OK, this might be tougher, but most passwords are a lot easier to crack. Photo by WindKoh on Flickr.

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

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

Breaking through • AVC

Fred Wilson:

»

I exchanged an email with a friend who is trying to get a mobile app business off the ground. I told him that he and his team are attempting to do something that is hard and has gotten a lot harder in the past few years.  He replied that he is looking for a way to break through. I encouraged him and wished him well.

This morning I did something I do on a regular basis. I went through the iOS and Android app store free app leaderboards looking for non-game apps that have broken into the top 100 and stayed there for months. I could not find any. It’s possible that I missed something. My technique is not scientific. I just browse and use my memory, which is not exactly a foolproof method. There are better ways to do this but I like to do it this way.

I think launching a consumer focused mobile app and getting sustained traction (>1mm MAUs for six straight months), is almost impossible right now. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done. I am sure there will be exceptions that will prove the rule.

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Yup. The mobile app business has commoditised at amazing speed. The bigger the user base, the faster it happens.
link to this extract

50 Sony BRAVIA TV models from 2012 will lose access to YouTube on Sept. 30 • 9to5Google

»

In the past, Google API changes have resulted in YouTube no longer working on older Apple TVs and other devices running previous OS versions. 50 Sony BRAVIA TVs models released in 2012 are about to loose support for YouTube playback due to recent changes made by Google.

Many owners of affected sets have reported that watching videos through the “New YouTube on TV” app has resulted in black screens, freezes, and halted playback. A hardware bug or defect is not the cause of the issue, but rather a specification change made on Google’s end that “exceed the capability of the TV’s hardware.”

Sony is removing the YouTube icon and making the app unavailable staring September 30. 50 different models ranging from 20 to 89-inches across the EX, HX, and X series will be affected by the removal. Head to Sony’s support site for the full list of models. Buying a Chromecast or other streaming stick is a quick and easy way to regain YouTube playback and get access to other smart TV features.

Sony does not cite the exact specification change, but Google recently announced that all YouTube connections will soon be encrypted with HTTPS.

«

From the launch of Google TV in the UK in 2012:

»

Suveer Kothari, Google’s head of global TV distribution, said this launch was “the beginning of a long journey” for the company’s TV ambitions in Europe.

“We think there’s going to be huge benefits from bringing the internet to TV. Google TV attempts to address the problem that there’s not really a great experience to access the internet on your TV screen, which is a similar problem we saw in the smartphone market five years ago.”

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link to this extract

Fast, lean, and accurate: modeling password guessability using neural networks • USENIX

William Melicher and others at Carnegie Mellon:

»

Human-chosen text passwords, today’s dominant form of authentication, are vulnerable to guessing attacks. Unfortunately, existing approaches for evaluating password strength by modeling adversarial password guessing are either inaccurate or orders of magnitude too large and too slow for real-time, client-side password checking. We propose using artificial neural networks to model text passwords’ resistance to guessing attacks and explore how different architectures and training methods impact neural networks’ guessing effectiveness.

We show that neural networks can often guess passwords more effectively than state-of-the-art approaches, such as probabilistic context-free grammars and Markov models. We also show that our neural networks can be highly compressed—to as little as hundreds of kilobytes— without substantially worsening guessing effectiveness. Building on these results, we implement in JavaScript the first principled client-side model of password guessing, which analyzes a password’s resistance to a guessing attack of arbitrary duration with sub-second latency.

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The slides are quite scary too. (Thanks Pete for the link.)
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Lunch with the FT: Nick Denton • FT.com

Matthew Garrahan:

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I ask how he is adjusting to life as a bankrupt. “I go on the subway into the office,” he says, in a mid-Atlantic accent that betrays his years in the US. “I look around at people and probably 80% of them are worrying about what would happen to them if they didn’t get their next pay cheque. Or they are worrying about how they are going to meet their rent in this incredibly expensive city.” He puts on his sunglasses. “It helps put things into perspective.”

Our lobster bisques are promptly delivered to our table. I mention that he seems happier than when I saw him at Gawker’s wake. “I can’t afford to be that affected.” Gawker’s fate was “predestined”, he says, “the end-product of having made a decision early on to give writers freedom and encouragement to say what was on their minds”.

That seems like a stretch when you think that it was a sex tape featuring a wrestler with a tan the same colour as our soup that triggered Gawker’s downfall. But Denton continues, insisting that the site never shied away from covering anyone — no matter who they were. The alternative, he says, would have been “to be a media company like all the others”.

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link to this extract

OpenOffice, after years of neglect, could shut down • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

»

Many developers have abandoned OpenOffice to work on LibreOffice, a fork that got its first release in January 2011. While LibreOffice issues frequent updates, OpenOffice’s most recent version update was 4.1.2 in October 2015. That was the only OpenOffice release in 2015, and there were only two updates in all of 2014. LibreOffice got 14 version updates in 2015 alone.

In July, OpenOffice issued an advisory about a security vulnerability that had no fix. The problem could let attackers craft denial-of-service attacks and execute arbitrary code. One of the workarounds suggested by the OpenOffice project was to use LibreOffice or Microsoft Office instead. A patch for that problem that can be applied to existing versions of OpenOffice was released in late August, but concerns about fixing future security problems remain.

Though the vulnerability didn’t become public until recently, [OpenOffice vp Dennis] Hamilton wrote that the problem and a proof of concept was reported to the OpenOffice team just as version 4.1.2 was about to be released. Developers figured out a source code fix in March this year, but “we were sitting on the fix because we didn’t want to give anyone ideas when they saw it applied to the source code unless there was a release in the works,” Hamilton wrote.

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link to this extract

How Hi-Fi magazines write about cables, part 19: magic rocks • Kirkville

Kirk McElhearn takes us to the zone of weirdness that is “Brilliant Pebbles”, which allegedly improve the sound of your hi-fi. How?

»

»

The original glass bottles for Brilliant Pebbles have been replaced by clear zip lock bags, which have a more linear response than glass. We employ a number of highly-specialized, proprietary techniques in the preparation/assembly of Brilliant Pebbles to enhance the crystals’ inherent characteristics.

«

Plastic certainly has a more linear response than glass. Paper bags might be more efficient still. Or no bags at all.

»

The fundamental operating principle of Brilliant Pebbles involves a number of atomic mechanisms in the crystals. Brilliant Pebbles will enhance the performance of your audio system so your favorite music and even your experience playing online fantasy games will become a mind blowing auditory experience.

«

«

Perhaps you’re wondering how they’re used. McElhearn can help:

link to this extract

Is the Google Car in trouble? • Autocar

Hilton Holloway:

»

Perhaps one of the reasons for [Google Car project leader Chris] Urmson’s exit was the Google Car project’s philosophical U-turn performed last September, with the hiring of ex-Hyundai US boss John Krafcik as CEO of the Google self-driving project. Google has also just signed a deal with Fiat-Chrysler to build autonomous prototypes based on the company’s Chrysler Pacifica MPV, all of which suggests that any idea that Google would put its own self-driving cars into production now looks increasingly unlikely.

Perhaps such a tie-up with the car industry was inevitable. Despite the time spent on testing and development, the Google self-driving cars had covered a relatively modest 1.7m miles as of this summer. In stark contrast, Tesla claimed that, by May this year, drivers of its cars had clocked up 100 million miles with the Autopilot function engaged. While this is nowhere near the same as the intended full autonomy of the Google cars, it shows the huge disadvantage of trying to jump straight to a fully autonomous car from experimental vehicles.

Furthermore, not only do the Google cars have a selfimposed 25mph top speed, it took until 2011 for fully autonomous testing on public roads to become legal in the US, when Nevada changed its local laws. California — Google’s home state — didn’t change the law until this year. It is still only legal in four states.

«

In trouble? More likely it’s shifting its focus, as the hire of Krafcik implies – away from a “make it ourselves” model, towards a “license it out” model.
link to this extract

The anosognosic phone • Safely Ignored

Hans Gerwitz, in October 2014:

»

Back in September, a design student posted a design fiction video of Phonebloks, a modular phone platform. It got a lot of attention, but I counted myself among numerous skeptics of the design, given how much size and weight would be added and the unrealistic sizing of the imagined modules.

During October’s Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, I had the chance to chat with aforementioned student, who seemed more interested in his small-scale plastic recycling project. It did not take long to confirm that he was an “idea guy”, not to be bothered with the realities of implementation; that’s for the magician engineers to work out. My skepticism was confirmed.

But that same week, Google Motorola (no slouch of engineering) announced Project Ara, which is basically the same concept, and “partnered” with Phonebloks to share in the attention.

«

You’re wondering: anosognosic? From Wikipedia:

»

Anosognosia (/æˌnɒsɒɡˈnoʊziə/, /æˌnɒsɒɡˈnoʊʒə/; from Ancient Greek ἀ- a-, “without”, νόσος nosos, “disease” and γνῶσις gnōsis, “knowledge”) is a deficit of self-awareness, a condition in which a person who suffers some disability seems unaware of the existence of his or her disability.

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The rest of Gerwitz’s post nails Ara, two years ahead of its death. (And ahead of my post on its death.)
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Flat smartphone growth projected for 2016 as mature markets veer into declines • IDC

»

Worldwide smartphone shipments are expected to reach 1.46 billion units with a year-over-year growth rate of 1.6% in 2016 according to the latest forecast from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.

Although growth remains positive, it is down significantly from the 10.4% growth in 2015. Much of the slowdown is attributed to the decline expected in developed regions in 2016, while emerging markets continue with positive growth. Developed markets as a whole (United States, Canada, Japan, and Western Europe) are expected to see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of -0.2%, while emerging markets (Asia/Pacific excluding Japan, Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa, and Latin America) will experience a CAGR of 5.4% over the 2015-2020 forecast period.

“Growth in the smartphone market is quickly becoming reliant on replacing existing handsets rather than seeking new users,” said Jitesh Ubrani, senior research analyst with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Device Trackers. “From a technological standpoint, smartphone innovation seems to be in a lull as consumers are becoming increasingly comfortable with ‘good enough’ smartphones. However, with the launch of trade-in or buy-back programs from top vendors and telcos, the industry is aiming to spur early replacements and shorten lifecycles. Upcoming innovations in augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) should also help stimulate upgrades in the next 12 to 18 months.”

«

IDC in June forecast that growth would be 3.1% for the year, so this is quite a cut already. The premium market (developed countries) is saturated; all that’s left for growth, for now, is the low-end business.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

“Look, just type what I say, OK?” Photo by abrinsky on Flickr.

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

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

Malware in Transmission client • Transmission

»

Q. What happened?

A. It appears that on or about August 28, 2016, unauthorized access was gained to our website server. The official Mac version of Transmission 2.92 was replaced with an unauthorized version that contained the OSX/Keydnap malware. The infected file was available for download somewhere between a few hours and less than a day. Additional information about the malware is available here and here.

«

Keydnap steals credentials from the OSX keychain (where system and personal passwords live). Yes, there is a certain irony in a Bittorrent client being subverted like this.
link to this extract

How a Japanese cucumber farmer is using deep learning and TensorFlow • Google Cloud Big Data and Machine Learning Blog

»

In Japan, each farm has its own classification standard and there’s no industry standard. At Makoto’s farm, they sort them into nine different classes, and his mother sorts them all herself — spending up to eight hours per day at peak harvesting times.

“The sorting work is not an easy task to learn. You have to look at not only the size and thickness, but also the color, texture, small scratches, whether or not they are crooked and whether they have prickles. It takes months to learn the system and you can’t just hire part-time workers during the busiest period. I myself only recently learned to sort cucumbers well,” Makoto said.

Distorted or crooked cucumbers are ranked as low-quality product

There are also some automatic sorters on the market, but they have limitations in terms of performance and cost, and small farms don’t tend to use them.

Makoto doesn’t think sorting is an essential task for cucumber farmers. “Farmers want to focus and spend their time on growing delicious vegetables. I’d like to automate the sorting tasks before taking the farm business over from my parents.”

«

Wonderful story.
link to this extract

Speech is 3x faster than typing for English and Mandarin text entry on mobile devices • Stanford University

»

With the ubiquity of mobile devices like smartphones, two new widely used methods have emerged: miniature touch screen keyboards and speech-based dictation. It is currently unknown how these two modern methods compare. We therefore evaluated the text entry performance of both methods in English and in Mandarin Chinese on a mobile smartphone. In the speech input case, our speech recognition system gave an initial transcription, and then recognition errors could be corrected using either speech again or the smartphone keyboard.

We found that with speech recognition, the English input rate was 3.0x faster, and the Mandarin Chinese input rate 2.8x faster, than a state-of-the-art miniature smartphone keyboard. Further, with speech, the English error rate was 20.4% lower, and Mandarin error rate 63.4% lower, than the keyboard. Our experiment was carried out using Baidu’s Deep Speech 2, a deep learning-based speech recognition system, and the built-in Qwerty or Pinyin (Mandarin) Apple iOS keyboards. These results show that a significant shift from typing to speech might be imminent and impactful.

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That’s a big difference. But do you really want people burbling away to their phone with their Facebook update?
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Beyond Verbal will tell us what people are thinking • Tech In Asia

Osman Husain:

»

wouldn’t it be neat if emotions could be decoded? If there was an app out there that could analyze human interaction and stop us from acting on assumptions?

Beyond Verbal is trying to tackle this mammoth problem. Its tech allows developers to understand people’s moods, attitudes, and emotional characteristics in real-time, as they speak.

“We envision a world in which personal devices understand our emotions and well-being, enabling us to become more in tune with ourselves,” explains Yuval Mor, CEO of Beyond Verbal. “Understanding emotions can assist us in finding new friends, unlocking new experiences and, ultimately, helping us understand better what makes us truly happy.”

The startup’s software can be integrated into existing products, helping devices and applications envision not just what users type, click, or touch, but also how they feel and what they mean.

«

I’m sceptical; it’s hard to measure what verbal signals mean, even harder to interpret non-verbal signals. Humans aren’t always good at it.
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The €13bn bite • The Economist

»

America criticised the [EC ruling against Apple’s Irish tax arrangements], calling it “unfair”. It had warned that it might retaliate in some way if Brussels went ahead. It argues that the commission is trying to turn itself into a “supranational tax authority”, threatening the consensus achieved through BEPS on the crucial “arm’s-length principle” at the heart of transfer-pricing rules. These govern the prices that subsidiaries of a multinational in different countries charge each other for the products and services that flow between them.

The Americans are fretting mainly because the ruling signals that Europe will lay claim to some of the more than $2 trillion of profits that American firms have amassed offshore, under the deferral provisions. Policymakers in Washington believe only the federal government has the right to tax this, as and when it is brought home. The Brussels decision may spur American politicians to set aside their differences on tax reform and agree on a package with a reduced tax rate for profits that firms repatriate; better that than to let Europe dip into the offshore pot, they think.

«

Apple has allowed for this tax in its accounts – whether to be paid in the US or to Europe. The Economist nails this: the row now is over whether the money goes to European countries or to the US, not the principle of whether profits should be taxed.
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EDTX triples damages award against Samsung due to false testimony, discovery violations • IPWatchdog.com | Patents & Patent Law

Steve Brachmann:

»

The court decided to award enhanced damages in this case because of egregious behavior on behalf of Samsung, including attempts to copy the technology and demonstrably false testimony given by Samsung. For example, Samsung’s representatives testified under oath that they only became aware of Imperium IP’s patents in June 2014, when the infringement action was first brought to court. Depositions and other discovery proved this to be incorrect. One witness who worked at ESS Technologies, the company to which the ‘884 patent was first assigned, testified that Samsung sought specific information on anti-flicker and flash technology. It was also proven that Samsung had previously attempted to purchase the patents-in-suit from Imperium, concealing its identity through a patent broker. Instead of June 2014, the court found that Samsung knew about Imperium’s patents since at least April 2011.

Samsung’s egregious conduct also included its failure to produce relevant documents. Although Samsung was aware since July 15th, 2015, about the need to produce e-mail and documents relevant to the patent broker used by Samsung to conceal its identity, those documents were only produced at 2:19 AM on the fourth day of the jury trial. As the court noted, the time to produce these documents was during discovery, not during trial.

«

Awkward. Technologies used in the Galaxy Tab 7 and 7.7 tablets, ATIV laptop and network-connected cameras.
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Worldwide tablet market expected to rebound in 2018 as Windows opens doors for growth and ipads come out of a slump • IDC

»

The decline of the worldwide tablet market is set to continue for the remainder of 2016 as year-over-year growth reaches an all-time low of -11.5% and shipments of 183.4 million units, according to forecast data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker. Positive growth is set to return in 2018 and continue through 2020 with shipments reaching 194.2 million tablets as detachable tablets continue to steal share from traditional PCs.

“Appealing to the commercial audience will be key as detachable tablets aim to take a larger piece of the traditional PC market,” said Jitesh Ubrani, senior research analyst with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Device Trackers. “Windows and iOS already have solid detachable offerings and with the latest version of Android, Google will also have a horse in the race as they finally offer better multitasking support and added security features.”

«

The notable thing about the forecast is that it suggests Android’s 2020 share will be 9 points lower than in 2015/6 (58% v 67%), almost all of which will be taken by Windows.

Then again, five-year forecasts are for the optimistic.
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Blame your lousy internet on poles • Backchannel

Susan Crawford:

»

Poles, as it turns out, seethe with operatic drama. They are creosote-soaked, 40-foot-high wooden battlegrounds. And, right now, a handful of companies — the usual villains in the internet access story — is very interested in keeping the status quo in place by quietly making sure that access to these vertical conflict zones is fraught with difficulties.
Chattanooga, again, was lucky. It has a city-owned electric utility that controls its own poles, so the city can use the utility to carry out its fiber dreams. That’s allowed Chattanooga to reap the benefits of roughly $1 billion in the form of new jobs and other spillover effects the city has seen since 2011.

But many cities don’t control their own poles. In some areas, poles are controlled by utilities, or even telecom companies. Anyone hoping to string fiber in those places faces two nightmarish, indefinite periods of delay and uncontrolled costs: first getting an agreement in place with the pole owners, and then getting the poles physically ready for a new wire. We’ll call these steps Swamp One and Swamp Two.

«

Much the same applies in Britain: BT had the state monopoly on poles and is only reluctantly being forced by Ofcom to let other companies use that infrastructure that it was given effectively for free on privatisation.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

“Oh, I’m not interested in your joining my professional network on LinkedIn, then.” Photo by pinprick 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.

Why isn’t your old phone getting Nougat? There’s blame enough to go around • Ars Technica

Andrew Cunningham:

»

Not all of the big Android phone makers have announced their plans for the Nougat update, but if you look at Sony’s and Google’s and HTC’s official lists (as well as the supplemental lists being published by some carriers), you’ll notice they all have one big thing in common. None of the phones are more than a year or two old.

And while this is sadly the norm for the Android ecosystem, it looks like this isn’t exclusivelythe fault of lazy phone makers who have little incentive to provide support for anything they’ve already sold you. Sony, for instance, was working on a Nougat build for 2014’s Xperia Z3 and even got it added to the official Nougat developer program midway through, only to be dropped in the last beta build and the final Nougat release.

After doing some digging and talking to some people, we can say that it will be either very difficult if not completely impossible for any phone that uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 or 801 to get an official, Google-sanctioned Nougat update (including the Z3). And that’s a pretty big deal, since those two chips powered practically every single Android flagship sold from late 2013 until late 2014 and a few more recent devices to boot.

This situation has far-reaching implications for the Android ecosystem. And while it can be tempting to lay the blame at the feet of any one company—Google for creating this update mess in the first place, Qualcomm for failing to support older chipsets, and the phone makers for failing to keep up with new software—it’s really kind of everybody’s fault.

«

Though largely Qualcomm’s. Not sure you can really blame Google “for creating this update mess in the first place”. Updating software is what software companies do.

But this is a terrific piece of exposition of all the moving parts, and why some of them actually don’t move.
link to this extract

Lenovo’s Yoga Book could make physical keyboards an endangered species • CNET

»

Lenovo on Wednesday introduced the Yoga Book, a unique tablet/hybrid PC with two touchscreen displays that fold in on each other. A normal display makes up the top half, while the bottom half is a touchscreen featuring a digital “smart keyboard.”

Lenovo’s investment in such a product underscores the shifting patterns in how consumers — particularly younger people — interact with devices. The company’s research found that people under 30 took to the digital keyboard immediately, while those older than 30 approached it with skepticism. If the Yoga Book takes off, it could mark the starting point for when the physical keyboard loses its spot as the go-to tool for composing a note.

“While the traditional keyboard or laptop are unlikely to disappear entirely, other devices will take over more of our computing tasks,” said Avi Greengart, an analyst at Current Analysis.

If anyone can pull this off, it might be Lenovo. The company has led the world in PC sales for more than three years, and has led the charge in moving beyond basic laptops toward hybrids and two-in-one PCs that incorporate tablet elements. Indeed, Jeff Meredith, vice president of Lenovo’s Android and Chrome computing business group, said his team designed the Yoga Book based on the tablet, not a PC.

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Clever idea. Apologies for this and the later CNet link, which has autoplay video enabled – you have been warned.
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Dropbox: leaked DB of 68 million account passwords is real • The Register

Richard Chirgwin:

»

A leaked database purported to contain login information for 68 million Dropbox accounts is the real deal. The cloud biz confirmed the authenticity of the records to The Register, with independent verification from IT security guru Troy Hunt.

The archive, which is being shared online, contains Dropbox user IDs and hashed passwords stolen by hackers in 2012. Today’s confirmation follows a mass reset of passwords by Dropbox last week when copies of the database started surfacing on the internet.

A spokesperson told The Register: “We are confident that this is not a new incident; this data is from 2012, and these credentials were covered by the password reset.”

The Register’s conversation with Hunt – the operator of HaveIBeenPwned and a security educator – bears that out to a degree: while Hunt has identified his pre-2012 user ID in the list, your humble hack’s post-2012 account is not in the nearly 70 million records.

«

HIBP is a terrific resource.
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Swift warns banks about successful raids by hackers • FT.com

Martin Arnold:

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Hackers have carried out a series of successful raids on banks via the Swift global payments network, the organisation has warned its members this week as it pushes them to tighten their cyber security.

In a letter seen by the Financial Times, Swift told its 11,000 members that “a good number” of the attacks had been repelled after being spotted by its own security programme or by other banks, but some of the hackers had made off with an unspecified amount of cash.

The non-profit co-operative, which is owned by the banks, has faced concerns about its vulnerability after cyber criminals made off with $81m from the Bangladeshi central bank in February. Several similar cases, some of which were successful, have since emerged at banks in Vietnam, the Philippines and Ecuador…

…The letter added: “The customers that have been targeted have varied in size and geography; used diverse connectivity methods and a range of interfaces from different vendors. The targeted customers have, however, shared one thing in common; they have all had particular weaknesses in their local security.”

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link to this extract

Samsung delays shipments of Galaxy Note 7 for quality control testing • The Guardian

Samuel Gibbs:

»

There have been several unconfirmed local reports of users claiming that the battery of the Galaxy Note 7 battery exploded during charging. Samsung did not elaborate on what further testing was required and to where shipments of the high-priced phablet were being delayed.

The Galaxy Note 7 is the first Samsung smartphone to have a USB-C connector. The new connector brings with it a new charging standard to which some third-party cables have been found to be non-compliant, causing damage to devices from laptops to smartphones using the new port. Amazon recently clamped down on the non-compliant and dangerous cables.

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USB-C, eh? *taps nose*
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Turns out the signal astronomers saw was “strong” because it came from Earth • Ars Technica

Oh well, we tried to get (y)our hopes up.
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Privacy groups file FTC complaint over Whatsapp Facebook privacy ‘bait and switch’ • Techdirt

Karl Bode:

»

As expected, EPIC and the Center for Digital Democracy have filed a formal complaint with the FTC (pdf), accusing Facebook of violating Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act. In public statements, both organizations accuse Facebook and Whatsapp of a “bait and switch” on previous promises that user information would not be used for marketing across the Facebook social media empire:

»

“The FTC has an obligation to protect WhatsApp users. Their personal information should not be incorporated into Facebook’s sophisticated data driven marketing business,” said Katharina Kopp, Ph.D., and CDD’s Director of Policy. “Data that was collected under clear rules should not be used in violation of the privacy promises that WhatsApp made. That is a significant change that requires an opt-in, according to the terms the FTC set out. It’s not complicated. If WhatsApp wants to transfer user data to Facebook, it has to obtain the user’s affirmative consent.”

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Did you read Dave Eggers’ The Circle? Remember the transparent shark? Facebook is that shark. (If you haven’t: highly recommended.)
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How LinkedIn’s search engine may reflect a gender bias • The Seattle Times

Matt Day:

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Search for a female contact on LinkedIn, and you may get a curious result. The professional networking website asks if you meant to search for a similar-looking man’s name.

A search for “Stephanie Williams,” for example, brings up a prompt asking if the searcher meant to type “Stephen Williams” instead.

It’s not that there aren’t any people by that name — about 2,500 profiles included Stephanie Williams.

But similar searches of popular female first names, paired with placeholder last names, bring up LinkedIn’s suggestion to change “Andrea Jones” to “Andrew Jones,” Danielle to Daniel, Michaela to Michael and Alexa to Alex.

The pattern repeats for at least a dozen of the most common female names in the U.S.

Searches for the 100 most common male names in the U.S., on the other hand, bring up no prompts asking if users meant predominantly female names.

LinkedIn says its suggested results are generated automatically by an analysis of the tendencies of past searchers. “It’s all based on how people are using the platform,” spokeswoman Suzi Owens said.

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Algorithmic bias is hard to spot, but it’s there all right.
link to this extract

Video games allow characters more varied sexual identities • The New York Times

Laura Parker:

»

Jesse Fox, an assistant professor in the School of Communication at Ohio State University who studies how online interactions influence people’s offline attitudes, found that avatars can powerfully affect how people act in the real world. In a series of studies she conducted from 2009 through 2013, she saw that participants responded better to avatars modeled on their real appearances, as opposed to generic-looking avatars.

This is linked to what is known as the Proteus effect, a concept introduced in 2007 by the Stanford researchers Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson, who concluded that the appearance of a person’s online avatar had a significant impact on his or her behavior, in and out of a virtual environment. In one study, participants who were assigned a more attractive avatar in a virtual environment were found to exhibit more confidence and intimacy in the real world than those assigned to a less attractive avatar.

“This tells us that avatars can change our behaviors,” Ms. Fox said. “They allow us to practice and test out certain behaviors in a virtual world.”

Ms. Durkee said this was true for her. Before her transition, she began playing The Sims in 2001 and found comfort in being able to live vicariously through the female characters.

“When I was younger, I always wanted to play games as a female character, even before I knew why,” she said. “I can’t fathom how different my life would be if I were exposed to positive representation of trans people at a young age.”

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Interesting topic. But man, NYT headlines are the absolute pits. No wit, no zing.
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Historic Dell and EMC transaction set to close on September 7, 2016 • Business Wire

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“This is an historic moment for both Dell and EMC. Combined, we will be exceptionally well-positioned for growth in the most strategic areas of next generation IT including digital transformation, software-defined data center, converged infrastructure, hybrid cloud, mobile and security,” said Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies. “Our investments in R&D and innovation, along with our 140,000 team members around the world, will give us unmatched scale, strength and flexibility, deepening our relationships with customers of all sizes.”

“I am proud of everything we’ve built at EMC – from humble beginnings as a Boston-based startup to a global, world-class technology company with an unyielding dedication to our customers,” said Joe Tucci, chairman and chief executive officer of EMC. “The combination of Dell and EMC creates a new powerhouse in the industry – providing the essential technology for the next era in IT.”

«

The corporate equivalent of a snake swallowing a cow. Let’s see how the snake’s digestion proceeds.
link to this extract

For Samsung’s Gear s3, size matters. And that’s a problem • CNet

Roger Cheng:

»

Samsung on Wednesday unveiled the Gear S3, its latest entry into the burgeoning market of wearable tech. The new smartwatch is more durable and runs longer than its predecessor. It also includes an LTE cellular radio so it doesn’t always have to pair with your phone.

The catch is that the S3 also surpasses the previous model in size.

The two versions of the Gear S3, the Frontier and the Classic, both come with the same gain in bulk. Samsung said it needed the extra room to pack in new features. It’s also paying attention to trends — the company said that men are overwhelmingly buying more smartwatches than women, so it felt comfortable with the larger Gear S3. While the exact number varies from region to region, roughly 80% of smartwatch buyers are men.

This may, however, be a case where a one-size-fits-all philosophy ends up backfiring. Men may be leading the way in buying smartwatches now, but that may not necessarily be the case in the future. By designing a product that appeals more to men, Samsung could be powering a self-fulfilling prophecy that would trap it in that demographic.

“I don’t want to look like a kid playing dress-up with her daddy’s watch,” CNET editor Jessica Dolcourt said after trying out the Gear S3. “This watch obviously isn’t made for my wrist.”

«

The S3 is actually bigger than the S2. This seems retrograde, and not in a good way.
link to this extract

Live polls and online polls tell different stories about the election • FiveThirtyEight

Harry Enten at the vote-prediction (and other statistical things) site:

»

FiveThirtyEight generally takes an inclusive attitude towards polls. Our forecast models include polls from pollsters who use traditional methods, i.e., live interviewers. And we include surveys conducted with less tested techniques, such as interactive voice response (or “robopolls”) and online panels. We don’t treat all polls equally — our models account for the methodological quality and past accuracy of each pollster — but we’ll take all the data we can get.

This split, however, between live-interview polls and everything else, is something we keep our eye on. When we launched our general election forecasts in late June, there wasn’t a big difference in the results we were getting from polls using traditional methodologies and polls using newer techniques. Now, it’s pretty clear that Hillary Clinton’s lead over Donald Trump is wider in live-telephone surveys than it is in nonlive surveys.

We don’t know exactly why live-interview polls are getting different results than other types of surveys; there are a lot of potential causes and it’s something we’ll be digging into.

«

If I were in Clinton’s camp, I’d find this worrying; people are more likely to be honest about their intentions when they’re not talking to another person, as UK pollsters have repeatedly found.
link to this extract

As browsers accelerate, innovation outpaces security • The Parallax

Seth Rosenblatt:

»

Browser security flaws have such a major impact on consumer security that hackers participating in an annual browser hacking contest take home tens of thousands of dollars for finding previously undocumented security holes in major browsers. And quickly addressing those security flaws is important for the sake of more than just safety; an IBM study from 2010 estimates it’s 100 times more expensive to fix a bug after it has reached the public.

Web-browsing security risks extend to vulnerabilities in the sites browsers access and deliver to your device. A June 2016 WhiteHat Security study found that it takes site publishers an average of 150 days to address most vulnerabilities and an average of 500 days to patch high-risk vulnerabilities. That’s plenty of time for a hacker to drive an attack through a hole.

«

link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Android tablet Cambrian explosion! Photo by Kevin Marks 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. Chew 40 times before swallowing. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Astronomers don’t think that so-called SETI signal is aliens—and neither should you • WIRED

Sarah Scoles:

»

While astronomers don’t know if this signal is squished or spread-out, they do know the middle frequency that the telescope was sensitive to: around 11 gigahertz.

Two things: Radio telescopes are supposed to catch cool waves from space. And they do that. But they also catch less cool waves from Earth, or from Earth-orbit. Airport radar, Wi-Fi, spark plugs, cell phones, and basically anything that runs on electricity emits radio waves. And satellites use these frequencies to ping and downlink. The research team has not presented data to rule out humans as the signal’s makers. In fact, one will note that 11 gigahertz is in the exact middle of a band of the radio spectrum allocated to “fixed satellites.”

“We see signals that come and go every day, all the time,” says Gerry Harp, Director of SETI Research at the SETI Institute. “We would not have given much credibility to this signal in our survey. It would be one of so many others, and they are almost always local interference.”

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The aliens are us? Disappointing.
link to this extract

Apple is working on iPad upgrades and refreshed Mac lineup • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman and Jungah Lee:

»

Upcoming software upgrades for the iPad include wider operating-system support for Apple’s stylus accessory, while hardware performance improvements are also in development, according to the people. The refreshed Mac hardware line includes new versions of the iMac desktop, MacBook Air laptop, and a 5K standalone monitor in collaboration with LG Electronics Inc., in addition to a thinner MacBook Pro laptop.

The company hopes to ship the updated iPad software next year, while the Macs are expected as soon as late 2016, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing unannounced products. Apple has not updated any Macs, besides the 12-inch MacBook, since last year. The company declined to comment.

«

More stylus support on the iPad, and USB-C on the Macbook Air and iMacs, and a weird OLED function key thing on the Macbook Pro. Macs arriving some time in October, iPad software landing next year.
link to this extract

Weak tablet demand prompting vendors to leave segment • Digitimes

Monica Chen and Joseph Tsai:

»

With tablet demand continuing to weaken, Taiwan-based vendors have taken a conservative attitude about their tablet operation. Asustek Computer and Acer have turned to focus more on niche applications, while Micro-Start International (MSI) has already phased out of the business and to focus mainly on gaming PC product lines. China-based white-box players that have joined Intel’s China Technology Ecosystem (CTE), have also mostly stopped pushing tablet products.

Dropping demand is expected to cause Asustek’s tablet shipments to fall below three million units in 2016, according to sources from the upstream supply chain, leaving Apple the only player that is still able to achieve strong profits from the tablet sector.

The sources also pointed out that despite weakening tablet shipments, Wintel-based 2-in-1 devices continue to enjoy growth. However, growth rates are still not strong enough to offset the decline of tablets…

…As for the white-box tablet industry, the current number of players that is still releasing tablet products is only one-third of the industry’s peak. Many tablet white-box players that were selected by Intel’s nurturing project have already given up their tablet development as Intel has been cutting subsidies and new platform development.

«

Significant development: Asus(tek) made the Nexus 7, which was probably the best-selling Google Android tablet of all time. (Via Harvey.)
link to this extract

Exclusive: Google will absorb Nest software developers • Fortune

Dan Primack and Leena Rao:

»

Nest’s entire platform team will become part of Google, which also resides under the Alphabet umbrella, in order to create a unified Internet of things platform. It will be led by longtime Google executive Hiroshi Lockheimer, who currently serves as senior vice president of Android and who recently assumed more responsibility for “living room” products. The combined group also will continue to work on Google Home, a smart speaker rival to the Amazon Echo, while simultaneously fending off Amazon challenges elsewhere in the smart home.

Nest and Google are likely to pitch this as an obvious synergy, but it also plays into ongoing efforts to pare costs at smaller Alphabet units other than Google. By moving Nest software developers over to Google payroll, Nest’s financial situation would improve dramatically (so long as new Nest-branded products continue to be developed).

«

I still think Jan Dawson’s overall analysis of the smart home scenario from May 2016 is correct: the problem for Nest is that the addressable market is still pretty small, so it needs to make different things, not just hope more people will buy its thermostats and smoke alarms.

Also not mentioned: what this does to Tony Fadell’s pledge that Nest wouldn’t share data with Google. Or is that long gone?
link to this extract

Amazon’s Echo will be able to control Sonos speakers next year • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

Beginning in 2017, anyone with an Alexa-enabled device — right now that’s the Echo, Echo Tap, or Echo Dot — will be able to control Sonos speakers with voice commands.

It’s a great pairing for both companies; Sonos speakers sound way better than the Echo, and Alexa is quickly evolving as the leading smart home voice assistant. And since everything works over Wi-Fi, all existing Sonos devices are supported; Amazon’s Echo is still handling the microphone / listening part and communicating commands to the Sonos gear.

«

link to this extract

Why we still don’t have better batteries • MIT Technology Review

Richard Martin:

»

According to a recent analysis of more than $4bn in investments in energy storage by Lux Research, startups developing “next-generation” batteries—i.e., beyond lithium-ion—averaged just $40m in funding over eight years. Tesla’s investment in its Gigafactory, which will produce lithium-ion batteries, will total around $5bn. That huge investment gap is hard to overcome.

“It will cost you $500m to set up a small manufacturing line and do all the minutiae of research you need to do to make the product,” says Gerd Ceder, a professor of materials science at the University of California, Berkeley, who heads a research group investigating novel battery chemistries. Automakers, he points out, may test new battery systems for years before making a purchase decision. It’s hard to invest $500m in manufacturing when your company has $5m in funding a year.

Even if new battery makers manage to bring novel technologies to market, they face a dangerous period of ramping up production and finding buyers. Both Leyden Energy and A123 Systems failed after developing promising new systems, as their cash needs climbed and demand failed to meet expectations. Two other startups, Seeo and Sakti3, were acquired before they reached mass production and significant revenues, for prices below what their early-stage investors probably expected.

«

link to this extract

Facebook recommended that this psychiatrist’s patients friend each other • Fusion

Kashmir Hill:

»

Most of her patients are senior citizens or people with serious health or developmental issues, but she has one outlier: a 30-something snowboarder. Usually, Facebook would recommend he friend people his own age, who snowboard and jump out of planes. But Lisa [the psychiatrist; not her real name] told me that he had started seeing [friend recommendations for] older and infirm people, such as a 70-year-old gentleman with a walker and someone with cerebral palsy.

“He laughed and said, ‘I don’t know any of these people who showed up on my list— I’m guessing they see you,’” recounted Lisa. “He showed me the list of friend recommendations, and I recognized some of my patients.”

She sat there awkwardly and silently. To let him know that his suspicion was correct would violate her duty to protect her patients’ privacy.

Another one of her female patients had a friend recommendation pop up for a fellow patient she recognized from the office’s elevator. Suddenly, she knew the other patient’s full name along with all their Facebook profile information.

“It’s a massive privacy fail,” said Lisa. “I have patients with HIV, people that have attempted suicide and women in coercive and violent relationships.”

«

Same sort of thing, at one remove, that got Google Buzz effectively shut down and earned Google a 20-year oversight from the US Federal Trade Commission.
link to this extract

Confessions of an ex-Facebook trending news curator: ‘They are just going to get rid of the product altogether’ • Digiday

Tanya Dua got hold of one such, who had gems like this:

»

[the Gizmodo article] said we weren’t treated like other Facebook employees. That’s not true, we were treated like anybody else. We could go to the happy hours, participate in the events, people talked with us in the office. We weren’t tucked away in some corner. We got three free meals. But my biggest problem was that while all these perks were great, they pampered us into complacency.”

Q: What do you mean?
A: Most newsrooms have discussions about what’s going on. You don’t just sit on your computer and write with your headphones on all day. When we were on these topics, and I had a question or wanted to get an editor’s opinion, I always felt like I was bothering them. The push toward quotas and producing content didn’t allow for that. You never felt like you were able to voice any considerations. Like, for instance, there were problems with the tool’s tagging feature. There were pre-set keywords, but they were sometimes inaccurate and wrong, and there was nowhere for us to voice that these topics were insufficient…

…
Q: So the purpose of the trending team was just to teach the algorithm how to eventually filter the news itself?
A: I would like to believe that, because that would mean that we actually served a purpose and did something good. But if you’ve used the tool in the last few days, you’d realize that the algorithm didn’t learn shit. The topics are just wrong — they have bad articles and insufficient sources. I think they are just going to get rid of the product altogether, because there is going to be backlash when people who do use the tool realize that the quality has gone down — unless there are severe algorithmic changes that improve the quality of the topics.

«

A quote for the ages to come: “the algorithm didn’t learn shit.”
link to this extract

Notes on that StJude/MuddyWatters/MedSec thing • Errata Security

Rob Graham on the “St Jude hackers approached hedge fund/shorting company Muddy Waters saying they had found zero-day flaws in MedSec pacemakers:

»

There are many ethical issues, but the first should be dishonesty and spin of the Muddy Waters research report.

The report is clearly designed to scare other investors to drop St Jude stock price in the short term so that Muddy Waters can profit. It’s not designed to withstand long term scrutiny. It’s full of misleading details and outright lies.

For example, it keeps stressing how shockingly bad the security vulnerabilities are, such as saying:

»

We find STJ Cardiac Devices’ vulnerabilities orders of magnitude more worrying than the medical device hacks that have been publicly discussed in the past. 

«

This is factually untrue. St Jude problems are no worse than the 2013 issue where doctors disable the RF capabilities of Dick Cheney’s pacemaker in response to disclosures. They are no worse than that insulin pump hack. Bad cybersecurity is the norm for medical devices. St Jude may be among the worst, but not by an order-of-magnitude.

The term “orders of magnitude” is math, by the way, and means “at least 100 times worse”. As an expert, I claim these problems are not even one order of magnitude (10 times worse). I challenge MedSec’s experts to stand behind the claim that these vulnerabilities are at least 100 times worse than other public medical device hacks.

«

link to this extract

Apple made wireless headphones called ‘AirPods’ for iPhone 7 • Pocket-lint

Elyse Betters:

»

Something quite unexpected might be announced alongside the next iPhone models on 7 September. 

While everyone is focused on built-in hardware features for the so-called iPhone 7, Russian regulatory trademark filings spotted by mobiltelefon.ru seem to confirm that Apple is readying standalone hardware for its upcoming phones. The filings, which were published by the Eurasian Economic Commission on 29 August, refer to wireless headphones called AirPods.

This has been a long-rumored brand name for Apple’s wireless headphones for iPhone 7. The next iPhone is thought to ditch the 3.5mm headphone jack, leaving customers with either the Lightning connector or Bluetooth technology for connecting audio devices like headphones. These AirPod headphones are likely a first-party accessory, as there is no indication they’re a Beats product.

«

Odd that they haven’t leaked from the supply chain, since Apple would have to be making them by the multiple millions.
link to this extract

A message to the Apple community in Europe • Apple (IE)

Tim Cook:

»

Taxes for multinational companies are complex, yet a fundamental principle is recognized around the world: A company’s profits should be taxed in the country where the value is created. Apple, Ireland and the United States all agree on this principle.

In Apple’s case, nearly all of our research and development takes place in California, so the vast majority of our profits are taxed in the United States. European companies doing business in the U.S. are taxed according to the same principle. But the Commission is now calling to retroactively change those rules.

Beyond the obvious targeting of Apple, the most profound and harmful effect of this ruling will be on investment and job creation in Europe. Using the Commission’s theory, every company in Ireland and across Europe is suddenly at risk of being subjected to taxes under laws that never existed.

«

“Taxed in the country where the value is created” sounds good – but in that case why would subsidiaries of multinationals based in country A ever pay any tax on transactions and profit generated in country B, even though they might be doing transactions just like those of a non-multinational based in country B – which would be taxed?
link to this extract

State aid: Ireland gave illegal tax benefits to Apple worth up to €13bn • European Commission press release

»

Following an in-depth state aid investigation launched in June 2014, the European Commission has concluded that two tax rulings issued by Ireland to Apple have substantially and artificially lowered the tax paid by Apple in Ireland since 1991. The rulings endorsed a way to establish the taxable profits for two Irish incorporated companies of the Apple group (Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe), which did not correspond to economic reality: almost all sales profits recorded by the two companies were internally attributed to a “head office”. The Commission’s assessment showed that these “head offices” existed only on paper and could not have generated such profits. These profits allocated to the “head offices” were not subject to tax in any country under specific provisions of the Irish tax law, which are no longer in force. As a result of the allocation method endorsed in the tax rulings, Apple only paid an effective corporate tax rate that declined from 1% in 2003 to 0.005% in 2014 on the profits of Apple Sales International.  

This selective tax treatment of Apple in Ireland is illegal under EU state aid rules, because it gives Apple a significant advantage over other businesses that are subject to the same national taxation rules. The Commission can order recovery of illegal state aid for a ten-year period preceding the Commission’s first request for information in 2013. Ireland must now recover the unpaid taxes in Ireland from Apple for the years 2003 to 2014 of up to €13bn, plus interest.

«

That’s a hell of a lot more than I had been expecting – yet even so Apple will be able to afford it quite easily. (It is going to appeal.) Here’s a notable point though:

»

The taxable profits of Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe in Ireland are determined by a tax ruling granted by Ireland in 1991, which in 2007 was replaced by a similar second tax ruling. This tax ruling was terminated when Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe changed their structures in 2015.

«

Is the structure more normal-tax-friendly now?
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

There’s an extraterrestrial signal – but is it a signal, or just noise? Photo by Paulgi 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. Can cause drowsiness. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

SETI has observed a “strong” signal that may originate from a Sun-like star • Ars Technica

Eric Berger:

»

It remains only the barest of probabilities that astronomers have just found evidence of extraterrestrial, intelligent life. Nevertheless, in the community of astronomers and other scientists who use radio telescopes to search the heavens for beacons of life there is considerable excitement about a new signal observed by a facility in Russia.

According to Paul Gilster, author of the Centauri Dreams website, the Italian astronomer Claudio Maccone and other astronomers affiliated with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence have detected “a strong signal in the direction of HD164595.” HD 164595 is a star of 0.99 solar masses about 95 light years from Earth, with an estimated age of 6.3 billion years. The system is known to have at least one planet, HD 164595 b, which is similar in size to Neptune and orbits its star in 40 days. Other planets may exist in the system as well.

The observation was made with the RATAN-600 radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya, in southern Russia, Gilster reports. He cautioned that the evidence is very preliminary:

»

No one is claiming that this is the work of an extraterrestrial civilization, but it is certainly worth further study. Working out the strength of the signal, the researchers say that if it came from an isotropic beacon, it would be of a power possible only for a Kardashev Type II civilization…

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Kardashev 1: basically, us. (Can store and use some of a star’s energy.) Kardashev II: can use *all* the power from a star. Don’t ask about Kardashev III. Too scary.
link to this extract

Meet the man siphoning money from Donald Trump • POLITICO

Shane Goldmacher:

»

At a glance, the two websites look virtually indistinguishable. Both feature a photo of Donald Trump, in a suit and red tie, in front of a giant American flag. Both seemingly offer a chance for two to win dinner with Donald Trump.

One is at donaldjtrump.com; the other is at dinnerwithtrump.org.

The first belongs to Trump’s campaign. The second is a scheme run by Ian Hawes, a 25-year-old Maryland man who has no affiliation with Trump or his campaign and who has preyed on more than 20,000 unsuspecting donors, collecting more than $1 million in the process.

In just its first three weeks of operation, Hawes’ PAC spent more than $108,000 on Facebook ads, offering an opportunity to win “Dinner with Donald Trump” — and netted itself nearly $350,000 in donations, according to federal records.

The biggest chunk of the money raised — $133,000 — went to a company that Hawes founded and owns, CartSoft LLC. The purpose of the payments is described on federal records as “media” and “media purchasing,” though CartSoft’s website describes itself as an online payment-processing platform.

Since its launch, the PAC has collected more than $1 million, Hawes told POLITICO. It has reportedly spent $0 on behalf of Trump.

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link to this extract

23andMe’s consumer DNA data gold mine is starting to pay off • Fast Company

Christina Farr:

»

After decades of inconclusive results, researchers backed by Pfizer and Massachusetts General Hospital revealed that they had identified several genetic markers associated with depression earlier this month. It was the largest study of its kind, using data from more than 120,000 people.

In February, a new paper explored the role that genetics plays on an individual being a morning person or a night owl, and in April another study looked at resilience to Mendelian childhood diseases, such as cystic fibrosis.

Each of these studies used insights gathered from customers of 23andMe, the Google-backed company that makes a direct-to-consumer genetic test kit. Perhaps best known for its battles with regulators over its consumer genetics test in 2013, 23andMe has quietly expanded its business to include brokered access to its database of more than 1 million people’s DNA.

«

Tricky to know, though, whether the insights are real or just accident. Genetics is infuriatingly difficult like that.
link to this extract

Hyper – HyperCard for the modern age

Intriguing app (for Android, iOS, Mac.. Apple TV?!) From the introduction:

»

Hyper lets you create very rich documents called Stacks, which are like your very own mini-apps for personal or work needs. No coding required.

With only a few taps, make a bespoke to-do list, a real-time collaborative shopping list for your next party, a travel guide for your summer trip, a poll or survey for work, a sleek web page listing your homemade crafts, a personalized expense tracker, your private Yelp clone or Instagram clone, a company face book, a photo blog, a lightweight ticket system for contractors… The possibilities are endless.

Hyper is made for multiple users, multiple devices and multiple screens

Hyper is designed for how people use software today: your stacks are always with you with native apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac, and even Apple TV. Use your phone to add a photo to a stack while on the go, and use your desktop back at home if you need to enter lots of text.

«

Haven’t tried it, but the cross-platform element sounds good.
link to this extract

Report: Automated fact-checking is coming (and soon) • Poynter

Alexios Mantzarlis:

»

[The fact-checking charity] Full Fact, like others before it, argues for combining several tools into a single automated fact-checking workflow.

The organization is at varying stages of designing or developing some of these tools. With “Hawk” and “Trends,” Full Fact tracks popular factual claims. “Stats,” the most intriguing of the lot, automatically checks claims against potentially relevant data it surfaces from the database of the British Office for National Statistics.

Ciampaglia notes that the report is “an ambitious plan” but that “there are indeed huge automation opportunities that can be reaped from just what is currently available off the shelf.”

Beyond providing details on the Full Fact’s own work, the report summarizes other initiatives while offering categorizations that can help clarify the scope of this field. By posing open questions to researchers and calling for a collaborative approach, it also aims to spark a wider conversation on automated fact-checking.

«

Just imagining what the effect of automated fact-checking – working as fas as speech – would be on political debate. (This is Full Fact’s blog post on the topic.)
link to this extract

How Lending Club’s biggest fanboy uncovered shady loans • Bloomberg

Max Chafkin and Noah Buhayar:

»

When Lending Club went public in late 2014, [Bryan] Sims scraped together about $1,000 to buy stock. “It sounds dumb now,” he said, “but it felt like a chance to participate in history.” He was so taken by Lending Club that he began listening to the company’s earnings calls. “Like a weirdo,” he said. It was on one of these calls, in 2015, that he heard Chief Executive Officer Renaud Laplanche say that 14% of Lending Club’s borrowers, or more than 100,000 people, “returned for a second loan.” That struck Sims as curious. He knew that for all the information the company made public about its borrowers—incomes, employment histories, their reasons for borrowing—one thing it didn’t list was repeat customers.

Sims decided to take a look at the hundreds of loans he’d invested in, arranging them in a spreadsheet that displayed their amounts, interest rates, and information about borrowers’ salaries, employers, locations, incomes, and credit ratings (FICO scores, specifically). Two loans caught his eye. Both had been issued to individuals with the same employer in the same small town. So far, so coincidental. But looking deeper, Sims found that the salaries were nearly identical. Both borrowers had opened their first line of credit in the same month.

This, Sims realized, is the same dude. It wasn’t a borrower who’d paid off one loan and happily returned for a second. It was one person with two active loans, and Lending Club was treating them as completely unrelated, charging wildly different interest rates. The borrower was paying about 15% interest on one loan of about $15,000; on the other, he was paying 9% on twice the principal. That meant the investors who held only the second loan were leaving money on the table. And Lending Club didn’t seem to be doing anything to help them.

«

A terrific story of data revealing the story. (A bit like The Big Short, but with more limited impact.)
link to this extract

Why did Facebook promote a fake story about Megyn Kelly? • The Atlantic

Robinson Meyer, on what happened after the company fired all those tedious “journalist” people who used to look at trending stories in favour of engineers, who would watch over the sacred algorithms:

»

the company assured users that it would still remain discerning. “There are still people involved in this process to ensure that the topics that appear in Trending remain high-quality—for example, confirming that a topic is tied to a current news event in the real world,” said a release from the company on Friday.

If so, they’re not doing their jobs very well. From Sunday evening to early Monday morning, Facebook allowed the topic “Megyn Kelly” to trend. Driving the trend was an article claiming that Kelly had been fired by Fox News for supporting Hillary Clinton. The story, hosted by endingthefed.com, was completely inaccurate: Kelly has not endorsed Clinton, and she has not been fired by Fox. Yet with the assistance of Facebook’s algorithmic editors, it garnered 200,000 likes.

On Sunday night, I asked Facebook whether a human editor approved the topic before it trended, and how it plans to keep this from happening in the future; it had not responded by press time.

«

So not only are the engineers bad at this, they’re bad at responding.
link to this extract

LinX Imaging Presentation • Scribd

Linx was acquired by Apple in April 2015. It produced array camera technology – and this is a presentation that it made in June 2014, saying “Array camera technology update – we are ready!” with details about its image quality capabilities, especially in low light, and its depth map capabilities, which can create 3D mapping “in milliseconds”. Useful for VR or AR, perhaps.
link to this extract

Big data, Google and the end of free will • FT.com

Yuval Noah Harari (in an extract from his new book Homo Deus):

»

We are already becoming tiny chips inside a giant system that nobody really understands. Every day I absorb countless data bits through emails, phone calls and articles; process the data; and transmit back new bits through more emails, phone calls and articles. I don’t really know where I fit into the great scheme of things, and how my bits of data connect with the bits produced by billions of other humans and computers. I don’t have time to find out, because I am too busy answering emails. This relentless dataflow sparks new inventions and disruptions that nobody plans, controls or comprehends.

But no one needs to understand. All you need to do is answer your emails faster. Just as free-market capitalists believe in the invisible hand of the market, so Dataists believe in the invisible hand of the dataflow. As the global data-processing system becomes all-knowing and all-powerful, so connecting to the system becomes the source of all meaning. The new motto says: “If you experience something — record it. If you record something — upload it. If you upload something — share it.”

Dataists further believe that given enough biometric data and computing power, this all-encompassing system could understand humans much better than we understand ourselves. Once that happens, humans will lose their authority, and humanist practices such as democratic elections will become as obsolete as rain dances and flint knives.

«

There’s a lot of discussion around this book.
link to this extract

Anker issues recall and replacements after researcher demonstrates unsafe USB-C cables • Android Police

Michael Crider:

»

It turns out that a specific cable from budget accessory provider Anker might be dangerous, because it “remembers” the voltage for the USB-C power input on some newer laptops like the Chromebook Pixel, then provides that same voltage to phones if not unplugged from a more powerful charging base. USB-C laptops are designed to take 15V-20V power input, but some phones are only designed to take inputs at up to 5V. The differential could damage low-power electronics or, in extreme cases, cause battery explosions or fires.

Here’s Nathan’s video demonstrating the faulty cable that sends unsafe voltages to devices that aren’t designed to accept them. With cables (or at least the USB-C connections on them) now compatible with everything from a tiny wearable to a full-power laptop, it’s a serious problem for end users.

«

Anker doing a recall (will everyone get the message? Will everyone swap them?). USB-C still feels like a poor bet: USB 1.0 never had this sort of problem, nor Firewire, nor Thunderbolt.
link to this extract

I got scammed by a Silicon Valley startup • Medium

Penny Kim:

»

My first paycheck was late. Jessica, Tom (our new project manager who started in June), and I were the only ones that received cashier’s checks on July 20th. My sign on bonus was not included. I asked about it and was told it was coming in the next check. The other employees received nothing and I’m not sure why. I can’t recall a time in my life where I was paid my wages in a cashier’s check so I requested a pay stub. Charlie told me that they wouldn’t be able to help with payroll until we moved over to Gusto, a new accounting system. He and Michael would get back to me on this. I didn’t like this answer. Considering this was my first payroll experience, I abruptly halted my apartment search and paid for a temporary Airbnb covering the first half of August. The boxes of what was left of my life remained in the back seat of my car. Something was up and I started feeling uncomfortable.

Around this time, Bruce and I were sharing personal concerns and he confided in me that he had let Michael borrow $50,000 from his personal savings. Did you read that? A startup employee gave his life savings to our CEO. He wasn’t the only one. Another biz dev team bro who was crashing on the CEO’s couch, Bobby, apparently lent Michael five figures too. In disbelief, I asked why he needed money when he has $2M already committed in the company. Bruce said that Michael had his offshore money tied up with the IRS because of unpaid taxes and essentially his assets were frozen until he went to court. These people are not related by blood or lifelong ties so why would they trust Michael enough to do this after only knowing him a few months? Again, I chalked it up to bro culture and secretly hoped they would get their money back.

«

As you can guess, this has a big helping of “nope” with a side order of “nope nope nope”. Lots of valuable lessons, and not only for tech startup employees.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Could you pick out a face from this crowd, even slightly disguised? Some people could. Photo by -AX- on Flickr.

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

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

EU to rule against Ireland in Apple tax case • Irish Times

Cliff Taylor:

»

The EU Commission is preparing to issue a final ruling that Ireland’s tax deal with Apple represented illegal state aid.

However sources believe the amount of tax Ireland will be asked to collect from the US giant will be much less than the billions of euro which had been originally suggested by some analysts.

The Government and Apple will immediately signal that they will challenge the ruling in the European courts, a process that could take some years. Sources say that government and the US company remain in “lock step” on the issue…

…While the precise terms of the EU Commission decision – and whether it will mention an actual figure – remain unclear, sources believe that the sum involved is likely to be in the hundreds of millions rather than the billions. One suggestion is that Ireland could be pressed to recoup somewhere between €500m and €1bn from Apple. However the final terms of the commission decision are not yet fully clear.

«

By me and Samuel Gibbs in in September 2014: “Apple may have to repay millions from government tax deal“. The figure suggested then was between €100m and €850m.
link to this extract

The detectives who never forget a face • The New Yorker

Patrick Radden Keefe:

»

Studying the map, Porritt plotted the various routes and developed a hunch that the man [the police wanted to question] lived in Camden. Porritt grew up there, and he decided to go and ask around. He invited Alison Young, an officer who had just joined the unit, to tag along. Young is twenty-nine, with long red hair and an ebullient sense of humor. She had worked as a community-support officer for several years, but one day she was summoned to an auditorium at Scotland Yard, where dozens of officers were instructed to take a facial-recognition exam. Using a laptop, Young found matches in a series of faces that were presented like masks—without hair or other context. When the test was done, she was startled to learn that she had received the second-highest score.

By some estimates, as many as a million CCTV cameras are installed in London, making it the most surveilled metropolis on the planet. Boris Johnson, who before becoming Britain’s Foreign Secretary served as the city’s mayor, once said, “When you walk down the streets of London, you are a movie star. You are being filmed by more cameras than you can possibly imagine.”

Porritt thought that the cameras outside the Camden Road railway station might have caught the groper walking by, so he and Young visited the CCTV office there. As Porritt examined the equipment, Young gazed out a window at scores of rush-hour commuters streaming in and out of the station. Then, suddenly, she shouted, “Oh, my God. That’s him!”

Young was staring at a man just inside the entrance: he had a mustache and wore glasses. She watched him pick up a Metro from a stack on the floor and walk out of the station.

“We ran like maniacs,” Young recalled. They caught him, and after he was in handcuffs he muttered to Porritt, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” A fifty-six-year-old clerical worker named Ilhan Karatepe, he subsequently pleaded guilty to three counts of sexual assault and received a suspended sentence. (He was also barred from riding public transportation by himself.)

«

link to this extract

How China outgrew Xiaomi • Tech In Asia

Steven Millward with more on Xiaomi’s struggle in its home market:

»

To see how Xiaomi’s divergence from Chinese consumers played out, you only need to look at the average selling price of new smartphones in China.

As China hits peak smartphone, a significant number of people have been trading up, pushing up the average selling price of new mobiles in the country. It looks like this:

The average new smartphone in China in 2013 cost just US$207 as most people opted for cheap models. That suited Xiaomi with its best-selling Redmi phones ranging from US$105 to US$150. But then, by 2015, IDC figures show that shoppers typically splashed US$257 per new smartphone as more shifted to pricier devices, including some opting for the iPhone 6. At that price point, Xiaomi’s most important phones had been left behind by shoppers.

“While users are slowly moving upstream, there are still significant volumes seen in the low-end market,” observes [IDC senior analyst Tay] Xiaohan.

The new Huawei P9, which costs from US$640, is propelling the Chinese tech giant to the top of the country’s smartphone battle at a time when Chinese consumers are spending more than ever on their smartphones. Photo credit: Huawei.

Xiaomi does have pricier phones, such as the Mi5 from US$270, but there are fewer choices for consumers in its upper ranges. And at a time when Chinese phone owners are going upmarket, Xiaomi’s top-end model, the big-screened Mi Note, has had no refresh for 19 months, putting it at odds with the usual annual upgrade cycle that shoppers now expect of smartphones.

«

link to this extract

Carson Block takes on St. Jude Medical claiming hack risk • Bloomberg

Michelle Cortez, Erik Schatzker and Jordan Robertson:

»

Many in the technology and medical communities say the risk of such hacks is remote at best. But Block, no stranger to drawn-out corporate feuds, says in a 33-page report that St. Jude’s deficiencies are so great – and stand in such sharp contrast to offerings from rivals including Medtronic Plc – that its [pacemaker and defibrillator] equipment should be recalled and sales of the devices that account for 45% of St. Jude’s revenue should be halted until the problem is fixed. That could take years.

“The nightmare scenario is somebody is able to launch a mass attack and cause these devices that are implanted to malfunction,” Block said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. St. Jude “should stop selling these devices until it has developed a new secure communication protocol.”

Muddy Waters became aware of the potential flaws after a startup cybersecurity company, Miami-based MedSec Holdings Inc., approached the short-selling firm three months ago. The hackers had been working for more than a year, ferreting out security flaws in medical devices made by four leading companies. One stood out from the rest: St. Jude’s products had an “astounding” level of problems, including lack of encryption and authentication between devices, which could allow hackers to tap into implanted devices, said MedSec Chief Executive Officer Justine Bone, herself an experienced hacker.

«

Interesting (novel?) monetisation method for zero-day hacks: approach short-sellers so you can make a killing as the stock falls.
link to this extract

Facebook fired its Trending editors, apparently trying to get rid of bias by getting rid of humans • Quartz

Joon Ian Wong , Dave Gershgorn & Mike Murphy:

»

A new group of humans will still be involved with Trending, although they’ll be asked to focus on correcting the algorithm’s mistakes, like preventing mundane or repetitive stories from appearing as news, according to a Facebook blog post. The retooled Trending feature will now automatically pull excerpts from news articles, a feature that may force Facebook to compensate news publishers in the European Union in the future, under proposed new rules from the European commission.

According to sources, the Trending team’s editorial staff were alerted at 4pm that they were being fired—as the news of Facebook’s switch to algorithms first broke—and were asked to leave the building by 5pm. The contractors (all of whom were at the company less than 1.5 years) were given severance equal to pay through September 1, plus two weeks, sources say.
However, removing human writers from Trending doesn’t necessarily eliminate bias. Human bias can be embedded into algorithms, and extremely difficult to strip out.

«

Such delightful hiring practices! And now the engineers will have even more boring tasks than the writers did. I’d be prepping my CV if I were one of those assigned to that.
link to this extract

The NSA is hoarding vulnerabilities • Schneier on Security

Bruce Schneier on the “Shadow Brokers” hack of NSA tools:

»

what I want to talk about is the data. The sophisticated cyberweapons in the data dump include vulnerabilities and “exploit code” that can be deployed against common Internet security systems. Products targeted include those made by Cisco, Fortinet, TOPSEC, Watchguard, and Juniper – systems that are used by both private and government organizations around the world. Some of these vulnerabilities have been independently discovered and fixed since 2013, and some had remained unknown until now.

All of them are examples of the NSA – despite what it and other representatives of the US government say – prioritizing its ability to conduct surveillance over our security. Here’s one example. Security researcher Mustafa al-Bassam found an attack tool codenamed BENIGHCERTAIN that tricks certain Cisco firewalls into exposing some of their memory, including their authentication passwords. Those passwords can then be used to decrypt virtual private network, or VPN, traffic, completely bypassing the firewalls’ security. Cisco hasn’t sold these firewalls since 2009, but they’re still in use today.

Vulnerabilities like that one could have, and should have, been fixed years ago. And they would have been, if the NSA had made good on its word to alert American companies and organizations when it had identified security holes.

«

Al-Bassam was formerly known as the hacker known as Tflow – a member, in turn, of the hacking group Lulzsec. Strange how things turn out.
link to this extract

Did better broadband make Americans more partisan? • The Guardian

Nick Cohen:

»

In a research paper published in the American Journal of Political Science, Yphtach Lelkes, Gaurav Sood and Shanto Iyengar found depressing proof that the web is fuelling segregation. The rollout of broadband in the US allowed them to conduct a controlled experiment. Access to new broadband services varied wildly because each state had different “rights of way” laws governing the use of the conduits, trenches and towers broadband providers need. The researchers matched the attitudes of those who did and did not have broadband with data on partisan hostility from studies of voters beliefs in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections.

Greater use of the web ensured that an admirer of Jon Stewart would think that conservatives were not just mistaken but stupid, or a viewer of Fox News would work on the assumption that liberals were wicked. Both sides could dismiss uncomfortable facts as lies. Both sides allowed their politics to become so bound up with their identity, opposing arguments felt almost as if they were physical assaults. As the authors put it in a separate paper: “Partisans discriminate against opposing partisans to a degree that exceeds discrimination based on race.”

«

This is an important topic – which may have growing importance pre- and post-election in the US. The paper is called “The Hostile Audience: the effect of access to broadband internet on partisan effect”.
link to this extract

Government hackers caught using unprecedented iPhone spy tool • Motherboard

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

»

On the morning of August 10, Ahmed Mansoor, a 46-year-old human rights activist from the United Arab Emirates, received a strange text message from a number he did not recognize on his iPhone.

“New secrets about torture of Emiratis in state prisons,” read the tantalizing message, which came accompanied by a link.

Mansoor, who had already been the victim of government hackers using commercial spyware products from FinFisher and Hacking Team, was suspicious and didn’t click on the link. Instead, he sent the message to Bill Marczak, a researcher at Citizen Lab, a digital rights watchdog at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

As it turned out, the message wasn’t what it purported to be. The link didn’t lead to any secrets, but to a sophisticated piece of malware that exploited three different unknown vulnerabilities in Apple’s iOS operating system that would have allowed the attackers to get full control of Mansoor’s iPhone, according to new joint reports released on Thursday by Citizen Lab and mobile security company Lookout.

«

How bad was it?

»

NSO’s malware, which the company codenamed Pegasus, is designed to quietly infect an iPhone and be able to steal and intercept all data inside of it, as well as any communication going through it.

“It basically steals all the information on your phone, it intercepts every call, it intercepts every text message, it steals all the emails, the contacts, the FaceTime calls. It also basically backdoors every communications mechanism you have on the phone,” [Lookout VP of research Mike] Murray explained. “It steals all the information in the Gmail app, all the Facebook messages, all the Facebook information, your Facebook contacts, everything from Skype, WhatsApp, Viber, WeChat, Telegram—you name it.”

«

A few thoughts on this.
• He received the message August 10; Apple’s update came out 15 days later – is this Apple’s fastest-ever security update?
• Mansoor has been repeatedly targeted, yet clearly he’s also able to shake off the UAE government repeatedly
• it’s a hell of a vindication for Apple’s stance on privacy. But the hackers have a huge monetary incentive to keep finding zero-day flaws.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What if there isn’t life on alien planets? Would that be good or bad for our prospects? Picture by Ryan Somma on Flickr.

You can now sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. Then you’ll get it from next week! Or maybe even today if you sign within an hour of the post going live. (You’ll need to click a confirmation link. It ain’t spam.)

A selection of 10 links for you. Tax-exempt. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Can software make you less racist? • Coding Horror

Jef Atwood:

»

With Nextdoor, you’re more connected with your neighbors than ever before. But through that connection you may also find out some regressive things about your neighbors that you’d never have discovered in years of the traditional daily routine of polite waves, hellos from the driveway, and casual sidewalk conversations. [To wit: some are racist, whether through intent or accident.]

To their immense credit, rather than accepting this status quo, Nextdoor did what any self-respecting computer geek would do: they changed their software. Now, when you attempt to post about a crime or suspicious activity …

… you get smart, just in time nudges to think less about race, and more about behavior.

The results were striking:

»

Nextdoor claims this new multi-step system has, so far, reduced instances of racial profiling by 75%. It’s also decreased considerably the number of notes about crime and safety. During testing, the number of crime and safety issue reports abandoned before being published rose by 50%. “It’s a fairly significant dropoff,” said Tolia, “but we believe that, for Nextdoor, quality is more important than quantity.”

«

I’m a huge fan of designing software to help nudge people, at exactly the right time, to be their better selves. And this is a textbook example of doing it right.

«

link to this extract

Global tablet shipments to up over 16% on quarter in 3Q16 • Digitimes Research

Jim Hsaio:

»

Global tablet shipments will bounce back 16.3% sequentially to reach nearly 47m units in the third quarter, but the volume will still be down over 10% compared to the same quarter a year ago, showing the market is still in no condition of recovering, according to Digitimes Research.

The sequential shipment growth is attributed to vendors’ inventory build-ups for the year-end holidays in Europe and North America and the fact that several emerging markets have seen improved economies, which has increased tablet demand, Digitimes Research said.

Despite the absence of new models for the second half of 2016, Apple will see its tablet shipment dip only slightly on year to 9.5 million units in the third quarter thanks to steady demand for 9.7iniPad Pro. However, shipments by white-box tablet makers are expected to increase significantly to 18.5m units in the third quarter on growing shipments to retail shops in the US and Europe and an easing in the supply of some key parts and components.

«

Apple plus the white-box (no-name Android) vendors will be over half of volume, which doesn’t leave much for the bigger players. Notable too: “Lenovo may temporarily outperform Amazon to take the third position in third-quarter rankings, but its tablet business unit has decided to shift its focus to Chromebooks and other Android devices.”

In other words: there’s no profit in branded Android tablets (unless you’re Samsung).
link to this extract

Fourteen years after decriminalizing all drugs, here’s what Portugal looks like • Mic.com

Zeeshan Aleem:

»

In 2001, the Portuguese government did something that the United States would find entirely alien. After many years of waging a fierce war on drugs, it decided to flip its strategy entirely: it decriminalized them all.

If someone is found in the possession of less than a 10-day supply of anything from marijuana to heroin, he or she is sent to a three-person Commission for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction, typically made up of a lawyer, a doctor and a social worker. The commission recommends treatment or a minor fine; otherwise, the person is sent off without any penalty. A vast majority of the time, there is no penalty.

Fourteen years after decriminalization, Portugal has not been run into the ground by a nation of drug addicts. In fact, by many measures, it’s doing far better than it was before.

«

link to this extract

Subscribe and Save on Amazon? Don’t count on it • The New York Times

Brian Chen:

»

What do subscriptions to a newspaper, magazine or Netflix account have in common? Once you sign up, you expect to pay the same rate every month.

Yet that’s not the case at Amazon when you subscribe to its Subscribe & Save program, which automatically refills orders for household staples like instant coffee, napkins or trash bags.

Amazon’s subscription program, which was introduced in 2007, lets consumers register to have their favorite consumables delivered regularly — monthly, for example — in exchange for a discount of at least 5% off each order. Buried in the e-commerce company’s terms and conditions is that the Subscribe & Save discount is applied to the price of the item at the time that the order is placed. And on Amazon, prices change frequently — including sometimes rising.

I learned this the hard way while reviewing an email summary of my Amazon subscriptions. A pack of lint rollers that I had subscribed to for more than two years recently jumped to $18.04 a pack, up from $12.44 since the last delivery a few months ago, or almost a 50% increase.

A quick web search revealed other consumers were also surprised by price jumps for Subscribe & Save items. One Amazon customer said he signed up for a $10 box of chewing gum and was charged $100 for the same product a month later. In Amazon’s online forums, dozens of people posted about prices of Subscribe & Save items fluctuating, with some calling the program a “bait and switch” subscription scheme.

«

Often suspected, now confirmed. What about for one-off items when you’re logged in, logged out, or accessing by Tor? That varies too.
link to this extract

This 100-year-old to-do list hack still works like a charm • Fast Company

James Clear:

»

Ivy Ledbetter Lee was a successful businessman in his own right and is widely remembered as a pioneer in the field of public relations. As the story goes, Schwab brought Lee into his office and said, “Show me a way to get more things done.”

“Give me 15 minutes with each of your executives,” Lee replied.

“How much will it cost me?” Schwab asked.

“Nothing,” Lee said. “Unless it works. After three months, you can send me a check for whatever you feel it’s worth to you.”

During his 15 minutes with each executive, Lee explained his simple method for achieving peak productivity:

• At the end of each workday, write down the six most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow. Do not write down more than six tasks.
• Prioritize those six items in order of their true importance.
• When you arrive tomorrow, concentrate only on the first task. Work until the first task is finished before moving on to the second task.
• Approach the rest of your list in the same fashion. At the end of the day, move any unfinished items to a new list of six tasks for the following day.
• Repeat this process every working day.

The strategy sounded simple, but Schwab and his executive team at Bethlehem Steel gave it a try. After three months, Schwab was so delighted with the progress his company had made that he called Lee into his office and wrote him a check for $25,000 [worth about $400,000 in today’s money].

«

To which you sort of hope Lee would say “What sort of shortchanging bastard are you?” But it’s a good technique, reputedly.
link to this extract

inside the battle over Google Fiber • The Information

Kevin McLaughlin, on the project which has been going since 2010 and wanted to have passed 40m homes and have 5m subscribers by 2015 – but has instead come to six cities and got about 200,000 broadband users and perhaps 53,000 TV subscribers:

»

Last month, Alphabet CEO Larry Page ordered Google Fiber’s chief, Craig Barratt, to halve the size of the Google Fiber team to 500 people, said the second person close to Alphabet. (The Google Fiber unit is now known as Access.)

Mr. Page has also told Mr. Barratt to reduce the current cost of bringing Google Fiber to customers’ homes to one-tenth the current level.

Keeping Google Fiber going using cheaper technology and with lower overhead reflects a tenuous compromise among a group of senior executives at Alphabet with mixed feelings about the project. On one side, Alphabet co-founders Mr. Page and Sergey Brin aren’t satisfied with the pace of Google Fiber’s rollout or the costs.

CFO Ruth Porat, though known as a cost-cutter, has played a mediator role. She has told Mr. Page that Google Fiber has a solid business model that can succeed, and needs to be given time to work, said the person close to Alphabet. “She is in the middle saying, ‘Hey, relax, this is a complicated business, let’s see what they can do with the budget they have,” the person said. Still, “the Fiber group is on a pretty tight leash and getting a lot of feedback that they should solve the problems with technology,” using wireless.

«

Demanding the cost is cut by 90% is a typical Page move – demand what seems impossible, see what happens.
link to this extract

Microsoft Excel blamed for gene study errors • BBC News

»

The researchers claimed the problem is present in “approximately one-fifth of papers” that collated data in Excel documents.
The trio, writing for the Melbourne-based academic institute Baker IDI, scanned 3,597 published scientific papers to conduct their study.

They found 704 of those papers contained gene name errors created by Excel.

Ewan Birney, director of the European Bioinformatics Institute, does not blame Excel and told the BBC: “What frustrates me is researchers are relying on Excel spreadsheets for clinical trials.”

The Excel gene renaming issue [where genes such as Septin 2, known as SEPT2, appear as the date September 2nd] has been known among the scientific community for more than a decade, Birney added.
He recommended that the program should only be considered for “lightweight scientific analysis”.

«

“Lightweight”. Ouch.
link to this extract

Jig Saw : Daniel Eatock

»

This work was created for the Deptford Design Challenge, an annual project in which thirty artists/designers are invited to redesign discarded objects from the Deptford Thrift Market (London). Eatock selected a 2000-piece “JR” puzzle depicting a thatched English country cottage, photographed the loose puzzle pieces on a tabletop and used the resulting print as the image of a second puzzle. Gallery visitors are invited to assemble the loose pieces.

«

“What have you got me for Christmas?”

“It’s a 2000-piece puzzle..”
link to this extract

Chinese scientists to pioneer first human CRISPR trial • Nature News & Comment

David Cyranoski:

»

Chinese scientists are on the verge of being first in the world to inject people with cells modified using the CRISPR–Cas9 gene-editing technique.

A team led by Lu You, an oncologist at Sichuan University’s West China Hospital in Chengdu, plans to start testing such cells in people with lung cancer next month. The clinical trial received ethical approval from the hospital’s review board on 6 July.

“It’s an exciting step forward,” says Carl June, a clinical researcher in immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

There have been a number of human clinical trials using an alternative gene-editing technique, including one led by June, that have helped patients combat HIV. June is also a scientific adviser on a planned US trial that would also use CRISPR–Cas9-modified cells for the treatment of cancer.

Last month, an advisory panel of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) approved that project. But the trial also requires a green light from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and a university review board. The US researchers have said they could start their clinical trial by the end of this year.

«

Notable step. Could be huge; could be a flop; could be “great, but just for special cases” – which seems most likely.
link to this extract

Why i hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing • Nick Bostrom

From 2008, but still relevant after the latest discovery of an Earth-like planet near another sun:

»

From these two facts [no observed alien civilisations; space is REALLY big] it follows that there exists a “Great Filter”. 1 The Great Filter can be thought of as a probability barrier. It consists of exist one of more highly improbable evolutionary transitions or steps whose occurrence is required in order for an Earth‐like planet to produce an intelligent civilization of a type that would be visible to us with our current observation technology. You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be powerful enough— which is to say, the critical steps must be improbable enough—that even with many billions rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals, at least none that we can detect in our neck of the woods.

Now, an important question for us is, just where might this Great Filter be located? There are two basic possibilities: It might be behind us, somewhere in our distant past. Or it might be ahead of us, somewhere in the millennia or decades to come. Let us ponder these possibilities in turn.

«

See if you can work out which of those two possibilities is preferable. Bostrom’s essay is unhurried and thorough, yet economical.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Yes, Facebook really is testing autoplay video with sound! Photo by pasa47 on Flickr.

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

We found Amazon’s secret drone testing site hidden in the English countryside • Business Insider

Sam Shead drove to Cambridge, and then its countryside, and seems to have found Amazon’s test site. A fun little narrative, well-told through simple photos. (Though could have done with better photos and Shead spending more time staking out the secret drone testing site, to be honest.)
link to this extract

An exclusive look at how AI and machine learning work at Apple • Backchannel

Steven Levy usually gets insider interviews at Google; this time, it’s Apple, on its AI efforts:

»

The most recent purchase was Turi, a Seattle company that Apple snatched for a reported $200 million. It has built an ML toolkit that’s been compared to Google’s TensorFlow, and the purchase fueled speculation that Apple would use it for similar purposes both internally and for developers. Apple’s executives wouldn’t confirm or deny. “There are certain things they had that matched very well with Apple from a technology view, and from a people point of view,” says Cue. In a year or two, we may figure out what happened, as we did when Siri began showing some of the predictive powers of Cue (no relation to Eddy!), a small startup Apple snatched up in 2013.

No matter where the talent comes from, Apple’s AI infrastructure allows it to develop products and features that would not be possible by earlier means. It’s altering the company’s product road map. “Here at Apple there is no end to the list of really cool ideas,” says Schiller. “Machine learning is enabling us to say yes to some things that in past years we would have said no to. It’s becoming embedded in the process of deciding the products we’re going to do next.”

One example of this is the Apple Pencil that works with the iPad Pro. In order for Apple to include its version of a high-tech stylus, it had to deal with the fact that when people wrote on the device, the bottom of their hand would invariably brush the touch screen, causing all sorts of digital havoc. Using a machine learning model for “palm rejection” enabled the screen sensor to detect the difference between a swipe, a touch, and a pencil input with a very high degree of accuracy. “If this doesn’t work rock solid, this is not a good piece of paper for me to write on anymore — and Pencil is not a good product,” says Federighi. If you love your Pencil, thank machine learning.

«

Would not have guessed that. Though I will say that I predicted AI as the “next big thing” for your phone in the talk I gave at TedX Hilversum last year. Most noteworthy: how it reconciles privacy with machine learning. (By keeping it on the phone, in a 200MB store.)
link to this extract

Spotify is out of contract with all three major labels – and wants to pay them less • Music Business Worldwide

Tim Ingham:

»

The Swedish streaming company has been out of a long-term deal with Universal Music Group for more than a year, say our sources.

Its contract with Warner Music Group expired in early 2016, while its licensing agreement with Sony Music Entertainment ran out of juice a few months ago.

In practical terms, this isn’t a huge problem.

Spotify continues to be licensed by all three majors on a rolling month-by-month basis, and the possibility of UMG, Sony or Warner catalogues being pulled is widely regarded as out of the question.

The majors, have, however, gnashed their teeth a little over Spotify’s recent promotional deals – not least its new family plan, which matches Apple Music’s equivalent by offering up to six people premium access for just $14.99 per month.

Some parties within Universal, Sony and Warner are believed to be uneasy about Spotify’s decision to announce such promotions without any long-term licensing agreements in place. (The situation was described by one senior major source to MBW today as a “very grey area”.)

Spotify’s investors, meanwhile, must be concerned about Daniel Ek’s chances of pulling off an IPO without long-term major label deals: the majors own around 75% of global recordings market share.

«

Spotify’s weakness is that it wants to cut the amount it pays – presently 55% of revenue (v 58% for Apple Music) – but is hardly in a strong place to bargain. And meanwhile, its debt-fuelled race for an IPO continues. It can’t service its debt without a big (IPO) cash infusion: it lost $200m on revenues of $2bn last year, and the debt adds an extra $55m to its costs in its first year.

If you were negotiating for a music label, how would you play this?
link to this extract

Growing number of iPhone 6 and 6Plus devices affected by insidious ‘touch disease’ • Mac Rumors

Juli Clover:

»

As the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus approach their second birthday, a growing number of users are suffering from what appears to be a latent manufacturing issue that presents as a gray flickering bar at the top of the screen and a display that’s unresponsive or less responsive to touch.

In a new blog post and video, repair site iFixit says a number of third-party repair outlets have seen iPhone 6 and 6 Plus models affected by the bug, which appears to be very common. STS Telecom owner Jason Villmer says he sees faulty iPhone 6 and 6 Plus models multiple times a week, while another repair tech in Louisiana sees up to 100 iPhone 6 and 6 Plus devices that don’t respond well to touch.

“This issue is widespread enough that I feel like almost every iPhone 6/6+ has a touch of it (no pun intended) and are like ticking bombs just waiting to act up,” says Jason Villmer, owner of STS Telecom–a board repair shop in Missouri.

iFixit is calling the problem “Touch Disease,” and says Apple appears to be aware of the issue based on dozens of complaints on Apple’s support forum, but isn’t “doing anything about it.” Multiple people who brought their iPhones to Apple Stores were told that Apple doesn’t recognize it as an issue and nothing could be done as their iPhones were out of warranty.

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iFixit says that it’s because of an inherent flaw in the design that links the Touch IC chips to the logic board. But in that case, wouldn’t every single phone have the problem, and probably sooner?
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Completely Wrong • Medium

“The Grugq” takes apart James Bamford’s piece suggesting that “there is another Snowden inside the NSA leaking all those files being auctioned by a hacker group“. It’s lengthy, but even this slice will tell you the thoroughness of the takedown:

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The Auction Fallacy

• This assumes that the auction is real. There is no reason to believe that. The preparation for the distribution of the files — packaging, account creation, uploading, and announcing — spans weeks. From the way it was done we can conclude that the perpetrators were: careful (everything has been scrubbed, they used encrypted anonymous webmail); cautious (multiple locations guaranteeing wide dispersal and difficult removal); skilled (good crypto practices), and persistent (i.e. driven by purpose.) This is a lot of work for what is bound to be very little money (just over USD$1000, at this time.)

• Anyone who is skilled enough to setup this operation should be knowledgeable enough to know that selling the tools to non-FVEY nation states would be more profitable. They could literally do the exact same thing (minus the public announcement) and contact individual embassies from Europe, Asia, Africa, etc. They would get more money and run less risk. Hell, even just giving the bugs to ZDI would generate a bigger payout!

• Bitcoin is a terrible protocol to use when running an auction against the NSA. Determining where BTC are cashed out is simply a little bit of graph analysis. Know what the NSA is excellent at? Graph analysis. A Bitcoin based auction is not the way to monetise an NSA ops toolkit (and remain free.)

• To quote daveaitel: No team of “hackers” would want to piss off Equation Group this much. That’s the kind of cojones that only come from having a nation state protecting you. — Source

• If the auction was legitimate, there is no reason that 60% of the auction data would be “free” as proof. The screen shots and one or two tools/exploits (e.g. ones for old bugs) would be sufficient to pique the interest of potential bidders. Instead the “proof” file is, essentially, the entire kit and caboodle (pun absolutely intended.)

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Consider yourself informed.
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Grab your headphones: Facebook is testing video with autoplay sound • Mashable

Ariel Bogle:

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From Tuesday local time, some Australians may notice autoplay on all types of video (including ads and Facebook Live) acting differently on their mobile app.

In one version of the test, sound plays immediately as the video begins, if you have sound enabled on your device. Another group is able to turn sound on during the test session using an icon that will sit to the bottom right of videos. 

Both groups see a pop-up message informing them about how to use the controls, and sound will only play if the smartphone’s volume is up. If you don’t want to annoy your workmates, sound can also be turned to “always off” in Facebook settings.

“We’re running a small test in News Feed where people can choose whether they want to watch videos with sound on from the start,” a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable Australia. “For people in this test who do not want sound to play, they can switch it off in Settings or directly on the video itself.

“This is one of several tests we’re running as we work to improve the video experience for people on Facebook.”

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How is this “improving” the video experience for ordinary people on Facebook? This is nonsense. The “people on Facebook” for whom this is improving the experience are advertisers on Facebook. But as Mashable points out, Facebook’s own research shows that 80% of people don’t like ads that play with sound without warning.

And what is the story, which is otherwise insightful, missing? A comment from an independent expert.
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I was wrong about the iPad Pro • Technobuffalo

Todd Haselton:

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The iPad Pro 9.7 has changed my work habits. When I wake up in the morning, I’ll take it from my nightstand and start the day sitting at my kitchen table, reading the news, drinking coffee, and cruising through Twitter. If there’s something big going on, I’ll write a story before I take my wife to the train. The rest of the day is spent on my Windows 10 PC in my office, for the most part, until the evening when I return to the iPad Pro. I’ll finish editing and scheduling posts for some of our west coast writers from the iPad Pro while doing the daily NYT Crossword, for example, an app that I found isn’t available on Android tablets.

I love the portability. If I decide to change my work habits, I’ll bring the iPad Pro with me in the car, ready to edit or write a story from a coffee shop or diner over lunch. It’s lighter than my other devices and offers exactly what I need. And while my Chromebook offered a similar experience in terms of productivity, the better display, comfortable keyboard (it’s really amazing) and larger selection of apps keep bringing me back to the iPad Pro.

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Notice how he calls his “work habits” the things he does when he’s not at work. Though I agree – the 9.7 iPad Pro is great, especially with a keyboard.
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Breaking News 1: How monetizing became malvertising • Reynolds Journalism Institute

Barrett Golding:

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Bromium Labs found more than half the ads with malware payloads were on either news or entertainment websites, with news at the top of the pack (32 percent). Like all marketers, malvertisers want premiere placement on well-respected sites. The ad-bidding process grants them their wish.

In March 2016 the websites of The New York Times, BBC, Weather Network, The Hill, Newsweek, AOL, MSN, and NFL all, as CNET reported, “inadvertently ran malicious ads that attempted to hijack the computers of visitors and demand a ransom.”

This even juicier website-breaking news is from Engadget: “Forbes asked readers to turn off ad blockers in order to view the article. After doing so, visitors were immediately served with pop-under malware, primed to infect their computers, and likely silently steal passwords, personal data and banking information.”

Malicious advertisements sources, Bromium Labs

The problem is not new. It’s been happening on news sites for years. These headlines are from 2013:

“The Amount of Questionable Online Traffic Will Blow Your Mind: The World Wide rip-off” – Adweek.
“The $7.5 Billion Ad Swindle” – The Ad Contrarian.
Google has run an anti-malvertising team since 2009. Here’s a recent report on their progress:

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Google is enabling traffic laundering, where websites with pirated content redirect visitors to shell websites displaying AdSense ads. These ads finance piracy, and Google is taking a cut in the process. Google clients have no clue of the reputational risk they run by using AdSense.
—“A Real Life Example of Google’s Implication in Ad Fraud and Traffic Laundering,” Kalkis Research

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CNBC and CNN commentator Shelly Palmer wrote, “Ad tech has evolved into a toxic ecosystem that is killing itself, and it is taking digital advertising with it.” His article, “What We’ll Do When Ad Tech Dies,” concludes, “Ad tech will be with us in its current form until someone goes to jail.”

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Why is it that news sites are so particularly targeted? Because they take a ton more ad-tech ads? (Via Rob Leathern.)
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Opting out: the illusion • Medium

Rob Leathern:

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I wanted to opt out of all behavioral ads, not just AdRoll, and so landed on this [Ghostery] “Global opt-out” page. It was easy to select all and choose “Opt out of selected companies”. I saw stuff happening in the browser indicating to me that this seems to work (hard to know though, seems difficult to test as a user). But then I noticed that for a lot of these companies it said “go to site” to opt-out. So let’s go through the numbers here:

a. There are 615 names on this list
Here’s the full list in a Google Doc broken down by ones that you have to visit the site versus not. Here’s a screenshot of the interface.

Source: Ghostery.com, August 11, 2016

b. I was able to opt-out of 269 of them (44%)
c. 4 Didn’t respond in the browser
d. 342 Required me to visit the website (56%)

AdRoll was one of the 342 that required me to visit the website to opt-out. I’ve heard of them and they’re generally thought of as a good company, but there are hundreds of names on this list even people who’ve worked in this industry for years have never heard of (and affiliations with industry organizations usually require a membership fee only, not any degree of vetting).

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The best part? Opting out of being targeted on your cookie data requires cookie data.
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Strong demand for Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 tests supply chain • Reuters

Se Young Lee:

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While robust demand could help deliver another solid quarter of earnings, Samsung also risks missing out on potential sales if it cannot boost supply quickly. Rivals such as Apple are poised to launch new phones which could pull customers away from Samsung if a shortage persists.

“As pre-order results for the Galaxy Note 7 have far exceeded our estimates, its release date in some markets has been adjusted,” Samsung told Reuters in a statement without commenting on where launch delays could occur.

Production problems for the curved displays for the Galaxy S6 edge phone resulted in disappointing sales last year, and some investors fear a repeat if the world’s top smartphone maker does not move quickly to meet Note 7 demand…

…”The party got more visitors than Samsung expected, so they just need to put more food out,” said Nomura analyst C.W. Chung, who said the supply situation was not a major risk given that Samsung made key parts such as displays and chips in-house.

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And how big is that demand?

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Samsung could sell as many as 15m Galaxy Note 7 phones this year, Chung said, compared with an estimated 9m Galaxy Note 5 phones sold last year.

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For comparison, the iPhone SE could hit about 9m sales this year – and that’s its low-end phone. The Note 7 is a hit, but this stuff is all relative.

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Android Nougat’s single most confounding feature • Fast Company

Harry McCracken:

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here’s something I just don’t get: Nougat retains the pointless eyesore of a status bar at the top, which quickly fills up with tiny notification icons that remind me of Windows 98, including dupes such as the three Facebook icons you can see below:

Now, I’m sure there are folks who like this feature. Fine. I can’t imagine, though, that I’m the only one who wants to turn it off. Not only does the operating system have no way to do that, but the third-party apps I know of that offer the ability either mess up Android in other ways or require the phone to be rooted.

I switch back and forth between iOS and Android on a regular basis; both are so good these days that I can’t decide which one I prefer. But every time I come back to Android and see those notification icons pile up, I wonder how they’ve survived so long.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

Imagine not playing here – but getting paid handsomely for doing so. Photo by rodrigot on Flickr.

A selection of 12 links for you. Wash separately from other colours. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Soccer’s ultimate con man was a superstar who couldn’t play the game • Atlas Obscura

Tucker Leighty-Phillips:

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Brazilian soccer star Carlos Kaiser had it all: exclusive contracts with popular teams, money, fame, and women. The professional soccer star was only missing one thing: the ability to play soccer. Arguably the greatest con artist in all of sports history, Kaiser (birth name Carlos Henrique Raposo) was able to maintain a career that spanned nearly two decades while playing in as few games as possible and never scoring a goal.

Admittedly, Kaiser was not completely devoid of soccer skill. He initially showed promise in youth leagues, signing a professional contract with popular club Puebla in 1979 after impressing scouts, but was quickly let go. However, Kaiser had devised a plan to keep his career going. By riding the coattails of more promising colleagues, faking injuries at pertinent times, and taking advantage of the lack of technology, Carlos Kaiser was able to maintain a professional athlete’s lifestyle without ever having to prove his athleticism.

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OK, he could play the game (anyone can play soccer). But he didn’t spend any noticeable time actually playing. And “con man” – well, sort of.
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Consumer ultraslim and detachable uptake revitalizes PC and tablet market in western Europe • IDC

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Chromebooks are gaining momentum and experiencing high growth, especially in the Nordics. As we are in the Nordics’ back-to-school season, many vendors pushed shipments in 2016Q2, in particular targeting the education sector in the region, where the adoption of this form factor is taking off. Volumes are still low, as Chromebook are in early adoption stage among schools, but the growth potential is promising, especially in Sweden (59.7% YoY increase in 2016Q2).

Similarly to ultraslims, detachables are experiencing interesting growth in Western Europe, as shipments rose from 0.5m in 2015Q2 to 1.6m units in 2016Q2, in contrast with the 6.0% decline of the tablet market. Detachables performed strongly across all Western Europe, posting triple-digit growth in all countries. Surface continued to be the most widely adopted detachable in the commercial segment, while iPad Pro reached first position in the consumer segment. Detachables posted strong growth in both consumer and commercial, showing that interest in this form factor continues to be on the rise in both segments. Despite the rapid growth in both segments, the drivers behind their performance differ between them.

“The interest in detachables in the commercial segment is generated by the number of premium devices available in the market and the increasing number of use cases in which detachables emerge as the optimal solution. While deployments are not massive, since detachables are mainly adopted either to address specific vertical needs or by top executive ranks, the number of companies adopting them is clearly picking up as some of the classic concerns such as device performance are being tackled by this wave of new releases” said Daniel Gonçalves, research analyst, IDC EMEA Personal Computing. “On the other hand the penetration of detachables in the consumer segment is driven by many local vendors and white brands moving away from the already saturated slate space dominated by Android. These players keep targeting market share in the entry-level space, and now they also supply 9- or 10-inch screen size, Windows-based devices with basic features and keyboard capabilities.”

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IDC is taking the “PC plus tablet” market as the proxy for everything that’s going on – though at 17.2m (in western Europe) that still saw a 3.4% year-on-year fall, with tablets down by 6% while PCs fell by 1.6%.
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This must be the biggest Windows Blue Screen of Death ever seen • Geek.com

Lee Mathews:

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The Blue Screen of Death has been around for more than 20 years. You’ve probably seen one or two before, but you’ve never seen one quite this big.

That massive video wall (probably around 50 feet tall) you see below graces the entrance to CentralFestival, a shopping mall in Pattaya, Thailand. Blake Sibbit happened to be outside when the Windows-powered signage tripped over itself and captured this awesome image.

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That is superb.
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Private lives are exposed as WikiLeaks spills its secrets • Associated Press

Raphael Satter and Maggie Michael:

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WikiLeaks’ global crusade to expose government secrets is causing collateral damage to the privacy of hundreds of innocent people, including survivors of sexual abuse, sick children and the mentally ill, The Associated Press has found.

In the past year alone, the radical transparency group has published medical files belonging to scores of ordinary citizens while many hundreds more have had sensitive family, financial or identity records posted to the web. In two particularly egregious cases, WikiLeaks named teenage rape victims. In a third case, the site published the name of a Saudi citizen arrested for being gay, an extraordinary move given that homosexuality is punishable by death in the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom.

“They published everything: my phone, address, name, details,” said a Saudi man who told AP he was bewildered that WikiLeaks had revealed the details of a paternity dispute with a former partner. “If the family of my wife saw this … Publishing personal stuff like that could destroy people.”

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Wikileaks used to be careful about this sort of thing. No more.
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Why AI development is going to get even faster. (Yes, really!) • Mapping Babel

Jack Clark:

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Robotics has just started to get into neural networks. This has already sped up development. This year, Google demonstrated a system that teaches robotic arms to learn how to pick up objects of any size and shape. That work was driven by research conducted last year at Pieter Abbeel’s lab in Berkeley, which saw scientists combine two neural network-based techniques (reinforcement learning and deep learning) with robotics to create machines that could learn faster. Robots are also getting better eyes, thanks to deep learning as well. “Armed with the latest deep learning packages, we can begin to recognize objects in previously impossible ways,” says Daniela Rus, a professor in CSAIL at MIT who works on self-driving cars.

More distant communities have already adapted the technology to their own needs. Brendan Frey runs a company called Deep Genomics, which uses machine learning to analyze the genome. Part of the motivation for that is that humans are “very bad” at interpreting the genome, he says. That’s because we spent hundreds of thousands of years evolving finely-tuned pattern detectors for things we saw and heard, like tigers. Because we never had to hunt the genome, or listen for its fearsome sounds, we didn’t develop very good inbuilt senses for analyzing it. Modern machine learning approaches give us a way to get computers to analyze this type of mind-bending data for us. “We must turn to truly superhuman artificial intelligence to overcome our limitations,” he says.

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Subtle point: machine learning systems can discern patterns that we can’t because we look for patterns.
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People disregard security warnings on computers because they come at bad times • Brigham Young University

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Software developers listen up: if you want people to pay attention to your security warnings on their computers or mobile devices, you need to make them pop up at better times.

A new study from BYU, in collaboration with Google Chrome engineers, finds the status quo of warning messages appearing haphazardly—while people are typing, watching a video, uploading files, etc.—results in up to 90% of users disregarding them.

Researchers found these times are less effective because of “dual task interference,” a neural limitation where even simple tasks can’t be simultaneously performed without significant performance loss. Or, in human terms, multitasking.

“We found that the brain can’t handle multitasking very well,” said study coauthor and BYU information systems professor Anthony Vance. “Software developers categorically present these messages without any regard to what the user is doing. They interrupt us constantly and our research shows there’s a high penalty that comes by presenting these messages at random times.”

An example of a security message, the Chrome Cleanup Tool.

For example, 74% of people in the study ignored security messages (example above) that popped up while they were on the way to close a web page window. Another 79% ignored the messages if they were watching a video. And a whopping 87% disregarded the messages while they were transferring information, in this case, a confirmation code.

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Pinterest acquires Instapaper, which will live on as a separate app • Techcrunch

Matthew Lynley:

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Pinterest said today that it would be acquiring the team behind Instapaper, which will continue operating as a separate app. The Instapaper team will both work on the core Pinterest experience and updating Instapaper.

Pinterest’s logic here is that one of the company’s core tenets is bookmarking — much like Instapaper’s primary goal with its app. The company has been on an aggressive acquisition binge in the past few months. In July, Pinterest acquihired the team behind Highlight and Shorts. It would seem that much like other apps that remain very popular in certain niches, Pinterest is going to let this one continue running (at least, until it ends up running its course).

We haven’t heard much from the Instapaper team in a while. One of the last major updates happened in May last year, and while the app has been chugging along (and will continue to do so as the team continues to work at Pinterest), a lot of the same functionality that Instapaper pioneered has found its way into other core user experiences.

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“Acquiring the team behind” sounds subtly different from “acquiring the company”. An acquihire which will let Instapaper rot? Has Instapaper just reached the end of its innovative life, and is now being put out to pasture? Feels that way. Not that Pinterest has set the innovative world alight for some years now.
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Helping users easily access content on mobile • Google Webmaster blog

Doantam Phan, product manager:

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Although the majority of pages now have text and content on the page that is readable without zooming, we’ve recently seen many examples where these pages show intrusive interstitials to users. While the underlying content is present on the page and available to be indexed by Google, content may be visually obscured by an interstitial. This can frustrate users because they are unable to easily access the content that they were expecting when they tapped on the search result.

Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible. This can be problematic on mobile devices where screens are often smaller. To improve the mobile search experience, after January 10, 2017, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly.

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Laudable aim, though I suspect that what will actually happen is that Google’s crawler bot won’t get interstitials (tested via the user-agent), and normal people will.
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Google recruiting web stars, Hulu for virtual reality push • Bloomberg

Lucas Shaw:

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Google will help promote projects from Hulu LLC and fund the production of 360-degree videos with YouTube stars like the Dolan twins and Justine Ezarik, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private deals. The division of Alphabet Inc. has also partnered with video-game producers and sports leagues to boost its biggest virtual-reality initiative.

“It’s apparent they’ve spent a lot of money internally,” said Finn Staber, co-founder of TheWaveVR, a virtual-reality startup developing a music app for Daydream.

The company is relying on apps, shorts and games to promote Daydream, a hybrid store and software service that Google hopes will be the dominant way people engage in virtual reality, much like Android is for smartphones. An update to Android software that will support Daydream began rolling out Monday. The idea is to encourage the growth of the technology and ensure Google maintains a central role in helping people find things to watch.

Google is entering what has quickly become a crowded marketplace, with products from Facebook Inc., Sony Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. and HTC Corp. Whereas Sony’s Morpheus headset is tethered to its PlayStation video-game console, Google is focused on mobile-based VR, whereby consumers snap their phones into a visor or headset. With the headset on, Daydream presents users with an array of apps, from YouTube to HBO Now.

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Pushing hard on what is very early days – but it’s a few million; to Google, that’s just seed money.
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Oculus rift founder is a sham, according to a new claim from Zenimax • Alphr

Vaughn Highfield:

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it’s all part of an ongoing court case from 2014 against Oculus, Facebook and the acquisition of its VR tech. “Instead of complying with his contract, during his last days at ZeniMax, [Carmack] copied thousands of documents from a computer at ZeniMax to a USB storage device,” reads the amended charges.

“He never returned those files or all copies of them after his employment with ZeniMax was terminated. In addition, after Carmak’s employment with ZeniMax was terminated, he returned to ZeniMax’s pemises to take a customized tool for developing VR Technology belonging to ZeniMax that itself is part of ZeniMax’s VR technology.”

The amended claim goes into deeper territory by accusing Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe of deliberately fabricating Luckey’s origin story to the press.

According to ZeniMax, Iribe “disseminated to the press the false and fanciful story that Luckey was the brilliant inventor of VR technology who had developed that technology in his parents’ garage.”

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Computers trounce pathologists in predicting lung cancer type, severity • Stanford Medicine News Center

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Computers can be trained to be more accurate than pathologists in assessing slides of lung cancer tissues, according to a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The researchers found that a machine-learning approach to identifying critical disease-related features accurately differentiated between two types of lung cancers and predicted patient survival times better than the standard approach of pathologists classifying tumors by grade and stage.

“Pathology as it is practiced now is very subjective,” said Michael Snyder, PhD, professor and chair of genetics. “Two highly skilled pathologists assessing the same slide will agree only about 60% of the time. This approach replaces this subjectivity with sophisticated, quantitative measurements that we feel are likely to improve patient outcomes.”

The research was published Aug. 16 in Nature Communications.

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And could probably be applied to other forms of cancer. “Probably”? Certainly. How long before cancer diagnosis is done automatically, remotely, routinely – so that early-stage cancers are detected from some trivial sample?
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Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam • Medium

Fred Benenson had been doing some web shopping, and later got an email from Sears – despite never having given his email to Sears:

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I was extremely curious how Sears managed to sign me up without ever knowing my email in the first place.

On Criteo’s website, it says received they received my email from a “partner” database:

What partner? What database? There’s no explanation of who gave my email address to Criteo.
But after puzzling through their site, here is what I think happened:

• I am signed up to some platform which is a Criteo partner. It’s entirely unclear who this partner is. While Criteo boasts a “close partnership” with Facebook, Facebook claims that they do not share personally identifying information such as your email address with ad partners. Regardless, a platform with my email address gave it to Criteo.
• That platform dropped a Criteo cookie in my browser at some point in the past.
• That platform delivered my information (a way to identify me using a cookie and a hash of my email address) to Criteo.
• A couple weeks ago servers alerted Criteo that my Criteo ID was browsing sears.com. They are able to do this because sears.com loads Criteo code and uses a criteo.com cookie (screenshot here).
• Criteo queries its partner for my email address when Sears wants to send spam to users who browsed their website.
• Sears gets my email via Criteo and subscribes me to a newsletter and sends me the spam.

Criteo (and their partners, like sears.com) have successfully performed an end-run around the traditional newsletter opt-in process.

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Wonder if this would breach data protection laws in the UK and Europe. I think the penultimate step might do – can’t pass an email that wasn’t already held to a business user.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Hey, remember that story in Wired about the “survey” by Rantic? They’ve struck it out on the basis that the survey can’t be confirmed as actually existing. Win.

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.