” Linda Lewis said of her grandson.

“It set off alarms in my house.”

«

Makes sense: video and games work the processor hard (all those pixels to shift, plus computation). But the fact these people didn’t know about it? This is becoming serious. Children are more likely to use the phones for this sort of thing.

Meanwhile, Samsung has lost $25bn in value since all this began.
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Spin this: we need to actually address the consumer need • Digital Content Next

Chris Pedigo:

»Apple recently announced a fairly big change [coming in iOS 10] in their “Limit Ad Tracking” setting. Going forward, when a consumer activates the setting, the Identifier For Advertising (IDFA) will be set to 0. Thus, advertisers and ad tech companies would no longer be able to track that device across apps or websites and over time. While Apple asked companies to honor the “Limit Ad Tracking” setting before, it was hard (maybe impossible) to know whether companies actually complied. Now the setting has some teeth.

In response, ad tech lobbyist Alan Chapell is accusing Apple of giving consumers a way to opt out of advertising altogether. Naturally, as someone who advocates on behalf of publishers on these kinds of privacy issues, I had some initial reactions.

First, it’s absolutely ludicrous to say this is an opt out of advertising. Certainly it’s an opt out of behaviorally targeted advertising. But, the ads aren’t being blocked – they can still be served. What’s more the advertiser can still know that the ad has been served, where it was served and how it performed – companies would have a number of other options to derive this data. But let’s be clear: Advertisements can and will continue to be served. Apple’s change simply allows consumers to stop third party companies (with which they have no relationship) from using their IDFA to track everything they do on their device.

«

Chapell’s piece is headlined “Do consumers have a right to opt out of advertising?” and begins “The arms race between consumers and advertisers goes back as far as I can remember.” You’d think he’d get the hint. He does address the question at the end: he thinks not.
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Microsoft looks set to “end sales” of Lumia phones this December, director mentions Surface Phone – WinBeta

Jack Wilkinson:

»According to an employee at the company, who wishes to remain anonymous, the company is preparing to “end sales” of the range this year, December 2016. It does, however, seem a little odd to actually end sales, instead, we believe that Microsoft will be ending production of its Lumia devices. This latest piece of information fits in line with recent actions from the company, where it has permanently cut the prices of many of its Lumia devices over the past few months. This seems to be an effort to sell off remaining stock and coincides with December being the final month since the price cuts have become larger as time has progressed…

…There’s also been the issue of how Microsoft has been offering its Lumia devices on its Microsoft Store website and in physical stores. Over the past few weeks, several people have stated that the physical Microsoft Stores have been moving their Windows phone collections into smaller areas and out of the way from customers. For its website, the company removed the link to its Lumia range from its homepage in the US, while subsequently changing it on its other regional sites from Lumia to Windows phones.

We reached out to Microsoft regarding these findings. The company declined to comment on the ending of its Lumia range, stating only that there’s “nothing to share” at the moment. They suggested keeping an eye on their Microsoft Store page for the latest Windows phones.

«

The dream goes on of a “Surface Phone”, but it would probably sell in smaller numbers even than the Surface laptablet. And that would be a money-loser. Satya Nadella doesn’t seem enamoured of the idea.
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Dell Technologies to cut at least 2,000 jobs after EMC deal • Bloomberg

Dina Bass:

»Dell Technologies plans to cut about 2,000 to 3,000 jobs after acquiring EMC Corp. in the largest technology acquisition ever, according to people familiar with the company’s plans.
The reductions are planned for later this year and will be mostly in the US and in areas such as supply chain and general and administrative positions, as well as some marketing jobs, said the people. They asked not to be named because the dismissals aren’t public yet.

Dell is looking for cost savings of about $1.7bn in the first 18 months after the transaction but is largely focused on using the deal to boost sales by several times that amount, the people added. The new company has 140,000 employees.

“As is common with deals of this size, there will be some overlaps we will need to manage and where some employee reduction will occur. We will do everything possible to minimize the impact on jobs,” Dave Farmer, spokesman for Dell, wrote in an email. “We expect revenue gains will outweigh any cost savings, and revenue growth drives employment growth.”

«

When I started out reporting on tech, on a trade paper, one quickly learnt that with any merger there would be (1) an uncomfortable merging of different admin systems, usually bringing incompatibility and screwups (2) job losses as the victors took the spoils. Plus ca change.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What happens after you give up your Fitbit? Photo by Ian D on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. It takes courage. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

One year later: Can Android 7.0 Nougat save the Pixel C? • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo, pointing out that the Pixel C team had essentially said “yeah, Nougat, that’ll make it good”:

»

In the year 2016, do Android tablet apps still suck? To answer this, I installed the top 200 apps on the Pixel C and gave them all a quick test drive. I looked at apps only—not games—using this “Top Apps only” Play Store list. The idea is that games scale just fine on tablets; it’s apps that are the challenge.

Of the top 200 apps:

• 19 [9.5%] were not compatible with the Pixel C
• 69 [34.5%] did not support landscape at all
• 84 [42%] were stretched-out phone apps
• 28 [14%] were, by my judgment, actual “tablet” apps

That there aren’t many tablet apps isn’t a surprise to most people. What was a shock was the lack of landscape support in so many apps. More than 33% of the top 200 were all landscape, all the time, and many more (even some Google apps) had interstitials and other single screens that didn’t support landscape.

Android apps are primarily used on phones, which are primarily used in portrait mode. The Pixel C primarily lives in landscape mode, though—the cameras, physical buttons, microphones, and speakers are oriented with the expectation of landscape, and the device must be in landscape in order to use the physical keyboard. When compared to the phone market, this is a very rare configuration that creates a problem in apps that most people won’t notice.

«

Of course the iPad only got split screen functionality a year ago – and some apps don’t work in it. But the number that do work in tablet form is a lot higher than 14%. Amadeo is pretty damning about the indifference of developers to Android tablet apps – and indeed Google: “Google keeps producing and marketing flagship tablets, though, and it keeps trying to get away with a blown-up phone UI”, he says at one point.
link to this extract

Life after Fitbit: guilt or relief? • Futurity

Jennifer Langston-Washington:

»

Most people [who had abandoned Fitbit use] preferred social comparisons that made them look better than their peers, such as “you walked more than 70% of people,” over those that were framed negatively, such as “30% of people walked more than you”—even if the comparisons represented the same information.

The team also found that people who felt guilty about abandoning their Fitbit use were very receptive to recommendations that they return to tracking, while people who felt they had gotten what they had wanted out of self-tracking felt those same suggestions were judgmental and unhelpful.

The responses show that a one-size-fits-all design approach misses opportunities to support different types of users.

“Right now self-tracking apps tend to assume everyone will track forever, and that’s clearly not the case,” says coauthor James Fogarty, associate professor of computer science and engineering. “Given that some people feel relief when they give it up, there may be better ways to help them get better value out of the data after they’re done, or reconnect them to the app for weeklong check-ins or periodic tune-ups that don’t presume they’ll be doing this every day for the rest of their lives.”

«

See the full report.
link to this extract

Apple threatens more than 750,000 apps • appFigures

Ariel Michaeli:

»

Apple seems to be moving very quickly with this cleanup. Thousands of apps have already been removed. We’ll be releasing a report in the next few days with details.

Yesterday Apple launched a slew of goodies to get excited about. Less known however, is that Apple also introduced new rules for developers that go into effect immediately and threaten new and existing apps alike.

The new rules state that apps can’t have names that are longer than 50 characters and that existing apps that are outdated will be removed immediately.

What’s the magnitude of these new requirements? We used Explorer to dig through all iOS apps and here’s what we found.

«

11% of apps with overlong names (over 50 char) – principally games, and about a quarter (more than 550,000) haven’t been updated in more than two years, and again it’s games which are in the crosshairs.

So seems like a ton of games are about to vanish. Also: 62% of the outdated apps are paid-for. (Makes sense – paid apps are soooo 2012.)

Wonder if Google would ever consider a cleanout like this. Certainly a strange thing for Apple to be able to “we’ve got fewer apps than before!”
link to this extract

Overcast trying ads, dark theme now free • Marco.org

Marco Arment on his podcasting app’s business model change:

»

There’s still money in some software, especially if it helps people get their work done, but the market for most consumer apps is much more like music, video, news, opinion, and web services than traditional indie software: an overwhelming supply of free choices, many of which are great or good enough, making it hard for anyone with a paywall to succeed.

The content industries figured out the solution a long time ago. If 97% of my users can’t or would rather not pay, but they spend substantial time in the app every day, the solution is probably ads.

Ads are the great compromise: money needs to come from somewhere, and the vast majority of people choose free-with-ads over direct payment. Ads need not be a bad thing: when implemented respectfully, all parties can get what they want.

Most podcasts played in Overcast are funded by ads for this reason, and as a podcaster and (occasional) blogger myself, I already make most of my income from ads.

«

Reminder: about a year ago Arment offered one of the first iOS 9 adblockers, Peace (a paid-for app), which he then withdrew on the basis it made him uncomfortable to make money off blocking ads.
link to this extract

Why print news still rules • POLITICO magazine

Jack Shafer:

»

The newspaper has refined its user interface for more than two centuries. Incorporated into your daily newspaper’s architecture are the findings from field research conducted in thousands of newspapers over hundreds of millions of editions. Newspaper designers have created a universal grammar of headline size, typeface, place, letter spacing, white space, sections, photography, and illustration that gives readers subtle clues on what and how to read to satisfy their news needs.

Web pages can’t convey this metadata because there’s not enough room on the screen to display it all. Even if you have two monitors on your desk, you still don’t have as much reading real estate that an open broadsheet newspaper offers. Computer fonts still lag behind their high-resolution newsprint cousins, and reading them drains mental energy. I’d argue that even the serendipity of reading in newsprint surpasses the serendipity of reading online, which was supposed to be one of the virtues of the digital world. Veteran tech journalist Ed Bott talks about newsprint’s ability to routinely surprise you with a gem of a story buried in the back pages, placed there not because it’s big news but because it’s interesting. “The print edition consistently leads me to unexpected stories I might have otherwise missed,” agrees Inc. Executive Editor Jon Fine. “I find digital editions and websites don’t have the same kind of serendipity—they’re set up to point you to more of the same thing.”

«

link to this extract

Amazon has a potent weapon in the tablet wars: low prices • The New York Times

Nick Wingfield :

»

five years after unveiling that first tablet, Amazon is coming out with a new model of the device that takes the company’s single-minded obsession with offering the lowest practical price to new extremes.

It is doing so at a time when the overall tablet market is no longer the growth juggernaut it once was, with weak sales from the likes of Apple and Samsung. One notable exception to the downward trend is Amazon, which is seeing sales rise because its devices are so inexpensive.

“They’re obviously doing something right because they continue to grow in a market that is overall declining,” said Jitesh Ubrani, an analyst at IDC, the technology research company.

The latest Amazon tablet is the Fire HD 8, a new model of the company’s 8-inch touch-screen device.

«

Amazing that an IDC analyst couldn’t point out that the tablet market segments very simply: the high end, where the profit is and people use the tablets for many purposes, and the low end, where profit is usually negative (unless, say, you have a gigantic e-commerce and music/video store attached) and the principal use is watching video.
link to this extract

Samsung Galaxy Note 7 users should stop using and charging them, CPSC says • WSJ

Josh Beckerman:

»

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said Friday that Samsung Electronics Co.’s Galaxy Note 7 smartphone users should power them down and shouldn’t use or charge them, citing reports of fires involving lithium-ion batteries in some of the devices.

The move follows a Thursday warning from the Federal Aviation Administration saying the phones shouldn’t be used on planes “in light of recent incidents and concerns.”

The CPSC said it is “working cooperatively” with Samsung to formally announce an official recall as soon as possible. The agency said it “is working quickly to determine whether a replacement Galaxy Note 7 is an acceptable remedy for Samsung or their phone carriers to provide to consumers.”

Investors on Friday wiped more than $10 billion off Samsung’s market value following the FAA’s announcement as airlines issued warnings to their passengers about the phones.

«

This hurried product release – Samsung put it out in August to try to get ahead of Apple’s iPhone launch – has turned into an expensive fiasco. The recall isn’t that expensive, but the reputational hit is likely to linger.
link to this extract

Internet of things struggles as use of smart home gadgets flatlines • Daily Telegraph

James Titcomb:

»

Deloitte’s research, due to be released next month in its annual Mobile Consumer Survey, also shows modest adoption of connected security cameras and smart home appliances, at 3% and 2% respectively.

A greater percentage of those surveyed said they intended to purchase a smart device in the next year, with 7% planning to upgrade to a smart thermostat and 6% to a surveillance camera. However, this showed little change from Deloitte’s survey of a year ago, when the intention to upgrade was 6% and 5% respectively.

Paul Lee, Deloitte’s head of technology, media and telecoms research, said that at present, connected gadgets are too expensive and do not do enough for the vast majority of people to justify buying them.

“Some of them aren’t resonating well because they offer too little,” he said. “The ability to micromanage the temperature in your house doesn’t appeal to the mainstream, and the savings aren’t significant enough to upgrade.”

«

Full survey comes out this month.
link to this extract

WaveNet: a generative model for raw audio • DeepMind

»

This post presents WaveNet, a deep generative model of raw audio waveforms. We show that WaveNets are able to generate speech which mimics any human voice and which sounds more natural than the best existing Text-to-Speech systems, reducing the gap with human performance by over 50%.

We also demonstrate that the same network can be used to synthesize other audio signals such as music, and present some striking samples of automatically generated piano pieces.

«

I had been wondering how long it would be before DeepMind got to work on music. The stuff here is quite amazing. The DM-generated voice is really very impressive. And I’d like a playlist of the autogenerated music, please, for background music.
link to this extract

Revealing Dropbox’s dirty little security hack • Apple Help Writer

Phil Stokes made a little discovery:

»

If you have Dropbox installed [on a Mac], take a look at System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Accessibility tab (see screenshot above). Notice something? Ever wondered how it got in there? Do you think you might have put that in there yourself after Dropbox asked you for permission to control the computer?

No, I can assure you that your memory isn’t faulty. You don’t remember doing that because Dropbox never presented this dialog to you, as it should have:

That’s the only officially supported way that apps are allowed to appear in that list, but Dropbox never asked you for that permission. I’ll get to why that’s important in a moment, but if you have the time, try this fascinating experiment: try and remove it.

Ok, you say, no problem. We all know how to do that – open the padlock [on the Accessibility tab], un-click the checkbox. Click the ‘-‘ button to remove it from the list. Simple, right? Look there it goes, no more Dropbox in the the Preferences panel, right?

Wrong…like a bad penny it’ll be back again before you know it. Either log out and log back in again or quit Dropbox and restart it. Dropbox will surreptitiously insert itself back in to that list AND the checkbox will be checked. That’s the magic of Dropbox for you. If you don’t want to try it for yourself, watch me do it:

«

Initially Stokes reckoned the only way to get rid of this – which, as he points out, leaves your machine wide open to a hack by Dropbox, or by someone who hacks into Dropbox (remember all those passwords from 2012 that got stolen?) – was to remove Dropbox. But he discovered a simpler way. So you can keep using Dropbox, but securely.

His followup post, on how Dropbox does it (it’s nefarious, all right) is worth reading too. Dropbox has since updated its explanation page for why it wants the password.. but doesn’t explain all the hacking that goes on.

Question for Windows users: does the same apply?
link to this extract

If you want to switch carriers, buy Verizon’s iPhone 7 • PC News

Sasche Segan points out that there are two models of iPhone 7, and one doesn’t work on CDMA networks (as used by Verizon and Sprint):

»

the secret may lie in this Bloomberg story saying that Apple moved to Intel modems for some number of iPhones, which would be the AT&T and T-Mobile models. We reported this rumor as far back as 2015, and it was widely echoed in the financial and trade press in mid-2016.

That would mean that while the Sprint, Verizon, Japanese, and Chinese units are probably running Qualcomm’s X12 modem, which is the same one used in the Samsung Galaxy S7 and other top smartphones right now, the AT&T and T-Mobile models probably use Intel’s XMM7360. Intel’s modems don’t support CDMA.

Please understand that this is all (informed) speculation. I’m getting radio silence from Apple right now, and Qualcomm, Intel, and all of the carriers have just pointed me back to Apple for comment.

If Apple has gone with Intel, that’s Apple getting back to its roots. The first iPhones used modems from Infineon, which was purchased by Intel and became Intel’s modem division. But I’m a bit concerned because while the X12 is the current gold standard for modems, we’ve never seen the XMM7360 in any US phone, although it’s been on the market since late 2015. So we don’t know anything about the real-world performance of the XMM7360 versus the X12. That’s relevant because a phone’s modem, which controls its connection to the Internet, is a very, very important part.

Intel’s XMM7360 does not support the newest network features like 256 QAM and 4×4 MIMO, which are part of T-Mobile’s latest network upgrades. But those features are optional on the X12, so Apple’s X12 may not support them either. We don’t know.

«

This is the sort of thing, though, that would be horrendous to discover after the fact as a phone buyer. But Apple’s probably not going to go with an “Intel Inside” sticker.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Even without seeing all of your face, you can be recognised by automated systems. Photo by simcsea 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. Aren’t they all? I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Dear Mark. I am writing this to inform you that I shall not comply with your requirement to remove this picture. • Aftenposten

Espen Egil Hansen is – well, let him explain:

»

Dear Mark Zuckerberg.

I follow you on Facebook, but you don’t know me. I am editor-in-chief of the Norwegian daily newspaper Aftenposten. I am writing this letter to inform you that I shall not comply with your requirement to remove a documentary photography from the Vietnam war made by Nick Ut.

Not today, and not in the future.

The demand that we remove the picture came in an e-mail from Facebook’s office in Hamburg this Wednesday morning. Less than 24 hours after the e-mail was sent, and before I had time to give my response, you intervened yourselves and deleted the article as well as the image from Aftenposten’s Facebook page.

To be honest, I have no illusions that you will read this letter. The reason why I will still make this attempt, is that I am upset, disappointed – well, in fact even afraid – of what you are about to do to a mainstay of our democratic society.

First some background. A few weeks ago the Norwegian author Tom Egeland posted an entry on Facebook about, and including, seven photographs that changed the history of warfare. You in turn removed the picture of a naked Kim Phuc, fleeing from the napalm bombs – one of the world’s most famous war photographs.

«

Fake news? Fine! Real news? Uh-uh.
link to this extract

Apple will not give first-weekend sales of iPhone 7 • Reuters

Julia Love:

»

Apple will not release first-weekend sales of its new iPhone 7, the company said on Thursday, making it harder for analysts to get a read on the product’s prospects amid questions over whether its popularity has peaked.

The company decided to stop the practice because the number of phones sold during the period has become more a reflection of Apple’s supply than demand, a company spokeswoman said, when asked whether Apple will be releasing the figure.

“As we have expanded our distribution through carriers and resellers to hundreds of thousands of locations around the world, we are now at a point where we know before taking the first customer pre-order that we will sell out of iPhone 7,” Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet said. “These initial sales will be governed by supply, not demand, and we have decided that it is no longer a representative metric for our investors and customers.”

«

Pretty surely indicates a peak.
link to this extract

LG’s G series will keep toying around with the modular concept • CNET

Roger Cheng:

»

When LG introduces a concept, it will stubbornly stick with it.

The company did so with the rear power button, as well as the curved display. Its latest experiment came in the G5, which featured modular attachments that can be swapped in and out, providing a camera grip and better audio capabilities.

While the G5 fared poorly with consumers, LG is sticking with the modular concept in the subsequent generation, according to LG spokesman Ken Hong.

The news comes as LG introduces the V20, a phone that is more conventional than its more experimental sibling. The V20 is supposed to have a souped-up phone, a removable metal back and sharp display. But nowhere is there an option to plug in different attachments.

«

Stubbornly stick with losing money on a flawed concept. But you go ahead, LG.
link to this extract

Beyond the iPhone • Stratechery

Ben Thompson:

»

The truly wireless future that [Jony] Ive hinted at doesn’t just entail cutting the cord between your phone and your headphones, but eventually a future where phones may not even be necessary. Given that Apple’s user experience advantages are still the greatest when it comes to physically interacting with your device, and the weakest when it comes to service dependent interactions like Siri, that is a frightening prospect.

And that is why I ultimately forgive Schiller for his “courage” hubris. To Apple’s credit they are, with the creation of AirPods, laying the foundation for a world beyond the iPhone. It is a world where, thanks to their being a product — not services — company, Apple is at a disadvantage; however, it is also a world that Apple, thanks to said product expertise, especially when it comes to chips, is uniquely equipped to create. That the company is running towards it is both wise — the sooner they get there, the longer they have to iterate and improve and hold off competitors — and also, yes, courageous. The easy thing would be to fight to keep us in a world where phones are all that matters, even if, in the long run, that would only prolong the end of Apple’s dominance.

«

link to this extract

‘Faceless recognition system’ can identify you even when you hide your face • Motherboard

Joshua Kopstein:

»

In a new paper uploaded to the ArXiv pre-print server, researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Saarbrücken, Germany demonstrate a method of identifying individuals even when most of their photos are un-tagged or obscured. The researchers’ system, which they call the “Faceless Recognition System,” trains a neural network on a set of photos containing both obscured and visible faces, then uses that knowledge to predict the identity of obscured faces by looking for similarities in the area around a person’s head and body.

The accuracy of the system varies depending on how many visible faces are available in the photo set. Even when there are only 1.25 instances of the individual’s fully-visible face, the system can identify an obscured faced with 69.6% accuracy; if there are 10 instances of an individual’s visible face, it increases to as high as 91.5 percent.

In other words, even if you made sure to obscure your face in most of your Instagram photos, the system would have a decent chance identifying you as long as there are one or two where your face is fully visible.

«

You knew there would be a neural net in there somewhere.
link to this extract

How Google Analytics ruined marketing • TechCrunch

»

Marketers in the high-tech world who use phrases such as “social media marketing,” “Facebook marketing” and “content marketing” do not understand the basic difference between marketing strategies, marketing channels and marketing content. And Google Analytics is to blame.

In the just over 10 years since the release of the platform in November 2005, too many tech marketers now ignore the difference between strategies and channels, favor digital channels that often deliver lower returns than traditional channels and think that direct responses are the only useful ROI metric.

And all of that is wrong.

«

It’s a long piece – save it for when you have some time – but Scott works in marketing and communications.
link to this extract

Why the iPhone 7 Plus’s dual cameras are a big deal • VentureBeat

Jordan Novet:

»

San Francisco street photographer Ken Walton spent some time with the [Huawei] P9 earlier this year, and he liked the dual cameras. “It’s really, really making all the difference,” he told me in an interview. “I finally feel like I could do real work — like, a serious photograph.”

Developers of third-party photo applications will also be impacted. “When you use the AVCaptureDevice class for video or photo capture, you can choose to use the dual camera device to gain these features, or to specifically use only the wide-angle or telephoto camera for more manual control,” Apple says in its developer documentation.

On top of all that, the iPhone 7 Plus is the first iOS device to get a dual-lens camera. Until now, the feature has been limited to Android devices. Inevitably iPhone and iPad devotees will be curious — many will want to try it and find out if the excitement is justified.

«

link to this extract

What’s really missing from the new iPhone: cutting-edge design • The New York Times

Farhad Manjoo with a thoughtful piece:

»

Two years ago, the designer Khoi Vinh, a former design director for The New York Times who now works at Adobe, summed up Apple’s design prowess this way: “If there’s a single thread that runs through nearly every piece of Apple hardware, it’s conviction, the sense that its designers believed with every fiber of their being that the form factor they delivered was the result of countless correct choices that, in totality, add up to the best and only choice for giving shape to that particular product.”

But in assessing the iPhone 6, then new, Mr. Vinh felt Apple had gone astray. Whereas the iPhone 5 had sharp, sophisticated lines that set it apart from everything else, “the iPhone 6’s form seems uninspired, harkening back to the dated-looking forms of the original iPhone, and barely managing to distinguish itself from the countless other phones that have since aped that look,” he wrote.

That was in 2014. Now, two years later, we still have the same basic iPhone design. For years, Apple has released a redesigned iPhone every other year, but now we’re going to go three years without a new iPhone look.

And while Apple has slowed its design cadence, its rivals have sped up. Last year Samsung remade its lineup of Galaxy smartphones in a new glass-and-metal design that looked practically identical to the iPhone. Then it went further. Over the course of a few months, Samsung put out several design refinements, culminating in the Note 7, a big phone that has been universally praised by critics. With its curved sides and edge-to-edge display, the Note 7 pulls off a neat trick: though it is physically smaller than Apple’s big phone, it actually has a larger screen.

«

There’s a subtle tension here. Critical observers – and to some extent the public – want new versions of these things to look different, so that we can see the progress. But the evolution of the smartphone form factor has been so intense over the past nine years that the only change remaining has to be incremental – evolutionary, not revolutionary – because, hell, how much can you change a button and some rectangular glass? If you put out the iPhone 5 now, it would look ugly and harsh. The Note 7 is a great design, but if you’d seen it in 2007 you’d have recognised its parent.

Another facet of Manjoo’s argument is the mouse that recharges in its belly, and the pencil you charge by sticking into the iPad like a rectal thermometer, and the battery pack that makes the iPhone look pregnant. Notice how all three are about charging; wireless charging would remove those embarrassments. And then notice how the new AirPods and the Apple Watch don’t have charging ports. Trends…
link to this extract

When your boss is an algorithm • Financial Times

Sarah O’Connor:

»

This protest outside the UberEats office in south London on August 26 is one of the first industrial disputes to hit the city’s so-called gig economy. It is a strange clash. These are workers without a workplace, striking against a company that does not employ them. They are managed not by people but by an algorithm that communicates with them via their smartphones. And what they are rebelling against is an app update.

UberEats launched in London in June, promising “the food you want, from the London restaurants you love, delivered at Uber speed”. In a bid to recruit self-employed couriers to ferry food from restaurants to customers, UberEats initially offered to pay £20 an hour. But as customer demand increased, the company began to reduce pay. By August, the couriers were on a piece rate with a fiddly formula: £3.30 a delivery plus £1 a mile, minus a 25% “Uber service fee”, plus a £5 “trip reward”. Then, one day, the couriers woke up to find the app had been updated again. The “trip reward” had been cut to £4 for weekday lunch and weekend dinner times, and to £3 for weekday dinner and weekend lunch times. Outside those periods, it had been cut altogether.

“They tricked us,” roars a man called Manou over the din, hunching over the handlebars of his motorbike. Like many experienced couriers, he left his job with a different delivery company because Uber was offering better pay. Not any more. “They make us feel like they can just use us and destroy us and create new tools,” he says. Imran Siddiqui, one of the leaders of the protest, says he feels bad because he had encouraged other couriers to sign up for UberEats before they changed the pay. “If they don’t resolve this strike it’s going to spread like a fire.”

«

But was it really an algorithm, or a human tweaking an algorithm? I shade towards the latter.
link to this extract

Google given more time to reply to EU antitrust charge on Android • Reuters

Foo Yun Chee:

»

Alphabet’s Google has been given two more weeks to counter EU antitrust charges that it uses its dominant Android mobile operating system to block competitors, the European Commission said on Thursday.

The EU competition enforcer in April accused the U.S. technology giant of harming consumers because of its demand that mobile phone makers pre-install Google Search and the Google Chrome browser on their smartphones to access other Google apps.

Google was initially given until July 27 to respond to the charges but asked for an extension to Sept. 7.

“On Android, the last deadline set by the Commission for Google’s reply, after an extension request by Google, is Sept. 20,” a European Commission spokesman said in an email.

«

Fine. And what’s happening with the search antitrust charges? The EC is making glaciers look like headlong madcap sprinters. Everything seems to have been decided; so what are we waiting for, exactly?
link to this extract

Australian airlines ban use of Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phones after battery fires • Reuters

Tom Westbrook:

»

Three Australian airlines have banned passengers from using or charging Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy Note 7 smartphones during flights due to concerns over the phone’s fire-prone batteries.

Qantas, its budget unit Jetstar and Virgin Australia said they had not been directed to ban the use of the phone by aviation authorities, but did so as a precaution following Samsung’s recall of the phones in 10 markets.

Although customers will still be able to bring the phones on flights, the ban extends to the phones being plugged in to flight entertainment systems where USB ports are available.

The recall follows reports of the 988,900 won ($885) phone igniting while charging – an embarrassing blow to Samsung, which prides itself on its manufacturing prowess and had been banking on the devices to add momentum to a recovery in its mobile business.

«

This is just going to roll on and on for the Note 7. And try this one:

»

A Florida man says that his Note 7 ignited while charging in the center console of his Jeep Grand Cherokee, and that the vehicle was thoroughly destroyed in the ensuing fire.

Nathan Dornacher had only had his new smartphone for four days. He says he was unaware of the recall.«

link to this extract

Apple’s headphone changes signal problem for airlines, IFE • Runway Girl

»

As Apple kills off the 3.5mm headphone jack from the iPhone 7, a significant issue for airlines looms: a sizable proportion of their passenger base will no longer by default have a set of 3.5mm headphones to carry with them for use in the in-seat IFE system.

Apple will include a set of wired headphones, but with its own proprietary Lightning connector replacing the 3.5mm jack. The company, alongside many other retailers, will sell Bluetooth headphones as well.

The #PaxEx problem is this: while 3.5mm headphones were the standard, passengers with Apple smartphones could reasonably be expected to pop their headphones into their carryon and use them with the latest airline IFE systems. For iPhone 7 users and beyond, that will no longer be the case.

For the airlines that do not provide headphones, and for passengers who prefer to use their own to the airlines’ often cheap versions, this is a big issue.

It would seem that there are three general sets of options for airlines.

«

Hand out headphones; add Lightning jacks to seats; add Bluetooth to seats. Pretty sure I know which of those is cheapest. (And what’s with “a sizable proportion will no longer have 3.5mm headphones”? Unless the expectation is that Android OEMs will follow suit, which is possible but is going to take years.)
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

It’s the iPhone 7! Probably. Photo by tuaulamac on Flickr.

A selection of 15 links for you. Yeah, well, just do your best. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The hype — and hope — of artificial intelligence • The New Yorker

Om Malik:

»

Michelle Zhou spent over a decade and a half at I.B.M. Research and I.B.M. Watson Group before leaving to become a co-founder of Juji, a sentiment-analysis startup. An expert in a field where artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction intersect, Zhou breaks down A.I. into three stages. The first is recognition intelligence, in which algorithms running on ever more powerful computers can recognize patterns and glean topics from blocks of text, or perhaps even derive the meaning of a whole document from a few sentences. The second stage is cognitive intelligence, in which machines can go beyond pattern recognition and start making inferences from data. The third stage will be reached only when we can create virtual human beings, who can think, act, and behave as humans do.

We are a long way from creating virtual human beings. Despite what you read in the media, no technology is perfect, and the most valuable function of A.I. lies in augmenting human intelligence…

…Using Zhou’s three stages as a yardstick, we are only in the “recognition intelligence” phase—today’s computers use deep learning to discover patterns faster and better. It’s true, however, that some companies are working on technologies that can be used for inferring meanings, which would be the next step. “It does not matter whether we will end up at stage 3,” Zhou wrote to me in an e-mail. “I’m still a big fan of man-machine symbiosis, where computers do the best they can (that is being consistent, objective, precise), and humans do our best (creative, imprecise but adaptive).”

«

link to this extract

Intel, TPG to form jointly-owned, cybersecurity company called McAfee • ZDNet

Stephanie Condon:

»

Intel has reached a deal to sell a majority stake in Intel Security to the private equity firm TPG, creating a jointly-owned, pure-play cybersecurity company called McAfee, Intel announced Wednesday.

Intel will get $3.1bn in cash for the deal, as well as a 49% stake in the new business. TPG will own the remaining 51% and will make a $1.1bn equity investment in the business. The transaction values Intel Security at $4.2bn.

Intel Security general manager Chris Young will be appointed CEO of the new company once the transaction closes. Young published an open letter to Intel Security’s stakeholders on Wednesday, outlining the benefits of the deal.

«

Bought it for $7.7bn in 2011. A relevant detail that somehow fell out of the story. So it gets $3.1bn and has 49% of $4.2bn, or $2.1bn: that’s $5.2bn. In other words, $2.5bn of value vanished in five years.
link to this extract

Facebook’s ‘Trending’ feature exhibits flaws under new algorithm • WSJ

Georgia Wells:

»

After “trending” became automated on Aug. 26, Facebook replaced all headlines with a keyword, which users can hover over for a description of the story.

Some of the keywords don’t accurately represent the main topic of the news story. News recently labeled “The Hamptons” was about presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s recent fundraising efforts there.

The credibility of “trending” news took a hit in the past week. It featured a story from conservative site EndingtheFed.com about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly that falsely claimed that Fox News fired Ms. Kelly because she secretly supported Mrs. Clinton for president.

A Fox News spokeswoman said the story was an “egregious mistake.” EndingtheFed.com said it isn’t responsible for the content that appeared on its site because it was taken from another site, Conservative101.com. Conservative101.com didn’t respond to a request for comment.

A Facebook spokeswoman said the story met standards because there was a sufficient number of articles about it.

«

“Exhibits flaws” is one way to put it.
link to this extract

The “secret browser” inside iOS 10 • Recode

David McIntosh:

»

With iOS 10, people will have access to apps within iMessage that allow them to seamlessly add a visual layer to the messages they send — everything from disappearing text to animated GIFs, stickers and videos. These apps are invoked natively from within iMessage, and can tap into many of the same OS-level capabilities as an app that sits on your homescreen. Beyond exposing a tray of app icons inside iMessage, the platform enables users to send fully programmable apps (“MSMessages”) that are embedded in iMessage conversations that, when tapped, invoke a fully programmable and dynamic screen.

Apple is not the first to introduce this type of platform; Kik launched one of the first HTML5 Messaging platforms back in 2013, and Facebook Messenger pioneered messaging platforms. However, Apple brings two unique powers to bear: It owns and operates the largest and most-used messenger in North America as well as the underlying operating system itself, putting the company in a strong position to dominate the industry.

As more people take their conversations from the public web into private conversations via messengers, there’s an enormous opportunity for a new category of services as well as a threat to products that rely on public sharing and the web.

«

You mean Google, don’t you, David?
link to this extract

Apple iPhone 7 Plus camera: Dual camera tech explained • Pocket-lint

Mike Lowe:

»

Pro photographers love their background blur, known as bokeh, which depends on wide apertures (and subject distance and focal length, to varying degrees) to produce that soft background and popping subject depth.

Now Apple wants to extend bokeh to the masses (or fauxkeh, given that it’s digitally produced) by using both the iPhone 7 Plus’s cameras in one. The 23mm (equivalent) wide-angle lens can be compared to the 56mm (equivalent) tele lens to create a depth map, with close-up subjects rendered in focus, more distant objects out of focus and the faux effect added.

We’re yet to see any manufacturer produce a perfect bokeh in post-production – HTC, Huawei, LG and more have certainly tried – so Apple’s limiting of this effect to its new Portrait mode may limit its potential to slip-up. We’ll have to wait and see.

Now both iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus have that 23mm (equivalent) lens, with an f/1.8 aperture – which is brighter than the iPhone 6S’s f/2.2 aperture by a full stop and, therefore, lets in 50% more light than last time. It’s not the brightest lens on the market – Samsung already offers f/1.7 on its latest Galaxy phones – but will mean greater control and better low-light results than before.

Both cameras also offer optical image stabilisation for the first time – that was reserved for solely the Plus model previously.

«

So if OIS is now on both, you’ll probably get dual cameras on both models next year. That’s how it works. Huawei’s bokeh effect is smart – pick the focus point, pick an aperture. Have to see how Apple’s works out.
link to this extract

The 16GB iPhone is dead • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

»

It will be remembered fondly for its cheaper price and less fondly for its catchphrase, “Storage Almost Full.”

The 16GB model is survived by three new models, all with plentiful amounts of storage (for now). Apple’s iPhone 7 will be the first iPhone to be available with a base of 32GB, starting at $649. On up from there, Apple will offer 128GB and 256GB.

Android competitors long have offered 32GB as the entry-level option, and most of those phones feature an option to expand storage via a MicroSD slot.

“I will deeply miss the 16GB storage option and the rush to delete photos so I could take just one more,” said no one ever.

«

Now that is how you do snark, people on Twitter. (Um, except there’s still a 16GB iPhone SE model.)
link to this extract

Lightning to 3.5 mm Headphone Jack Adapter • Apple

Costs $9 in the US; costs £9 in the UK. At present exchange rate, $9 = £6.75; add VAT at 20% and that’s £8.10. Huh?
link to this extract

Apple Watch Series 2 improves a tick with GPS • WIRED

Brian Barrett:

»

But the most significant changes are happening on the inside. It’s now waterproof, so you can wear it in the shower and use it to track your swimming workouts. The new Watch has GPS as well, which helps untether it from your iPhone even more. That’s good news for runners and wanderers, but it’ll be interesting to see what kind of hit the battery life takes.

That’s an important step toward independence, the true goal of any smartwatch. But without being able to tap into mobile data, the Watch will still be the iPhone’s marionette, an extension of what your main display does rather than its own entity. That’s not altogether bad, and plenty of people enjoy the Watch as is. It’s something Apple reportedly, and rightly, has been working on, though. Until it happens, Apple’s iPhone killer will be brimming with untapped potential.

Otherwise, you’re looking at the usual spec bumps. Apple Watch Series 2 has a new chip that’s 50% faster and doubles the graphics performance, Apple says. There’s a new, brighter display that burns with the power of 1,000 nits.

«

Point for the headline. (“Improves a tick”.) Minus for not explaining what a nit is. (Gizmodo did in 2010.)

link to this extract

This image shows how camera lenses beautify or uglify your pretty face • Gizmodo

Jesus Diaz, in November 2011:

»

If you have ever used a dating site and thought “damn, he/she looked so hot in those pictures! What happened?” or “wow! He/she looks a lot better in person!” you know exactly what I’m talking about.

It’s all about the lens distortion (which is also affected by the subject’s distance to the camera). Lenses make the world look different than it does through your eyes. They bend light rays, capturing the scene within a certain field of view into a limited bi-dimensional frame: the photograph. Depending on the lens’ focal length, the image will deform more or less, affecting how faces and objects look in photos.

You can see how the deformation works in this Eastwood’s series, who took the same photo with a wide range of optics, going from a 350mm to 19mm. Eastwood moved the camera to frame the subject in exactly the same position so you could clearly see the effect.

«

Seems relevant, now that some people will get access to telephoto capabilities on their phoens.
link to this extract

Callblock’s new iOS app will block calls from over two million telemarketers • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

A new application, Callblock, coming to the iTunes App Store, claims to block phone calls from over 2 million telemarketers by type, including things like robocallers, debt collectors, political campaigners, scammers, and more. To identify which calls should be blocked, the app uses a combination of public and private records, ongoing research, and user reports, the company explains. As new entries are added to the database, the app will automatically update to include the changes.

Callblock is the latest release from Rocketship, the bootstrapped and profitable app studio behind a popular mobile ad blocker called Adblock Fast, which today has 750,000 users and is rated 4.5 stars and 4 stars on the Apple App Store and Google Play…

…Using Callblock is a lot like using a mobile ad blocker on iOS. However, instead of going into Safari’s Settings, you head into Settings –> Phone, then toggle the Callblock switch on. In the app, you can then configure which type of calls you want to block, by checking or unchecking its series of rules.

«

Adblocking comes to phone calls.
link to this extract

September 2015: What Apple’s 3D Touch aims to do: replace the physical iPhone home button • The Overspill

Me, just under a year ago, musing on 3D Touch and its possibilities:

»

What if – and it’s just speculation, you know, but what if – you were to put that “seems to move but doesn’t” technology into a phone? Yes, you’d have 3D Touch. That’s happened. But what if you put it into an iPhone home button? You could have something that seemed to move, and felt like it moved, but didn’t. You can double-click the Macbook trackpad; you could double-click a 3D Touch home button. But nothing moves. There’s just a piece of glass, and a sapphire circle for reading, and that’s it.

Think: when do you press the home button? When the phone is off and you’re enabling it, or to switch apps, or to get back to the home screen (so you can switch between app screens).

Most of the time – that is, time when you’re in apps – the Home button serves no purpose at all, except to be a grit-attracting water-allowing problem. Replacing it with a not-moving solid piece of glass would be a design and fault-resistance win.

«

link to this extract

Basic wearables soar and smart wearables stall as worldwide wearables market climbs 26.1% in the second quarter • IDC

»

Shipments of wearable devices reached 22.5m in the second quarter of 2016 (2Q16) according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker. Despite a decline in shipments for one of the largest vendors, the overall market for wearable devices grew 26.1% year over year as new use cases are slowly starting to emerge.

“Fitness is the low-hanging fruit for wearables,” said Jitesh Ubrani, senior research analyst for IDC Mobile Device Trackers. “However, the market is evolving and we’re starting to see consumers adopt new functionality, such as communication and mobile payments, while enterprises warm to wearables’ productivity potential.”

While the overall wearables market grew during 2Q16, its two categories traveled at different speeds and directions. Basic wearables (devices that do not support third party applications) grew 48.8% from 2Q15 levels while smart wearables (devices that support third party applications) declined 27.2% year over year.

“Basic wearables, which include most fitness trackers, have benefited from a combination of factors: a clear value proposition for end-users, an abundant selection of devices from multiple vendors, and affordable price points,” said Ramon Llamas, research manager, Wearables. “Consequently, basic wearables accounted for 82.8% of all wearable devices shipped during the quarter, and more vendors continue to enter this space. The danger, however, is that most devices end up being copycats of others, making it increasingly difficult to differentiate themselves in a crowded market.”

«

IDC puts Apple Watch shipments for the second quarter at 1.6m, down from 3.6m the year before. You’re reading this after Apple’s announcement of the new model(s), so we can all expect a big boost to those sales in the third and especially fourth calendar quarters.

What struck me though is that there isn’t a single Android Wear vendor in the top five. (Samsung isn’t there either; presumably it’s sixth.) On Google Play, it still hasn’t passed 5m activations. That’s a platform that is really struggling.
link to this extract

UK shelves privatisation of Land Registry • FT

Gill Plimmer:

»

The proposal was part of a programme of mooted sell-offs by the Treasury under the former chancellor George Osborne, aimed at raising £5bn by 2020.

But the plans attracted trenchant criticism from opponents including the Competition and Markets Authority, and John Manthorpe, former chief land registrar, who argued that a change in status could risk the confidence that homebuyers and other users have in the service.
The Open Data Institute, which was established by the government in 2012 to promote transparency as well as unions and other anti-privatisation campaign groups such as We Own It, also campaigned against the change in status.

A government source said: “No decision has been taken on the future of the Land Registry.
“A consultation on the Land Registry’s future closed in May and we are carefully considering our response. It is only right that new ministers take time to look at all their options before making a decision.”

«

Will feel happier when it’s definitely shelved, but this is good news for now.
link to this extract

Exclusive: how Elizabeth Holmes’s house of cards came tumbling down • Vanity Fair

Nick Bilton digs into the Theranos story, and has this acute observation along the way:

»

In Silicon Valley, every company has an origin story—a fable, often slightly embellished, that humanizes its mission for the purpose of winning over investors, the press, and, if it ever gets to that point, customers, too. These origin stories can provide a unique, and uniquely powerful, lubricant in the Valley. After all, while Silicon Valley is responsible for some truly astounding companies, its business dealings can also replicate one big confidence game in which entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and the tech media pretend to vet one another while, in reality, functioning as cogs in a machine that is designed to not question anything—and buoy one another all along the way.

It generally works like this: the venture capitalists (who are mostly white men) don’t really know what they’re doing with any certainty—it’s impossible, after all, to truly predict the next big thing—so they bet a little bit on every company that they can with the hope that one of them hits it big. The entrepreneurs (also mostly white men) often work on a lot of meaningless stuff, like using code to deliver frozen yogurt more expeditiously or apps that let you say “Yo!” (and only “Yo!”) to your friends. The entrepreneurs generally glorify their efforts by saying that their innovation could change the world, which tends to appease the venture capitalists, because they can also pretend they’re not there only to make money. And this also helps seduce the tech press (also largely comprised of white men), which is often ready to play a game of access in exchange for a few more page views of their story about the company that is trying to change the world by getting frozen yogurt to customers more expeditiously. The financial rewards speak for themselves. Silicon Valley, which is 50 square miles, has created more wealth than any place in human history. In the end, it isn’t in anyone’s interest to call bullshit.

«

That the WSJ’s John Carreyrou was interested in calling bullshit – and, crucially, finding out facts with which to make that call – is what set him apart.
link to this extract

Theranos: a library of articles and links 2006-2016 • Discoveries In Health Policy

Bruce Quinn MD PhD:

»

This blog began in December 2014, when a no-longer-existing blog ran a critical review of the favorable New Yorker article on Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.

For over a year, this blog entry records an informal log of online news articles about Theranos.   I do not review it for the dead links that likely accumulate over time.

«

Goes back to 2006. What’s noticeable (via Mike Masnick): lots of the writeups aren’t in the tech press at all (biotech, and biology, puzzles most tech writers; plus there’s no advertising in it, and barely any readers).
link to this extract

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. Send it to a friend if you like.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: bitcoin isn’t exactly “tied to the desktop” (from yesterday’s commentary) – though the mobile implementations are a bit clunky.

HTC’s Vive may impress, but sales – at least to Steam users – seem to have stalled. Photo by Red_Shuheart on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Washes whiter or your money back! I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

After a quiet summer, Twitter’s board will take a hard look at what comes next • Recode

Kurt Wagner:

»

The social communication company’s board of directors is set to meet this Thursday in San Francisco, and there are plenty of things to discuss. That includes, said sources, its fate as a standalone company.

That’s no surprise, since Twitter has been the subject of numerous takeover and acquisition rumors over the last few months, each one sending the stock up as investors hold out hope that Twitter will find a buyer.

There are the big corporate names that might take another close look at Twitter, such as Google (there’s an unusual scenario one source mentioned in which it becomes part of some Alphabet media spinoff), Apple and even media mogul Rupert Murdoch, either via 21st Century Fox or News Corp. Other possible bidders include private equity firms that may want to take the company private, where it can solve some of its issues out of the public eye.

«

Still struggling to imagine the universe in which Apple would want to buy Twitter.
link to this extract

The impossible Bloomberg makeover • UX Magazine

Dominique Leca on how you’ll never persuade Bloomberg to do a redesign on its terminals’ user interface to make it easier to use:

»

The Bloomberg terminal is the perfect example of a lock-in effect reinforced by the powerful conservative tendencies of the financial ecosystem and its permanent need to fake complexity.

Simplifying the interface of the terminal would not be accepted by most users because, as ethnographic studies show, they take pride on manipulating Bloomberg’s current “complex” interface. The pain inflicted by blatant UI flaws such as black background color and yellow and orange text is strangely transformed into the rewarding experience of feeling and looking like a hard-core professional.

The more painful the UI is, the more satisfied these users are.

The Bloomberg Terminal interface looks terrible, but it allows traders and other users to pretend you need to be experienced and knowledgeable to use it. Having been a user of the Bloomberg Terminal for five months, it took me a week and a few painful hours to handle it, and I am no genius. The only real impediments were the unbearable UI, remembering which key to push to make the “magic” work, and having to go through the 86-page manual.

«

link to this extract

14 excerpts from the FBI’s report on Hillary Clinton’s email • Mother Jones

Kevin Drum read the report so you don’t have to:

»

Oddly, the FBI never really addresses the issue of whether Hillary violated federal record retention rules. They obviously believe that she should have used a State email account for work-related business, but that’s about it. I suppose they decided it was a non-issue because Hillary did, in fact, retain all her emails and did, in fact, turn them over quickly when State requested them.

There’s also virtually no discussion of FOIA. What little there is suggests that Hillary’s only concern was that her personal emails not be subjected to FOIA simply because they were held on the same server as her work emails.

If you read the entire report, you’ll find bits and pieces that might show poor judgment on Hillary’s part. The initial decision to use one email device is the obvious one, something that Hillary has acknowledged repeatedly. Another—maybe—is her staff’s view of what was safe to send over unclassified email. But this is very fuzzy.

«

Perhaps the most amazing bit is the number of BlackBerries she got through. On average, each one lasted six months.
link to this extract

Is it possible to predict a NYT bestseller? • Medium

Andrew Rhomberg kept being asked about the upcoming book “The Bestseller Code”, which looks at what makes a blockbuster:

»

there is statement in the book that is misunderstood by many of those who interviewed me about the book and that is “the algorithm can predict if a book will be a best seller with accuracy 80%”.

I had a sense when being interviewed that most journalists thought this meant something along the following lines of: “if there are something like 500 New York Times best sellers this year, then this algorithm can produce a list of 500 titles and 400 of those will indeed turn out to be bestsellers”. Well that’s not actually what 80% accuracy means. The misunderstanding is in the “will produce a list of 500”…

…Let’s construct a different scenario. Imagine a Barnes & Noble megastore in the Midwest with 200,000 nicely ordered titles on its shelves including 1,000 titles in a section called “Past and Present New York Times Bestsellers”.

Now a mob of Trump supporters enters the stores and throws all the books on the floor in protest at Trump’s “Art of the Deal” not being displayed in the bestseller section. They don’t actually take any of the books with them, because, well, they are not really interested in reading books, so there are now 200,000 books lying in a jumble on the floor.

«

Question: how many of the bestsellers will be put back in the correct place, and how many won’t?
link to this extract

Not all networks are equal when wanting the best smartphone experience • CCS Insight

Ben Wood:

»

Different flavours of LTE are known by category — abbreviated to Cat x — which indicates the data throughput that the chip is capable of. Most of the phones listed above either use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 platform or Samsung’s home-grown Exynos chip. These chipsets support the variants of LTE up to Cat 12 (downlink). Of course most consumers will have absolutely no idea what this means — and it’s certainly nothing to do with fluffy kittens.

For many users in Europe, there’s one LTE variant, known as Cat 9, that’s available in a growing number of commercially available networks. More importantly, operators are increasingly supporting a technical advancement known as carrier aggregation. This is where multiple channels are combined within a network operator’s spectrum holding to deliver more capacity — think of it as more lanes on a motorway, which eases traffic. All of those lanes are then used simultaneously to maximise the raw data throughput that an operator can deliver to a single device.

The catch for users is that not all operators support this. In the UK, where I live for example, only EE currently can offer LTE Cat 9 and it supports three aggregated frequencies: two blocks of 2.6 GHz and one block of 1.8 GHz giving a maximum theoretical speed of 415 Mbps.

«

I’m with Three, and I’m just happy that with one dot (out of five) of 4G I get faster speeds than on my home broadband.
link to this extract

iPhones and the crown • Counterpoint Technology Market Research

»

All eyes are on the upcoming iPhone 7, even if the upgrades won’t be revolutionary across the board but should be more than enough to interest the maturing smartphone users around the world which are still using two to three year old devices and looking to upgrade to the latest iPhone which would be more than 10x improvement in performance and features.

We will continue to see Apple iPhone 7 to continue to keep the crown of the best-selling smartphone in the world over the next twelve months though challenges in some key markets such as China, India, Latin America will remain from players such as Huawei, Oppo and Samsung bringing cutting edge tech such as dual camera, fast-charging, AMOLED curved displays and so forth faster to the market.

«

The Huawei 9 Plus (linked above) has a dual camera system which lets you take a picture and then afterwards determine where you want the focus point to be, and what depth of focus you want. It’s very smart. Fairly confident that’s what Apple will announce with at least one iPhone today. It’s a very cool, potentially very useful – imagine going back to a picture pair and extracting fresh information – feature.

You’ll remember too that Huawei was the first with a Force/3D Touch implementation a year ago. That went nowhere. Meanwhile, every phone Apple announces from here on will include it by default.
link to this extract

VR adoption among Steam users has crashed to a halt • VentureBeat

Jeff Grubb:

»

The hot days of summer have not led to gamers looking for an escape in virtual reality.

The number of new HTC Vive owners on Steam grew only 0.3 percentage points in July and was flat in August, according to a survey (via Reddit) of customers that use Valve’s distribution network. The Oculus Rift headset from the Facebook subsidiary saw similar stagnation of 0.3% in July and 0.1% in August. At this point, only 0.18% of Steam users own the Vive and only 0.10% own the Rift. And with lethargic sales, both of these high-end head-mounted displays are going to need a lot of help to catch on with audiences.

July and August are important because they were the first months where both HTC and Oculus no longer had supply constraints. Through most of that two-month period, consumers could go online or even drive to a store to pick up one of these units instantly. The problem, however, is that no one is doing that.

«

Steam has more than 125m registered accounts, and typically more than 10m concurrent users. So 0.18% owning a Vive would be 225,000 in use (0.10% = 125,000), if the survey is representative of the entire user base. But it probably isn’t, and the number is likely a lot lower.
link to this extract

The Google X moonshot factory is struggling to get products out the door • Recode

Mark Bergen (who has been a very reliable source on all things Google – not overhyped, and not rushing to publish):

»

In the past, Alphabet had budgeted more than $1bn a year for X, according to one high-level source*. Most funds went to its car project, now seven years old, and Google Glass, the much-hyped wearable that fizzled in its first incarnation and left X last year.

But hiring slowed to a crawl when the Alphabet reorganization arrived, sources said, part of a drive to evaluate spending on the company’s ambitious offshoots.

And people started leaving. The most high-profile exit was a cadre of self-driving car engineers who formed the startup Otto earlier this year, then sold it to Uber this month.

Multiple people who have left X told me that the inability to ship products was a leading reason for the departures.

Multiple people have also told me that Astro Teller, the longtime X chief, is increasingly frustrated. Sources describe most of X’s public projects — Project Loon, drones, robotics and wind energy kites — as rudderless.

X still employs many gifted roboticists, designers and engineers. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are both actively involved with the teams, sources said. They moved their Alphabet offices to the third floor of the X building, according to one source.

“It’s Sergey’s Batcave,” said one former employee.

«

Compare this piece, which has actual journalism, to the next one…
link to this extract

The death of Project Ara shows Google is all grown up • WIRED

Davey Alba:

»

Look, some things are gonna die and some are gonna live. ATAP is building other stuff, and maybe that will fare better. But the reality is that when a company gets to be the size of the Google, the smaller stuff has a harder time surviving. Alphabet can help. As [Jackdaw Research’s Jan] Dawson says, with Alphabet, Google seems to be saying, people “can’t just keep tinkering in the corner, and hope that no one discovers what the true financial state of things is.” And that’s about right. But at the same time, you do need people tinkering in the corner.

«

Two things. First, “all grown up” is a horrible phrase that leering newspapers use about women who have just passed their 16th birthday and so hey, legal. Note to editors: don’t use.

Second, as @papanic points out, if this had been Apple then everyone would be saying “can’t innovate/doomed”. On the contrary: Apple doesn’t break its divisions out as Google does, and you don’t know what little projects it does and doesn’t have people tinkering away on in the corner – Force Touch, anyone? (Ditto Microsoft, Uber, Samsung, etc etc.)

Meanwhile, it might be insightful to look at projects that have been announced by Google and then run into the sand. Smart contact lenses, anyone?
link to this extract

Cyber threat grows for bitcoin exchanges • Reuters

Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss:

»

When hackers penetrated a secure authentication system at a bitcoin exchange called Bitfinex earlier this month, they stole about $70 million worth of the virtual currency.

The cyber theft – the second largest by an exchange since hackers took roughly $350m in bitcoins at Tokyo’s MtGox exchange in early 2014 – is hardly a rare occurrence in the emerging world of crypto-currencies.

New data disclosed to Reuters shows a third of bitcoin trading platforms have been hacked, and nearly half have closed in the half dozen years since they burst on the scene.

This rising risk for bitcoin holders is compounded by the fact there is no depositor’s insurance to absorb the loss, even though many exchanges act like virtual banks.

Not only does that approach cast the cyber security risk in stark relief, but it also exposes the fact that bitcoin investors have little choice but to do business with under-capitalized exchanges that may not have the capital buffer to absorb these losses the way a traditional and regulated bank or exchange would.

“There is a general sense in the bitcoin community that any centralized repository is at risk,” said a U.S.-based professional trader who lost about $1,000 in bitcoins when Bitfinex was hacked. He declined to be named for this article.

«

Acceptable risk of new technology? Or inherent security problem with a system that seems irredeemably tied to the desktop? The article doesn’t come down on either side, but the statistics – and the experts’ views – seem to point to it being an inherent problem.
link to this extract

Image super-resolution through deep learning • GitHub

David Garcia:

»

Image super-resolution through deep learning. This project uses deep learning to upscale 16×16 images by a 4x factor. The resulting 64×64 images display sharp features that are plausible based on the dataset that was used to train the neural net.

Here’s an random, non cherry-picked, example of what this network can do. From left to right, the first column is the 16×16 input image, the second one is what you would get from a standard bicubic interpolation, the third is the output generated by the neural net, and on the right is the ground truth.

As you can see, the network is able to produce a very plausible reconstruction of the original face. As the dataset is mainly composed of well-illuminated faces looking straight ahead, the reconstruction is poorer when the face is at an angle, poorly illuminated, or partially occluded by eyeglasses or hands.

«

Even so, bloody amazing. That’s three hours of training on a GTX 1080 GPU.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Multiply by 2.5 million, and you get an expensive sort-of recall. Photo by HL | B 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. Without a doubt. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The internet thinks I’m still pregnant • The New York Times

Amy Pittman was overjoyed to find herself pregnant (and downloaded an app to follow her embryo’s virtual progress), and then deeply saddened when she miscarried at one month:

»all those milestones I had been anticipating came and went: first ultrasound, hearing the heartbeat, fingernail development, the gender reveal and so on.

Had I been pregnant, each phase would have filled me with excitement, trepidation and wonder. As each non-milestone ticked by, I lay awake at night imagining the little chocolate chip growing to the size of a walnut and then a peach as the sadness descended upon me and remained until I fell asleep.

I hadn’t realized, however, that when I had entered my information into the pregnancy app, the company would then share it with marketing groups targeting new mothers. Although I logged my miscarriage into the app and stopped using it, that change in status apparently wasn’t passed along.

Seven months after my miscarriage, mere weeks before my due date, I came home from work to find a package on my welcome mat. It was a box of baby formula bearing the note: “We may all do it differently, but the joy of parenthood is something we all share.”

«

Yes, you guessed. The app passed on her pregnancy status (even though she had told it of her miscarriage).
link to this extract

People in Los Angeles are getting rid of their cars • BuzzFeed News

Priya Anand:

»Eric Spiegelman grew up in a six-car family in the San Fernando Valley and has lived in Los Angeles for the majority of his life. At the end of May, he let the lease on his Volkswagen CC expire, opting to live car-free in a city synonymous with car culture. For the past three months, he’s been commuting to and from work exclusively via Uber and Lyft — mostly using Pool and Line, cheaper options that allow passengers to share trips with other riders on similar routes.

“It ran so contrary to the culture that I’d been brought up in, and also my sense of what was doable,” Spiegelman, 39, told BuzzFeed News. “It was the most unnatural feeling thing at first. But it was so freeing.”
An understandable sentiment — after all, Spiegelman is president of the LA Taxicab Commission.

Spiegelman had been studying the economics of riding Uber and Lyft versus a taxi or driving a personal vehicle when he decided to run the math for his own car. He made a spreadsheet outlining the cost of leasing his Volkswagen: $458 monthly for the lease itself, $158 for insurance, $70 for gas, and at least $72 for parking, for a total cost of about $758. Based on those calculations, he said he has saved more than $1,100 in the last three months, spending an average of $3.42 for each UberPool or Lyft Line ride to work in August.

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Thinly sourced; there’s no real data on how many people are getting rid of their cars. But as an indicator, it could be relevant. Parking tickets (and the hassle of finding parking places) rather than other costs might be important. Notice how large parking charges were in Spiegelman’s calculation.
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How the Apple iCar could crack the automotive industry • Autocar

Greg Kable:

»Those who have held talks with the Apple president during the past 12 months, including executives from Audi, BMW, Fiat Chrysler, Ford, General Motors and Mercedes-Benz are under no illusion of the company’s intentions. They are convinced Cook has already given the go-ahead to the partly autonomous iCar and expect it will be launched by 2021 as a precursor to a fully autonomous successor model to be introduced around 2026 as regulatory conditions are altered to allow features such as fully automated parking.

Apple’s goal? An initial 500,000 sales annually, according to those that have met with Cook. That might not sound like much for a company that manages to shift some 230 million smartphones each year. However, it is an acceptable target for a company new to the automotive scene and 10 times what another one of California’s electric car startups, Tesla, managed in 2015. As a further point of reference, combined sales of the BMW i3 and i8 totalled just 29,500 last year.

To ensure widespread appeal for the Apple car, Cook is relying on the implementation of what automotive business leaders interviewed by Autocar describe as “disruptive technologies” – a term given to features that are expected to significantly change the face of motoring in much the same way the touchscreen altered our use of the mobile phone: highly efficient electric propulsion, rapid charging, autonomous driving capability, gesture control, holographic displays, wireless internet functions, artificial intelligence… the list goes on.

The iCar will get you from A to B, but it’s set to be much more than mere transport for masses. Like the iPhone, it has been conceived to also be a personal assistant with a level of connectivity far beyond that of any existing car of today.

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There’s a fair bit of speculation, but also plenty of hard fact in this. The 500,000 sales figure is gigantic in comparison to other electric car companies. One to watch.
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Mapping traffic fatalities • Lucas Puente

»On Monday, August 29, DJ Patil, the Chief Data Scientist in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Mark Rosekind, the Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), announced the release of a data set documenting all traffic fatalities occurring in the United States in 2015. As part of their release, they issued a “call to action” for data scientists and analysts to “jump in and analyze it.” This post does exactly that by plotting these fatalities and providing the code for others to reproduce and extend the analysis.

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Looks like this:

I know: close all the roads! Should sort it. (Something like this would be great for the UK too, of course. The data thing.)
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Huge damages: Samsung unlikely to achieve goals of sales, operating profit after Galaxy Note 7 recalls • BusinessKorea

Cho Jin-young:

»The biggest problem is sales suspension of the new handset. When a company has low sales, it makes more losses. A senior official from the industry said, “The more smartphones a company produces, the lower fixed costs it will achieve. So, operating profits can rapidly reduce when production stops and there are no new sales due to the incident. The amount can even reach trillions of won.”

Marketing is another problem. The company has to delay or cancel new marketing campaigns which are scheduled this month. An official from the industry said, “There are limits to increase production so the company can boost the production by 10 to 20 percent. However, it is impossible to double it. The company may have an extensive marketing plans after the release and it will make an additional loss when the plan doesn’t go well as scheduled.”

This is why some market watchers say that the company will see a vicious cycle that new sales suspension and contracted marketing plans can lead to the decrease in operation profits and then to lower sales of new products. In particular, many expect that it is the structure that hit both semiconductor and display sectors at the same time. It means that the low sales of the Galaxy Note 7 will adversely affect on the performance of the semiconductor and display divisions of Samsung Electronics, reducing the total profits. Moreover, how to bear losses with component firms will have a considerable effect on the performance.

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Estimates it will hit profits in the quarter by $1.3bn. I wonder, though, if it will lose sales: the Note 7 is hardly an impulse buy, so wouldn’t those who want it be prepared to wait? Also, it’s not quite an official recall; it’s a sort-of sales halt with replacement. (Recalls are more expensive.)
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Apple reportedly hikes order volumes for new iPhone devices • Digitimes

Siu Han and Steve Shen:

»Apple reportedly has revised upward orders by 10% for parts and components needed for production of the new iPhone devices scheduled to be released on September 7, according to sources from the iPhone supply chain in Taiwan.

The hike in order volumes indicates that Apple still remains positive about replacement demand for new iPhones from existing iPhone users, said the sources, adding that Apple originally predicted that shipments of the new iPhone devices in the second half of 2016 will reach only 60% of iPhone shipments recorded in the year earlier period.

Shipments of iPhone 6s reached 30m units a month on average in the second half of 2015, the sources noted.

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So that’s.. 66% of last year’s figure? Or 70%? Either way, the market saturation at the top end is biting.
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Dan Lyons: ‘It made me confront myself… I’d never felt old before’ • The Guardian

Andrew Anthony interviewed Lyons, whose wonderful book Disrupted is now published in the UK:

»Q: As a tech journalist, startups weren’t an entirely new world to you. But were you taken by surprise?
DL: It was a big revelation. I had a lot of ideas about what it would be like. They turned out to be wrong or incomplete. One big thing, for example: I always thought that when these tech guys go on about changing the world and making it a better place that once us reporters went home and they were on their own they sort of laughed. That they were cynical and it was bullshit.

I didn’t expect that there were people who really believed that stuff. I was really taken aback by that. I thought, I can do that fake changing the world shit. I can do that marketing song and dance, I know the racket. But I was shocked by that – that people had really drunk the Kool-Aid.

Q: One point you make in your book is that the financial structure of startups is less about creating new products than shifting money to a few fortunate individuals. Was that a shock?

DL: You think I’d have known that beforehand. I think I’d never seen it that clearly. It was a revelation to me that to some of these guys, the companies were secondary to extracting money. The companies were just vehicles to achieve that.

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These are the subtle tweaks that Kayak, Google, and Marriott are using to make you spend more • Quartz

Leslie Josephs:

»Earlier this year, travel search site Kayak swapped out the word “Select” when listing flight options to “View Deal” and said a 1% bump in revenue followed. For its Europe site, Kayak highlighted a recent price decline using a bright green font, which also led to a 1% increase in sales.

It gets higher commissions from hotel bookings than from airlines, so it also sets hotels as the default search on its site, even though some customers may have other preferences for their lodging.
Kayak told Quartz it conducts some 30 experiments a month, testing out new designs and language. Many users may not even notice anything has changed on the site. (Google this summer also added a “deal” label that pops up when a hotel’s price is below historical rates for certain dates.)

Where you book may not seem like a big deal, but it is to a hotel company, which doesn’t want to pay out a commission to third-party online travel agents like Kayak. So they’re trying to make life easier.

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When Google did its search deal with AOL, the finance was on a knife edge. Then one of the coders discovered that putting the search ads in bold led to more clicks. It guaranteed Google’s profit. Tweaks can make a big difference.
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Everyone seems to hate online reader comments. Here’s why I treasure them • The Washington Post

Margaret Sullivan:

»I find value in reader comments that can’t be adequately reproduced elsewhere. The argument that the conversation has migrated to Facebook and Twitter is flawed. Those are good places for discussion, but they are no substitute for having discussion take place where the story itself lives. I’m convinced that many smart readers with something to contribute will not follow a story onto social media to talk about it. News organizations should fix online comments rather than ditch them.

They need fixing, for sure. Too often, they are a place where trolls congregate, ready to offer their mean-spirited opinions. Too often, comments are racist, misogynistic, abusive and even libelous. They can also hurt newsgathering, sometimes criticizing reporters’ sources and making them more reluctant to talk to reporters next time.

In 2010, when I was the editor of the Buffalo News, managing editor Brian Connolly and I were disturbed enough by the gutter-bound, destructive comments to try an experiment. It was weird enough to get us some national attention, though that wasn’t our goal: we took away the anonymity of reader comments, requiring readers to use their names and tell us their locations, in much the same way as traditional letters to the editor.

It was inconvenient and time-consuming for us, and it reduced the number of comments substantially — but it made a world of difference in terms of civility.

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I will write at greater length about comments (honest), but the key problem with news sites’ use of them is that they don’t have a method to highlight good ones and make the useless ones vanish. Good comments are invaluable. But without being able to find the good ones quickly, you’re left with a timesucking morass.
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Vendors realising the importance of robust offline smartphone distribution in tier 2&3 cities and beyond • IDC India

»The China based vendors on the back of their quality products at affordable prices and wide availability have largely contributed to the growth of price segment $150-$200 & $200-$250 across top 30 cities contributing 28% in Tier 1 cities in Q2 2016 as compared to 19% in Q1 2016 and 24% in Tier 2&3 cities as compared to 17% in the previous quarter.

“Apart from Reliance Jio (Lyf), other Indian vendors were unable to hold on to their market share in Q2 2016. Similar was with global vendors except for Samsung which managed to sustain its market leadership position. This has led to a sharp increase in the market shares of China based vendors across all Tiers even with their mid segment ASPs (ranging from $150-$200) purely on the back of strong distribution channel, better channel schemes and huge promoter programmes as compared to the rest” says Varun Singh , Market Analyst, IDC India. “This is a clear indication that the offline channel cannot be wished away by vendors for operating long term in highly competitive Indian market” adds Singh.

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Chinese vendors, unable to find growth at home, are muscling in on India. Meanwhile Apple’s tiny share of the overall market there translates to a 35.6% share of the $300+ market.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified