Pictures like this of ocean sands off the Bahamas are available via the Landsat app. Photo by NASA Goddard on Flickr.

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

A selection of 12 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How things work • Gawker

Nick Denton, two days from his 50th birthday, writes the last post on the site:

»

Peter Thiel has gotten away with what would otherwise be viewed as an act of petty revenge by reframing the debate on his terms. Having spent years on a secret scheme to punish Gawker’s parent company and writers for all manner of stories, Thiel has now cast himself as a billionaire privacy advocate, helping others whose intimate lives have been exposed by the press. It is canny positioning against a site that touted the salutary effects of gossip and an organization that practiced radical transparency.

As former Gawker developer Dustin Curtis says, “Though I find the result abhorrent, this is one of the most beautiful checkmates of all time by Peter Thiel.”

In cultural and business terms, this is an act of destruction, because Gawker.com was a popular and profitable digital media property—before the legal bills mounted. Gawker will be missed. But in dramatic terms, it is a fitting conclusion to this experiment in what happens when you let journalists say what they really think…

…Gawker’s remit was eventually so broad, news and gossip, that subject matter proved no barrier. And Gawker’s web-literate journalists picked up more story ideas from anonymous email tips, obscure web forums or hacker data dumps than they did from interviews or parties. They scorned access. To get an article massaged or fixed, there was nobody behind the scenes to call. Gawker was an island, one publicist said, uncompromised and uncompromising.

«

Best read it now: the site will be dead soon.
link to this extract

Access, accountability reporting and Silicon Valley • Nieman Reports

Adrienne LaFrance:

»

It’s typical to see technology coverage that simply aggregates directly from a tech company’s blog—the modern-day equivalent of a press release—with little or no analysis or additional reporting. One damning example of this lack of skepticism is evident in the early, glowing coverage of Theranos, the health-technology company that said it had developed a cheap, needle-free way to draw and test blood. It wasn’t until last year that an investigative reporter from The Wall Street Journal, prompted by a sunny New Yorker profile of the Theranos founder, began to ask serious questions about whether the technology actually worked the way Theranos claimed it did. That reporting, from John Carreyrou, encouraged other reporters to be more skeptical, too, and ultimately led to a federal criminal investigation into whether the company misled investors and regulators about the state of its technology.

Investigations like Carreyrou’s—or getting inside the grueling corporate culture at Amazon, as The New York Times did last year; or detailing Google’s powerful but hidden lobbying efforts, as The Washington Post has; or contextualizing the cultural complexities of programs like Facebook’s Free Basics, as I’ve tried to do; or establishing a drumbeat of smart, in-depth coverage of the fight between Apple and the F.B.I.—is the only way to begin to understand the complex social and political impact of technology.

Technology companies “are all dedicated to revamping our daily existence,” says Streitfeld, who reported and wrote the Amazon piece for the Times with Jodi Kantor. “What happens when they succeed? Who loses? When they stumble, like Facebook in India, what does it mean? The rise of tech is, in my opinion, the great story of our time”…

…according to Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, “To actually cover technology properly,” Bell says, “it’s about society and culture and human rights. It’s about politics. This idea that you can have a Washington bureau where you don’t have somebody who really understands some of the issues in [computing] infrastructure or A.I., and how data is really political? They are new systems of power, and that’s one of the areas where I think news organizations have been slow.”

«

link to this extract

ObservedEarth on the App Store

»

Want to explore our constantly changing Earth through high resolution multi-spectral satellite imagery? ObservedEarth simplifies the process of obtaining, processing, and visualising earth observation data.

«

Tons of Landsat imagery from a public repository. More details on the website:

»

A range of desktop, mobile, and web applications exist that provide access to satellite imagery. ObservedEarth differs in that it makes accessible a history of observations showing how the Earth has changed over time. Watch rivers change their path, bushfire destruction, forrest regrowth, expansion of urban developments, snowfalls. Earth observation data has wide ranging applications…

…ObservedEarth downloads unprocessed satellite data which is then processed locally on the iPhone/iPad, this enables much greater flexibility in the range of visualisations that can be offered. Raw data consumed by ObservedEarth is often available within hours of the satellite passing overhead.

«

iOS-only at present. Looks amazing. Here’s a video of what you can get:

link to this extract

These charts show that Pokemon Go is already in decline • Bloomberg

Luke Kawa and Lily Katz:

»

Enthusiasm about the potential for Pokemon Go (and augmented reality gaming in general) to improve Nintendo Co Ltd.’s financial performance sent shares parabolic after the app launched in the U.S., and even spurred rallies in secondary plays linked to the success of the game.

Data from Sensor Tower, SurveyMonkey, and Apptopia, however, show that Pokemon Go’s daily active users, downloads, engagement, and time spent on the app per day are all well off their peaks and on a downward trend.

Source: Axiom Capital Management

Source: Axiom Capital Management

“The declining trends should assuage investor concerns about the impact of Pokémon Go on time spent on the above named companies,” writes Anthony.

If these declines prove enduring, this would cast aspersion not only on the viability and popularity of Pokemon Go, but augmented reality gaming at large, according to the analyst.

“The Google Trends data is already showing declining interest in augmented reality, whereas interest in virtual reality remains high,” he concludes.

«

link to this extract

Pokemon Go technology is not just for fun and games, survey says • Fortune

Barb Darrow:

»

there are real business applications for similar augmented reality (AR) technology that have already proven themselves in the market. New research from consulting firm Deloitte bears this out.

Out of 500 mid-market companies surveyed, a whopping 89% said they already use augmented reality in their businesses. That may be surprising until you realize that companies like Hunter Douglas has offered an AR app for Apple devices for several years that lets you preview how a given window treatment will look in your own room before you buy it.

AR is different from virtual reality in that AR incorporates the real world into the view, while virtual reality, as enabled by products like Oculus Rift, builds an entirely new, all-immersive world.

Steve Keathley, deputy chief information officer for Deloitte said AR comes in handy for any application that requires a sneak preview of what a finished product will look like.

«

link to this extract

Android 7.0 Nougat review — do more on your gigantic smartphone • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo with an incredibly thorough review of Nougat:

»

After a lengthy Developer Preview program starting in March, the final version of Android 7.0 (codenamed “Nougat”) is finally launching today. The OS update will slowly begin to rollout to devices over the next few weeks. This year, Google is adding even more form factors to the world’s most popular operating system. After tackling watches, phones, tablets, TVs, and cars, Nougat brings platform improvements aimed at virtual reality headsets and—with some help from Chrome OS—also targets laptops and desktops.

For Android’s primary platform (still phones and tablets), there’s a myriad of improvements. Nougat brings a new multitasking split screen mode, a redesigned notification panel, an adjustable UI scale, and fresh emoji. Nougat also sports numerous under-the-hood improvements, like changes to the Android Runtime, updates to the battery saving “Doze” mode, and developer goodies like Vulkan and Java 8 support.

«

You could skip to the final page – with the conclusions, and the observation that as nice as Nougat is for large-screened phones, most probably won’t see it. Marshmallow is a year old; about 15.2% of Android phones contacting Google Play have it. That inertia will probably get worse as the user base grows, and cheaper phones which don’t get updated are more prevalent.
link to this extract

Apple acquires personal health data startup Gliimpse • Fast Company

Christina Farr and Mark Sullivan:

»

The acquisition will bolster Apple’s efforts in digital health. In recent years, Apple has delved into the sector with a range of services (HealthKit, CareKit, and ResearchKit) that allow patients, clinicians, and researchers to access important health and wellness data via a range of mobile devices. That’s in line with Gliimpse’s mission of uniting disparate streams of health information.

What stands out about the deal is that Gliimpse is intended for patients with diseases like cancer and diabetes. Apple recently hired a top pediatric endocrinologist who developed a HealthKit app for teens with Type 1 diabetes, signaling an increased interest in applications for chronically ill users.

It’s unlikely that this acquisition will bring Apple’s health technologies under the purview of federal regulators. CEO Tim Cook recently told Fast Company in an interview that he sees a major business opportunity for the company in the non-regulated side of health care: “So if you don’t care about reimbursement, which we have the privilege of doing, that may even make the smartphone market look small.”

«

link to this extract

The Chinese (smartphones) are coming • Bloomberg Gadfly

Tim Culpan:

»

Just as television makers Zenith, Motorola and RCA were eventually replaced by Japanese names like Sony, Sharp and Panasonic, so too will Chinese brands overtake the US market.

The latest entrant looks set to be Xiaomi. The richly valued upstart appears ready to dip its toes in one of the world’s most important electronics markets. While China is larger by volume, the US is lucrative because average device prices are much higher.

In an interview with Bloomberg Television on Friday, Xiaomi’s vice president and international front man Hugo Barra said a US move is inevitable:

»

We will lead with social media, with the channels that allow us to get in touch with the young generation that are enthusiastic about new technology. We are definitely going there.

«

Xiaomi’s entry into the US has been in doubt on concern that the Chinese company, which has been widely criticized as a wholesale copycat of Apple and others, would immediately face intellectual property lawsuits.

However, Xiaomi’s purchase this summer of around 1,500 patents from Microsoft seems to have quelled those worries and given the Beijing startup the courage to move directly onto Apple’s home turf.

«

Good point about the TV sets. That is what smartphones are becoming – though more personal.
link to this extract

The Note 7 still delivers embarrassing real-world performance • XDA Developers

Eric Hulse:

»

Every year we notice the same pattern: new Galaxy device comes out, it gets positive reviews (excluding, perhaps, the Galaxy S5), and among one of the positive points, you usually find performance… somehow.

This is something that, of course, varies from publication to publication. But in general, the story is the same year after year: we see the breakdowns from the more-mainstream publications speak positively about these devices’ performance, somehow suspending the otherwise year-long notion that Samsung’s software is in dire need of a serious rework. It’s not uncommon to see the same publications, or even the same reviewers, then admit that the devices had slowed down since their review was printed, often in such tremendous ways that make us forget that advancements like project TRIM ever happened. The Galaxy Note 7 has just come out, and with Grace UX – Samsung’s thorough redesign of TouchWiz – coupled with top-of-the-line components, we would hope this trend would be reversed on both fronts — coverage and reality.

«

Hulse points to problems with the performance of the Note 7 after a few days’ use: “The worst hiccups and stutters – or delays – happen only every now and then, but the phone itself is simply slower than its competitors at nearly every action.”

Odd how the reviews tend not to have used it for as long. Remarkable how XDA Developers should be the site to point to this. Keep that thought.
link to this extract

Samsung reminds us — again! — that you can’t make people use an app they don’t want • Recode

Peter Kafka:

»

Samsung’s music service, which you didn’t know existed, stops existing next month.

As Variety reported earlier, Samsung will shutter Milk Music on Sept. 22. It joins Samsung’s Milk Video in the Graveyard For Samsung Media Services No One Wanted Except Samsung Executives.

It’s easy to pick on Samsung here, but they’re not the only company to overestimate the power of a distribution platform.

It’s true that you can’t get media/apps/services to customers without access to a platform. But control of the platform doesn’t mean customers are going to use your media/apps/services: They’ve got plenty of choice, and they’ll choose the ones they want.

«

Not forgetting Samsung’s ChatOn, closed in 1Q 2015.
link to this extract

Should you charge your phone overnight? • The New York Times

Jonah Engel Bromwich:

»

in theory, any damage from charging your phone overnight with an official charger, or a trustworthy off-brand charger, should be negligible.

But the act of charging is itself bad for your phone’s battery.

Here’s why.

Most phones make use of a technology that allows their batteries to accept more current faster. Hatem Zeine, the founder, chief scientist and chief technical officer of the wireless charging company Ossia, says the technology enables phones to adjust to the amount of charge that a charger is capable of supplying.

The technology allows power to pulse into the battery in specific modulations, increasing the speed at which the lithium ions in the battery travel from one side to the other and causing the battery to charge more quickly.

But this process also leads lithium-ion (and lithium-polymer) batteries to corrode faster than they otherwise would.

«

Recommendation: use a lower-power charger which will charge it less quickly. It’ll charge slower, and last longer.
link to this extract

VR Noir shows how virtual reality will transform television • VentureBeat

Joe Durbin:

»

VR Noir is a 360-degree film with interactive elements created by the Australian studio Start VR. The experience hits all the necessary beats of its namesake genre: the rumpled ex-cop P.I., the mysterious femme fatale and an even more mysterious murder to unravel. However, all of these familiar beats seem fresh and innovative in this immersive new medium.

Let’s be clear: if VR Noir was a standard television show it would not be considered that great. After watching it for myself, I’ve concluded that the performances are fine, but clearly amateur, the plot is on the flimsy side, and the twists feel lackluster. But the quality of the story and content isn’t what’s most important about this particular piece of filmmaking — it’s how it uses the technology.

As events unfold in VR Noir, you’re given agency within the narrative. You can choose to ask a client more questions, or simply take a case. You get to take control of a spy camera as you stake out a mark on a rooftop. And above all you get to experience a story as the main character, as opposed to simply watching from the sidelines. In this way, it carries forward the torch that Gone lit before it.

This nexus of interaction, immersion and narrative has the potential to become the de facto delivery system for entertainment in the future. VR Noir‘s producer, Nathan Anderson, laid out his commitment to this new style of production in an official statement accompanying the app’s release.

»

“We wanted to explore how film and gaming VR experiences they could live together,” Anderson said. “Can you have a cinematic experience that also allows you to have some agency in the outcome? My career quest is to find the convergence of storytelling, game design and interactivity.”

«

«

Very early days, and there must be limits to where/what you can view.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Conspiracy theories! They’re so reassuring. Photo by Kenya Allmond on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. That’s decimal 10. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

I went on a weeklong cruise for conspiracy theorists. It ended poorly • Popular Mechanics

Bronwen Dickey did so you don’t have to:

»Inside my orientation tote bag was a shiny blue bracelet I was supposed to wear at all times. “Makes it easier to find members of the group,” Adele said. But that wasn’t necessary. Most of the cruisers—the vacationers, not our group—were generally outfitted in bright colors and loud prints. As the days passed, a lot of them began wearing novelty captain’s hats from the gift shop. The conspiracy group, on the other hand, was mostly serious-looking senior citizens in “Infowars” T-shirts. Some of them wore casts, others walked with canes. Two relied on motorized scooters. None looked like he or she could afford to spend money frivolously. One eighty-year-old man’s toes poked through the tops of his worn leather loafers.

I headed to the windowless conference room that had been temporarily renamed the Liberty Lab.

“Welcome everyone,” said Dr. Susan Shumsky, the founder of Divine Travels and (claim to fame) one-time personal staff member of Beatles’ guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. (Her doctorate in divinity is from the Teaching of Intuitional Metaphysics in San Diego.) “I’d like to begin with a prayer.” Nearly everything the woman wore was either bright pink or sparkled. “Breathe in divine light!” she said. We closed our eyes and inhaled. Across the hall, in Gatsby’s Casino, slot machines clanged to a piped-in soundtrack of Taylor Swift and Rihanna.

Then sixteen presenters introduced themselves and gave brief synopses of their seminars. Laura Eisenhower—great-granddaughter of Dwight!—said she had been invited in 2006 to join a secret American colony on Mars and that aliens, including some prominent U.S. politicians, are already living on earth in disguise.

«

At this point you’d be looking for the emergency exits. Then you realise – you’re on a ship. There’s no getting off. And indeed, it didn’t end well.
link to this extract

98 personal data points that Facebook uses to target ads to you • The Washington Post

Caitlin Dewey:

»Targeting options for Facebook advertisers*
1. Location
2. Age
3. Generation
4. Gender
5. Language
6. Education level
7. Field of study
8. School
9. Ethnic affinity
10. Income and net worth
11. Home ownership and type
12. Home value
13. Property size
14. Square footage of home
15. Year home was built
16. Household composition«

And plenty more where that came from. (“Relationship status” is at 32. But they’re in no particular order.)
link to this extract

The new menage a trois • Psychology Today

Hara Estroff Marano on how smartphones intrude into relationships:

»It’s not just that we have only so much time and attention. Smartphones actually transform interpersonal processes. In a much-discussed 2014 study, Virginia Tech psychologist Shalini Misra and her team monitored the conversations of 100 couples in a coffee shop and identified “the iPhone Effect”: The mere presence of a smartphone, even if not in use—just as an object in the background—degrades private conversations, making partners less willing to disclose deep feelings and less understanding of each other, she and her colleagues reported in Environment and Behavior.

With people’s consciousness divided between what’s in front of them and the immense possibility symbolized by smartphones, face-to-face interactions lose the power to fulfill. Mobile phones are “undermining the character and depth” of the intimate exchanges we cherish most, says Misra. Partners are unable to engage each other in a meaningful way.

On or off, smartphones are also a barrier to establishing new relationships, observe Andrew Przybylski and Netta Weinstein of the University of Essex in England. When they assigned pairs of strangers to discuss either casual or meaningful events, the presence of a smartphone, even outside the  visual field, derailed the formation of relationships—especially if the participants were asked to talk about something personally significant. Smartphones “inhibited the development of interpersonal closeness and trust and reduced the extent to which individuals felt understanding and empathy from their partners,” the team reports in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Subversion of the conditions of intimacy, they believe, happens outside of conscious awareness.

«

That’s really quite disturbing, in a subtle way.
link to this extract

Hackers trick facial-recognition logins with photos from Facebook (what else?) • WIRED

Lily Hay Newman:

»Earlier this month at the Usenix security conference, security and computer vision specialists from the University of North Carolina presented a system that uses digital 3-D facial models based on publicly available photos and displayed with mobile virtual reality technology to defeat facial recognition systems. A VR-style face, rendered in three dimensions, gives the motion and depth cues that a security system is generally checking for. The researchers used a VR system shown on a smartphone’s screen for its accessibility and portability.

Their attack, which successfully spoofed four of the five systems they tried, is a reminder of the downside to authenticating your identity with biometrics. By and large your bodily features remain constant, so if your biometric data is compromised or publicly available, it’s at risk of being recorded and exploited. Faces plastered across the web on social media are especially vulnerable—look no further than the wealth of facial biometric data literally called Facebook.

«

Very theoretical – but probably the sort of thing that could be automated.
link to this extract

Linux flaw that allows anyone to hijack Internet traffic also affects 80% of Android devices • Lookout Blog

Andrew Blaich:

»Lookout recently discovered a serious exploit in TCP reported this week also impacts nearly 80% of Android, or around 1.4bn of 1.8bn devices, based on an install base reported by Statista. The vulnerability lets attackers obtain unencrypted traffic and degrade encrypted traffic to spy on victims.

The issue should be concerning to Android users as attackers are able to execute this spying without traditional “man-in-the-middle” attacks through which they must compromise the network in order to intercept the traffic.

Researchers from University of California, Riverside and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory recently revealed a vulnerability in TCP at the USENIX Security 2016 conference, specifically pertaining to Linux systems. The vulnerability allows an attacker to remotely spy on people who are using unencrypted traffic or degrade encrypted connections. While a man in the middle attack is not required here, the attacker still needs to know a source and destination IP address to successfully execute the attack.

«

One for the nation-state attackers. But still one. (Notable from that Statista chart: for 2015, presumably end 2015, it puts iOS’s installed base at 463m devices, Windows Phone at 45m, BlackBerry at 19, and “other” at 31m. The BlackBerry number sounds low, as does the Windows one.)
link to this extract

From Chrome apps to the web • Chromium Blog

Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, VP product management:

»We have always believed in making the open, interoperable web as strong as possible. For a while there were certain experiences the web couldn’t provide, such as working offline, sending notifications, and connecting to hardware. We launched Chrome apps three years ago to bridge this gap.

Since then, we’ve worked with the web standards community to enable an increasing number of these use cases on the web. Developers can use powerful new APIs such as service worker and web push to build robust Progressive Web Apps that work across multiple browsers. More capabilities will continue to become available on the web.

As we continue our efforts to simplify Chrome, we believe it’s time to begin the evolution away from the Chrome apps platform. There are two types of Chrome apps: packaged apps and hosted apps. Today, approximately 1% of users on Windows, Mac and Linux actively use Chrome packaged apps, and most hosted apps are already implemented as regular web apps. We will be removing support for packaged and hosted apps from Chrome on Windows, Mac, and Linux over the next two years.

«

1% is still a big number. Wonder, though, how many will notice this.
link to this extract

Samsung took 82% profit share of Android camp in Q2 2016 • Strategy Analytics

Linda Sui:

»According to the latest published report from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies (WSS) services: Value Share: Global Smartphone Revenue, ASP and Profit by OS by Price-Tier : Q2 2016, global smartphone industry revenues dipped -5% annually during Q2 2016. Android maintained top position as the largest OS by revenue, followed by iOS. Microsoft and Blackberry platforms made no profit at all. Tizen fell to the fifth position by volume.

Samsung led the pack among all Android OEMs by volume, value and profitability. The Korean vendor took 26% volume share, 38% value share and 82% of profit share within Android camp during Q2 2016. Huawei ranked the second spot by volume and value among all Android OEMs. Chinese OEM OPPO and vivo pushed into top 5 list thanks to surging volumes and improved ASP.

«

If Tizen is fifth by volume, then it shipped fewer than 0.5m handsets. That remaining 18% of profit share – shared among all the other vendors – is $820m. LG made a loss; Lenovo made a loss; Sony made a $4m profit. So that suggests Huawei, OPPO and vivo might have made some money. And Xiaomi too?
link to this extract

Taiwan makers reluctant to yield to Apple requests to lower quotes • Digitimes

Cage Chao and Steve Shen:

»Apple has met resistance from makers in Taiwan’s supply chain to lower their quotes for parts and components for iPhone 7 devices, a move which aims to force Apple to discontinue its established policy of constantly squeezing profits from Taiwan suppliers.

Apple is said to have asked downstream part and component suppliers, excluding Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Largan Precision, to reduce their quotes for iPhone 7 devices by as much as 20% even though order volumes for new phones are reportedly 30% lower than those placed a year earlier.

Major downstream suppliers, notably Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE) and associated companies under the Foxconn Group, have replied Apple that they could not be able to accept orders without reasonable profits at this time.

Apple is leveraging the rising handset supply chain in China to force Taiwan-based companies to reduce their quotes comparable to those offered by China-based suppliers. But it makes no sense for such a requirment since the quality of products rolled out by Taiwan- and China-based suppliers is standing at different levels.

«

When your orders are falling, you can’t squeeze like you did.
link to this extract

New Nokia smartphones confirmed for Q4 2016 • AndroidAuthority

Rob Triggs:

»The company didn’t spill any details about the specifications of its upcoming smartphones and tablets, nor their targeted price points. However, a rumor that appeared earlier in the year suggests that Nokia is planning two premium phones, which will be powered by Android 7.0 Nougat. The Nokia smartphones are reported to feature 5.2 and 5.5-inch QHD OLED displays, a Snapdragon 820 processor, a 22.6MP camera, and a metal body with water and dust resistance.

Along with high-end smartphones, HMD is expected to unveil two new Nokia feature phones in the next six months. Nokia also completed a $191m acquisition of Withings in May, opening up an avenue into the connected halth market. Clearly Nokia is working to get itself back into the smartphone game, but are you excited to see what the company has to offer after all this time?

«

So this time Nokia *is* going to go Android. Let’s see how that goes.
link to this extract

The meaning of trust in the age of AirBnB • Tim Harford

Tim Harford:

»Prosperity not only requires trust, it also encourages it. Why bother to steal when you are already comfortable? An example of poverty breeding mistrust comes from Colin Turnbull’s ethnographic study The Mountain People (US), about the Ik, a displaced tribe ravaged by Ugandan drought in the 1960s. If Turnbull’s account is itself trustworthy (it may not be), in the face of extreme hunger, the Ik had abandoned any pretence at ethical behaviour and would lie, cheat and steal whenever possible. Parents would abandon their own children, and children betray their own parents. Turnbull’s story had a horrific logic. The Ik had no hope of a future, so they saw no need to protect their reputation for fair dealing.

One of the underrated achievements of the modern world has been to develop ways to extend the circle of trust by depersonalising it. Trust used to be a very personal thing: you would trust your friends or friends of friends. But when I withdrew €400 from a cash machine, it was not because the bank trusted me but because it could verify that my bank would repay the money. This is a cold corporate miracle.

Over the past few years, people have been falling in love with a hybrid model that allows a personal reputation to work even between strangers. One example is Airbnb, which lets people stay in the homes of complete strangers, a considerable exercise of trust on both sides. We successfully used it on another stop in our Bavarian holiday. Airbnb makes personal connections but uses online reviews to keep people honest: after our stay, we reviewed our host and he reviewed us.

«

link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Longer battery life is coming to smartphones – honestly. Photo by astio on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Refrigerate after opening. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Doubling battery power of consumer electronics • MIT News

»“With two-times the energy density, we can make a battery half the size, but that still lasts the same amount of time, as a lithium ion battery. Or we can make a battery the same size as a lithium ion battery, but now it will last twice as long,” says Hu, who co-invented the battery at MIT and is now CEO of [MIT spinout] SolidEnergy.

The battery essentially swaps out a common battery anode material, graphite, for very thin, high-energy lithium-metal foil, which can hold more ions — and, therefore, provide more energy capacity. Chemical modifications to the electrolyte also make the typically short-lived and volatile lithium metal batteries rechargeable and safer to use. Moreover, the batteries are made using existing lithium ion manufacturing equipment, which makes them scalable.

In October 2015, SolidEnergy demonstrated the first-ever working prototype of a rechargeable lithium metal smartphone battery with double energy density, which earned them more than $12 million from investors. At half the size of the lithium ion battery used in an iPhone 6, it offers 2.0 amp hours, compared with the lithium ion battery’s 1.8 amp hours.

SolidEnergy plans to bring the batteries to smartphones and wearables in early 2017, and to electric cars in 2018. But the first application will be drones, coming this November.

«

link to this extract

Apple hits roadblocks in cutting watch ties to iPhone • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman, Alex Webb and Scott Moritz:

»Ever since its inception, network carriers have been urging Apple to release a version of the watch that can connect to data networks independent of the iPhone, and the Cupertino, California-based company had been working to untether it from the handset, one of the people said. As it is now the watch must be synced with an iPhone to download most types of content and consistently track location.

Apple had been in talks this year with mobile phone carriers in the U.S. and Europe to add cellular connectivity to the watch, according to people familiar with the talks. A cellular chip would have theoretically allowed the product to download sports score alerts, e-mail and mapping information while out of an iPhone’s reach.

During the discussions, Apple executives expressed concern that the cellular models may not be ready for release this year and that the feature may be pushed back to a later generation, according to the people. Apple warned that, even on an aggressive schedule, the earliest possible shipment time-frame for cellular models would have been this December, one of the people said.

The source of the delay is that current cellular chips consume too much battery life, reducing the product’s effectiveness and limiting user appeal, according to three of the people. Apple has begun studying lower-power cellular data chips for future smartwatch generations.

«

I bet the carriers want Apple to have a phone-independent watch. Think of the data charges they could ring up. (Apple would use a software SIM, as in the iPad – no fiddling about putting them in.) Update: it’s been pointed out to me that the carriers would offer a special linked plan with your phone – as happens now with Android Wear 3G watches. Otherwise you get two different phone numbers for your watch and phone, which is sub-optimal.
link to this extract

Counting Apple’s customers • Asymco

Horace Dediu:

»Even though it has not happened yet, the trend is pretty clear. Apple will at some point in time have a billion paying customers.

What is more significant that the specific count is that these customers mostly chose to be customers individually. Some may be have been given the products as gifts, but the vast majority bought the items for themselves. Apple benefitted from hundreds of million of individual purchase decisions.

Furthermore, having made the decision to purchase, chances are that they will do so again. Apple customers are a recurring revenue. In fact, it’s fairly easy to calculate that being an Apple customer is equivalent to spending about $1/day on its products and services, indefinitely.

Apple is not there yet, but a billion dollars a day from a billion customers is not inconceivable. That would be quite an achievement.

«

The graphs are worth casting a glance at.
link to this extract

Our next chapter: Otto joins Uber • Official Otto Blog

»When we founded Otto, we committed to rethinking transportation. Today we are taking a leap forward by joining the Uber team to deliver on that promise.

Together with Uber, we will create the future of commercial transportation: first, self-driving trucks that provide drivers unprecedented levels of safety; and second, a platform that matches truck drivers with the right load wherever they are.

At Otto, we believe that drivers shouldn’t have to choose between safety and earnings. Our self-driving trucks will allow drivers to rest while their truck is moving, and our platform will ensure drivers can easily find loads and are paid fairly.

By combining these two technologies, we can create a freight network that is constantly learning and improving. Each truck that joins the network can provide valuable information that makes all other trucks safer and more efficient. In turn, drivers get paid more and shippers get a more reliable service. Self-driving trucks together with a marketplace create a virtuous cycle where everyone benefits.

«

Clearly, Uber’s aims go far beyond a simple taxi service now. Taken together with the news that it’s going to start testing self-driving cars in Pittsburgh this month, we can begin to discern the shape of future commercial transport. There don’t seem to be a lot of human drivers in it.
link to this extract

The Rich Kid of Instagram who isn’t quite what she seems • The Guardian

Marina Hyde:

»Lost in Showbiz is intrigued by the rise of a sublebrity by the name of Julia Stakhiva, who is featured in an absolute defeat of an E4 show called Rich Kids of Instagram. A hymn to the eye-watering conspicuous consumption of various young idiots, it has launched Julia on the scene as a “billionaire’s daughter”. She is given to dispensing unpleasant aphorisms for attention, such as “Anyone can be rich but not everyone can be beautiful”, and “I’m not suitable for an office job because of how well I dress and how educated I am”. Her most frequent refrain is a variation on the notion that she was born a billionaire’s daughter, and can only live a billionaire’s lifestyle.

If I have a cavil – and really, it’s such a tiny one – it is that until just a few weeks ago, Julia rented a room in my mother-in-law’s flat. And via that classic billionaire accommodation hook-up, spareroom.co.uk.

Indeed, it was interesting to discover that during a holiday absence by said owner, Julia had invited the cameras into the property, told some whoppers in order to sign the release forms, and used it to form the backdrop to her Rich Kids shenanigans. Various photoshoots also seem to have taken place. It is hard to pick a standout, but for me it’s probably edged by the snap of her reclining on my mother-in-law’s bed, stroking the latter’s cat in a casually proprietorial fashion. It’s like the bears in the old story ask: “Who’s been posing for the newspapers on MY BED?”

«

Ooooops. Rule 1: don’t pretend to be a billionaire’s daughter while using property owned by the relative of a newspaper reporter. Make sure to read it for the article’s killer final sentence.
link to this extract

This is what’s missing from journalism right now • Mother Jones

Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery:

»Shane Bauer’s prison project took more than 18 months. That included four months in the prison and more than a year of additional reporting, fact-checking, video production, and legal review, including work by more than a dozen other people on the MoJo staff. And that was the only way we could have gotten that story: By definition, incarceration is invisible to most people, and that’s doubly true for private prisons. Recordkeeping is spotty, public disclosure is limited, visits are difficult. The only people who can describe what really goes on inside are prisoners, guards, and officials, all of whom have a strong interest in spinning the story. To get at the truth, we had to take time, and go deep.

And we had to take considerable financial risk. Conservatively, counting just the biggest chunks of staff time that went into it, the prison story cost roughly $350,000. The banner ads that appeared on the article brought in $5,000, give or take. Had we been really in your face with ads, we could have doubled or tripled that figure—but it would have been a pain for you, and still only a drop in the bucket for us.

MoJo did have support from three foundations for our criminal justice reporting. That’s amazing—but foundation grants only go so far.

«

And what did they achieve? Nothing much, just changed US policy on the use of private prisons. Serious reporting has a problem. Talking of which…
link to this extract

Gawker.com to end operations next week • Gawker

JK Trotter:

»After nearly fourteen years of operation, Gawker.com will be shutting down next week. The decision to close Gawker comes days after Univision successfully bid $135m for Gawker Media’s six other websites, and four months after the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel revealed his clandestine legal campaign against the company.

Nick Denton, the company’s outgoing CEO, informed current staffers of the site’s fate on Thursday afternoon, just hours before a bankruptcy court in Manhattan will decide whether to approve Univision’s bid for Gawker Media’s other assets. Staffers will soon be assigned to other editorial roles, either at one of the other six sites or elsewhere within Univision. Near-term plans for Gawker.com’s coverage, as well as the site’s archives, have not yet been finalized.

«

Pour one out; Gawker may have been infuriating at times, and completely missed the mark at others, but it did some really important balloon-bursting over the pomposity of people in tech that many of the mainstream sites just wouldn’t touch. However it never stood a chance against a billionaire determined to fund lawsuits to shut it down.
link to this extract

What went wrong for Xiaomi • IBT

David Gilbert:

»Xiaomi’s meteoric rise was based on one simple fact: It was able to produce smartphones with premium hardware and features which cost a fraction of those on sale from Apple or Samsung. However that advantage rapidly vanished when multiple manufacturers followed suit and produced their own smartphones which offered premium specs at low prices.
However, unlike Xiaomi, its competitors were able to offer something new and something innovative. Vivo offered curved screens; Oppo and OnePlus dangled rapid charging; LeEco offered exclusive content; and Huawei threw in dual lens cameras and fingerprint sensors.

“I think Xiaomi’s current performance and growth in the smartphone space has stalled, as competitors with better R&D, vertical manufacturing expertise, and a wider distribution and geographic footprint has surpassed the brand,” Neil Shah, analyst with CounterPoint Research told IBTimes UK. “Xiaomi’s inability to innovate independently is one of the key reasons.”

Another issue for Xiaomi is its continued focus on the ultra-budget end of the market with products like its RedMi series, despite clear evidence that Chinese customers were willing to pay more for their smartphones…

…data from CounterPoint Research suggests that up to 85% of the company’s revenue comes from smartphones, while another major source of revenue comes from its software and services division.
This means that investments in the likes of Ninebot, the Chinese company that bought Segway, have yet to pay off — and it is unclear if they ever will.

As Steve Millward wrote on the Tech in Asia blog, “Xiaomi is in deep s**t”, and it is difficult to see a way back. “I don’t see much of a recovery coming for Xiaomi in the future,” Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research concludes.

«

link to this extract

Verizon offered to install marketers’ apps on phones • AdAge

Garett Sloane:

»The wireless carrier has offered to install big brands’ apps on its subscribers’ home screens, potentially delivering millions of downloads, according to agency executives who have considered making such deals for their clients. But that reach would come at a cost: Verizon was seeking between $1 and $2 for each device affected, executives said.

Verizon started courting advertisers with app installations late last year, pitching retail and finance brands among others, agency executives said.

It has only offered the installations on Android phones, because Google’s software is open for carriers to customize. Apple controls its platform more tightly.

The proposed deals with brands ensure that their apps download to only new devices when consumers activate the phones and their software for the first time.

Verizon has 75 million smartphone post-paid subscribers and activates about 10 million new phones a quarter. Android phones command more than 50% of the U.S. market, according to ComScore.

It’s unclear whether Verizon sold any guaranteed app installations.

«

Cheaper, the article points out, than comparable pay-per-install campaigns on Facebook or Google, which can cost around $5. I’m not sure this is so terrible, as people can delete the app. But to judge from some of the coverage, it’s AWFUL.
link to this extract

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

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Issie Lapowsky of Wired is looking into the “Rantic survey” from the other day. I think there’s a deeper story. Stay tuned.

Another site is turning off comments. Photo by Rob Hurson 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. They’re slinky, they’re linky. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The next wave of AI is rooted in human culture and history • Engadget

Mona Lalwani spoke to the wonderful Genevieve Bell, who is an anthropologist at Intel (yes, really), and a careful student of human trends:

»As an anthropologist, I wanted to interrogate AI not just as a technical agenda but as a cultural category. I wanted to look at the intellectual history of it. I found myself reading [Alan] Turing and his incredibly provocative question: “Can a machine think?” And the whole notion of the Turing test — Is there a moment where we as humans can no longer distinguish ourselves from the machines? It’s a really interesting formulation both of a technical idea but also a cultural one. It’s also where you can see the cultural ambivalences and anxieties too.

In the conversations in the press and public culture, AI is often accompanied by everything from the language around the robot apocalypse, the singularity, to the idea that they’ll replace or kill us, all depending on the narrative. I was interested in why those two stories were so tightly coupled. Why have the conversations around AI always necessitated this other conversation? Unpicking that was also a very anthropological endeavor.

«

Must-read.
link to this extract

Snapchat strikes Olympic gold • FT.com

Hannah Kuchler:

»Almost 50m people have watched the Olympic Games on Snapchat so far, as broadcasters including NBC and the BBC use the app to reach a millennial audience.

Nearly one in three daily Snapchat users has viewed the clips in Live Stories, showing that the app could challenge other social sites such as Facebook and Twitter for dominance in live events.

The LA-based start-up partnered with seven broadcasters showing in countries including the US, the UK and Brazil, to show stories that include footage from the games and from the crowds in the last 24 hours.

In the first seven days to last Thursday, 49m unique visitors viewed Olympics content on Snapchat, almost a third of the 150m daily active users of the app.

«

That’s Snapchat, which was just some prototype code in September 2011, and barely known during the last Olympic games. Technological change can be fast.
link to this extract

Stealing bitcoins with badges: How Silk Road’s dirty cops got caught • Ars Technica

Cyrus Farivar and Joe Mullin:

»It was October 2013, and [DEA agent Carl] Force had spent the past couple of years working on a Baltimore-based task force investigating the darknet’s biggest drug site, Silk Road. During that time, he had also carefully cultivated several lucrative side projects all connected to Bitcoin, the digital currency Force was convinced would make him rich.

One of those schemes had been ripping off the man who ran Silk Road, “Dread Pirate Roberts.” That plan was now falling apart. As it turns out, the largest online drug market in history had been run by a 29-year-old named Ross Ulbricht, who wasn’t as safe behind his screen as he imagined he was. Ulbricht had been arrested earlier that month in the San Francisco Public Library by federal agents with their guns drawn.

Now government prosecutors were sifting through a mountain of evidence, and Force could only guess at how big it was. The FBI got around the encryption of Ulbricht’s Samsung Z700 laptop with a street-level tactic: two agents distracted him while a third grabbed the open laptop out of his hands as Ulbricht was working. The kingpin had been caught red-handed, tapping commands to his Silk Road subordinates up until the moment he was cuffed.

Force had been treating Ulbricht like his personal Bitcoin ATM for several months by this point, attempting to extort DPR one day and wrangling Bitcoin bribes for fake information the next. Now, Force didn’t want to be holding those bitcoins anymore. He opened an account with Bitstamp, a Slovenia-based Bitcoin exchange where he thought he could turn coins into cash quickly and quietly.

But when Force opened Bitstamp account #557042 on October 12, 2013, it sealed his fate.

«

Terrific storytelling.
link to this extract

USB Type-C could kill your headphone jack. Here’s how • CNET

Stephen Shankland:

»there are good arguments to be made for embracing USB audio, [Intel architect Brad] Saunders said, and the companies that make USB controller chips are very excited about the idea.

For one thing, the 3.5mm audio jack takes up precious volume inside phones, which we all want to be as slim as possible. For another, the analog circuitry of 3.5mm audio can cause interference that disrupts other electronics in a phone, Saunders said.

And digital audio opens up possibilities for lots of sound-processing options without requiring expensive headphones or earbuds. That includes audio effects to make music sound like it’s playing in a big concert hall, or signal processing to cancel noise like jet engines or rumbling trains. “All of those come into play if audio is in a digital domain,” Saunders said, which would let phone makers offer premium features without having to sign deals with premium audio companies like Dolby or Bose.

USB devices have controller chips that consume power. That’s no problem for PCs with big batteries, but it is for phones. That’s why the new USB audio standard requires power management abilities like turning off features that aren’t being used, Saunders said. As a result, with USB headphones, “the difference in battery life is negligible” compared with 3.5mm audio jacks.

«

link to this extract

NPR website to get rid of comments • NPR Ombudsman

Elizabeth Jensen:

»I did find the numbers quite startling. In July, NPR.org recorded nearly 33 million unique users, and 491,000 comments. But those comments came from just 19,400 commenters, [NPR social media exec Scott] Montgomery said. That’s 0.06% of users who are commenting, a number that has stayed steady through 2016.

When NPR analyzed the number of people who left at least one comment in both June and July, the numbers showed an even more interesting pattern: Just 4,300 users posted about 145 comments apiece, or 67% of all NPR.org comments for the two months. More than half of all comments in May, June and July combined came from a mere 2,600 users. The conclusion: NPR’s commenting system — which gets more expensive the more comments that are posted, and in some months has cost NPR twice what was budgeted — is serving a very, very small slice of its overall audience.

It’s not possible to tell who those commenters are; some users comment anonymously. But there are some clues that indicate those who comment are not wholly representative of the overall NPR audience: They overwhelmingly comment via the desktop (younger users tend to find NPR.org via mobile), and a Google estimate suggested that the commenters were 83% male, while overall NPR.org users were just 52% male, Montgomery said.

When viewed purely from the perspective of whether the comments were fostering constructive conversations, the change should come as no surprise. The number of complaints to NPR about the current comment system has been growing—complaints that comments were censored by the outside moderators, and that commenters were behaving inappropriately and harassing other commenters.

«

There’s a similar writeup by Montgomery but it doesn’t have those deep-dive numbers that Jensen offers. “The market has spoken. [Twitter and Facebook] is where people want to engage with us,” Montgomery says earlier.

News site comment software is screwed. Personally I would short Disqus, which NPR (and many others) used.
link to this extract

Bots are better without conversation — Medium

Ted Livingston, founder and CEO of messaging service Kik:

»At Kik, we remain bullish on bots, but we’ve noticed the same thing everyone else has: so far, there has been no killer bot. This is not yet the world that the early hype promised. But then again, we’re only four months into this. The bot ecosystem is at an earlier point now than the App Store was before Apple introduced in-app purchases. The game lasts longer than the first pitch.

Since we opened our bot platform for developers in April, more than 20,000 bots have been built for Kik. We’ve learned a lot. One of the things that has become increasingly clear is that the initial discussion about bots being powerful because of their conversational potential was somewhat misguided. It’s certainly possible to imagine a world in which we routinely carry out human-like conversations with robots to get things done or be entertained, but we don’t yet live in such a world. In fact, I believe we’ll look back on the early emphasis on “conversational commerce” as a mistake…

…It’s also important to note that we don’t think bots are going to replace apps any time soon. That’s not the point. The point is that people are increasingly spending their time in chat apps, so we’re building experiences inside chat that allow people to do more while they’re there. That’s why bots are so interesting.

«

Still a sceptic, personally. A visual interface does require you to launch an app, but RAM is cheap, switching apps is easy (people do it all the time) and a visual interface is quicker than a typed conversation. It’s GUI v CLI (command line interface). Unless you know the magic incantations, GUI wins every time.
link to this extract

Will the P&G story bring down ad tech? Please? • The Ad Contrarian

Bob Hoffman:

»Online display advertising has been sold to us as superior to traditional advertising because it presumes that reaching the perfect individual is more economically advantageous than reaching a broad demographic type.

For the most part, offline advertising is sold on demographics while display advertising is sold on data-driven targeting.

While Proctor & Gamble’s experience should not be taken as conclusive proof of anything, it suggests that for big brands the demographics model is more economically efficient than the data-driven model.

Their experience with Fabreze air freshener was cited by The Wall Street Journal as an example of how highly targeted advertising failed.

For Fabreze, P&G targeted people with pets and people with large families. The presumption was that these people would have a significantly higher likelihood to purchase an air freshener than the public at large. Sales stagnated.

Then P&G targeted all adults over 18 — a very broad swath. And sales picked up.

Presumably P&G had the good sense to use the same creative so they knew what variable they were testing.

If P&G’s experience turns out to be projectible – and it has been reported that other marketers are having similar experiences – the whole model of online advertising, based on data-driven “precision targeting” and tracking – and enabled by ad tech – needs to go right down the toilet. It’s a sham.

«

P&G is rather large to be a canary in a coalmine, but this might be one of those moments – at least for larger advertisers.
link to this extract

Confidential data question Cyanogen’s user figures • The Information

Amir Efrati:

»[Cyanogen co-founder and CTO Steve] Kondik said historically there have been challenges with tracking CyanogenMod users, given that its users were “privacy-focused.” (The earliest versions of the software, which started in 2009, restricted any kind of tracking.) In addition, he said, “there was a lot of uncertainty around” the user numbers at the company and, as a startup, “we don’t have the best dashboards and mechanisms” for counting them. He added that in recent weeks the company had discovered six to seven million users who had manually opted out of being tracked by the software. This group represented about two-thirds of the total user base, he said.

“We just figured this out,” he said.

Touting big numbers and growth is de rigeur for consumer tech startups, and it’s common for them to use creative definitions of a “user.”

The numbers quoted by Cyanogen executives after the company launched in 2013 made it seem like the operating system had broad consumer appeal — even bigger than Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS, they liked to say. The company has raised more than $100m in funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Benchmark Capital.

«

So Cyanogen(Mod) had about 10m users? All of them, however, active in comment threads about how AMAZING Cyanogen(Mod) is/was. But it doesn’t look like the VC companies are going to see their money back.
link to this extract

Bias lighting • Coding Horror

»Bias lighting is the happy intersection of indirect lighting and light compensation. It reduces eye strain and produces a better, more comfortable overall computing display experience.

The good news is that it’s trivially easy to set up a bias lighting configuration these days due to the proliferation of inexpensive and bright LEDs. You can build yourself a bias light with a clamp and a fluorescent bulb, or with some nifty IKEA LED strips and double-sided foam tape. It really is that simple: just strap some lights to the back of your monitors.

I’m partial to the IKEA Dioder and Ledberg technique myself; I currently have an array of Ledbergs behind my monitors. But if you don’t fancy any minor DIY work, there are a wide array of inexpensive self-adhesive LED strips out there – which also have the benefit of being completely USB powered, and thus can power up and down with your monitor or TV.

«

👏

link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: yesterday’s post included a link from Wired about a survey of Facebook users and political views, allegedly carried out by a company called Rantic. However, Rantic is a “buy followers” social media marketing company (my opinion? A parasite on the business) and I don’t think the survey is robust. Without evidence to the contrary, I doubt it even exists. I’ve emailed the Wired writer suggesting the story be withdrawn or at the very least queried for the full survey data, but haven’t heard back so far. Fingers crossed. In the meantime I’ve removed the link from the site, and urge you to ignore any findings it might have appeared to pass on.

When you’re their age, which apps and tech will you be using? Photo by Defence Images 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 12 links for you. Oh, they are. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Ageing out of the 25-34 bracket, one app at a time • FT.com

Lisa Pollack:

»Hardware and software previously used with enthusiasm has become an annoyance. New apps are passing me by. And this isn’t only about not downloading Pokémon Go, thus missing out on the delights of walking into lampposts while trying to catch a Pikachu (which is, I hasten to add, the only character name I know).

Consequently I’m beginning to suspect that, like a child counting the years in notches marking their height, I will increasingly count mine by the number of social media networks that I don’t understand. Already a couple of years ago, a girl I was mentoring tried to tell me about the website “ask.fm”. The explanation was as arduous for me as I suspect my tutoring on simultaneous equations was for her. I still don’t entirely get it. More recently, my clumsy attempts at understanding and using Snapchat ended in befuddlement. I couldn’t even figure out how to add my contacts and yet almost 50m people have watched the Olympics on it. (In the US, by the way, the app reaches 41% of that existential-crisis-inducing 18-34 age bracket.)

This newfound tech ineptitude is particularly disturbing for someone who is, by and large, an informal tech support colleague in the office. Have a problem with a spreadsheet? Need to connect your computer to a printer? Want to know the best way to get screenshots into presentations or how smartpens work? Then chances are, you’ve emailed me.

In the last four months though, that email will have gone to the solitary computer screen on my desk. Once upon a time, I thought that having six monitors, like a trader at a bank, was the coolest thing ever. Now a second screen stands unused to the side. I’ve even reverted to having a paper to-do list where once it was all online. “When I was your age, I used to use TweetDeck!” I want to shout to selfie-posing Snapchatterers. Because then they’d realise I was once like them. Right?

«

link to this extract

Will iris scanner be killer app for Samsung jumbo phone? • Korea Times

Kim Tae-gyu:

»People will be able to send money on Samsung Electronics’ new cell phone by just looking at it.

Korea’s major lenders said Tuesday that they are working on biometrics-based authentication, which would be enabled by an iris-scanning option built into the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 that will be released later this week.

The iris scanning-powered Samsung Pass will let customers of Woori, Shinhan and KEB Hana banks carry out mobile-banking transactions with the new phone.

The mobile giant seems to be confident about the success of the new feature.

“Samsung Pass service will simplify the complicated process of authentication,” Samsung’s mobile chief Koh Dong-jin said last week during a media event. “It is the safest security technology at the current level.”

«

Iris scans look like a very promising technology – where’s the research on it, though? If Apple had done this we’d have had a million articles examining how robust or otherwise it is.
link to this extract

Twitter and YouTube would not remove Anjem Choudary’s posts, court told • The Guardian

Press Association:

»Social media giants had the last word on Anjem Choudary’s online posts, even after he was arrested for inviting support for Islamic State.

British authorities made repeated efforts to get his Twitter posts and YouTube videos taken down after an oath of allegiance to the Caliphate surfaced online with the preacher’s name on it, jurors at the Old Bailey were told during his trial in July.

But they had no power to force corporations to remove material from the internet even if it was believed to have fallen foul of UK anti-terror laws.

The preacher was found guilty in July of supporting Islamic State but details of the trial, including the verdict, could not be reported until now.

An open-source researcher from the National Counter Terrorism Police Operations Centre (NCTPOC) told the trial of a series of failed attempts.

The officer, identified only by a number, said in a statement read to court that it was up to the companies whether or not to take down posts and videos as “the police do not have the capability to remove any material from any platform”.

«

link to this extract

WikiLeaks released a cache of malware in its latest email dump • Engadget

Andrew Dalton:

»In its rush to let information be free, WikiLeaks has released over 80 different malware variants while publishing its latest collection of emails from Turkey’s ruling AKP political party. In a Github post, security expert Vesselin Bontchev has laid out many of the instances of malicious links, most of which came from “run-of-the-mill” spam and phishing emails found in the dump. While WikiLeaks has claimed the emails shed light on corruption within the Turkish government, New York Times reporter Zeynep Tufekci has pointed out that the materials have little to do with Turkish politics and mostly appear to be mailing lists and spam.

«

“In its rush to let information be free”, or perhaps “With disregard for innocent people who would be affected”.
link to this extract

All Windows 10 PCs will get Windows Holographic access next year • TechCrunch

Darrell Etherington:

»Windows 10 users will be able to dive into mixed reality starting next year, with an update planned that can let any “mainstream” Windows 10 PC run the Windows Holographic shell the company first revealed in January 2015.

The update will allow users to multi-task in mixed reality environments, which combine traditional 2D Windows 10 apps with immersive, 3D graphical environments. These will be enabled via a range of “6 degrees of freedom devices,” input devices that add positional tracking to other more traditional forms of input, like clicking and pointing.

The Windows team is trying to make this more broadly available, too, thanks to support for a range of Windows 10 PCs that don’t necessarily need the specs required to run full-scale VR today. As an example, Microsoft presented a video of Windows 10 Holographic running at 90 FPS on an Intel NUC, a tiny desktop PC that’s not super expensive and included integrated Intel graphics.

«

Useful? Useless? Probably the latter for a huge number of users. How many will ever use it?
link to this extract

Roomba creator responds to reports of ‘poopocalypse’: ‘We see this a lot’ • The Guardian

Olivia Solon on people who come home to find their robot vacuum cleaner has been spreading poo around the house:

»Los Angeles marine biologist Jonathan Williams endured a similar trauma. It’s happened three times in the past few months, ever since his family moved to a house with their pug, Alice.

The first time it happened he came back from work to find “tread-marks of caked-in poop all over the house”.

The next two times were much worse. “It’s almost like [Alice the pug] deliberately left it right in front of its path at the start of the cycle.”

The last time it happened, Alice had been out in the morning and evacuated her bowels, lulling Williams and his wife into a false sense of security. “We thought it was safe and we could run it, but it seems like she was storing some up for us.”

“Quite honestly, we see this a lot,” said a spokesman from iRobot, the company that makes the Roomba.

“We generally tell people to try not to schedule your vacuum if you know you have dogs that may create such a mess. With animals anything can happen.”

Are there any plans to introduce any poop detection technology to the product? “Our engineers are always trying to figure out ways to help people with their problems, and we’ve known this is an issue people deal with.”

«

“We see this a lot”? How “a lot” is that?
link to this extract

Ed Snowden explains why hackers published NSA’s hacking tools • Techdirt

Mike Masnick with the details around a hack of a server holding some NSA malware:

»What’s new? NSA malware staging servers getting hacked by a rival is not new. A rival publicly demonstrating they have done so is.

Why did they do it? No one knows, but I suspect this is more diplomacy than intelligence, related to the escalation around the DNC hack. Circumstantial evidence and conventional wisdom indicates Russian responsibility. Here’s why that is significant: This leak is likely a warning that someone can prove US responsibility for any attacks that originated from this malware server. That could have significant foreign policy consequences. Particularly if any of those operations targeted US allies. Particularly if any of those operations targeted elections. Accordingly, this may be an effort to influence the calculus of decision-makers wondering how sharply to respond to the DNC hacks.

TL;DR: This leak looks like a somebody sending a message that an escalation in the attribution game could get messy fast.

«

Subtle; and the timing of the revelation, done in a way to bring attention, is notable too.
link to this extract

Samsung Galaxy Note 7 review: the best new Android phone • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

»While touring an apartment that I’m considering, I chose to snap photos and video of the space with the Note 7 instead of my iPhone 6s. Like the S7 and S7 Edge, the low-light photos are sharper and clearer than Apple’s. Even shots taken outdoors or in well-lit environments are more exciting to review on the Note because of the crisper display. And there are no storage fears here. The Note 7 comes with 64GB of local storage—and has a MicroSD slot that will support cards up to 256GB.

«

Stern’s review is terrific – she wrote the whole thing with the S-Pen stylus, she took Samsung’s “it’s waterproof!” at its word and made videos underwater with it (it worked fine), she points to the odd problem of differentiating between the S7, S7 Edge and Note7 (basic, edge screen, stylus). And TouchWiz isn’t as awful as it used to be. It’s an excellent response to the otherwise tedious task of reviewing hardware.

Samsung owns the top end of Android. The iPhone 7 (or whatever it’s called) will need something special in the photo space.
link to this extract

Final words – the Samsung Galaxy Note7 (S820) review • Anandtech

Joshua Ho wraps up his (long) review:

»With all of this said I think the Note7 is fairly checkered. I’m sure there are people that are foaming at the mouth to buy one because it’s the only phablet on the market that really does a stylus well and if you’re someone that wants the Note7 for the stylus then you should stop reading now and go buy one immediately because everything else on the market won’t meet your needs. If the stylus is just something that’s nice for you to have then the calculus gets much more difficult. The Galaxy S7 edge is currently about $750 and you can easily find people reselling new ones for any operator or international variants on Amazon for $600 or so. The Note7 does appreciably improve on the Galaxy S7 Edge, but it’s basically the S7 edge in a new package and with an S-Pen. You also get an extra 32 GB of storage which does justify the extra $100 that bumps the Note7 up to $850.

With all of that said, I get the distinct sense that it will be much harder to justify the price well before the end of this year. The camera quality is kind of a disappointment given all of the hype at the launch of the Galaxy S7 given the dual pixel sensor and larger 1.4 micron pixels when the camera quality itself is not really an improvement over the Galaxy Note5 and is beaten out by the HTC 10. The software experience still shows dropped frames. There are still software features that feel like obvious gimmicks. The design is still lacking ID [industrial design] detailing. I’m sure other people will praise this device anyways but when a phone is this expensive and with smartphones in general getting polished to a mirror sheen each scratch becomes more obvious no matter how minor.

A lot of things are going to seem like nitpicks but the whole point of paying 400 USD more is so that the ID and engineering in both hardware and software bridges the last mile. Again, this is still a good phone and it really is as good as it gets for now, but with so many fall launches coming up I find it very hard to whole-heartedly recommend this phone.

«

link to this extract

The duo that dominates dressage • The New Yorker

Sam Knight:

»The piaffe is probably the most demanding and exquisite movement in the Olympic sport of dressage. A horse in piaffe defies what horses otherwise do. Instead of going anywhere, it jogs on the spot, three-quarters of a ton of moving muscle, feet rising and falling in the same four hoofprints like an animation in a flip book. Next week, in Rio de Janeiro, seven judges around an arena, known as a manège, will evaluate the piaffes of the four-day dressage competition. In addition to making sure that the horses don’t go forward or backward, or side to side, the judges will keep track of the number of steps (twelve to fifteen), their height (as high as the cannon bone on the foreleg; as high as the fetlock on the rear), and insure that they are not, in the somewhat baroque language of the sport, “unlevel.” Then they will score each piaffe out of ten.

No one knows what piaffing is for. The movements of dressage are said to have their origins in the training of horses for war, and one theory suggests that the piaffe might have been useful for trampling enemies.

«

This is deeply researched, beautifully written work which takes you through all the human emotion of the story (and there’s plenty) and informs you about it. You can see Charlotte Dujardin’s winning Olympic freestyle routine; the reaction of most people is “how does the horse know what to do? She’s just sitting there.” Which shows you how subtle sport can be.
link to this extract

Chromebook Market Size, Share – Industry Report, 2023 • Global Market Insights

»Chromebook market size was estimated to witness 5.3m unit sales in 2014 and is anticipated to exceed 17m units by 2023. Education sector alone accumulated 72% of the overall industry share in 2014. Growing demand for these systems in education sector is likely to drive the industry growth over the forecast period.

As of 2014, North America accounted for 84% of the overall industry share which was numbered at 4.8m units. The US Chromebook market was the largest single shareholder, with over 60% demand from the education sector. Other business accounted for 1.1% share and consumers accounted for 38.6% Chromebook market share in the region…

…EMEA [Europe, Middle East, Africa] chromebook market share contributed only 11% of the overall revenue in 2014 that accounted for 620,000 units out of which 72.3% were accounted for by the education sector, 26.8 % by consumers and other business accounted for 0.9% of the overall EMEA industry. Asia Pacific region along with Japan accounted for 146,000 units in 2014.

Key industry participants chromebook industry include Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba, Acer, HP and Samsung among others.

«

The clunky grammar (“estimated to witness”?) suggests this emanates from Asia, but the supply chain insights might be right for the present. That figure for 2023 seems low, though, if they achieve any significant inroads into the education market.
link to this extract

Image completion with deep learning in Tensorflow • Github

Brandon Amos:

»Content-aware fill is a powerful tool designers and photographers use to fill in unwanted or missing parts of images. Image completion and inpainting are closely related technologies used to fill in missing or corrupted parts of images. There are many ways to do content-aware fill, image completion, and inpainting. In this blog post, I present Raymond Yeh and Chen Chen et al.’s paper “Semantic Image Inpainting with Perceptual and Contextual Losses,” which was just posted on arXiv on July 26, 2016. This paper shows how to use deep learning for image completion with a DCGAN. This blog post is meant for a general technical audience with some deeper portions for people with a machine learning background. I’ve added [ML-Heavy] tags to sections to indicate that the section can be skipped if you don’t want too many details. We will only look at the constrained case of completing missing pixels from images of faces. I have released all of the TensorFlow source code behind this post on GitHub at bamos/dcgan-completion.tensorflow.

We’ll approach image completion in three steps.

• We’ll first interpret images as being samples from a probability distribution.
• This interpretation lets us learn how to generate fake images.
• Then we’ll find the best fake image for completion.

«

This is a very technical paper – but you can just zoom through it and look at the pictures, which are amazing: we’re already getting machine leaning systems which are able to fake pictures. What happens as they get better, and come into the hands of people who are motivated to fake pictures?
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified I did include a link from Wired quoting a company called Rantic. Turns out they’re infamous marketing hoaxers; I’ve come across a few companies like that. I’m contacting Wired to suggest it removes the story too.

Blurring your face in photos might be reversible. Bloody machines. Photo by ScottNorrisPhoto on Flickr.

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

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

The immortal myths about online abuse • Medium

Anil Dash points out a number of (proven) falsehoods about how to fix abuse within networks, and concludes:

»The bottom line, as I wrote half a decade ago, is that if your website is full of assholes, it’s your fault. Same goes for your apps. We are accountable for the communities we create, and if we want to take credit for the magical moments that happen when people connect with each other online, then we have to take responsibility for the negative experiences that we enable.

Our communities are defined by the worst things that we permit to happen. What we allow tells the world who we are.

«

That “worst things that we permit to happen” is where Twitter is struggling to bring things back to where it wants to be.
link to this extract

Google is working on a new operating system named Fuchsia • The Verge

James Vincent:

»Looking into Fuchsia’s code points gives us a few clues. For example, the OS is built on Magenta, a “medium-sized microkernel” that is itself based on a project called LittleKernel, which is designed to be used in embedded systems (computers that have a specialized function and often don’t need an actual operating system, like the software in a digital watch). Similarly, both of the developers listed on Fuchsia’s GitHub page — Christopher Anderson and Brian Swetland — are experts in embedded systems. Swetland is a senior software engineer at Google and Anderson has previously worked on the company’s Android TV and Nexus Q projects.

However, the Magenta kernel can do a lot more than just power a router. Google’s own documentation says the software “targets modern phones and modern personal computers” that use “fast processors” and “non-trivial amounts of RAM.” It notes that Magenta supports a number of advanced features, including user modes and a “capability-based security model.” Further evidence that Fuchsia is intended for more than just Wi-Fi-connected gadgets include the fact that Google already has its own IoT platform (the Android-based Brillo), and the fact that the new OS includes support for graphics rendering. Some users of Hacker News have even suggested that Fuchsia could be use for augmented reality interfaces.

«

This story neatly encapsulates a lot of modern (tech) journalism. What’s missing from it? First, it’s a rewrite of an Android Police story. But it adds nothing to it – no outside expert opinion, and particularly no comment from Google itself. Could nobody pick up a phone and just ask? Even to get “no comment”? (James Vincent tells me he did contact Google, which hasn’t so far responded. That’s not atypical for Google.)

The Verge often seems to preen about its web presence, but its editors seem content to have lots of warmed-over takes which add nothing to the original. That’s not sustainable for the writers or editors.
link to this extract

Boffins’ blur-busting face recognition can ID you with one bad photo • The Register

Darren Pauli:

»Scientists have found a way to accurately identify completely obscured faces using recognition systems trained on only a handful of well-lit photos.

The work by Seong Joon Oh, Rodrigo Benenson, Mario Fritz, and Bernt Schiele of Max Planck Institute in Saarbrücken, Germany, finds faces can be recognised with up to 91.5% accuracy when the system is fed with just 10 clear images of a target’s face.

The Faceless Person Recogniser is up to 69.6% accurate when working from just one image.

Accuracy sharply falls when imperfect training images are used. The team introduced black colour into the images dropping performance to 14.7%, still better than random guessing which clocks in at 4.65%.

They warn such an accurate system would likely be already in use.

“It is very probable that undisclosed systems similar to the ones described here already operate online,” the team says.

“We believe it is the responsibility of the computer vision community to quantify, and disseminate the privacy implications of the images users share online.”

The paper Faceless Person Recognition; Privacy Implications in Social Media [PDF] finds that obfuscation methods including Gaussian blurring are not enough to prevent obscured photos from being used in facial recognition.

«

link to this extract

Caution flags for tech in classrooms • NPR

Anya Kamenetz:

»A group of recent studies on technology in education, across a wide range of real-world settings, have come up far short of a ringing endorsement.

The studies include research on K-12 schools and higher ed, both blended learning and online, and show results ranging from mixed to negative. A deeper look into these reports gives a sense that, even as computers become ubiquitous in classrooms, there’s a lot we still don’t know — or at least that we’re not doing to make them effective tools for learning.

First, a quick overview of the studies and their results:

Last fall, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development published its first-ever, and one of the largest-ever, international analyses of student access to computers and how that relates to student learning. (The OECD administers the PISA test, the world-famous international academic ranking.)

For this report, the researchers asked millions of high school students in dozens of countries about their access to computers both in the classroom and at home, and compared their answers to scores on the 2012 PISA. Here’s the money quote:

“Students who use computers very frequently at school do a lot worse in most learning outcomes, even after controlling for social background and student demographics.”

«

Are we going to have to rethink this whole thing? Though there is a lot of uncertainty around how computers are used in the different countries, and how those fit into the courses.
link to this extract

How we killed the Tea Party • POLITICO Magazine

Paul Jossey:

»The Tea Party movement began building in the George W. Bush years. Profligate spending and foreign adventurism with no discernible results nurtured disgust with Washington’s habit of spending beyond its means and sending others to die in its wars. When President Obama made reorganizing the nation’s health care system his foremost priority—and repeatedly misrepresented its effects in the process—anger at Washington exploded.

Republicans inside the Beltway reacted to the burgeoning Tea Party with glee but uncertainty about how to channel the grass-roots energy usually reserved for the left. A small group of supposedly conservative lawyers and consultants saw something different: dollar signs. The PACs found anger at the Republican Party sells very well. The campaigns they ran would be headlined “Boot John Boehner,” or “Drop a Truth Bomb on Kevin McCarthy.” And after Boehner was in fact booted and McCarthy bombed in his bid to succeed him, it was naturally time to “Fire Paul Ryan.” The selling is always urgent: “Stop what you’re doing” “This can’t wait.”

One active solicitor is the Tea Party Leadership Fund, which received $6.7m from 2013 to mid-2015, overwhelmingly from small donors. A typical solicitation from the TPLF read: “Your immediate contribution could be the most important financial investment you will make to help return America to greatness.” But, according to an investigation by POLITICO, 87% of that “investment” went to overhead; only $910,000 of the $6.7m raised was used to support political candidates. If the prospect signs a “petition,” typically a solicitation of his or her personal information is recorded and a new screen immediately appears asking for money. Vendors pass the information around in “list swaps” and “revenue shares” ad infinitum.

«

Sounds like the direct marketing/ad tech business, because essentially that’s what it is – just applied to politics. Trump is essentially the politician raking over the furious ashes of the Tea Party’s animus.
link to this extract

Brain.fm brings musical AI to Rio Olympics’ training • ReadWrite

Cate Lawrence:

»Brain.fm is a freemium auditory program designed to help people either focus, relax or sleep using AI-generated music. It’s [sic – CA] users include students, insomniacs and athletes. Heavily steeped in scientific research, its creators have a history in making niche audio brainwave software for psychologists and researchers and their work includes patents on auditory brainwave stimulation and memory.

«

Stumbling over to Brain.fm, one notes that its readme says you shouldn’t use it if you’re epileptic, pregnant, or wearing a pacemaker: “those who fit into any of the above categories, whether knowingly or not, should not use this application.” How can you agree to something you might not know about? (Pacemaker excepted.)

You get a number of free sessions, and then you have to pay. Would like to know if this really has value; Lawrence’s byline photo doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. You’ll see.
link to this extract

Google’s high-speed web plans hit snags • WSJ

Jack Nicas:

»Google parent Alphabet Inc. is rethinking its high-speed internet business after initial rollouts proved more expensive and time consuming than anticipated, a stark contrast to the fanfare that greeted its launch six years ago.

Alphabet’s internet provider, Google Fiber, has spent hundreds of millions dollars digging up streets and laying fiber-optic cables in a handful of cities to offer web connections roughly 30 times faster than the U.S. average.

Now the company is hoping to use wireless technology to connect homes, rather than cables, in about a dozen new metro areas, including Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas, according to people familiar with the company’s plans. As a result Alphabet has suspended projects in San Jose in California, and Portland in Oregon.

Meanwhile, the company is trying to cut costs and accelerate its expansion elsewhere by leasing existing fiber or asking cities or power companies to build the networks instead of building its own…

…Alphabet hopes the investment in Google Fiber will eventually pay off with subscriber fees and, indirectly, more clicks on its search ads. Fiber costs $70 a month for the fastest internet connection and an additional $60 a month for TV. Analysts estimate a one-time cost for Alphabet of more than $500 for each home the network reaches, not all of which subscribe.

Alphabet declined to disclose its number of subscribers. Based on numbers reported to the U.S. Copyright Office, research firm MoffettNathanson said in March the TV service had 53,000 subscribers total as of December.

«

Based on 53,000 subscribers, that’s revenue of between $11.1m and $20.7m per quarter. Digging up roads really is not such a great business. Setting up wireless internet will be a lot cheaper – but it’s tricky to keep working well: all you need is one big storm and all your carefully placed aerials are out of alignment.
link to this extract

Top three China smartphone vendors had combined 47% market share in 2016 Q2 • IDC

»

https://accounts.icharts.net/icharts/embed/MH/QzyNF

iCharts

With growth coming mainly from replacement users in PRC, vendors employed aggressive marketing in the past few months. OPPO hired a few brand ambassadors to launch its R9 series prompting other vendors to follow suit after seeing their strong success. vivo hired a famous Korean star who’s wildly popular in China as its brand ambassador while Xiaomi hired three different ambassadors for its Redmi line. Recently, Huawei also announced a brand ambassador for its Honor line in China – a departure from its previous marketing message focused on product features. Most of these ambassadors seem to target the younger crowd. While having brand ambassadors is not a new phenomenon in China, vendors seem to be more aggressive with their marketing strategies. This is seen to be a new tactic for vendors such as Xiaomi that never used to spend on advertising.

While the Chinese vendors all saw QoQ growth in the market, Apple continued to decline in its shipment volumes. The iPhone SE was not a hit in China, where consumers prefer larger screen-sized phones. In 2016Q2, close to 90% of phones shipped in China had screen sizes that were 5 inches and above. Apple fans are holding out for the new iPhones to be launched in 2016Q3, which could likely give Apple a boost in China.

“In the past, Xiaomi started the trend of selling its phones online and other vendors soon followed suit and created their own online brand. After vendors witnessed OPPO’s success with its R9, they also started riding on the trend of hiring celebrity endorsers to represent their brand and appeal more to the young crowd,” says Xiaohan Tay, senior market analyst IDC Asia/Pacific.

Despite the market being saturated and driven mainly by replacement users, vendors are still aggressive with their marketing tactics, experimenting with new ways to win over consumers.

“Hiring celebrity endorsers may help increase numbers in the short-term, but this alone may not be sufficient to drive numbers in the long run. As there is very little differentiation across products to warrant significant brand loyalty, vendors must constantly think out of the box to get people hyped up about their products,” ends Tay.

«

What’s noticeable in the graph (which requires Flash for you to copy the code with a click 😱)(and might be blocked by WordPress’s security 🙄) is how Xiaomi has tumbled in that year. Not clear how it can regain momentum – and if it doesn’t, what then?
link to this extract

Tim Cook, the interview: Running Apple ‘is sort of a lonely job’ | The Washington Post

Jena McGregor with a long interview with Cook, which has lots of notable parts (which will have been filleted all over the web). Here’s the part I found telling:

»Q: Everyone’s always wanting to know what’s next. The car. The TV. You spoke about artificial intelligence and augmented reality. How do you make sure great ideas surface in such a big organization?

TC: Great people surface great ideas. We’re a believer in small teams versus monolithic huge teams. The product teams are horizontal, where people from hardware and software services can all work together.

We don’t have divisions. We’ve elected not to do what business school, and I think every other larger company, does: They break down their company into smaller divisions. They give each division a P&L, and each division does their own marketing and communications and operations.

We always re-challenge ourselves on this question. But we keep coming back to what the customer wants from us is a user experience that is seamless. They want to start working on whatever they’re working on from their iPhone. And then they want to go to the Mac, and they want it to be absolutely seamless. The only way to assure that is to do things once.

That means the top of the company must work together incredibly well. Think about if you were the CEO of a company with a lot of divisions — I’m going to exaggerate a little bit — it would almost be like you’re a holding company CEO. That is the model for most companies. But that’s not what customers want from us. You can’t have a weak link. You can’t have people who don’t get along. It has to be people who have great respect for one another and who work as a team.

«

link to this extract

Native Skype for Windows Phone walked behind shed, shot heard • The Register

Richard Chirgwin:

»Microsoft’s killed off a native Skype client for Windows Phone.

WinPho users won’t be alone: Redmond will also discontinue Skype clients on Android 4.02 or lower and iOS 7.

Microsoft has already announced that OS X and Linux will lose native clients under its Skype-for-the-cloud strategy.

Rather than announcing the shift, Microsoft has updated its Skype product support page to say (for various operating systems):

»While support will no longer be available from October 2016, the Skype app on Windows Phone 8 and Windows Phone 8.1 will continue to work (possibly with some limitations) until early 2017, when we finish moving Skype calling to the cloud (see Skype blog).

«

«

So Microsoft is driving everyone back to browsers for Skype because apps are, what, too much trouble? I thought the hassle with different browsers was part of what drove apps in the first place. More likely that Skype will see less and less use in favour of native client apps.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Can you think of someone who you’d really like to get infected by the Locky ransomware? We can. Picture by Christolph Scholz on Flickr.

Hello! We’re back. Is this thing on?

A selection of 12 links for you. Enough is enough. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

South Korea confirms Google antitrust probe • FT.com

Song Jung-a:

»South Korea’s antitrust watchdog says it is looking at whether Google has violated the country’s anti-competition laws, officially confirming its scrutiny of the global internet search group for the first time.

The Korea Fair Trade Commission did not elaborate on the scope of the investigation.

Local media have reported that the regulator is probing the company’s advertising policy, after Korean advertising agents filed a complaint with the KFTC in 2014 that Google had not paid them commissions for online advertising since 2012.

Friday’s statement from the KFTC came on the same day the Seoul Economic Daily newspaper reported that the regulator was poised to clear Google of charges that it abused its dominant market position with its advertising policy.

Separate media reports have suggested Google is under scrutiny over alleged abuse of its Android smartphone operating system’s dominance.

«

This is quite strange when compared with the report from Business Korea, which says:

»The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) of South Korea came to a conclusion that Google Korea’s preloaded apps and subsidies for search ads do not constitute any abuse of market dominance. This is because Naver enjoyed a market share of more than 70%, Daum Kakao enjoyed a market share of 15% to 19% and that of Google was merely 2% to 8% during the period of 2008 to March this year, when Google was involved in preloading of apps in the South Korean market.

«

They’re slightly different, but Business Korea seems to be saying things are fine, where the FT is saying things aren’t.
link to this extract

Machine learning is fun! Part 4: modern face recognition with deep learning • Medium

Adam Geitgey:

»Ok, so which measurements should we collect from each face to build our known face database? Ear size? Nose length? Eye color? Something else?

It turns out that the measurements that seem obvious to us humans (like eye color) don’t really make sense to a computer looking at individual pixels in an image. Researchers have discovered that the most accurate approach is to let the computer figure out the measurements to collect itself. Deep learning does a better job than humans at figuring out which parts of a face are important to measure.
The solution is to train a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (just like we did in Part 3). But instead of training the network to recognize pictures objects like we did last time, we are going to train it to generate 128 measurements for each face.

«

Geitgey’s writeup is lengthy but all fascinating. (And there are three previous parts.)
link to this extract

Craig Federighi comes clean on how Night Shift avoids ghosting artifacts when scrolling • iDownload

Christian Zibreg:

»A customer from Germany emailed Craig Federighi, who is Apple’s Senior Vice President in charge of Software Engineering, to complain about Night Shift mode potentially emitting more blue light than F.l.ux, an iPhone app that serves the same purposes like Night Shift but was banned from the App Store following the release of iOS 9.3.

He received the following reply:

»

Given the display technology we push it as far as we can without introducing major red ghosting artifacts when scrolling / animating. (Unfortunately, the red phosphors in the LCD hold their color longer and when we shift the display too far into the red then scrolling results in irritating ghosting artifacts).

«

«

My expectation is that the next iPhones will have the Tru-Tone display which adjusts to the light around them. Which requires even better displays.
link to this extract

What if intelligent machines could learn from each other? • The Conversation

Raja Jurdak:

»As an example, we have demonstrated how smartphones that are in proximity to each other can both run their own AI machines and share logic blocks from their programs to accelerate learning how to maintain battery life.

There are two reasons behind these benefits. First, each phone learns independently, developing its own genetic material of program logic – an evolution of sorts.

This is known as the “island model” in evolutionary computing. In the IoT, each device becomes its own “island”. Occasionally, the devices share what they’ve learned.

This adds to the diversity of their genetic pool, which can be beneficial in a system that learns or evolves. It also means that both devices know how to react better to new contexts that may have originally been observed by other collaborating devices.

«

link to this extract

Russia tells Google to cough up some loose change in Android monopoly probe • The Register

Iain THomson:

»Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) has fined Google 468 million rubles ($6.8m) on charges that its Android operating system has been illegally disadvantaging other software vendors.

Last February, the FAS announced an investigation into Android after complaints from local search engine Yandex that Android phones came bundled with some Google apps. Yandex whined that this was anticompetitive and was sucking away its business customers.

In a statement, the FAS said it was imposing the fine (equal to around three hours’ worth of profit last quarter for the search giant) because Google was forcing Russian mobile phone companies to install its search app, its Maps, and its App store.

The FAS also objected to these services occupying prime real estate on the screens of Android phones, and to the Chocolate Factory banning some Russian apps from its storefront.

«

link to this extract

How I got tech support scammers infected with Locky • Borderline

Ivan Kwiatkowski:

»I agree to purchase his package and find test credit card numbers as fast as I can. For obvious reasons, the payment processor rejects the transaction and we try again four or five times. In the end, I suggest using my second credit card and give him another random yet valid (as far as the Luhn algorithm is concerned) number. Dileep makes me repeat both payment details at least ten times and I play dumb. He calls his superior in the hopes of figuring out why the payment isn’t going through. In the meantime, I hear other operators in the background repeating credit card numbers and CVVs aloud. I’m assuming they’re not PCI-DSS compliant. That’s when I’m hit by a stroke of genius. I open my “junk” e-mail folder where I find many samples of the latest Locky campaign – those .zip files containing a JS script which downloads ransomware. I grab one at random, drag it into the VM. The remote-assistance client I installed has a feature allowing me to send files to the operator. I upload him the archive and say:

— I took a photo of my credit card, why don’t you input the numbers yourself? Maybe that’ll work.
At first, Dileep ignores me. He makes me type in my information a few more times (he’s persistent, I’ll give him that), until I put my foot down:

— Look, Dileep, I’m old and my sight is not so good. It’s starting to hurt, having to squint to read those tiny numbers. Also, we’ve established I’m no good with computers, how about you give me a hand here?

He says nothing for a short while, and then:
— I tried opening your photo, nothing happens.

(I do my best not to burst out laughing.)

— Are you sure? Sometimes my pictures have a problem opening on MacOS, are you on Windows?
— Yes, he replies. Your pictures are corrupted because your computer is infected. This is why we need to take care of this.

And while a background process quietly encrypts his files, we try paying a couple more times with those random CC numbers and he finally gives up, suggesting that I contact my bank and promising to call me back next Monday.

In conclusion, whenever one stumbles on an obvious scam, the civic thing to do is to act like you buy it. Rationale: scammers don’t have the time to separate legitimate mugus from the ones who just pretend.

«

That is so wonderfully wicked. I hope as many people as possible manage to do this.
link to this extract

This is why there are so many ties in swimming • Deadspin

Timothy Burke:

»why doesn’t FINA, the world swimming governing body, increase its timing precision by adding thousandths-of-seconds?

As it turns out, FINA used to. In 1972, Sweden’s Gunnar Larsson beat American Tim McKee in the 400m individual medley by 0.002 seconds. That finish led the governing body to eliminate timing by a significant digit. But why?

In a 50 meter Olympic pool, at the current men’s world record 50m pace, a thousandth-of-a-second constitutes 2.39 millimeters of travel. FINA pool dimension regulations allow a tolerance of 3 centimeters in each lane, more than ten times that amount. Could you time swimmers to a thousandth-of-a-second? Sure, but you couldn’t guarantee the winning swimmer didn’t have a thousandth-of-a-second-shorter course to swim. (Attempting to construct a concrete pool to any tighter a tolerance is nearly impossible; the effective length of a pool can change depending on the ambient temperature, the water temperature, and even whether or not there are people in the pool itself.)

«

In Lane 1, competing for Germany, Werner Heisenberg.
link to this extract

iMessage’s ‘end-to-end’ encryption hardly any better than TLS, say cryptography researchers • Tom’s Hardware

Lucian Armasu:

»Ever since Edward Snowden released the NSA documents, an encryption mechanism called “forward secrecy” has significantly increased in popularity with service providers. The mechanism essentially automatically rotates the encryption keys at regular intervals, and once it switches to a new key, past data can’t be decrypted anymore.

This has been a main feature of end-to-end encryption protocols such as Off-The-Record (OTR) and Signal, but Green said iMessage lacks it completely. The lack of forward secrecy means that if someone steals an iOS or macOS device and unlocks it, they can then decrypt past conversations from those devices.

The researchers also criticized Apple for using non-standard encryption that seems implemented in a rather ad hoc manner. Moreover, Apple doesn’t use a properly authenticated symmetric encryption algorithm and instead relies on a digital signature to prevent tampering. This is what makes the chosen ciphertext attacks that can recover full contents of some messages possible.

Green once again recommended that Apple entirely replace iMessage with a new messaging system that’s been properly designed and verified. However, he realizes that Apple has to maintain some sort of backwards compatibility for the hundreds of millions of users that would continue to use iMessage even if Apple did create a new messaging app.

Because of that, he and his team also proposed some “short-term patches” for iMessage that can make the older iMessage clients a little more secure, as well as some long-term ones that will break iMessage’s compatibility with the old clients…

…The researchers said that they have reported all of these vulnerabilities to Apple, and the company has already implemented most of the proposed short-term patches such as the duplicate RSA ciphertext detection and certificate pinning (only for iOS 9+ clients), and it removed gzip compression. However, Green and his team stressed that Apple should eventually do a major overhaul of the iMessage protocol while following their proposed long-term changes.

«

link to this extract

Twitter now censors verified journalist accounts in Turkey’s post-coup purge • The Daily Dot

Efe Kerem Sozeri:

»Based on two recent court orders issued after the July 15 coup attempt, on July 23 and on July 25, Twitter withheld at least 12 journalists’ and three media outlets’ accounts; three of the censored accounts are verified. A quick tally of recently censored journalists lists as many as 26 accounts, half of which are verified.

The majority of the censored accounts are the former reporters and editors of the Zaman Amerika daily, an outlet close to Gülen movement, which Erdoğan blames for the coup attempt. However, the list also includes a Kurdish journalist, @AmedDicleeT, who has 186,000 followers, Kurdish daily @ozgurgundemweb1, and even the official account of the Kurdish news agency @DicleHaberAjans.

However, Twitter’s censorship criteria is still unclear, as these accounts do not complete the full list of journalist accounts that Turkey wants censored in these two court orders. Two other journalists who worked at Gülen-affiliated outlets, @tuncayopcin and @EmreUslu, are listed in the order but are not censored, nor is reporter @RifatDogann who works for the independent outlet @Dikencomtr.

Beyond the journalist accounts, Twitter seem to protect its international credibility by not censoring Amnesty’s Turkey researcher @andrewegardner, whose account was listed in the first court order.

«

Twitter Turkey supports (lots of) censorship, and is toying with reintroducing the death penalty – the latter of which would disqualify it from joining the European Union. It’s a mess.
link to this extract

Wonder is a bot that will remember anything for you • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»Quick! What’s your gym locker combination? Your girlfriend’s favorite Starbucks order? The type of ink your printer uses? Can’t remember? Gotta look it up? There’s a lot of information that we can’t access via a Google search, but instead tend to make a mental note of in order to recall. Sometimes, we might jot these things down in Notepad, but often we forget to do that, too. A new bot called Wonder wants to help by remembering anything you want, then return the information you need via a text message.

It’s a pretty simple but clever idea. After you go to the Wonder website and provide your phone number, the bot sends you a text that explains how it works.

Basically, you just text Wonder the information you’ll need to recall at a later date, and it stores that for you in its system. When you’re trying to later remember something, you just text Wonder a question, like “Who’s our company’s dental insurance provider?,” “When’s the next company meeting?,” or whatever other information you’ve previously fed into it by way of text message. The bot will promptly respond with the answer.

«

OK, given stuff like that which you don’t want to commit to a note (even a passworded note?), can see the point.
link to this extract

Why everything might not be ‘great’ at Google’s $2.4bn venture capital business • Business Insider

Sam Shead:

»Google Ventures is likely to say that there’s no overlap between itself and the other Alphabet investment divisions but it’s perfectly possible that they end up treading on one another’s toes from time to time.

One startup cofounder even went as far as to say: “GV had no role after the Alphabet split.”

Looking at the data
CB Insights looked at GV deal data over the last five years. The researchers found that GV made 46% less deals in 2015 — the year that Alphabet was formed — than it did in 2014.

The biggest drop-off in GV deal activity was at the seed stage, where GV went from a high of over 40 new deals in 2014 to 0 in the first half of 2016.

The CB Insights researchers wrote: “Growth investments done through Google Capital and direct minority investments by Google into the likes of SpaceX and Magic Leap have increased in the past two years.”

Although GV is yet to make any seed stage deals in 2016, it has made several larger deals. In the first half of the year, GV made 31% more investments than the same period in 2015, but 30% fewer than in H1 2014, according to CB Insights.

Ultimately, the success of a VC firm comes down to the number of big exits from startups in its portfolio. CB Insights notes that GV has had six exits over $1bn (£773m) since its inception, with the latest one coming after Jet.com was acquired by Walmart for $3bn (£2.3bn).

A Google Ventures spokeswoman said: “Bill Maris has decided to step down to take a break with his family and tackle something new.”

«

link to this extract

Checking the time, and other killer smartwatch uses • NPD Research Group

Eddie Hold:

»Smartwatch adoption skews younger and lower income in many cases and while the natural inclination is to simply label this group as “early tech adopters,” the reality is a little different.

It appears that a successful target sector for the watch is the service industry, ranging from valets to bar staff and waiters. These are users that cannot stay glued to their phones while they are working, but still want access to “glanceable” information such as messaging notifications, alarms and (of course) how long they have left on any given shift. The ability to remain in contact without reaching for the phone is still the killer app.

This all bodes well for the newer generation of smartwatches, which can connect via cellular rather than just Bluetooth. The freedom to completely un-tether from the smartphone could become the next logical “killer use” as it means you can go for a run without carrying that ever-larger smartphone with you, for example, or range further in the restaurant without worrying about Bluetooth.

«

Would not have guessed that for the adopter market, but it does make sense when you consider it.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: it’s Turkey, not Twitter, that is considering the reintroduction of the death penalty.

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.

This might be too many for a listicle, but odd numbers intrigue more than even. Honest. Photo by Hecuba’s Story on Flickr.

Business note: The Overspill’s Start up will be taking a week’s break next week, returning – if we’re spared – on August 15. So don’t come crying to me on Monday when your inbox is empty.

A selection of 12 links for you. The wrong number, as you’ll see. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

‘Digital detox’ promotes offline focus on love and jobs • FT.com

Madhumita Murgia:

»One in three Britons is choosing to undergo a “digital detox”, unplugging themselves from the internet in an effort to focus on their work and relationships, according to an Ofcom survey.

More than a third of people surveyed by the telecoms regulator said they had deliberately taken a break from their connected devices at some point, with 5% doing so for as long as a month. One in ten said they had done so as recently as the previous week from when they were surveyed…

…The study — of 2,025 adults and 500 teenagers — found that many felt bound to their devices, often experiencing separation anxiety if parted from them. In fact, six in ten internet users described themselves as being “hooked”, spending the equivalent of a day a week online.

More than half said they slept with their phone within reaching distance, checking it first thing in the morning and last thing at night. A quarter of mobile users said the first thing they did if they woke up during the night was check their phone.

A majority said their digital obsession negatively affected their offline lives: nearly half said they had ignored household chores and put off sleep as a result of spending too much time online, while a third felt they had neglected family and friends for their devices.

«

The full Ofcom report is here (and press release here).
link to this extract

Welcome to the Cyborg Olympics • Nature News & Comment

Sara Reardon:

»Around the world, nearly 80 research groups in 25 countries are honing their technologies for the €5m (US$5.5m) event. They range from small, ad hoc teams to the world’s largest manufacturers of advanced prostheses, and comprise about 300 scientists, engineers, support staff and competitors: disabled people who will each compete in one of six events that will challenge their ability to tackle the chores of daily life. A race for prosthetic-arm users will be won by the first cyborg to complete tasks including preparing a meal and hanging clothes on a line. A powered-wheelchair race will test how well participants can navigate everyday obstacles such as bumps and stairs.

The venue — Zurich’s 7,600-spectator ice-hockey stadium — should combine with the presence of television cameras and team jerseys to give the Cybathlon a sporting vibe similar to that of the Paralympics, in which disabled athletes compete using wheelchairs, running blades and other assistive technologies. The difference is that the Paralympics celebrates exclusively human performance: athletes must use commercially available devices that run on muscle power alone. But the Cybathlon honours technology and innovation. Its champions will use powered prostheses, often straight out of the lab, and are called pilots rather than athletes. The hope is that devices trialled in the games will accelerate technology development and eventually be used by people around the world.

«

Now this is an Olympics we can all support.
link to this extract

This is what Apple should tell you when you lose your iPhone • Hacker Noon

Joonas Kiminki:

»We got the car window fixed in a matter of hours, I later bought a new phone etc etc, but then yesterday — eleven days after the phone was stolen — the most interesting thing happened: I got an SMS and an email notifying that the phone was found!

The email looks exactly like an Apple email should. The sender is “Apple”. Google Inbox, Apple Mail and the traditional Gmail all let the email pass as non-suspicious. All the links in the footer lead to the right places.

I of course rushed to the address on the link and then started typing my credentials, but then suddenly stopped. Something was just not right.

At this point it’s probably best to note that I’m sort of professional. I’m managing director in a company that builds and supports large scale websites. We deal with web stuff all day long. I’m pretty sure many people would have just punched in their apple id and password and only then wondered why the login doesn’t work.

It does look very convincing, doesn’t it? All the links work, there’s jQuery features in place for a smooth user experience etc.

Let me take you inside the mind of a person who’s lost their phone for a while. You’re of course bummed that it got stolen in the first place. Everybody blames themselves at least a bit. Then, you set all the notifications on for notifying if it ever finds its way back online. Finally, you sort of forget it — and when messages finally arrive that it’s found, you rush at full speed to learn about your dear phone’s adventure.

Looking at the page above, there were two things that alarmed me. First, the address seemed a little off. Not really something Apple would use, is it?…

… If you ever lose your iPhone, iPad or iPod, be extra alert for upcoming identity theft attempts. This is what Google.com and Apple should’ve told me 12 days ago when I searched for what to do. The scam was so professional with perfect English and mobile responsive web pages that I consider myself lucky not to have given away my password. And as said, I’m sort of a professional.

«

Kiminki makes a good point. Clearly, thieves have wised up to the fact they can’t unlock phones without the iCloud passwords, and are phishing to a remarkable degree to get around this.
link to this extract

Oppo smartphone shipments marred by tight AMOLED supply • Digitimes

Sammi Huang and Steve Shen:

»Shipments of smartphones by China-based Oppo may fall short of its revised goal of shipping 90-100m units in 2016 due to insufficient supply of AMOLED panels from Samsung Display, according to industry sources.

Oppo shipped 50m smartphones 2015 and originally set a goal to ship 60m in 2016. However, the vendor raised its shipment goal for the year to 80m units in June and revise the goal again to 90-100m recently, the sources indicated.

Oppo has been increasing its orders for smartphone panels recently, looking to achieve its shipment goal. However, Samsung Display is having trouble supplying sufficient AMOLED panels to Oppo due to tight production capacity, said the sources.

«

Problem of relying on a competitor for your display panels. What happens once Apple starts wanting OLED too?
link to this extract

Electric vehicle charge points to outnumber petrol stations by 2020, say Nissan • The Guardian

James Murray:

»Public electric vehicle (EV) charge points will outnumber petrol stations in the UK by the end of the decade, marking a potential tipping point in the adoption of zero emission vehicles.

That is the conclusion of a new analysis by auto giant and EV manufacturer Nissan, which argues that based on current trends EV charge points will overtake traditional petrol stations by August 2020.

The report found that there were 8,472 traditional fuel stations in the UK at the end of last year, representing a steady decline from the 37,539 recorded in 1970. Based on the rate of decline in recent decades the number of petrol stations is likely to fall to under 7,870 by summer 2020, Nissan said.

In contrast, the UK’s EV charging network is expanding fast and plans are underway to accelerate its growth further over the coming years. As such, Nissan predicts the number of public EV charging locations will reach 7,900 by August 2020, although it adds that “accelerating adoption of electric vehicles means this crossover could happen a lot sooner”.

The report notes that there are now 4,100 public EV charging locations in the UK, representing rapid expansion given there were only a few hundred as recently as 2011. In contrast, more than 75% of traditional petrol stations have closed in the last 40 years.

«

Hmm. Define “traditional” petrol station. Does that include supermarkets? They’re the ones which have been wiping out the other petrol stations, but it’s unlikely they in turn will close.
link to this extract

Keeping an eye on security: the iris scanner of the Galaxy Note7 • Samsung Newsroom

»Each individual has a uniquely different and highly intricate iris pattern in each eye, which is completely developed at a very young age and remains unchanged throughout one’s lifetime. This, combined with the fact that iris patterns are almost impossible to replicate, makes iris scanning one of the most secure and reliable biometric techniques available.

As a result, it is widely being used for access control in pharmaceutical dispensing, border control and airport security…

…Samsung was able to apply two new components to enable iris recognition without sacrificing the design of the Galaxy Note7. To do so, the device was equipped with a dedicated iris camera, which utilizes a special image filter to receive and recognize the reflected images of the irises with a red IR LED light.

This red light allows for the best range for iris scanning. Furthermore, unlike traditional visible (or RGB) images, which can be affected by iris color or ambient light, infrared images display clear patterns and have low light reflection.

Samsung’s proprietary technology also makes use of the light emitted from the Galaxy Note7’s display so the scanner can receive data even in low light environments.

Together, these components ensure that iris readings are accurate and speedy. In fact, iris scanning requires fewer registration trials and results in fewer false acceptances than fingerprint scanning.

«

I would very much like to see some testing on the false accept/false reject rate for this, as well as the speed. High-end technology, but obviously going to move down to the other top-end models soon. Will others follow suit?
link to this extract

Designers come out for Apple in patent fight with Samsung • Reuters

Andrew Chung:

»Apple Inc deserved the hundreds of millions of dollars in damages Samsung Electronics Co paid for infringing patented designs of the iPhone because the product’s distinctive look drives people to purchase it, a group of design industry professionals told the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday.

Setting up a clash with a number of Silicon Valley companies that have come out on the side of Samsung, more than 100 designers and educators signed on to a new court brief supporting Apple.

They include famous fashion names Calvin Klein, Paul Smith and Alexander Wang, the industrial design director at Parsons School of Design, the design director for Bentley Motors, and Tony Chambers, the editor-in-chief of Wallpaper magazine.

Samsung has appealed to the Supreme Court part of the $548m it paid Apple last December related to a jury verdict from 2012. Samsung says the $399m of that amount that was awarded for copying the designs of the iPhone’s rounded-corner front face, bezel and grid of icons is excessive and contributed only marginally to a complex product…

…The designers on Thursday said that in the minds of consumers, the “look of the product comes to represent the underlying features, functions, and total user experience.”

Stealing a design can lead to a lost sale, and Apple deserves to be compensated for that with the infringer’s entire profits, they said.

«

link to this extract

Why do odd numbers make people click on your story? • Medium

Andrew Watt:

»have you ever wondered why editorial teams are producing seemingly never ending listicles, especially those with an odd number?

Well, odd numbers are one of three elements which psychologists and web content studies have shown can entice a website visitor to click on a headline and visit an article.

One such study can be found in George Loewenstein’s The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation (1994), which concludes that humans are attracted to content which promises a short list of tips or insights on a subect the reader wishes to know more about or one which piques their interest.

Additionally, a meta-analysis of over 300 articles about online learning, conduced by instruction specialist Abreena Tompkins, concluded that grouping information in parcels of three or five enables readers to absorb information better.

«

I had thought listicles tended to range around the 10 mark, but will pay closer attention in future.
link to this extract

The European making sure America’s tech giants play by the rules • Bloomberg

Adam Satariano and Aoife White interview Margrethe Vestager:

»What if the competitors’ products just aren’t as good? People don’t seem to have a problem with Google’s quality.

MV: That’s not the question. You don’t know if someone can come up with something better. Just because something is good doesn’t mean it’s the end of innovation. If it was, well then, we’d still be in horse carriages.

But isn’t there a choice? You’re investigating Google because people need to sign up for its services when they use Android. Can’t somebody download another search or e-mail app for their phone?

MV: If everything is presented to you, then your impetus to look for something new is so much smaller. Android is a very good operating system—open source. But how Android is used seems to place customers in a lot of instances on a one-way Google Street. That’s because you want an out-of-the-box experience, and even before you start thinking there is something else, you’re in a 100% Google experience.

«

She says as a result of her work investigating this, “I’ve become slightly more obsessed with data security and much more reluctant to give away my data.”
link to this extract

The soap opera effect: when your TV tries to be smarter than you • CNET

Danny Sullivan, writing in April 2012:

»If you’re really interested in why the effect happens, it’s because soap operas (and some other television shows) are shot on video, which is cheaper than film. But shooting on video increases the number of frames displayed per second, giving them that particular look.

Many modern televisions seem to automatically create additional frames, even for filmed content. This “motion interpolation” is meant to smooth motion, which might be useful if you’re watching a fast-action sporting event. But it also effectively makes content that was shot on expensive film appear to have been recorded on cheap video.

TelevisionInfo.com had a nice, recent article explaining this in more detail. This CNET article also explains it briefly, though it doesn’t name it as the Soap Opera Effect.

What I found remarkable is that people have been complaining about this for several years. Complaints are all over the Internet. How did I end up with a new set configured by default to show images in a way that you’d think manufacturers know plenty of people dislike. Why do I even need it at all?

My TV, I’d argue, is trying to be smarter than I am. It’s trying to smooth out “blur” and “judder” and remake the picture in a way it assumes will be better. But instead, it transforms the picture into something that feels unnatural.

«

I arrived at this via a Daring Fireball link, read it and worried my new TV was doing this. And then went and tried to configure it. And then, just like Sullivan goes on to explain, couldn’t find out what setting in the thicket of “picture” settings would actually be involved in this. Film? Sports mode? Who knows?
link to this extract

Avoiding the census • #censusfail

»August 9 is Census night. All over Australia, families and households will huddle around laptops with poor quality internet connections to answer a series of questions that will provide a snapshot of who we are as a nation. The data collected by the census is invaluable. It provides important statistics about Australia which drive the development of evidence based government policy.

In previous years, although your name and address were collected, it was not stored. As of this year (2016) things are different — your name and address are now stored to enable future linking to other datasets. The Census has transitioned from anonymous statistics to an identifiable, personal record of every person in the country.

As per their privacy policy, the Australian Bureau of Statistics will store your name and address separate to the remainder of your Census responses, with names replaced by “anonymous linkage keys”. At this point in time, no information has been published on how these linkage keys are generated. A Freedom of Information request has been lodged to provide this information however may not be released prior to the Census taking place.

«

However, you can make foolish mistakes in your name spelling which will make it hard for you to be matched…
link to this extract

Intel’s smartwatches are so hot right now – LITERALLY: Basis Peaks recalled for skin burns • The Register

Shaun Nichols:

»Intel has recall every single one of its Basis Peak smartwatches – and urged people to stop using them – because they can become dangerously hot.

Chipzilla has issued a notice to anyone who bought the Basis Peak, asking them to send back the watch along with any and all accessories for a full refund.

“We had hoped to update the software on your watch to address the problem. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we aren’t able to develop such a solution without completely compromising the user experience,” Intel said.

“As a result, we are asking that you return your Basis Peak watch and authorized accessories for a full refund at your earliest convenience.”

Not that anyone should have been actually using the Basis Peak, anyway. Intel issued an advisory on June 13 that customers stop wearing the watch, amidst multiple reports that it was prone to becoming so hot as to cause “burns and blisters” on the skin of those brave enough to wear it.

«

Brings to mind Fitbit’s recall of its Force wristband in late 2014 due to irritation and burns. Those things can get really hot.
link to this extract

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam. But the next one won’t arrive for a week.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What is it like to perceive millions more colours than other people? Photo by RoRoPics on Flickr.

A selection of 13 links for you. Great links, really terrific– they’re the best possible links. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Kim Kardashian has finally stopped using her Blackberry, but not by choice • Jezebel

Bobby Finger:

»Kim Kardashian, mother of North, Saint, and Selfies, is having a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day, and it’s all because her phone broke. But not her Lumee®-wrapped iPhone, which is presumably fine and could easily be replaced by Apple. It’s her second phone—her Blackberry—that has suffered irreparable damage.

Kim, as many of you probably know, is a vocal Blackerry fan—an unsolicited and uncompensated spokesperson, if you will. She prefers their physical keyboards to touchscreen versions on most phones of today, and has spent the past several years stockpiling the now-discontinued BlackBerry Bolds (her favorite model) on eBay to have on hand when one ultimately breaks…

«

And it broke. And she can’t find any on eBay. Huh. I’d have kept one buy to sell to her at a gigantic price, myself.
link to this extract

comma.ai research

»the comma.ai driving dataset

7 and a quarter hours of largely highway driving. Enough to train what we had in Bloomberg [a prototype self-driving car built in a garage].

Examples

We present two Machine Learning Experiments to show possible ways to use this dataset:

Training a steering angle predictor

Training a generative image model

«

45GB compressed, so you’ll need a fast link. More to the point, it’s out there for you to do something with – if you’re in machine learning.
link to this extract

History tells us what may happen next with Brexit and Trump • Medium

Tobias Stone, in an essay that will (once you read it) probably scare the living daylights out of you:

»Ignoring and mocking the experts , as people are doing around Brexit and Trump’s campaign, is no different to ignoring a doctor who tells you to stop smoking, and then finding later you’ve developed incurable cancer. A little thing leads to an unstoppable destruction that could have been prevented if you’d listened and thought a bit. But people smoke, and people die from it. That is the way of the human.

So I feel it’s all inevitable. I don’t know what it will be, but we are entering a bad phase. It will be unpleasant for those living through it, maybe even will unravel into being hellish and beyond imagination. Humans will come out the other side, recover, and move on. The human race will be fine, changed, maybe better. But for those at the sharp end — for the thousands of Turkish teachers who just got fired, for the Turkish journalists and lawyers in prison, for the Russian dissidents in gulags, for people lying wounded in French hospitals after terrorist attacks, for those yet to fall, this will be their Somme.

«

It’s a terrific essay which I’ve had sitting open in a tab for around a month, because I was scared to read it. Then I read it, and was even more scared (such as his “if Trump wins and Putin decides he wants to do something” scenario), but better educated. Notable above all is his suggestion of how the Brexit vote might trigger a global political tsunami.

Stone also responded to a number of (often incoherent) responses here.
link to this extract

Scientists have found a woman whose eyes have a whole new type of colour receptor • ScienceAlert

Fiona Macdonald:

»After more than 25 years of searching, neuroscientists in the UK recently announced that they’ve discovered a woman who has an extra type of cone cell – the receptor cells that detect colour – in her eyes.

According to estimates, that means she can see an incredible 99 million more colours than the rest of us, and the scientists think she’s just one of a number of people with super-vision, which they call “tetrachromats”, living amongst us.

Most humans are trichromats, which means we have three types of cone cells in our eyes.

Each type of cone cell is thought to be able to distinguish around 100 shades, so when you factor in all the possible combinations of these three cone cells combined, it means we can distinguish around 1 million different colours…

…So how do you get a fourth type of cone cell?

The idea of “tetrachromats” was first suggested back in 1948 by Dutch scientist HL de Vries, who discovered something interesting about the eyes of colour blind people.

While colour blind men only possess two normal cone cells and one mutant cone that’s less sensitive to either green or red light, he showed that the mothers and daughters of colour blind men had one mutant cone and three normal cones.

That meant they had four types of cone cells, even though only three were working normally – something that was unheard of before then.

Despite the significance of the finding, no one paid much attention to tetrachromats until the late ’80s, when John Mollon from Cambridge University started searching for women who might have four functioning cone cells.

«

This. Is. Mindblowing. First that you can interpolate these peoples’ existence; then that you can find them.
link to this extract

Welcome to AirSpace • The Verge

Kyle Chayka:

»It’s easy to see how social media shapes our interactions on the internet, through web browsers, feeds, and apps. Yet technology is also shaping the physical world, influencing the places we go and how we behave in areas of our lives that didn’t heretofore seem so digital. Think of the traffic app Waze rerouting cars in Los Angeles and disrupting otherwise quiet neighborhoods; Airbnb parachuting groups of international tourists into residential communities; Instagram spreading IRL lifestyle memes; or Foursquare sending traveling businessmen to the same cafe over and over again.

We could call this strange geography created by technology “AirSpace.” It’s the realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live / work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go: a profusion of symbols of comfort and quality, at least to a certain connoisseurial mindset. Minimalist furniture. Craft beer and avocado toast. Reclaimed wood. Industrial lighting. Cortados. Fast internet. The homogeneity of these spaces means that traveling between them is frictionless, a value that Silicon Valley prizes and cultural influencers like Schwarzmann take advantage of. Changing places can be as painless as reloading a website. You might not even realize you’re not where you started.

It’s possible to travel all around the world and never leave AirSpace, and some people don’t. Well-off travelers like Kevin Lynch, an ad executive who lived in Hong Kong Airbnbs for three years, are abandoning permanent houses for digital nomadism. Itinerant entrepreneurs, floating on venture capital, might head to a Bali accelerator for six months as easily as going to the grocery store. AirSpace is their home.

«

Thoughtful piece.
link to this extract

Theranos had a chance to clear its name. instead, it tried to pivot • WIRED

Nick Stockton:

»Many of the people gathered in that conference room at the 2016 annual meeting of the American Association of Clinical Chemistry were probably expecting the company to address those allegations, with data. Instead, they got a box.

The box, called miniLab, is a tidy, humbled version of the mythos that made Theranos a $9bn unicorn. According to Holmes, it is a glimpse of Theranos’ next chapter, “an inflection point for our company.” Which may have baffled the number of people who thought they had bought tickets for a reckoning. But why not? Theranos’ old business model is dead, skewered by nine months of really bad press, and bled out by a recent federal ruling that bans Holmes from running a clinical testing lab for two years. So, if you take a big step back and look not at where Holmes was speaking — a medical conference — but where she was coming from — Silicon Valley — it’s clear what really happened on that stage in Philadelphia. She pivoted.

Holmes and Company once promoted an innovative, breakthrough technology that would run up to 70 different tests on a single drop of blood — obtained painlessly from a finger prick — while being cheaper and faster than anything else available. Then, Wall Street Journal investigative journalist John Carreyrou published articles alleging that the company’s technology was in fact, only capable of doing a few tests on a single drop of blood. Further, many of those blood drops collected from real customers had been diluted and analyzed using a competitor’s technology. The recent federal ban for Holmes has vindicated the Journal‘s claims.

The box Holmes presented today uses analytical methods developed years ago (by other people) to run an unspecified number of tests on a small (but larger than finger prick) volume of blood, obtained by poking a needle into a person’s arm.

«

“Behold my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
link to this extract

Amazon releases tools to help devs build games for its Alexa voice tech • Gamasutra

Alex Wawro:

»Amazon seems eager to entice developers into making games for its Alexa voice service, as the company this week added a straightforward interactive adventure game design tool (replete with source code) to its dev-oriented Alexa Skills Kit.

Given that voice-controlled choose-your-own-adventure games are a relative rarity in the game industry, this effort on Amazon’s part potentially opens up some intriguing opportunities for game makers.

While most probably know Alexa best as the voice of Amazon’s Echo (pictured) wireless speaker, the Alexa tech actually extends beyond the Echo to provide interactive voice-enabled services on an assortment of devices from both Amazon and other companies.

«

Seems to me you’d have to be exceptionally lonely, or solipsistic, to want to play an adventure game in this way. Or maybe the idea is that you do it as a sort of collaborative party game?
link to this extract

Keep calm and send Telegrams! • Telegram

»Some media reported on a “massive” hacker attack on Telegram in Iran.
Here’s what really happened:

Certain people checked whether some Iranian numbers were registered on Telegram and were able to confirm this for 15 million accounts. As a result, only publicly available data was collected and the accounts themselves were not accessed. Such mass checks are no longer possible since we introduced some limitations into our API this year.

However, since Telegram is based on phone contacts, any party can potentially check whether a phone number is registered in the system. This is also true for any other contact-based messaging app (WhatsApp, Messenger, etc.).

As for the reports that several accounts were accessed earlier this year by intercepting SMS-verification codes, this is hardly a new threat as we’ve been increasingly warning our users in certain countries about it. Last year we introduced 2-Step Verification specifically to defend users in such situations.

«

Hmm, but which “certain people” did the checking? Iranian security people? If they did it for 15 million accounts – let’s enumerate that again, 15 MILLION ACCOUNTS – it’s hardly trivial, and hardly likely to be someone doing it for lulz. This doesn’t seem good, despite the cheery tone of the blogpost.
link to this extract

David Lammy: The latest Tory privatisation shows the triumph of right-wing ideology over economic sense • LabourList

»During a debate on the future of the Land Registry back in June it was clear that the Government will not have the votes it needs to push through their proposed privatisation, such was the strength of opposition from Tory backbenchers. It is time for the Government to confirm the U-turn that the then junior minister George Freeman hinted at from the front bench and announce that it will not be going ahead with this misguided and damaging privatisation.

British property worth at least £120bn is currently owned offshore, with many of these transactions involving criminals buying up properties in order to launder huge sums of money and hide the proceeds of their crime and corruption. Continuing with this misguided privatisation would merely prove beyond doubt that promises to tackle corruption and pervasive tax avoidance are nothing more than empty rhetoric.

In a twisted irony, the various private equity firms and pension funds lining up to bid for the Land Registry are all themselves linked to tax havens. Our system of land and property ownership is contingent on an independent, trusted and impartial adjudicator to grant titles and oversee transactions, but privatisation will create a blindingly obvious conflict of interest that scuppers this impartiality and dashes the prospect of increased transparency in future.

If the very people implicated in money laundering and tax evasion scandals are in charge of the information that could expose the practices of offshore companies, what hope do we have of ever actually tackling corruption?

«

Those seem like good questions.
link to this extract

Companies House proposal to wipe data on dissolved firms sooner decried • The Guardian

Juliette Garside:

»Millions of public records used to track down white collar criminals and combat money laundering would be deleted under proposals being considered by the government’s company registration agency.

Companies House maintains a database on every firm incorporated in the UK, providing access to their accounts and listing all directors and shareholders. But the agency is facing mounting pressure from businesses – and reportedly from members of parliament – to take down valuable information.

Proposals are being considered to reduce the amount of time the records of dissolved companies are retained, from 20 years to six. If the rules are changed, more than 2.5m records could be lost. Campaigners are warning that such a move would be a major step back in the global fight against corruption.

Police investigators, the National Crime Agency, the Serious Fraud Office, lawyers, journalists and bank compliance teams all make extensive use of the data, with many searches involving dissolved companies and their directors…

…A Companies House spokesman said: “We are currently considering the correct period for which records of dissolved companies should be kept on the register. This issue is being considered following a number of complaints made by members of the public who believe that retaining, and making publicly available, information relating to long-dissolved companies is inconsistent with data protection law.”

«

However, there is no time limit for how long records should (or shouldn’t) be kept under data protection laws. I’d prefer transparency and retention: the data is relevant for a substantial period.

link to this extract

Negative energy • 2040 information law blog

Tim Turner:

»The Competition and Markets Authority announced a proposal in March to deal with the problem of so-called ‘disengaged’ customers, those who defy the market by sticking with their energy company rather than hopping from one to another. The idea is to force the providers to identify those who don’t switch, and create a central database to which all will have access for marketing purposes. After a consultation exercise, the final shape of the proposal will be announced this month. When interviewed on the Today programme at the time, a CMA spokesman denied that those on the list would be bombarded with marketing, although he conceded that they would be bombarded with “information”.

The list will contain names and addresses (although that wasn’t the CMA’s original intention), and access to it will be supervised by [energy regulator] OFGEM…

…CMA wanted to include phone numbers and email addresses in the dataset, which would have exposed millions of people to a torrent of spam, tacitly approved by the state. It’s not hard to imagine some of the less ethical companies pretending they can ignore TPS [the Telephone Preference Service, the marketing companies’ voluntary list to block unsolicited calls] and previous expressions of customer wishes on the basis that the OFGEM list has state support (PREDICTION: some of them will use appending services to add phone numbers or emails to the OFGEM list, and do this anyway).

«

You and I can see straight away that this is a bad idea. Turner can too, and so he FOI’d both the CMA and the Information Commissioner’s Office, but what he found out is not encouraging.

»

I am one of the disengaged customers. I moved into my house in 2001 and I haven’t changed energy supplier since. Yes, this might cost me money, but it is a conscious choice. I do not want to engage with the market. I do not want to switch to an alternative provider whose prices are lower because their customer service is terrible. I do not want to give my data to price comparison websites who will then flog it to anyone who feels like buying it. The ICO themselves revealed the complex web of intermediaries that led PCW data ending up in the hands of the Better Together campaign. Of course, I only know about this because it was discussed at a Data Protection Officer conference with Data Controllers, not because the ICO did any publicity about the PCWs’ practices that might have reached data subjects.

«

The shocking thing is that the CMA is willing to give up peoples’ privacy and peace of mind in order to create an artificial “competition” in the market. Shouldn’t the market have been set up better, and shouldn’t OFGEM be making competition happen? That’s what gets people to switch.
link to this extract

Bitcoin drops 20% after $70M worth of Bitcoin stolen from Bitfinex exchange • TechCrunch

Fitz Tepper:

»Bitfinex, one of the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges online, has suffered a major hack. The company has posted a note on their website detailing the security breach, and while it doesn’t mention a total amount, one of their employees confirmed on Reddit that the total amount stolen was 119,756 bitcoins.

That amount converts to about US$77m based on a price of $650 per bitcoin, which is about what Bitcoin traded at over the course of the last week.

After news of the hack spread the price of Bitcoin dropped almost 20%, settling in around the current price of $540 per bitcoin. It’s not exactly clear why the price dropped, but it’s likely Bitcoin investors got nervous about potential hacks on other exchanges and decided to sell off their Bitcoin holdings, which led to a rapid decrease in price.

«

Lots of finger-pointing about which part of the system is responsible, but no clear answers. Also note how the “value” of the hack actually falls because of the hack itself.

»

While it’s too early to speculate next steps, many are wondering what the fate of their coins will be. Because of the segregated BitGo wallets, only some customer’s wallets were compromised. This means that some user’s wallets may be totally intact. The question then becomes do you let those users withdraw their funds, or pool the funds and proportionally issue refunds so every user incurs the same loss, even if their own wallets weren’t directly compromised.

«

Capitalism or socialism? Who’d have thought bitcoin would lead people to those sorts of decisions?
link to this extract

Samsung’s bleeding edge • Bloomberg Gadfly

Tim Culpan:

»For Samsung, though, a lot of this technology is more gimmick than gimme. Iris-scanning sounds cool, but hardware-access security is less of a risk than online hacking or device-installed malware, and one wonders how well it will work with contact lenses or glasses anyway.

Yet it does allow the company to stand out from a crowd where most smartphones look the same, and more importantly lets the company charge huge premiums over the dozens of devices that use the same lineup of chips, displays and software. It’s also an acknowledgement by Samsung that its chief competitor isn’t Apple but every Android maker on the planet.

That means the $13bn Samsung spends annually on R&D is a vehicle for its highly visible marketing program, a fact that’s highlighted by the Galaxy S7 Edge, Galaxy J2 and Galaxy S7 taking the top three spots in Strategy Analytics’ first-half global market-share survey.It also tells you that for Samsung, necessity is not the mother of invention; marketing is.

«

Good points. Hard to believe many people can distinguish the video quality (or screen quality).
link to this extract

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

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified