Factories. What are they good for? Photo by andreakw on Flickr.

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A selection of 14 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The team of men behind Rachel Brewson, the fake woman whose Trump-fuelled breakup went viral • Jezebel

Anna Merlan:

»

If you were one of the people who became a little bit emotionally invested in Rachel Brewson’s breakup with her boyfriend Todd—if you felt sorry for her, or infuriated, or thought they both seemed like self-involved jerks— you may be comforted to know that she doesn’t exist.

As a tipster pointed out to Jezebel, and as we confirmed in interviews with the people who wrote her into being, “Rachel Brewson” was fake, the product of an unusually involved internet marketing scheme that managed to strew blog posts, personal essays, and social media profiles across fairly well-trafficked sections of the Internet.

Brewson wasn’t a publicity stunt, but an attempt to make money. The character was created by an (all-male) team of internet marketers interested in pushing traffic back to Review Weekly, a site that relied on various internet monetization schemes to try to generate a profit. In the process, they created a bunch of flimsy fake characters to write posts, and an unusually detailed one: Rachel. “She” got published on a few big sites—xoJane, Thought Catalog, Elite Daily—appeared on TV (where the company hired amateur actors to play her and Todd), and left a trail of profiles that remain on the internet to this day.

In the end, Review Weekly was an expensive failure, according to its owner, who chose to fire the entire staff at the end of May. The website remains online, but is no longer publishing new material.

But Rachel’s main creator, marketing consultant Kenny Hyder, says the site continues to passively generate income. And he still prides himself on what a great job his team did bringing Brewson to life.

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If 2016 were a fish, I’d throw it back.
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Exclusive: Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for U.S. intelligence – sources • Reuters

Joseph Menn:

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Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company complied with a classified U.S. government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said two former employees and a third person apprised of the events.

Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to a spy agency’s demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.

It is not known what information intelligence officials were looking for, only that they wanted Yahoo to search for a set of characters. That could mean a phrase in an email or an attachment, said the sources, who did not want to be identified.

Reuters was unable to determine what data Yahoo may have handed over, if any, and if intelligence officials had approached other email providers besides Yahoo with this kind of request.

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Good to see Menn back on top form. On the story, in the last paragraph: bet they did. Question is whether those providers complied.
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A personal Google, just for you • Google blog

Sundar Pichai:

»

When I look at where computing is heading, I see how machine learning and artificial intelligence are unlocking capabilities that were unthinkable only a few years ago. This means that the power of the software — the “smarts” — really matter for hardware more than ever before. The last 10 years have been about building a world that is mobile-first, turning our phones into remote controls for our lives. But in the next 10 years, we will shift to a world that is AI-first, a world where computing becomes universally available — be it at home, at work, in the car, or on the go — and interacting with all of these surfaces becomes much more natural and intuitive, and above all, more intelligent.

This is why we built the Google Assistant, which allows you to have a natural conversation between you and Google. It’s one Assistant that’s ready to help you throughout your day. The first instance appeared in our new smart messaging app Google Allo to help you in group conversations. But that’s just the beginning. We want to help you get things done in your world, across different places, contexts and situations. And that means building the Google Assistant and other amazing software into the hardware that you depend on every day.

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A technical follow-up: how we built the world’s prettiest auto-generated transit maps • Medium

Anton Dubrau of Transit, which makes the Transit app:

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Success!

[Our transit map of showing line intersections was] Pretty good for a Version 1. Much better than Google, seeing as you can more or less tease out where each line is going. We were ready to roll out Transit Maps! And then… Apple Maps happened.
In the summer of 2015, after having worked on our maps for the better part of a year, we were finally ready to release our first version of Transit Maps. Then Apple rolled out their transit maps, and they were really pretty.

They instantly raised the bar for what transit maps should look like. In our drawings and designs, the end goal was something similar to (or better than) what Apple subsequently released, but we were planning to get there after releasing our Version 1.

Compared to Apple, our proposed Version 1 was kind of mediocre. Our Designer-CEO decreed that beating Google was not good enough — we also had to at least play in the same league as Apple.

After closer scrutiny, we hypothesized that Apple was drawing their maps manually. There were huge lags between the release of new cities, and there was something strangely off about the way the maps looked — as though they were drawn by humans, not computers. This meant that although our maps weren’t quite as pretty, our algorithm was still ahead of theirs.

At this point, we also knew that the hard part was behind us.

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Apple to launch trio of iPad Pros in spring 2017, including 7.9in mini model • Mac Rumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

Apple will ship three new iPad Pro models around Spring 2017, including 7.9in, 10.1in, and 12.9in models, according to Japanese blog Mac Otakara.

The report, citing “reliable sources,” said the 12.9in model will feature a True Tone display like its current 9.7in counterpart, using advanced four-channel ambient light sensors to automatically adapt the color and intensity of the display to match the light in the surrounding environment.

The 12.9in iPad Pro is also said to gain the 9.7in model’s same 12-megapixel rear-facing iSight camera and True Tone flash.

The smaller 7.9in model, which will succeed the iPad mini 4, will likewise include a Smart Connector, True Tone display, four speakers, and a 12-megapixel rear-facing iSight camera with True Tone flash, as Apple works to standardize features across its tablet lineup, according to the report.

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A 10.1in model? Doesn’t quite ring true.
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Pixel, Galaxy, iPhone, oh my! Why pay a premium when every phone runs the same apps? • ZDNet

Jason Perlow:

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It isn’t as if companies like Apple, Google, Samsung, and the others vying for our attention have not been expending resources and enduring long development cycles to make better products.

They have. There are key quantitative improvements in performance between this year’s models and those of prior years. The benchmarks tell us this, as does the spec creep.

The problem is that the mobile technology has now matured to a certain level where every single product at every single price point is now more than good enough to address every consumers’ key needs in almost every conceivable use-case scenario.

The hardware has now become completely commoditized, and the capabilities of these mobile chipsets and display technology have vastly outstripped the capabilities and functionality of the software applications that run on them.

We’ve seen this before, of course. It happened to the PC industry during the 1990s and the early 2000s. The commodity desktop PCs got so powerful – with the fourth- and fifth-generation x86 CPUs and the amount of memory and disk $600 to $800 could buy. It didn’t make any sense to purchase a more expensive model since real-world performance – using the same dozen or so core business applications that everyone used – was the same.

The majority of the apps couldn’t make use of the surplus resources, and there was little or no value added to distinguish one brand of PC from another.

«

Well, slightly dependent on operating system.
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US election: cyber attacks a certainty • UK Authority

Michael Cross:

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Next month’s presidential election is the most divisive in living memory. It is also the one most certain to face a cyber attack – which could conceivably swing its outcome.

That’s the alarming consensus emerging in Washington DC as political commentators ponder the the consequences of a re-run over the “hanging chads” fiasco in Florida in 2000. Yet the technology picked to replace the old punchcard voting machines has its own vulnerabilities: in particular being open to invisible sabotage.

Potential attackers range from hostile governments – Russia has already attempted to alter election outcomes in Ukraine by targeting software used to aggregate votes – to foreign terrorist groups and home grown libertarian lone wolves.

In a series of reports called Hacking Elections Is Easy, the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT), a US think tank, points out that cyber attack on different aspects of the election process does not require a sophisticated actors or technology.

“Any hacker with enough time, a basic ability to navigate Deepweb, and access to YouTube, can impact public perceptions, control political conversations, and undermine the democratic process,” the study warns.

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Behind the Pixel: Google’s first real threat to Apple’s iPhone • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman got the behind-the-scenes preview:

»

When [former Motorola boss Rick] Osterloh, 44, came on board in mid-April, he brought Google’s hardware groups into one division, shuttering projects he didn’t see contributing to Google’s future. Now the engineers and designers from Google Glass, Chromecast and Pixel all work together. Keeping them separate, he says, made it “hard to drive toward the goal of portfolio strategy and focus.” Reflecting long-held ambitions to build an Apple-style supply chain, the hardware division now has a supply-management team, drawing on the expertise of the Nest smart-home unit acquired by Google nearly three years ago.

Google declined to say how much it’s spending on the effort. However, Jason Bremner, a former Qualcomm Inc. executive who works on Google’s hardware products, put it in context. “Part of being the seller of record means that inventory, that supply chain risk — you know, hundreds of millions of dollars on the line on any given day — that’s on Google now,” he said.

Now that Google is designing phones itself, the company can at long last put together a product roadmap going out several years. For example, last month Burke was able to see a photo taken by a Google handset that won’t debut until next fall. That “would have never happened with Nexus,” he says. Going forward, more and more of the phones’ guts will be developed in-house. Burke says the company will eventually be able to ship its own custom “silicon,” a buzzword for customized processors that make devices work better.

It’s a very different setup from Osterloh’s previous Google gig, when he ran the Motorola division. “While we were part of Google, we were very arm’s-length,” he says. Now his team gets early access to the company’s advances in machine learning and innovations from the Assistant group. The Pixel phones will also be the first to run the next version of Android, Nougat 7.1, complete with Google tie-ins like pro camera effects, instant chat support, and a service that automatically frees up phone storage via the cloud. 

«

The Pixel isn’t even vaguely a threat to the iPhone: Google can’t turn on the manufacturing capacity to compete (Apple is the second largest maker of phones, not just smartphones, in the world), and people who are likely buyers of iPhones are not likely to turn to the Pixel instead. The key threat is to Samsung and more particularly LG and Sony’s high-end would-be buyers. The problem for all the Android OEMs, including Google, is that the premium Android market is much smaller than the iPhone market (which is premium).

The penultimate paragraph though with the mention of customised silicon is the part to note. How far down that road is Google looking to go? And why?
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Additional security and privacy risks of light sensors • Security, Privacy and Tech Inquiries

Lukasz Olejnik on how you could capture someone’s PIN in a banking app via a malicious app which captures data from the light sensor on their smartphone:

»

Light sensor data is not unambiguously related to PIN’s digits. It’s not that a particular PIN’s digit resembles a particular light level; the matter is more subtle. According to the report, the information leak is emanating from the user behavioral analysis. The employed threat scenario envisions users using a specialized application monitoring the typing on a touchscreen. The application is trying to trick users to reveal their use patterns (how they type) in an activity similar to PIN typing. The application tracks lighting conditions and the rate of light level change (timestamped) when the user is typing, for later analysis of the light level change rate (e.g. speed). Light level variations are typically related to subtle angle changes caused by slight differences of the way how the device is held. You know, when you type on a smartphone, it tends to move slightly.

Then, the application waits (or tricks the user to do so) for a banking application start. Lighting conditions are still monitored. But at this point, user’s use patterns (which affect the rate sensor readout changes) are already known. The research studied the mechanics of PIN deducing.

The image below (from the report) shows how particular PIN digits correlated with light level changes.

It is quite clearly seen that in this particular case, the digits 0 and 9 were related with higher light level readouts; they could be clearly distinguished from others. A machine learning algorithm would have no problems in classifying these events.

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Why are politicians so obsessed with manufacturing? • NYTimes.com

Binyamin Appelbaum:

»

The manufacturing boom of the postwar years was an oddity, and there will be no repeat of the concatenation that made it happen: The backlog of innovations stored up during the Great Depression and World War II; the devastation of other industrial powers, Germany in particular, which gave the United States a competitive edge. Yet some parts of the formula that created the middle class may be possible to replicate. Unions played a large role in negotiating favorable work rules, many of which have since entered into law. Stronger unions — or federal regulators, who have increasingly replaced unions as the primary advocates for workers — could improve conditions in the service sector, too.

The enduring political focus on factory workers partly reflects the low profile of the new working class. Instead of white men who make stuff, the group is increasingly made up of minority women who serve people. “That transformation really has rendered the working class invisible,” says Tamara Draut, the author of “Sleeping Giant,” a recent book about this demographic transformation and its political consequences.

The old working class still controls the megaphone of the labor movement, in part because unions have struggled to organize service workers. Manufacturing was, logistically speaking, easier to organize. There were lots of workers at each factory, and most knew one another. Service work is more dispersed and done in smaller crews. Workers living in the same city and employed by the same retail chain, for example, would likely know only a handful of their compatriots. Fostering a sense of trust and shared purpose under these conditions is difficult.

At the same time, more and more men are plopping down on the sidelines of the economy. The Harvard economist Lawrence H. Summers estimates that by midcentury, one-third of men in their prime working years, between the ages of 25 and 54, will not be working.

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Samsung’s China smartphone sales expected to be hit amid turmoil from Note 7 recall • South China Morning Post

Bien Perez, Zen Soo and He Huifeng:

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Demand for Samsung Electronics smartphones in mainland China are expected by analysts to decline fast, as the international recall of its Galaxy Note 7 model casts a pall on the company’s sales in the world’s largest mobile phone market.

Samsung’s turmoil from its first large-scale withdrawal of a smartphone is largely predicted to benefit rivals Huawei Technologies, Oppo Electronics, Vivo, Xiaomi and Apple on the mainland, according to analysts and Chinese retailers interviewed by the South China Morning Post.

Tay Xiaohan, a senior market analyst at technology research firm IDC, said Samsung smartphone sales in the Chinese mainland “have been stagnant in the past few quarters” amid intense competition from major Chinese brands.

“The [Galaxy Note 7] global recall will further affect Samsung’s performance and reputation in China in the second half of this year,” Tay said.

«

The irony being that the models sold in China weren’t affected by the battery problem (different supplier). But some Chinese have been offended that the phones weren’t recalled – as if they didn’t matter.

However, Note 7 users are loyal. It’s all the non-Note 7 users who are the problem for Samsung.
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Amazon bans reviews based on free or discounted products • Ars Technica

Mark Walton:

»

While Amazon isn’t removing older incentivised reviews, except for those it deems particularly excessive, it will now take action against any companies found distributing products for free in exchange for reviews. The online retail giant has taken a zero-tolerance stance to outfits found violating its rules before, suing companies that directly pay for fake reviews, and in some cases even suing the individuals that write them.

“Any attempt to manipulate Community content or features, including by contributing false, misleading, or inauthentic content, is strictly prohibited,” reads Amazon’s updated community guidelines. “If you violate our Guidelines, we may restrict your ability to use Community features, remove content, delist related products, or suspend or terminate your account… Misconduct may also violate state and federal laws, including the Federal Trade Commission Act, and can lead to legal action and civil and criminal penalties.”

The only exceptions to the new rules are books—Amazon will “continue to allow the age-old practice of providing advance review copies”—and reviews that come from the Amazon Vine program. With Vine, Amazon (not the vendor or seller) asks reviewers to post opinions about new and pre-release products and does “not incentivise positive star ratings, attempt to influence the content of reviews, or even require a review to be written.” It also limits the total number of Vine reviews displayed for each product.

«

You’ll recall that it has been a problem. Let’s see how long it takes companies to work around this one.
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/qa/ – Winter is coming. – Question & Answer • 4chan

Hiroyuki Nishimura, who bought 4Chan a year ago:

»

Thank you for thinking about 4chan.
We had tried to keep 4chan as is.
But I failed. I am sincerely sorry.

Some notice there are no more middle ads and bottom ads on 4chan.
Ads don’t work well. So we reduced advertisement servers cost.
4chan can’t afford infrastructure costs, network fee, servers cost, CDN and etc, now.

4chan have three options.
-Halve the traffic cost
limit uploading image sizes
use slower servers.
close some boards

-Much more ads
pop-up / pop under ads
malicious ads

-More 4chan pass users
more features

«

Or read the easy explanation by Brianna Wu. TL;DR: 4Chan close to death.
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Microsoft just killed its awful fitness tracker • Gizmodo

Michael Nunez:

»

The imminent death of Microsoft’s fitness tracker shouldn’t be much of a surprise. When the original Band was introduced in late 2014, it received mixed reviews. Experts hoped the device would be one of the first health trackers consumers used regularly. The original Microsoft Band contained 10 sensors, which was significantly more than other fitness trackers from rivals like Fitbit and Basis included at the time. Microsoft also included powerful software to help people make sense of the data. Sadly, it wasn’t enough to save the device. The official Gizmodo review said the original Microsoft Band colossally disappointing and “left plenty of room for improvement.”

It never got any better, either. When Microsoft released the Band 2 one year later, the company was entering an even more competitive marketplace.

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Still don’t see that the new remodelled Microsoft will want to make wearables. Too competitive and too narrow a field if you don’t have other things to tie into.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A drug addict wonders where his next hit is coming from. Photo via jairoagua 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.

Behavioral Debt • Tech.pinions

Ben Bajarin:

»

Let’s use a tangible example in Facebook. Facebook would like to move into a more transactions-based model for the buying and selling of goods on their platform. Here we may likely see the messy reality of behavioral debt rear its ugly head. Consumers have built up years of behavioral debt doing a few main things on Facebook. Consumers are likely content in this reality and, when they want to buy something, they go to Amazon or some other established online merchant. Facebook wants to offer them the chance to do this on Facebook so they don’t have to leave and spend time and money somewhere else. But “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” and I have a feeling convincing consumers to do anything more than they do today will prove quite tricky for Facebook due to the many hours/years spent building up behavioral debt in how they use Facebook.

Similarly, Intel, Microsoft, and the PC makers would all like to sell more of the 2-in-1 PC concepts. These devices are not the cheapest machines on the market but they offer better margins. The problem is, 2-in-1 PCs sell at a fraction of the volume of notebooks. What Intel and Microsoft have not yet learned is there is a massive amount of behavioral debt built up around the PC form factor. People understand it, they are comfortable with it, and they have established workflows on it. Many of you have heard me say those who grew up with a PC have a bias for it. This bias is explained by behavioral debt.

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Hackers infect army of cameras, DVRs for massive internet attacks • WSJ

Drew Fitzgerald:

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The proliferation of internet-connected devices from televisions to thermostats provide attackers a bigger arsenal of weapons to infiltrate. Many are intended to be plugged in and forgotten. These devices are “designed to be remote controlled over the internet,” said Andy Ellis, security chief at network operator Akamai Technologies Inc., some of whose clients were affected. “They’re also never going to be updated.”

Experts have long warned that machines without their own screens are less likely to receive fixes designed to protect them. Researchers have found flaws in gadgets ranging from “smart” lightbulbs to internet-connected cars. Wi-Fi routers are a growing source of concern as many manufacturers put the onus on consumers to do the updating.

Level 3 identified cameras and video recorders made by Chinese manufacturer Dahua Technology Co. as the sources of a large share of the recent attacks, but Level 3 said other devices are being roped into a new attack network currently being assembled. Hackers often hijack the machines through computers that are already infected or poorly protected Wi-Fi routers.

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Question is, if you have a device like that, how do you protect it?
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Regeneration ← Terence Eden’s Blog

The aforesaid Eden:

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I’ve spent the last 15 years working in the mobile industry and, in truth, I think it is the industry that I’m leaving.

When I started out, I was the weirdo for having a touchscreen smartphone (Treo 180 represent!) – now everyone has them.

When I first began doing mobile websites, people thought it was a fad – I ended up running mobile websites with millions of users generating billions of euros.

They told me that no one wanted to wear Google Glass and… OK… I might have missed the ball on that one!

What I’m getting at is that mobile is saturated. I’m not naive enough to say Everything that can be Invented has been Invented – but we’re definitely in the “incremental improvement” stage of the industry. Short of a massive leap in power-delivery technology, the public acceptance of face-worn computers, or neural interfaces – I think the future might be *whispers* kinda dull.

Time to shake things up. Time to get out of a 15 year comfort zone. Time to change the world.

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Looking forward to finding out what’s next, since we’ll probably all be heading there after him.
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What the Twitter sale reveals about Twitter itself • Vanity Fair

Nick Bilton:

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Companies aren’t just a mirror of their current leaders’ views. Companies are the result of everything that their leaders have done while they were in charge. And Twitter is the result of more than a decade of infighting at virtually every level of the institution. For a while, there was literally a new C.E.O. coming into power every couple of years. Each time a new chief took the helm, the ship was steered in a different direction. It should come as no surprise that, in addition to trolls, Twitter has become a home for ISIS and other anti-Western groups. How do you grow a start-up when some of your most powerful users quit the service on a regular basis? While Jack Dorsey might have finally returned to lead the social network that he helped create in 2006, he now finds himself running a feral product that isn’t really housebroken and is too old to be trained otherwise. Twitter, after all, was raised by dozens and dozens of former executives who were, seemingly as often as not, concerned with their own history as that of the company.

Someone very close to Twitter recently told me that if it wasn’t for all the rumors around an acquisition, the company’s stock would likely be in the low single digits.

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The number of titles in the Netflix library is down 50% the past four years • Exstreamist

Tom Juel:

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There’s no denying that the total number of titles available on Netflix is declining, but after some research, we were surprised by just how much it has decreased over the past few years.

We pulled September 2016 title counts from uNoGS in the US, showing that there are currently 5,302 titles available in the US Netflix library including movies and TV shows. What this means is that, over the past four years, the Netflix library has collapsed 50% in total title count since its peak four years ago.

While the exact number of titles available on Netflix in 2012 is unknown, sources who used to work for the streaming giant have told us it was close to 11,000 movies and TV shows. Over the years, this gradual decline has come from major content owners pulling the plug on giving Netflix distribution rights, as well as Netflix decreasing their total spend on third party content.

Instead of having to renegotiate streaming rights repeatedly for third party content, Netflix has opted to place a heavier focus on original movies and shows, a move that, while certainly appearing successful thus far, is still considered by many to be a massive gamble. Netflix has had tons of success with shows like ‘House of Cards,’ ‘Orange is the New Black,’ ‘Narcos’ and more, but the fact remains that creating original content is extremely expensive and doesn’t scale the same way content acquisition can.

Last year, we reported that Netflix originals were out-performing their television network counterparts when it came to producing quality shows, losing only to HBO. So perhaps this decline in third party content isn’t quite as bad as the numbers make it sound. There’s probably an argument that while quantity has gone down, the quality has remained strong or perhaps even gotten better.

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#TrumpWon? trend vs. reality – i ❤ data • Medium

Gilad Lotan, chief data scientist at Betaworks, dug into the claims (untrue) that “#Trumpwon” began from Russian accounts, and finds a separate set of Twitter accounts which tweeted the photo:

»

What’s still unclear is who exactly photoshopped that image to make it seem like there was a Trump-Russia connection, and what else they have up their sleeves. What we’re seeing with this hashtag, is a highly organized group of interconnected accounts, dedicated to making their agenda as visible as possible.

Trending topics are helpful as they cut across information silos, gaining significant levels of attention from people who would otherwise never see your content.

The winner in this quest for attention and frame reaps huge rewards.

On the other hand, we’re seeing how false information can spread like wildfire, especially when there are enough people invested in making it true.

We have a few weeks to go, let’s see where this madness takes us!

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iPhone 7 and augmented reality • Above Avalon

Neil Cybart:

»

The iPhone 7 Plus dual-system camera is able to extract more data than any other iPhone camera. When combined with software and other technologies, this data will become incredibly valuable for Apple’s augmented reality efforts. In an effort to obtain those specialized technologies, Apple has been on a buying spree for augmented reality startups including Metaio, Emotient, Polar Rose, Faceshift, PrimeSense, Flyby Media, and Perceptio. The dual-camera system found in the iPhone 7 Plus is the first step in Apple turning the iPhone into a key component of an augmented reality platform relying on much of the technology acquired these past two years. 

While the Phone will become a key part of Apple’s augmented reality platform, there will be a range of devices capable of enhancing reality through both visual and audible feedback. One reason why Apple has no other choice but to get into transportation is that automobiles will end up representing a superior use case for augmented reality.

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High Hitler: how Nazi drug abuse steered the course of history • The Guardian

Rachel Cooke spoke to Norman Ohler, whose new book Blitzed explains the major – and previously overlooked – role of drugs in Germany’s second world war effort:

»

Pervitin, as it was known, quickly became a sensation, used as a confidence booster and performance enhancer by everyone from secretaries to actors to train drivers (initially, it could be bought without prescription). It even made its way into confectionery. “Hildebrand chocolates are always a delight,” went the slogan. Women were recommended to eat two or three, after which they would be able to get through their housework in no time at all – with the added bonus that they would also lose weight, given the deleterious effect Pervitin had on the appetite. Ohler describes it as National Socialism in pill form.

Naturally, it wasn’t long before soldiers were relying on it too. In Blitzed, Ohler reproduces a letter sent in 1939 by Heinrich Böll, the future Nobel laureate, from the frontline to his parents back at home, in which he begs them for Pervitin, the only way he knew to fight the great enemy – sleep. In Berlin, it was the job of Dr Otto Ranke, the director of the Institute for General and Defence Physiology, to protect the Wehrmacht’s “animated machines” – ie its soldiers – from wear, and after conducting some tests he concluded that Pervitin was indeed excellent medicine for exhausted soldiers. Not only did it make sleep unnecessary (Ranke, who would himself become addicted to the drug, observed that he could work for 50 hours on Pervitin without feeling fatigued), it also switched off inhibitions, making fighting easier, or at any rate less terrifying.

In 1940, as plans were made to invade France through the Ardennes mountains, a “stimulant decree” was sent out to army doctors, recommending that soldiers take one tablet per day, two at night in short sequence, and another one or two tablets after two or three hours if necessary. The Wehrmacht ordered 35m tablets for the army and Luftwaffe, and the Temmler factory increased production. The likes of Böll, it’s fair to say, wouldn’t need to ask their parents for Pervitin again.

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And yes, Hitler wasn’t overlooked when it came to medication. The most stunning article you’ll read today (unless you’ve already read it).
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Let us take a moment to mourn the BlackBerry • FT.com

Heather MacGregor is executive dean of Edinburgh Business School and the FT’s Mrs Moneypenny:

»

For my generation of working women, the BlackBerry handset, as a technological breakthrough, was every bit as liberating as the introduction of the contraceptive pill had been to a previous generation. As it could email from everywhere, you could be out of the office and still work perfectly well, allowing you to combine motherhood with a career in a way that had not been possible before. Indeed, a friend at a large US company found her BlackBerry meant that she could work part-time for 14 years — and very few people ever noticed. Suddenly flexibility was for everyone. The “always on” approach had arrived.

Others did not welcome the BlackBerry into their lives with such enthusiasm. Its highly addictive nature, which led to the “CrackBerry” nickname, meant that people rarely put the handset down when they came home in the evening. One (male) friend of mine had his BlackBerry addiction cited in his divorce as number three on his ex-wife’s list of his “unreasonable behaviour”.

In a world where digital detox retreats are the new indulgence for the well-heeled, it is hard to remember a time before we were “always on”. But let us not forget that the BlackBerry started all that.

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‘Piece of crap’: Apple hit with proposed class action lawsuits over iPhone ‘touch disease’ • CBC News

Sophia Harris:

»

The suit alleges that that the underlying problem is the touchscreen controller chips in the phone’s motherboard, which are not properly secured and can malfunction with regular use.

[Lead plaintiff Rae] Wiegers says she contacted Apple numerous times about her defective phone and never got a satisfactory response.

She shared with CBC News a transcript of her online chat in August with senior adviser “Dave” from Apple Support.

In the transcript, Wiegers explained her problem, mentioned that she had read numerous similar complaints online, and even sent Dave a link to a recent blog from an online repair guide, iFixit. The blog labelled the problem “Touch Disease,” and claimed that iPhone repair shops in the U.S. were being inundated with customers looking for fixes for the defect.

Dave responded that he had no information that the problem was “known to be a manufacturing issue from Apple.”

He also reminded Wiegers that her warranty had expired and that she’d have to get the phone repaired. He recommended that she visit the Apple feedback site where she could “tell engineering to look into it.” He signed off with a 🙂 happy face.

“I just about felt like throwing my phone through the screen at him,” says Wiegers.

«

1) Not yet certified in court; this is a Canadian action. Await progress.
2) We’re in 2016 and a national publisher calls a blogpost “a recent blog”.
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A shocking amount of e-waste recycling is a complete sham • Motherboard

Jason Koebler:

»

Until recently, I had never really thought about what happens to my old electronics. I took them to a community e-waste recycling drive, or dropped my old phone in a box somewhere, and I assumed my stuff was recycled.

An alarming portion of the time this is not actually the case, according to the results of a project that used GPS trackers to follow e-waste over the course of two years. Forty% of all US electronics recyclers testers included in the study proved to be complete shams, with our e-waste getting shipped wholesale to landfills in Hong Kong, China, and developing nations in Africa and Asia.

The most important thing to know about the e-waste recycling industry is that it is not free to recycle an old computer or an old CRT television. The value of the raw materials in the vast majority of old electronics is worth less than it costs to actually recycle them. While consumers rarely have to pay e-waste recycling companies to take their old electronics (costs are offset by local tax money or manufacturers fronting the bill as part of a legally mandated obligated recycling quota), companies, governments, and organizations do.

Or at least, in a rational market, your office would have to pay an e-waste recycler to take their old stuff. But an astounding amount of US electronics recyclers will take old machines at no cost or for pennies per pound, then sell them wholesale to scrapyards in developing nations that often employ low-salary laborers to dig out the several components that are worth anything.

«

link to this extract

Meerkat, star app of 2015, is officially dead • TechCrunch

Greg Kumparak:

»

Remember Meerkat? It came out of nowhere in early 2015 — a star of SXSW, in particular — and was on everyone’s tongue for weeks. Then came Periscope, a strikingly similar competitor built mostly in stealth mode, and word that Twitter had acquired it for nearly $100 million dollars before much of the world even knew it existed.

Suddenly, interest in Meerkat fizzled.

A year and a half later, Meerkat is dead, officially, as the company behind it shifts its efforts into a new project.

Ben Rubin, co-founder of Life On Air (the company behind Meerkat), announced this afternoon that Meerkat has been pulled from the App Store:

“We just removed Meerkat from the AppStore 😔 bitter sweet moment seeing it go while celebrating @houseparty“

The company itself, however, carries on: they’re now focusing on Houseparty, a group video chat application they’ve been building in secrecy for months. Houseparty lets you quickly jump into “parties” of up to 8 people simultaneously, creating drop-in-drop-out style video chats between any friends who are online at the same time. According to an article published this week by The Verge, Houseparty is already approaching its millionth user.

«

Rubin said that “broadcast wasn’t breaking as a daily habit”. Can see that it might never do, for the majority.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Guess how many episodes it took to hook people. Logo copyright Netflix.

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

A selection of 14 links for you. Come on, time to get back to work for the final three months of the year. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

New Netflix data reveals when viewers commit to TV shows • WSJ

John Jurgensen:

»

Netflix has a theory about why commitment tends to come quicker for certain kinds content.

“The more visceral a series is and viewers’ response to it, the more quickly they’re going to really get attached,” says Cindy Holland, Vice President of Original Content, referring to shows with immediate action, scares or other kinds of intensity. With shows that are more subdued and character driven, she adds, “it’s like the viewer befriending the character…you take time to choose your friends.”

In its methodology, Netflix says there is no correlation between how quickly viewers commit to a series and the total size of its audience. That’s one reason the new data won’t do much to satisfy people outside the company who want the equivalent of Nielsen ratings data for Netflix shows. To that Holland has a now-familiar response: “We aren’t particularly interested in sharing things that aren’t really relevant to us and our viewers.”

For 30 popular series on the service, Netflix identified the hooked episode for a given country, and then tallied the average across more than 35 of its territories, from Argentina to the United States. Viewing patterns were often similar from country to country, which Holland says debunks “conventional wisdom that in some countries a certain kind of storytelling doesn’t perform as well as in others.”

«

link to this extract

You don’t have to be stupid to work here, but it helps • Aeon Essays

Andre Spicer on how new recruits to the workforce meet gigantic, dispiriting corporate inertia, and what that means for the future:

»

Another significant source of stupidity in firms we came across was a deep faith in leadership. In most organisations today, senior executives are not content with just being managers. They want to be leaders. They see their role as not just running their business but also transforming their followers. They talk about ‘vision’, ‘belief’ and ‘authenticity’ with great verve. All this sounds like our office buildings are brimming with would-be Nelson Mandelas. However, when you take a closer look at what these self-declared leaders spend their days doing, the story is quite different.

No matter how hard you search there is little – if any – leadership to be found. What most executives actually spend their days doing is sitting in meetings, filling in forms and communicating information. In other words, they are bureaucrats. But being a bureaucrat is not particularly exciting. It also doesn’t look very good on your business card. To make their roles seem more important and exciting than they actually are, corporate executives become leadership addicts. They read leadership books. They give lengthy talks to yawning subordinates about leadership. But most importantly they attend many courses, seminars and meetings with ‘leadership’ somewhere in the title. The content of many of these leadership-development courses would not be out of place in a kindergarten or a New Age commune. There are leadership-development courses where participants are asked to lead a horse around a yard, use colouring-in books, or build Lego – all in the name of developing them as leaders.

At least $14bn gets spent every year on leadership development in the US alone yet, according to researchers such as Jeffrey Pfeffer at Stanford, it has virtually no impact on improving the quality of leaders. In our own research, we found that most employees in knowledge-intensive firms didn’t need much leadership. People working at the coalface were self-motivated and often knew their jobs much better than their bosses did.

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macOS Sierra code suggests Apple could replace Intel in Macs with custom ARM chips • iDownload

Christian Zibreg:

»

Could Apple be working on next-generation Mac hardware that would be powered by an in-house designed processor based on CPU blueprints from British fabless semiconductor maker ARM Holdings plc? That’s exactly the conclusion one could reach by looking closely at code strings in the macOS Sierra kernel, discovered by Dutch outlet TechTastic.nl.

It’s very peculiar that Apple would add support for ARM technology to macOS Sierra.

As you know, all Macs manufactured since 2005 run Intel chips. The Apple appears to be implementing support for ARM chips in the Mac operating system could mean that first ARM-based Macs might appear this year.

As TechTastic.nl states, developers no longer submit fully compiled binaries.

Instead, intermediary bit code is submitted which Apple uses to compile the binary code for the specific CPU architecture. Should Apple release an ARM-based Mac, developers wouldn’t need to re-submit their existing code nor would they need to add any ARM-specific code in order for their apps to run natively on ARM-based hardware.

“It is probably also one of the reasons why legacy applications have recently been removed from the App Store,” speculates the publication.

The macOS Sierra kernel indicates support for the ARM Hurricane family.

«

It all sounds like blather until that last line. Except ARM doesn’t have a Hurricane. So that must be an Apple codename.
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Google Home strategy aims to use Chromecast to beat Amazon Echo • Variety

Janko Roettgers:

»

Amazon struck a deal with Sonos to leverage the Echo for voice control for existing Sonos speaker systems in August, and followed up this week with a similar deal with DTS for Wi-Fi speakers powered by the company’s Play-Fi technology. And if that wasn’t enough, Amazon has also enabled a number of smaller manufacturers to add its Alexa smart assistant directly to their speaker systems.

Google’s own negotiations with consumer electronics manufacturers could be hampered by what multiple sources have described as overly aggressive muscle-flexing. At the meeting in June, Google is said to have told home audio vendors that they won’t be allowed to add any other digital assistants than Google’s own to their hardware if they want to continue to use Google Cast. Another source told Variety of similarly far-reaching demands made in negotiations with another big consumer electronics manufacturer — demands that ultimately led to talks breaking down.

(A Google spokesperson declined to comment on plans to add Google Assistant to third-party hardware, or on the meeting in question. She did however point out that some consumer electronics manufacturers have in the past used Google Cast in addition to competing technologies like AirPlay and Bluetooth.)

In the end, Google’s plan to beat Amazon’s Echo may still hinge on the performance of Google Home. Multiple leaks suggest that Google will sell the device for $130, which is $50 less than the price of an Amazon Echo. If anything, Google has shown with the success of its $35 Chromecast that these price differences can matter.

«

Playing hardball is hardly exclusive to Google, and isn’t a bad idea.
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AI-First, the overhype and the last mile problem • Vik’s Blog

Vik Singh is chief executive of AI startup Infer:

»

How do you get regular business users to depend on your predictions, even though they won’t understand all of the science that went into calculating them? You want them to trust the predictions, to understand how to best leverage them to drive value, and to change their workflows to depend on them.

This is the last mile problem. It is a very hard problem — and it’s a product problem, not a data scientist problem. Having an army of data scientists isn’t going to make this problem better. In fact, it may make it worse, as data scientists typically want to focus on modeling, which may lead to over-investing in that aspect versus thinking about the end-to-end user experience.

To solve last mile problems, vendors need to successfully tackle three critical components:

«

Those are: getting “predictive everywhere” with integrations; building trust; and making predictive disappear with proven use cases. Might not sound comprehensible on its own, but it makes sense in context. Infer is an example of the sort of company that nobody will have heard of, but will over the next five years insinuate its work into all sorts of daily decisions. You’ll wake up one day and its algorithms will have affected you directly.
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Samsung Display to decrease supply of notebook panels • Digitimes

Rebecca Kuo and Adam Hwang:

»

Samsung Display, following the sale of a 5G TFT-LCD factory to China-based Truly Opto-Electronics in 2015, will shut down another 5G factory in 2017. 5G factories mainly produce notebook-use panels, meaning Samsung Display’s supply of notebook panels will continue to decrease.

According to IHS Markit, Samsung Display produced about 30 million notebook-use panels in 2015 and its output will slip to 12 million units in 2016 and further to four million units in 2017. In particular, Samsung Display’s notebook panel production shrank from 4.17 million units in the first quarter of 2016 to 2.8 million units in the second.

Among notebook vendors, HP saw the largest impact from Samsung Display’s reduced supply, with shipments to HP dropping from 1.1 million panels in the first quarter of 2016 to 350,000 units in the second. In response, HP has shifted orders to other makers

«

link to this extract

Here’s my plan to save Twitter: let’s buy it • The Guardian

Nathan Schneider:

»

When I mentioned a Twitter buyout to co-op and crowdfunding veteran Danny Spitzberg, he reminded me of the Green Bay Packers. Have you ever wondered why the small-ish city of Green Bay has held on to its really good football team? It’s because, rather than being traded around by billionaires, the team started selling shares to its fans, starting in 1923. That has resulted in sold-out games, affordable ticket prices, tasteful stadium advertising, and an all-around successful, sustainable business model for generations.

I’m sure many of us have ideas about how we could make Twitter meet our needs better. One suggestion that came my way: “actually moderating threats and hatespeech.” But what would it take to put Twitter in the hands of those who rely on it most?

Armin Steuernagel, founder and managing partner at the innovative new investment firm Purpose Fund, suggested to me that it could go down this way: assemble a company and invite investment for shares that grant dividend rights, but not voting; gather about 20% of the funds needed for the buyout, then borrow the rest, and buy. As for the voting rights, they’d be distributed according to a “ladder of engagement,” including investors and general users, but allocating more control to those who contribute the most value to the platform, such as employees and the most active users. Finally, there could be a few “golden shares” with veto rights, perhaps controlled by a foundation representing all users.

«

It’s nice to have a dream. This one will never materialise.
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Apple’s relationship with pro music needs some mending • Create Digital Music

Peter Kim:

»

Here’s how bad this is: you show up to a gig, and out of the blue, your machine starts popping or dropping buffers or creating random distortion. That’s clear-the-floor stuff, things that could make people never want to play again. And it’s not necessary. Computers are perfectly capable of acting reliably for days at a time.

This is being reported by NI, but the cause is Apple and can impact other systems – I’ve reproduced the issues they’re describing in Serato DJ and Ableton Live, for instance, with different pieces of hardware from different vendors. People who work in support paint an ugly picture, and then anecdotal evidence is useful, because it covers a range of different situations. And it’s getting been worse through El Capitan: “OS X 10.9 (rare occurrences), OS X 10.10 (occasional occurrences) and OS X 10.11 (most occurrences, compared to the aforementioned OS versions).”

Now, it’s not uncommon to wait a few weeks when an OS comes out to make sure your complex ecosystem of software hosts, plug-ins, and hardware is compatible. But note the OS numbers – that’s years without a fix, and instead worsened regressions. That’s simply unacceptable. OS X 10.9 Mavericks is about to turn three years old (older if you count pre-release builds).

This should never have shipped in a stable OS in the first place. I can’t think of an instance of this happening on any recent build of Windows, and Microsoft doesn’t control the hardware you run on. It certainly should not have dragged on for years on a platform who has defined itself as the choice of musicians and producers.

The good news is, macOS 10.12 Sierra seems potentially to fix the problem (with AppNap functionality turned off manually, which isn’t totally ideal). More testing is needed to be sure of this.

«

It seems reasonable to expect new Apple Mac hardware this week, or by October 10 at the latest. But that’s not the whole of the problem, as Kim explains.
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A Yahoo insider says the hacked database could be much larger • Business Insider

Paul Szoldra:

»

Yahoo has said that the breach affected at least 500 million users. But the former Yahoo exec estimated the number of accounts that could have potentially been stolen could be anywhere between 1 billion and 3 billion.

According to this executive, all of Yahoo’s products use one main user database, or UDB, to authenticate users. So people who log into products such as Yahoo Mail, Finance, or Sports all enter their usernames and passwords, which then goes to this one central place to ensure they are legitimate, allowing them access.

That database is huge, the executive said. At the time of the hack in 2014, inside were credentials for roughly 700 million to 1 billion active users accessing Yahoo products every month, along with many other inactive accounts that hadn’t been deleted.

In late 2013, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said the company had 800 million monthly active users globally. It currently has more than 1 billion.

“That is what got compromised,” the executive said. “The core crown jewels of Yahoo customer credentials.”

«

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The over-medicated population • VolteFace

Abbie Llewelyn:

»

let’s look at the issues that [interventional cardiologist Aseem] Malhotra brings up with what he calls “a collective system problem”. Firstly, there is bias in the funding of drugs research. A great deal of funding comes from pharmaceutical companies who stand to gain a profit from the industry. The way they make the most profit is to create drugs that can be used by the largest number of people for the longest amount of time, which clearly means that they aren’t necessarily funding research that is the most beneficial to patients.

It also means that most of the new drugs produced in the last 20-30 years have been near copies of existing drugs, with just tiny alterations, meaning that the clinical advantages of these drugs over what was already available is minimal. A Barral report on all internationally marketed drugs between 1974 and 1994 found that only 11% were truly innovative and multiple independent reviews since then have also concluded that around 85-90% of all new drugs provide few or no clinical advantages to patients. On top of this, many of these drugs also have serious side effects, which have a negative impact on people’s health.

«

This is a gigantic topic, but it’s underreported outside the specialist space of medics.
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Google prepares to reject EU monopoly charges • Telegraph

James Titcomb:

»

While a response is expected in mid-to-late October, it could be delayed further as Google puts the finishing touches to its answers. The company may still offer concessions in a last-ditch attempt to seek a deal with the Commission that would lead to a reduced fine, but after several failed attempts in the past, the prospect of a truce appears unlikely.

Both sides are now believed to be prepared for a long-running battle, and any EU fine may be appealed at the European Court of Justice, a process that could take years and extend beyond Ms Vestager’s 2019 term.

The Commission’s combative stance has irritated the US government, which cleared Google of any search bias after its own investigation in 2013. Barack Obama has accused the EU of attempting to protect its own companies by reining in Silicon Valley giants.

When it responds, Google is likely to argue that it needs to place restrictions on Android to ensure the consistency of the software and that many price comparison services have benefited, not suffered, from the search engine.

«

Prepare for the PR war. There’s also (separately, for completeness) Ben Edelman has the English translation of the Russian antitrust finding against Google.
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Thoughts On Andromeda • Naofumi Kagami

The aforesaid Kagami:

»

Unlike Microsoft which still commands the vast majority of the business personal computing market via PCs, Android tablets do not appeal to people who want to work on business documents. This is also true for the mass iPad market, and is the challenge for tablets as a whole.

It has also been often mentioned that there are very few Android apps that have been designed to take advantage of the tablet form factor. Ars Technica’s Ron Amadeo examined 200 apps from Google Play’s “Top Apps” list and found the situation to be quite dire. (To be fair, the design of this analysis experiment is not very scientific. The choice of the “top free apps” list is arbitrary, and a control experiment with a similar list for iPad is necessary.)

Of the top 200 apps:

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

From the above, I think that it is safe to say that the markets that Andromeda is targeting (the PC and tablet markets), are the markets where Google is weakest.

«

Sounds promising.

»

The above situation is similar to the predicament where Microsoft finds itself in with respect to entering the smartphone market.

«

Sounds less promising.
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Google’s global ad warming pushes beachfront seo property into the ocean • SEOBook

Aaron Wall, from September 2015 (but still true): I

»

t takes a lot of effort & most people are probably too lazy to do it, but if you look at the arc of Google’s patents related to search quality, many of the early ones revolved around links. Then many focused on engagement related signals. Chrome & Android changed the pool of signals Google had access to. Things like Project Fi, Gogle Fiber, Nest, and Google’s new OnHub router give them more of that juicy user data. Many of their recently approved patents revolve around expanding the knowledge graph so that they may outright displace the idea of having a neutral third party result set for an increasing share of the overall search pie.

Searchers can instead get bits of “knowledge” dressed in various flavors of ads.

This sort of displacement is having a significant impact on a variety of sites. But for most it is a slow bleed rather than an overnight sudden shift. In that sort of environment, even volunteer run sites will eventually atrophy. They will have fewer new users, and as some of the senior people leave, eventually fewer will rise through the ranks. Or perhaps a greater share of the overall ranks will be driven by money.

Jimmy Wales stated: “It is also false that ‘Wikipedia thrives on clicks,’ at least as compared to ad-revenue driven sites… The relationship between ‘clicks’ and the things we care about: community health and encyclopedia quality is not nothing, but it’s not as direct as some think.”

Most likely the relationship *is* quite direct, but there is a lagging impact. Today’s major editors didn’t join the site yesterday & take time to rise through the ranks.

«

We’re at an inflection point: internet user growth has essentially stalled, as has the installed base for smartphone users; both are growing only slowly, and only in low-income countries. So Google’s revenue and profit growth has to come from showing more ads to people one way or another, as its Other Bets aren’t pulling their weight (comparatively).
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Those without substance suffer no wounds • Rough Type

Nicholas Carr:

»

In the 1960s, television gave candidates their bodies back, at least in two dimensions. With its jumpy cuts and pitiless close-ups, TV placed a stress on sound bites, good teeth, and an easy manner. Image became everything, as the line between politician and celebrity blurred. John Kennedy was the first successful candidate of the TV era, but it was Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton who perfected the form. Born actors, they managed to project a down-home demeanor while also seeming bigger than life. They were made for television.

Today, with the public looking to their smartphones for news and entertainment, we’re at the start of the third technological transformation of modern electioneering. The presidential campaign is becoming just another social-media stream, its swift and shallow current intertwining with all the other streams that flow through people’s devices. This shift is changing the way politicians communicate with voters, altering the tone and content of political speech. But it’s doing more than that. It’s changing what the country wants and expects from its would-be leaders. If radio and TV required candidates to be nouns — to present themselves as stable, coherent figures — social media pushes them to be verbs, engines of activity. Authority and esteem don’t accumulate on social media; they have to be earned anew at each moment.

What’s important now is not so much image as personality. But, as the Trump phenomenon suggests, it’s a particular kind of personality that works best — one that’s big enough to grab the attention of the perpetually distracted but small enough to fit neatly into a thousand tiny media containers. It might best be described as a Snapchat personality. It bursts into focus at regular intervals without ever demanding steady concentration.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Possibly not recommended if they came from a Chinese clinical trial. Photo by Toni Blay 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 15 links for you. Quite a lot, really. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How NPR factchecked the first presidential debate in realtime, on top of a live transcript • Nieman Journalism Lab

Shan Wang:

»

NPR used a transcription service that provides closed captioning via its API and fed the transcript into a single Google Doc where staffers cleaned up the transcription as it came in. Reporters, editors, the visuals team, copyeditors, researchers — ultimately more than 50 people had access to the Google Doc — scrambled to add their annotations, which were individually approved, edited, and then published. A researcher was also backreading the transcript and annotations as they were published to correct typos. 90 NPR member stations embedded NPR.org’s live annotations on their own sites, according to a spokesperson.

«

Pretty soon we’ll have machines that can just do it for us.
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80% of Chinese clinical trials’ data fabricated • Pharmafile

»

The government review of clinical trial practise involved 1,622 programs of new pharmaceutical drugs waiting upon government approval to begin mass production. According to the report, the data gathered during the clinical trials failed to meet analysis requirements, were incomplete or were untraceable. 

The SFDA report concluded that some of the companies involved were thought to have hidden or deleted records of potential adverse effects and tampered with the data that did not meet projections. As a result, more than 80% of applications for mass productions of newly developed drugs have been cancelled.

Though the extent of the scandal may be surprising, there has long been an awareness of issues within China’s pharmaceutical practises. Third party agencies that are tasked with inspecting facilities, known as contract research organisation, are quoted by the report as being “accomplices in data fabrication due to cutthroat competition and economic motivation”.

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But we were told that markets and competition were good things!
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China’s fast-growing LeEco just made a big hire as it continues its U.S. expansion • Recode

Ina Fried:

»

Chinese device maker LeEco, which has been on an acquisition and hiring spree in the U.S., said Wednesday it has hired former Qualcomm executive Rob Chandhok to lead its North American research and development efforts.

That follows the recent hiring of Huawei executive Richard Ren to run LeEco’s non-China device business and serve as acting president for North America. In April it hired two former executives from Samsung’s U.S. operations to serve as its revenue chief and chief administrative officer in the U.S.

The company, which makes everything from electric bicycles to smartphones, recently announced plans to spend $2bn to acquire TV and electronics maker Vizio.

«

Big money, big ambitions.
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Goodbye world: we’ve passed the carbon tipping point for good • Motherboard

Sarah Emerson:

»

It’s a banner week for the end of the world, because we’ve officially pushed atmospheric carbon levels past their dreaded 400 parts per million. Permanently.

According to a blog post last Friday from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, “it already seems safe to conclude that we won’t be seeing a monthly value below 400 ppm this year—or ever again for the indefinite future.” Their findings are based on weekly observations of carbon dioxide at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory, where climate scientists have been measuring CO2 levels since 1958.

What’s so terrifying about this number? For several years now, scientists have been warning us that if atmospheric carbon were allowed to surpass 400 parts per million, it would mark a serious “tipping point” into some unstoppable climate ramifications. In 2012, the Arctic was the first region on Earth to cross this red line. Three years later, for the first time since scientists had begun to record them, carbon levels remained above 400 parts per million for an entire month.

Chart: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Some description adapted from the Scripps CO2 Program website, “Keeling Curve Lessons.”

This time, experts believe we’re stuck here for good, due to the cyclical effects of Mauna Loa’s CO2 curve.

«

Sustainability matters.

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New Yorkers can now get unlimited Uber for $100 • Forbes

Brian Solomon:

»

Uber is rapidly moving into Amazon Prime-like subscription plans. After rolling out pricing options in six cities in September, the ride-sharing startup is adjusting and expanding its new “Uber Plus” program–including bringing it to New York City for the first time.

Starting this October, Uber users can pay up front for unlimited UberPool rides (taxi trips that you share with other passengers going in a similar direction) in Manhattan. The cost: $100 for unlimited rides in the first two weeks of October (1-14) and $200 for the full month. All rides must begin and end in Manhattan below 125th street.

«

A subscription! It’s a smart idea – create the expectation that Uber will be available on tap (but price it so most won’t be able to use all its value). Maybe the next step would be a dedicated Uber car. Parked outside your house. Which you can drive yourself. Hang on a minute..
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iMessage, metadata, and law enforcement: What you need to know • iMore

Rene Ritchie on The Intercept’s story that “Apple keeps records of who you contacted on iMessage for 30 days!”

»

Q Why is Apple keeping that log?

My understanding is that, at some point, Apple’s iMessage engineers decided they needed to keep a metadata log in order to detect and fix problems with iMessage dispatch.

Basically, when you type a contact into iMessage it figures out if that contact is also on an Apple device, and then sends an iMessage (blue bubble), or not on an Apple device, and then sends an SMS/MMS (green bubble).

Given that the messages themselves are end-to-end encrypted, that sorting has to be done up front, which generates metadata (data about data.)

Q: Does that really need troubleshooting?

Long time readers and iMessage users will remember that a few years ago, how iMessage handled dispatch was highly controversial. When switching between iPhone and iPad, or when switching to Android devices, people and media outlets were incensed that iMessage sometimes got it wrong.

Hell, people are still incensed when group messages spawn new threads because one of the participants switches devices mid-conversation.

So yes, it needs troubleshooting.

«

The Intercept felt like it was reaching a bit to find a controversy because, well, otherwise it wouldn’t be The Intercept.
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The demise of Google’s Project Ara and modularity in computing • Christensen Institute

Horace Dediu (who works and lectures at the Christensen Institute):

»

This idea of the modular phone was undoubtedly influenced by the history of the personal computer. The original IBM PC introduced modularity to personal computers by building them on a hardware “bus” where systems could be expanded via add-on cards that were user installable. In fact, the entire computer was easily put together from parts—the power supply, motherboard, case, display, video card, microprocessor, memory modules, etc. were all available for purchase separately. I put a few together myself during the 1990s and it was a hobby for many.

But the vast majority of people did not want to bother with building their own computers. The benefit of modularity was mainly for PC OEMs who took advantage of this modular architecture by sourcing parts and doing assembly on a just-in-time basis—as consumers placed their orders online. This “have-it-your-way” flexibility was what modularity enabled. It also meant that various sub-components like video cards and microprocessors could be improved at speeds different than those of hard drives or memories. Assemblers did not need to wait for any single improvement to continue offering a better product. The results were a tremendously rapid adoption of the product. Over a billion people became computer users in a matter of two decades.

When the smartphone emerged as a new computing form factor, it made sense that modularity should eventually take root. Recall that early computers, like early smartphones, where integrated products. The PC emerged after decades of mainframe and minicomputer evolution. The Project Ara visionaries saw this stage of modularity arriving and sought to enable it.

So why has Ara failed to even reach a market launch?

…This process of integration followed by modularization followed by re-integration and re-modularization is synchronized to a clock cycle in which performance is redefined. In other words, if the basis of competition changes, then the need for integration emerges. If and when the basis of competition stabilizes, the need for modularity returns.

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link to this extract

Google-funded loan startup to pay $6.3m for ‘deceptive’ practices • The Guardian

Sam Levin:

»

A Google-funded lending startup will have to pay $6.3m in fines and refunds for a number of “deceptive” practices, signaling the US government’s interest in regulating the growing industry of online alternatives to traditional payday loans.

LendUp – a San Francisco firm that claims to offer a “secure, convenient way to get the money you need, fast” – misled customers, hid its true credit costs, and reversed pricing without disclosing it to consumers, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

“LendUp pitched itself as a consumer-friendly, tech-savvy alternative to traditional payday loans, but it did not pay enough attention to the consumer financial laws,” bureau director Richard Cordray said in a statement Tuesday, announcing the settlement.

The company, which has funding from high-profile Silicon Valley venture capital firms and GV, Google’s venture capital branch, began marketing its services in 2012.

«

Just as a reminder: in May, Google said it would ban ads from payday lenders as part of a policy to “keep bad ads out”. SEO expert Aaron Wall at once pointed out that LendUp seemed to be well-favoured by Google’s search algorithm despite using “doorway pages” and being, well, a payday lender.

Would love someone versed in SEO to examine where LendUp ranks now on Google search compared to its rivals.
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Huawei could ditch Android Wear for Samsung’s Tizen in its future smartwatches • 9to5Google

Ben Schoon:

»

a report out of Korea has revealed that Huawei may be switching its wearable OS entirely, ditching Google’s Android Wear for Samsung’s Tizen.

Now this should all be taken with a huge grain of salt, but if this report is to be believed, Huawei wants to separate itself from Google’s Android Wear on its wearables. Why? The report states that “Huawei [is] looking for an OS other than Google’s as the US firm had not been very collaborative.” Samsung, on the other hand, apparently has agreed to be fully cooperative in tailoring Tizen for Huawei’s wearables.

So what does that mean? More or less, Huawei wasn’t happy with Google’s tight grip on the Android Wear ecosystem and wants to be able to further customize its devices, as we’ve seen with its software skin on smartphones. We even saw Huawei call on Google to allow more customization of the OS in early 2015.

«

link to this extract

Google pushes Android Wear 2.0 back to 2017, issues third developer beta • Ars Technica UK

Andrew Cunningham:

»

Google announced Android Wear 2.0 alongside what later became Android Nougat at Google I/O a few months ago, but aside from a second Wear 2.0 developer preview build in July, we haven’t heard much since. There’s good and bad news on that front: the good news is that Google is releasing a third Wear 2.0 developer preview today with some new features and tweaks. The bad news is that the final release of the software is being delayed.

Wear 2.0’s release date has been pushed back from a vague “this fall” window to an equally vague “early 2017” window, presumably so Google can keep testing and tweaking. To that end, Google will release a fourth developer preview build, and the 2.0 update will begin trickling out to supported watches after that.

The biggest addition to the Android Wear Developer Preview 4 is a watch version of the Google Play store that can browse and download watch apps and watch faces without your phone—developers told Google that they wanted watch apps to be easier to find, and this is Google’s answer. 

«

Not sure how that delay will help OEMs who have barely seen Android Wear watches leave the shelves.
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Google, Andromeda, mythology and hubris • Beyond Devices

Jan Dawson on the widely expected launch of some sort of conjoined Chrome-Android OS from Google called “Andromeda”; Google VP Hiroshi Lockheimer said that “We announced the 1st version of Android 8 years ago today. I have a feeling 8 years from now we’ll be talking about Oct 4, 2016.”

Dawson says:

»

My worry with Lockheimer’s remarks is that, in September 2008, Android wasn’t obviously going to be the hit it has since become. In hindsight, the launch of Android was enormously important, and helped create today’s smartphone market, but at the time the G1 launched it was a clunky and marginal bit of hardware. The concern is that whatever Google announces next week will be received — at least initially — in the same way. Perhaps some will see in it the promise of amazing things to come, but I suspect the initial impact will be marginal, and it will take years to see the true impact. And it’s entirely possible that the impact won’t be nearly as impressive as Google clearly thinks it will be. Although Lockheimer is saying that we’ll look back on October 4th as being a milestone event, he’s saying it ahead of time, and that’s where the hubris comes in.

«

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Yahoo data breach investigation • InfoArmor

The security group seems to – sort of – be suggesting that the Yahoo hack wasn’t a state-sponsored one:

»

Unfortunately, the security community and press haven’t verified the dump and appear to be focused only on the significant number of records having @yahoo.com domain name. For any experienced threat intelligence analyst, the price of 3 BTC (~ 1806.42 USD) for 200,000,000 Yahoo user accounts is suspiciously strange and has no rational explanation.

Further, by evaluating a sample of records, more confusion is created because the decrypted passwords from some of them were legitimate for actual Yahoo users. However, the vast majority of the data is not legitimate, including invalid accounts, deleted accounts, and nonexistent accounts. After extensive analysis and cross reference against the data breach intelligence systems of InfoArmor, it was determined that the dump is based on multiple third party data leaks, which have no relation to Yahoo. Presumably, the threat actor specially misrepresented this data set in order to sensationalize and sell it for the purpose of monetizing his efforts following the negative impact of his relationship with tessa88…

…The actual Yahoo data dump is still not available on any underground forums or marketplaces, and has been distributed from so called Group “E” to one of their proxies for further monetization based on the sale of particular records from the dump, which can be delivered based on the specific criteria of the buyer (login, recovery e-mail, geography, etc.).

According to InfoArmor, the data theft of the Yahoo customer database may be the key in several targeted attacks against US Government personnel, which resulted after the disclosed contacts of the affected high-level officials of intelligence community happened in October 2015.

«

Wouldn’t that suggest that it was? This seems confused.
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Samsung washing machine fires sparks recall warning reminder • Stuff.co.nz

Phillipa Yalden:

»

Two faulty washing machines have burst into flames in Waikato [New Zealand] in the last week – three years after they were recalled. 

Samsung issued a recall on four models of the top loader in 2013 due to the risk that moisture could penetrate the electrics and spark a fire. 

At the time, there were 34,000 affected machines in the marketplace, Fire Service National manager of fire investigations Peter Wilding said. 

About 88% of those had been recalled, leaving a further 4000 outstanding. 

READ MORE: * Thousands of burning washing machines still at large

«

I love that “still at large” as though they’re roaming the streets spitting at grannies. But it’s becoming a problem for Samsung: in the US, regulators says there are safety issues for top-loading models made between March 2011 and April 2016: a number have exploded.

White goods can be a problem. In the UK, Indesit has millions of tumble dryers which are liable to catch fire, for which it has only very gradually been rolling out a repair programme.
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Self-driving hype doesn’t reflect reality • WSJ

Christopher Mims digs into the details and asks the (peculiarly unasked) questions:

»

Ford, for example, has said it would release a self-driving car by 2021. Dig into the statements and press for details, and a Ford spokesman says that car will only be self-driving in the portion of major cities where the company can create and regularly update extremely detailed 3-D street maps. Ford declines to say how big those areas will be.

Lyft is collaborating with GM and says it will introduce fully self-driving cars by 2021. But co-founder John Zimmer says the vehicles will be limited to a specific geographic area and a top speed of 25 miles an hour.

Representatives of Volvo and Israel’s Mobileye NV, which makes self-driving technology and is collaborating with Intel and BMW, will impose similar limits on their coming self-driving vehicles. Volvo’s cars might refuse to go into self-driving mode on roads that are insufficiently mapped, says Erik Coelingh, the technical lead on Volvo’s self-driving car efforts. The cars will pull over to the side of the road, or come to a stop, if inclement weather impedes the vehicle’s perceptual abilities, Mr. Coelingh says.

That is a scary thought—and one reason why early “fully autonomous” cars will require monitoring by humans.

«

We were promised flying cars. Then we were promised fully autonomous cars…

This is though another example of the difference between good journalism and “oh look another corporate blogpost” writing. Mims simply kept asking for the detail, and the detail turns out to make the painting a lot less attractive than the broad brushstrokes given previously implied.
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Across the US, police officers abuse confidential databases • Associated Press

Sadie Gurman and Eric Tucker:

»

No single agency tracks how often the abuse happens nationwide, and record-keeping inconsistencies make it impossible to know how many violations occur.

But the AP, through records requests to state agencies and big-city police departments, found law enforcement officers and employees who misused databases were fired, suspended or resigned more than 325 times between 2013 and 2015. They received reprimands, counseling or lesser discipline in more than 250 instances, the review found.

Unspecified discipline was imposed in more than 90 instances reviewed by AP. In many other cases, it wasn’t clear from the records if punishment was given at all. The number of violations was surely far higher since records provided were spotty at best, and many cases go unnoticed.

Among those punished: an Ohio officer who pleaded guilty to stalking an ex-girlfriend and who looked up information on her; a Michigan officer who looked up home addresses of women he found attractive; and two Miami-Dade officers who ran checks on a journalist after he aired unflattering stories about the department.

“It’s personal. It’s your address. It’s all your information, it’s your Social Security number, it’s everything about you,” said Alexis Dekany, the Ohio woman whose ex-boyfriend, a former Akron officer, pleaded guilty last year to stalking her. “And when they use it for ill purposes to commit crimes against you — to stalk you, to follow you, to harass you … it just becomes so dangerous.”

«

link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: although there is presently no underground station close to Battersea Power Station in London, by the time Apple aims to move in (around 2020?), the Northern Line extension should be completed – and will start/end at, guess where, Battersea Power Station. So Apple’s London staff need not worry about long walks. They’ll just get told off by their Watches for not walking enough.

“Where’s the pig, though?” Photo by Dario-Jacopo Lagana’ 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.

Advocacy : where we stand • Getty Images

»

Today we’re campaigning to stop Google’s anti-competitive scraping of your imagery. By adding your name to both of the open letters below, you can lend your voice to the campaign and let US and EU anti-trust regulators know that it is not okay for Google to profit from your creativity and unfairly compete in the distribution of your images.

You do not need to be living in the United States or the European Union to sign these letters, nor do you need to be a Getty Images contributor. This affects the entire visual content industry and we are stronger together.

Click the links below to sign today.

«

One aggregator fighting against another.
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Two years spamming spammers back • Medium

Brian Weinreich:

»

I created a bot to respond to these types of emails…

»

“Sarah”: My husband dead two years ago and the family members wants to kill me and my children and seat on the inheritance he left for us with bank here l am now in a hiding with my kids and the documents of inheritance is with us…

Bot: Very nice! Where abouts are you located?

«

(Jump to mlooper.com to see how this conversation continued…)

^ that’s the Sp@m Looper. It’s a service I made that puts spammers (and scammers) in an email loop with a bot that regularly asks the spammer questions.

«

Finally a real use for chatbots.
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Donate to OpenStreetMap • OpenStreetMap

»

This year, we are raising money with a most important goal: our continued independence as a project.

OpenStreetMap is the largest open geographic database in the world, the data infrastructure for multitudes of mapping projects around the globe. Your donation to the OpenStreetMap Foundation will cover our core operational expenses in supporting the OpenStreetMap project: hardware costs, legal fees, administrative assistant and other expenses of our working groups and administration.

We currently run extremely lean for an operation for a project the size and importance of OpenStreetMap. The OpenStreetMap Foundation relies on revenue from individual and corporate membership dues, profits generated by the annual State of the Map conferences, and past donation drives (thank you so much for the support last year — GBP 60,000 for updating our server infrastructure). We must keep our income sources diversified, as these vary from year to year, but our modest needs stay the same. For this, we need your support.

«

At the time of saving, they’re just over one-tenth of the way to a €70,000 goal. If you use, contribute. And maybe even if you don’t.
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Twitter’s steep premium: the cost of employee stock grants • The New York Times

Michael de la Merced:

»

Buying Twitter would be a challenge for a number of reasons. Among the lesser-explored ones: The struggling social network pays out so much stock to its employees.

Even among its Silicon Valley peers, which have drawn closer scrutiny from investors recently because of their generous stock-based compensation practices, Twitter is notable for how much equity it doles out.

And those grants of restricted stock units or options, which would have to be covered to some degree by any buyer, simply add to the purchase price of any deal.

According to Twitter’s most recent annual filing, the company racked up $682m in stock-based compensation last year. By comparison, the company’s adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization — which also excludes stock-based compensation — for the year was $557.8m.

Factoring in the payouts would have pushed Twitter well into the red for the year.

«

Someone did point out this fact about the ESOs to me on Twitter after I wrote about the possibility of it being bought, and I can only apologise that Twitter’s search is so poor for any period longer than 14 days that I couldn’t find it to link to that instead.
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Apple is developing hardware for the ‘iPhone 8’ in Israel • Business Insider

Sam Shead:

»

Apple is using an office in Israel to develop hardware for the “iPhone 8,” which is expected to be released next year with a radical redesign, according to an employee at the site.

Details on the iPhone 8 are scarce at present but some reports, including this one from MacRumours, suggest that it will have an edge-to-edge display that removes the need for the top and bottom bezels where features like the fingerprint sensor and the front-facing camera are located.

Some hardware for the iPhone 8 is being created in Herzliya, Israel, according to a local Apple employee, who said employees in Israel work on all of Apple’s new products.

«

Wow! Tell us more about this knowledgeable person.

»

The employee, whose identity is being concealed by Business Insider, solders components for Apple.

«

🤔
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Apple to create stunning new HQ at Battersea Power Station • London Evening Standard

Jonathan Prynn:

»

Apple is to create a spectacular new London headquarters at Battersea Power Station in a massive coup for the developers behind the £9 billion project.

The iPhone and iPad maker will move 1,400 staff from eight sites around the capital into what it calls “a new Apple campus” at the Grade II* listed former electricity generator.

Its employees will occupy all six floors of office space in the brick “cathedral of power”, which is being painstakingly restored after 33 years standing derelict on the banks of the Thames.

In a statement to the Standard, Apple said it was looking forward to the 2021 opening of “our new London campus” as staff relocate to “this magnificent new development at one of the city’s best-known landmarks”. It added: “This is a great opportunity to have our entire team working and collaborating in one location while supporting the renovation of a neighbourhood rich with history.”

«

…though that history doesn’t include “building underground stations nearby”. The nearest is Vauxhall station, 20 minutes’ walk away. For staff used to the joys of Hanover Street and Covent Garden, Vauxhall might be something of a comedown. Perhaps they’ll walk to and from work listening to Pink Floyd’s “Animals”. (But “Dogs” or “Sheep”?)
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Google Car: sense and money impasse • Monday Note

Jean-Louis Gassée:

»

With all of the Can You Top This? PR that surrounds driving automation, [Alphabet CEO Larry] Page’s stance [that an autonomous car must be fully autonomous] is an admirable injection of thoughtfulness, a sobriety check. The visionary statements and self-driving demos (cue demo jokes) blithely omit the “mere matter of implementation”. What’s the plan, the timeline? What are we going to do with the 235 million cars and trucks on US roads, some expected to last 20 years or more? How will manufacturers negotiate the US Department of Transportation’s Federal Automated Vehicles Policy? Sometimes, the last 5% of a project takes 200% of the time and money.

Then we have another unanswered Google Car question: The path to money.

Personally, I think a company needs one really good idea every ten years, so for a company as rich as Google, a few billion dollars for a new breakthrough looked eminently affordable…for a while. But there is such a thing as too much, such as Google barges and many other puzzling pursuits that fall into the Because We Can category.

In May 2015, Ruth Porat left Morgan Stanley where she was Executive VP and Chief Financial Officer to become Alphabet’s CFO. The story is that her appointment had been heavily encouraged by investors who were concerned about Alphabet’s runaway “moonshot” projects. As expected, Porat set out to improve financial discipline and, for many projects, to demand a path to profitability. Highly speculative research, such as the Calico project’s quest to extend human life by 20 to 100 years, doesn’t entail huge financial outlays, but a grand and realistic endeavor such as developing the Google Self-Driving Car will require billions to reach its destination and raises business model questions as a result.

«

The years when Google could pile into lots of “because we can” – about five years ago? – feel distant now. As the presidential debate of some years went, echoing the fast food outlet advert, “where’s the beef?”
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Facebook and Google: the most powerful and secretive empires we’ve ever known • The Guardian

Ellen P. Goodman and Julia Powles:

»

Characterizing Facebook or Google as powerful media organs – even the most powerful – actually understates their power. Marshall McLuhan, 60 years ago, gave us another, fuller understanding of media. Electric light is a medium “totally radical, pervasive, and decentralized” that appears to us as media only when constituted into video content. Electrical current itself completely changes our relationship to the world and, in the process, reconstitutes us. A medium is not merely something that feeds us content. It is a condition like air or water, through which we move without noticing.

The analogy captures part of what is happening, but goes even further. Facebook and Google are not only carrying us, but constituting us. We are, in fact, their media. Geared as they are to sharing, clicking and eyeballs, these media do not measure and do not value solitary contemplation, reflection and disconnection. They thrive and pulse on popularity, not veracity. They feed on extremes, not common causes.

«

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BlackBerry bails on building its own phones • CNET

Roger Cheng:

»

BlackBerry posted fiscal second-quarter results on Wednesday that saw it swing to a loss of $372m, or 71 cents a share, from a year-ago profit of $51m, or 24 cents a share. Revenue fell by a third to $334m.

Analysts, on average, forecast a loss of 5 cents a share and revenue of $394m.

[CEO John] Chen confirmed on a call with analysts that BlackBerry will have little to do with future hardware efforts, and will only collect a royalty fee on any phone sold by its partners.

BlackBerry had previously teased a second Android phone to come, but that’s unlikely to show up.

It’s unclear whether future phones from the partnership will make their way to more mature markets like the US, where the carriers have been lukewarm on carrying the devices. But there is still a small, but dedicated, base of users who appreciate the physical keyboard and focus on security.

Chen teased other interested companies looking to strike similar partnerships around the world, but didn’t provide any names. He also hinted there would be high-end devices focused on security.

BlackBerry plans to complete the shutdown of the internal hardware business by the end of this fiscal year.

«

Sic transit gloria mundi. Microsoft next, then Sony?
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Defending against hackers took a back seat at Yahoo, insiders say • The New York Times

Nicole Perlroth and Vindu Goel:

»

In 2013, disclosures by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, showed that Yahoo was a frequent target for nation-state spies. Yet it took a full year after Mr. Snowden’s initial disclosures for Yahoo to hire a new chief information security officer, Alex Stamos.

Jeff Bonforte, the Yahoo senior vice president who oversees its email and messaging services, said in an interview last December that Mr. Stamos and his team had pressed for Yahoo to adopt end-to-end encryption for everything. Such encryption would mean that only the parties in a conversation could see what was being said, with even Yahoo unable to read it.

Mr. Bonforte said he resisted the request because it would have hurt Yahoo’s ability to index and search message data to provide new user services. “I’m not particularly thrilled with building an apartment building which has the biggest bars on every window,” he said.

«

These things build up over time. But eventually they take their toll.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Nice planet. Let’s go there. Photo by Kevin M Gill on Flickr.

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

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

Elon Musk’s Mars mission: all the news from the big announcement • The Verge

Russell Brandom:

»

On September 27, Elon Musk announced a bold new plan to establish a permanent human habitation on Mars with his company SpaceX. It’s one of the most ambitious schemes Musk — or humanity in general — has ever attempted, relying on huge advances in both rocketry and spaceship construction. Follow along here for the latest news about the project, and whether Musk can succeed in his longheld dream of bringing humanity to Mars.

Developing. Check out our SpaceX Mars Colonization liveblog for the latest updates and our storystream for all the news!

«

Sometimes I think that The Verge is actually one of those fake news sites that you see in films, announcing some new plot exposition. All it’s missing is the spinning headline.

(Sure, Musk announced all this stuff. It’s interesting. But it’s a long way to Mars. Matt Damon can probably sleep easy, without fear of abandonment, for now.)
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Facebook ordered to stop harvesting data on WhatsApp users in Germany • TechCrunch

Natasha Lomas:

»

Facebook has been ordered to stop harvesting the data of WhatsApp users in Germany.

The move follows the latter’s shock announcement last month that it would start sharing user data with its parent company, Facebook, including users’ phone numbers and last seen time in the app. Stated uses for the data includes marketing/ad targeting.

Shock because, back at the time of the $19BN acquisition, WhatsApp’s founder publicly stated that nothing would change for users of the ad-free messaging platform as a result of selling to the social network giant. Full marks if you didn’t believe a word of it at the time.

But reneging on such public statement looks to be what’s got the two into hot water in Hamburg now, with the city’s data protection authority describing the resulting situation as both misleading for users and a breach of national data protection law.

«

No doubt in a couple of years the UK’s Data Protection Registrar will decide the same, neatly shutting the stable door after the horse has moved to the next town and sent its kids to university.
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B2G OS and Gecko Annoucement from Ari Jaaksi & David Bryant • Google Groups

Julie McCracken, senior engineering program manager at the Mozilla foundation:

»

By the end of 2015 Mozilla leadership had come to the conclusion that our then Firefox OS initiative of shipping phones with commercial partners would not bring Mozilla the returns we sought. We made the first of a series of announcements about changes in the development of Firefox OS at Mozilla.  Since then we have gradually wound down that work and, as of the end of July 2016 have stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS. This message recaps what transpired during that period of time and also describes what will happen with the Firefox OS code base going forward.

«

Without a smartphone presence, the future for Mozilla looks unclear. The desktop is becoming less important, and it isn’t the default browser on any platform. Of course, that was the case when Firefox rose to prominence on the desktop too.
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Ordinary punters will get squat from smart meters, reckons report • The Register

Kat Hall:

»

Smart meters will benefit suppliers nearly twice as much as consumers in terms of cost savings, according to an assessment by the late Department for Energy and Climate Change.

The government’s £11bn smart meter project will require energy suppliers to offer 53 million meters to homes and small businesses by 2020. Smart meters are being rolled out in two phases.

The mass rollout phase is expected to begin next month, after several major delays. There are now more than 3.6 million smart meters in operation.

A Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee “evidence check” of smart meters noted that “although the scale and durability of such savings is contested and it would appear that the rollout could alter consumption levels by 2–3%.”

DECC’s assessment of the cost savings, contained in the evidence check, found that overall consumers in the UK would save £4.3bn, while suppliers would save nearly £8bn by cutting site visits and reduced inquiries.

Nick Hunn, CTO of WiFore Consulting, told the committee he was sceptical of the extent to which consumers will change their behaviour for a relatively modest financial reward, arguing that “£26 a year or 7p a day is not a big incentive”, and that “there are far cheaper ways of achieving savings”.

«

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The decline of Stack Overflow • Hackernoon

This is from 2015, but nothing is reckoned to have changed: Stack Overflow – like so many sites which have user-generated content and user-policed content – has been overrun by people who love to be in control. So, asks John Slegers:

»

Are there any alternatives?

Quora might seem like an obvious choice, but it shares many of the issues common at Stack Overflow, albeit in a less obvious manner. For example, downvoted answers are cleverly hidden from the eyes of most users and it’s not uncommon for answers to be deleted without any explanation or notification and/or without a visible trace to anyone but the answer’s author. Quora is giving some users completely anonymous powers to edit the site as they see fit, yet almost nobody seems to know about it.

So while Quora may seem more democratic and reasonable, this is really only at the surface. Trolling and plain petty authoritarianism from privileged users is no less common on that site. For many of the same reasons Huxley’s dystopian A Brave New World is more creepy and disturing than Orwell’s dystopian 1984, Quora is more creepy and more disturbing as a Q&A community than Stack Overflow.

«

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Premium commoditization • CCS Insight

»

Apple and Samsung have made $650 the standard starting point for flagship smartphones in the US. Each year these leading manufacturers up the specs with their new generation products while maintaining the price, but at some point in time, this cycle is bound to break down. This could be starting now.

We believe that consumer behaviour is showing a shift that’s starting with the younger generation of users who better understand device pricing and product features. On social media platforms and at several leading online retail sites, some smartphones are trending — an important indication of a growing awareness of value.

In particular, there is a trinity of budget premium smartphones making $400 a new standard price for value buyers. Huawei’s Honor 8, the OnePlus 3 and ZTE’s Axon 7 are attention-grabbing phones and it’s difficult to believe that devices like these won’t have a longer-term effect on the overall global market.

Huawei’s Honor 8 is a 5.2in phone with 32GB of storage, a 12-megapixel rear camera, USB Type-C and 4GB of RAM. It has a fingerprint sensor and NFC as well as an octa-core HiSilicon processor (Huawei’s in-house chipset brand). ZTE’s Axon 7 is a 5.5in phone running Android on a Snapdragon 820 with 4GB of RAM, a 20-megapixel rear camera, and 64GB of on-board storage. It also has a fingerprint sensor and NFC reader. The OnePlus 3 is also a 5.5in phone running on a Snapdragon 820 processor, but comes with 6GB of RAM. It’s also loaded with the same sensors and readers and USB-C.

For consumers who are less brand-conscious and interested in separating their phones from their operator payments, such devices are proving to be appealing.

«

$400 is the new $650.
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The tao of Notch beyond Twitter • The Escapist

Brad Glasgow interviews “Notch” – aka Markus Persson – who became fabulously wealthy when he sold Minecraft to Microsoft:

»

You’ve talked on Twitter about feeling isolated and you mentioned that it is difficult to tell who is your friend and who is there for the money. You’ve talked about how you like Vegas because you know everyone is there for your money.

MP: This was like a year ago or something?

BG: Right.

MP: Since then I’ve basically come completely out of it. Because I also realized that I’m really an introvert. So I think I kind of had this problem before, always, for my entire life. I didn’t necessarily want to have a lot of friends. And then once you sell your company and have a lot of money there’s not much else to do than continue learning or meet friends and exploring the real world, which is really fun, but it has been kind of a jarring change. I got to play it off, all of it, as just being a weird, eccentric Swedish guy, so it was easier to stop being social.

TE: It seems that it created an image online where people think you are this lonely, depressed rich guy with nothing to do.

MP: Well yeah, that’s the cultural idea of who I am, that I’ve become that.

TE: Is it accurate?

MP: I mean, I spend a lot of time alone, but it’s not as if I’m lonely, because that’s how I feel the most productive and happy. Generally if I’ve been alone programming for a couple of months then yeah I’m going to want to go out and see friends. So I kind of go back and forth, spend some time just programming and learning, you know, playing around with WebGL. And then I spend like a month doing a lot of social stuff like partying. I love partying. And a lot of dinners. I’m trying to learn how to appreciate red wine, which is impossible. I like red wine but I never remember any of it, like names of the old French chateaus.

«

It’s an eight-page interview (90 minutes of Skype chat). You can put the idea of Persson as some sort of gloomy bloke sitting in an empty mansion to bed.
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Blackberry phones face thumbs down • FT

Nic Fildes:

»

For many, a decision to close the unit would be an inevitable consequence of BlackBerry’s downward spiral since the ill-fated BlackBerry 10 launch in 2013. Then, its creative director, the singer Alicia Keys, unveiled the new handsets on stage, before continuing to tweet from an iPhone in the following days.

The latest industry data make grim reading for [BlackBerry CEO John] Chen as he considers whether to abandon making phones and go all in on software and security technology.

Smartphone sales figures from Gartner, the research company, show BlackBerry had a pitiful market share of 0.1% in the second quarter. That represented shipments of only 400,400 phones — less than a third of what it achieved the year before and a fraction of the 15m it sold in a quarter six years ago when at its peak.

Annette Zimmermann, an analyst with Gartner, said BlackBerry has sold only 1m phones this year. “That is not a sustainable business,” she said. “I don’t see any upside in trying to return it to a better state. It is the end of the story.”

There is still hope that a much smaller, more focused BlackBerry could succeed as a niche player and companies such as the rejuvenated Nintendo have proved that persistence can pay off. In April, Mr Chen hired Alex Thurber, a former McAfee executive, as his new head of device sales, suggesting he had not given up.

«

“Creative director”. Oh yes. And yet Chen boasted at the previous quarterly results that phones were near to gross margin breakeven. (Long way from operating profit though.) BlackBerry announces its quarterly results today, Wednesday.
link to this extract

Satya Nadella on Microsoft’s new age of intelligence • Fast Company

Harry McCracken:

»

“In the long arc of time, I learned from our own history that you can’t assume any high-volume device will be at the center of all activities for all time to come,” [Satya] Nadella adds, implying that just as Windows didn’t rule the world indefinitely, it’s not a given that iOS and Android will reign forever.

In the time since Nadella began making cloud-first, mobile-first into a mantra, it’s become clear that it involves a lot more than just making sure that Microsoft’s best-known apps are available in capable versions for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices.

Earlier this year, for instance, the company acquired SwiftKey, a third-party keyboard for Android and iOS that, in its Android incarnation, now utilizes neural network technology to power its guesses about what you’re really trying to type. “We’ve proved that the keyboard is not associated with the device, it’s associated with you,” says Nadella. “That’s a fundamental shift in computing.”

Nothing is more core to Microsoft’s AI vision than the way it treats Cortana as an agent that—with your consent—can know quite a bit about you, and then share it with specialized bots on a need-to-know basis. (The service currently has 133 million active users across Windows iOS, and Android.) As Nadella explains it, “it’s your data, as opposed to something that’s going to be used for advertising or conflated with other data or transferred over to other apps without your consent.”

«

That “long arc of time” phrase is a good one (Tim Cook uses it to insist iPad sales will recover); the numbers for Cortana are surprisingly high to me. (Presume most of those are on Windows 10 PCs and Xbox.) Would love to know what the daily user numbers are.
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Motorola goes through yet another massive layoff (updated) • Droid Life

“Kellex”:

»

According to two sources close to the matter, Lenovo just laid off hundreds of employees at Motorola, potentially more than 50% of the remaining workforce at the mobile device maker. One source actually pegged the number at 700+ out of 1200 remaining who will be told that they no longer have a job within the next day. 

At least one now-former employee took to Facebook to confirm the news (we’ve decided not to include a link to preserve his privacy), saying that he has been with the company for over 20 years and his last day will be this Friday. He mentioned that Lenovo was moving more operations to China, which one of our sources said has been the increasing pattern over the past two years. That source also thinks (according to the internal rumor mill) they may just relocate some remaining Chicago-based staff to North Carolina where Lenovo US is based. EDIT: Motorola denies this rumor and says they plan to keep their HQ in Chicago.

«

Lenovo confirmed to Droid-Life that the total number affected would be “less than 2% of the 55,000 employed by Lenovo globally” – which puts it at up to 1,100.

An executive at a US company once said to me that Google’s disposal of Motorola to Lenovo was a shocking act – the destruction of a longstanding American brand which was a pioneer in the mobile phone business. Now the staff are out too – on brutally short termination periods.
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Print to PDF on iOS 10 • Devonian Times

»

iOS 10 comes with a great but somewhat hidden feature: Print to PDF. It allows you to save any document that you can print as a PDF and send it by email or clip it to DEVONthink To Go.

In the Share sheet from any app choose Print. The print preview dialog appears. Now instead of printing “pinch” on the print preview like just as if you’d want to enlarge it. It opens — now as a PDF — in a separate dialog. Choose Share again and send it anywhere you like.

«

Who on earth thinks of doing the “zoom out” action and discovers this? But thank god someone did. Equally, though, was it put in intentionally by Apple, or is it some byproduct of how iOS 10 renders content (PDF is at the base of all display on OSX, and by extension iOS)?
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Mobile phone sales have peaked. Peaked! Geddit? Photo by jd_hiker on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. But fact-check it if you like. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

UK Mobile Consumer Survey • Deloitte

»

This year’s report will likely mark the end of the smartphone growth era, and the start of its consolidation. A mere nine years after the launch of the first full touchscreen smartphone, adoption is nearing a plateau, at 81% of UK adults, and 91% of 18–44 year olds.

The smartphone user base is approaching an unprecedented peak. No other personal device has had the same commercial and societal impact as the smartphone, and no other current device seems likely to.

While the base may plateau, relentless innovation continues at device and network levels. Devices are likely to incorporate more functionality and get even faster.

Biometric sensors, particularly fingerprint readers (this year’s cover image), are likely to see widespread adoption. Over a quarter of smartphones now have a fingerprint reader, of which three quarters are in use.

«

link to this extract

The mobile phone market has peaked • CCS Insight

»

CCS Insight’s latest global forecast for mobile phones confirms that the market has peaked at about 2 billion units per year after decades of growth.

The research firm expects than in 2016 shipments of mobile phones will slip 1.3% from their level in 2015, with most markets experiencing a difficult year. A notable exception is China, where the market is recovering from a very weak 2015; however, echoing the global trend, total shipments in the country are expected to stabilise at about 450m units a year until 2020.

Marina Koytcheva, Director of Forecasting at CCS Insight, noted, “After years of analysts and commentators talking about mobile phone market peaking within the visible horizon, it has now reached that point”.

CCS Insight’s forecast shows that smartphones remain the powerhouse of mobile phone shipment volumes. They continue to grow as a proportion of the total market and will account for almost three-quarters of the market in 2016, rising to nearly 90% in 2020. In 2016, 1.42bn units are forecast to ship, up 4.1% from 2015.

However, CCS Insight believes the pressure on smaller phone makers is increasing. Koytcheva continues, “As growth is depleting, competition is intensifying and it comes as little surprise that margins are being squeezed harder than ever. Companies without the scale advantages of manufacturers such as Samsung, Apple or Huawei will find it much harder to make money”.

«

Those without scale will lose money because of component price rises. Winter, of a sort, is coming.
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Business Insider testing paywall and an ad-blocking response • AdAge

Jeremy Barr:

»

Business Insider, according to co-founder and CEO Henry Blodget, has long harbored ambitions to create a dual-revenue business model, buoyed by both advertising and subscriptions.

The company plans to test those ambitions, starting this week, with a “small,” randomly selected group of readers, who will be prompted to subscribe to Business Insider. As is standard with so-called metered paywalls, the readers selected for this test will get an allotment of free articles. Multiple meter levels will be tried, starting at 10 free stories. For those impacted, the meter will re-start every 30 days.

These selected users will see the subscription message three times, at the beginning of the test, at the mid-point of their free story allotment, and with one story remaining…

…Also starting this week, readers that have installed and enabled an ad blocker will be told to either whitelist Business Insider’s website or pay up for a subscription, the same one offered to the small group of paywall-testers. (The New York Times is experimenting with a similar, whitelist-or-pay approach, which CEO Mark Thompson said in June is seeing results.)

«

Given that BI is frequently rewrites of paywalled or free articles (though also does original content), what is it offering that is worth a subscription?
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Google’s internet-beaming balloon gets a new pilot: AI • WIRED

Cade Metz:

»

Project Loon’s navigation system does not use deep neural networks. It uses a simpler form of machine learning called Gaussian processes. But the basic dynamic is the same. And it underlines the little acknowledged reality that deep learning is just part of the AI revolution. Over the course of Project Loon, the company has collected data on over 17 million kilometers of balloon flights, and through those Gaussian processes, the navigation system can start predicting what course the balloon should take, when it should move the balloon up and when it should move the balloon down (which involves pumping air into a balloon inside the balloon—or pumping the air out).

These predictions aren’t perfect—in large part because of the weather up in the stratosphere is so, well, unpredictable. The stratosphere sits above a lot of the weather, but according to Candido, the balloons have encountered far more uncertainty than the team expected. So, they’ve also beefed up the navigation system with what’s called reinforcement learning.

«

Would have been helpful if Wired could just to link to the Wikipedia page on Gaussian processes; essentially, they assume that events occur somewhere on a Gaussian (bell curve) probability distribution. So it’s like “dumb AI”.
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Microsoft: Windows 10 now on 400 million devices • ZDNet

Mary Jo Foley:

»

Windows 10 is now running on 400 million active devices as of today, September 26, Microsoft officials said.

That’s up from 300 million as of May 5, and 207 million at the end of March. “Active devices” mean devices than have been active in the past 28 days, Microsoft officials have said. The figure includes not only Windows 10 installed on PCs, tablets, and phones, but also on Xbox One consoles and HoloLens, Surface Hubs.

Microsoft’s original goal was to have Windows 10 running on one billion devices by 2018, but execs recently conceded they wouldn’t make that number until some unspecified time after that.

«

Strangely enough, the graph based on Microsoft’s publicly stated numbers (above, by me: blue line is the polynomial, not straight line, trend) suggests that it’s presently nicely on course to hit a billion by mid-2018. That could change depending on PC sales, though, as those are the main source of new Windows 10 activations.
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Disney is working with an adviser on potential Twitter bid • Bloomberg

Alex Sherman and Sarah Frier:

»

Disney, if it decides to make a bid, would be able to help the company further its video-streaming media strategy. Jack Dorsey, chief executive officer of Twitter, is also on the board of Disney.
Twitter shares reversed previous declines on the news of interest from Disney, rising as much as 2%. The shares were trading at $22.83 at 2:02 p.m. in New York. The stock soared 21% Friday following reports of the talks with Salesforce. Disney shares fell, dropping as much as 2% to $91.40.

“It’s a video distribution play,” said James Cakmak, an analyst at Monness Crespi Hardt & Co. “What Disney has to think about is what is its place in a post cord-cutting world. They are investing in technology for distribution — and this would give them the platform to reach audiences around the world.”

Disney Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger has developed a reputation as a strategic thinker with an appetite for bold bets such as the $7.4bn acquisition of animation studio Pixar just months after he became CEO.

«

Hmm, OK – that has some strategy to it, at least.
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New Samsung Note 7 battery issues surface with recall replacements • Patently Apple

Jack Purcher:

»

According to News Channel YTN, “The new handset still has battery issues. A Galaxy Note 7 buyer, surnamed Choi, had received a new Note 7 through the tech firm’s recall program, which began on Sept. 19 in Korea. His new phone, however, had a battery that drained quickly, with its battery level dropping almost 1% every second. It also overheated easily. Even when the Note 7 was being charged, the battery drained quickly.”

The report further noted that “After the battery level dropped to 1 percent, the battery did not get charged above 10 percent. And a technician at Samsung’s after-sales service center disconnected the charger as soon as he found out the power draining issue, probably because he was concerned about a possible explosion,” Choi was quoted as saying.

In a videotaped charge test of Lee’s defective Note 7, the handset showed the battery going from 75% to 49% in 39 minutes.

Another Galaxy Note 7 user, surnamed Lee, also claimed that the new phone he received through Samsung’s recall program had similar battery issues.” So it appears to not be an isolated problem.

«

This just seems to go on and on.
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Android and its first purchasable product, the T-Mobile G1, celebrate their 8th birthdays • Android Police

Richard Gao:

»

Eight years – that’s how long Android has been available to the public for. September 23rd, 2008 marked two huge events in Android’s history: T-Mobile’s release of the G1, the first Android device available to the masses, and Google’s release of the Android 1.0 SDK. Happy birthday, Android!

The T-Mobile G1, also known as the HTC Dream and Android Dev Phone 1, was the first Android device that the public could actually purchase. Reading through T-Mobile’s press release is pretty hilarious; things like touchscreen functionality, 3G, Gmail, and the Android Market seemed so futuristic back then, but pretty much every Android device has them now. We don’t have full QWERTY keyboards anymore, though.

Equally hilarious is the G1’s spec sheet – this chunky device sported a 3.2-inch 320p display, a 528MHz Qualcomm chip, 192MB of RAM, 256MB of internal storage, and a 3MP camera. Oh, and there wasn’t a headphone jack; remind you of any modern phones?

«

I usually detest “anniversary journalism” (five years ago today.. seventeen years ago..) but this is one worth marking. Android has transformed the world. You can cavil about whether it took ideas from Apple, but the key point is that it let let OEMs make affordable handsets for billions of people – and made entire new industries possible on a broad front. We’re only just beginning to see the benefit of the Shenzhen ecosystem on the wider economy.
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Why Oculus Rift will struggle at its UK launch • Midia Research

Zach Fuller, noting that the HTC Vive is reckoned to have already sold five times more devices than Oculus:

»

Sony will also be launching their Playstation VR headset next month, with the device holding the distinct advantage of being instantly adaptable to the 3 million PS4 consoles that have already been sold in the UK (as well as retailing at £200 pounds less than the Rift). With content also a pressing issue, with a multi-billion chasm between investment in VR Hardware and actual experiences, it helps that Playstation VR will be arriving alongside several well known game titles, with acclaimed series such as Star Trek and Resident Evil making their Virtual Reality debuts alongside the release. Coupled with brand recognition and Sony’s refined experience at distributing gaming products, this will likely give the Japanese conglomerate at the minimum a short-term lead in headset sales and disrupt momentum for the Rift.

By no means does this put Oculus out of the VR race. With Facebook’s support they are not only shielded by a financial advantage over HTC and Sony but are also invigorated by the ability to leverage their parent company’s mass influence over global consumers for the purpose of marketing.

«

Sony’s advantage in having gamers with compatible devices is huge, though.
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The democratization of censorship • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

»

The Internet can’t route around censorship when the censorship is all-pervasive and armed with, for all practical purposes, near-infinite reach and capacity. I call this rather unwelcome and hostile development the “The Democratization of Censorship.”

Allow me to explain how I arrived at this unsettling conclusion. As many of you know, my site was taken offline for the better part of this week. The outage came in the wake of a historically large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack which hurled so much junk traffic at Krebsonsecurity.com that my DDoS protection provider Akamai chose to unmoor my site from its protective harbor.

Let me be clear: I do not fault Akamai for their decision. I was a pro bono customer from the start, and Akamai and its sister company Prolexic have stood by me through countless attacks over the past four years. It just so happened that this last siege was nearly twice the size of the next-largest attack they had ever seen before. Once it became evident that the assault was beginning to cause problems for the company’s paying customers, they explained that the choice to let my site go was a business decision, pure and simple.

Nevertheless, Akamai rather abruptly informed me I had until 6 p.m. that very same day — roughly two hours later — to make arrangements for migrating off their network.

«

Krebs’s progress, from a writer on the Washington Post who covered security, to a full-blown expert on the underside of the web – with the attendant problems. He migrated his site with the help of Google’s Project Shield, which is a free program “to help protect journalists from online censorship”. It’s a Jigsaw project – one of the ones I mentioned last week. The source of the attack seems to have been hacked “internet of things” devices: CCTV cameras, video recorders, and so on.

Krebs also notes Bruce Schneier’s comment that “someone is learning how to take down the internet” (also noted here last week). There’s a worrying undercurrent here, as Krebs notes; the biggest problem is that ISPs in particular don’t act to solve it. (And there are ways they could.)
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Some cities are taking another look at LED lighting after AMA warning • The Washington Post

Michael Ollove:

»

If people are sleepless in Seattle, it may not be only because they have broken hearts.

The American Medical Association (AMA) issued a warning in June that high-intensity LED streetlights — such as those in Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, Houston and elsewhere — emit unseen blue light that can disturb sleep rhythms and possibly increase the risk of serious health conditions, including cancer and cardiovascular disease. The AMA also cautioned that those light-emitting-diode lights can impair nighttime driving vision.

Similar concerns have been raised over the past few years, but the AMA report adds credence to the issue and is likely to prompt cities and states to reevaluate the intensity of LED lights they install.

«

*looks at LED lights around house* Oh.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

“All I did was say my name was Jennifer Null.” Photo by Random McRandom 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.

Response to Airbnb’s report on discrimination • Edelman.org

(Professor) Ben Edelman:

»

This month Airbnb released a report (PDF) investigating discrimination by its hosts against guests (including racial minorities and others), assessing the evidence of the problem and evaluating proposed solutions. The accompanying announcement offers lofty principles—”creating a world where anyone can belong anywhere.”

In contrast to the company’s prior denials, Airbnb now admits the problem is urgent: “discrimination must be addressed”; “minorities struggle more than others to book a listing”; “some members of the community did not receive the timely, compassionate response they expected and deserved when they reported instances of discrimination”; Airbnb’s nondiscrimination policy was not widely known, within or outside company. This much is beyond dispute.

While Airbnb’s report is a step in the right direction, it does little to address the crucial subject of how to actually fix the problem of discrimination. Indeed, the report proposes actions of uncertain or unproven effectiveness.  At the same time, the report quickly dismisses a simpler alternative response—removing guest photos and names from booking requests—which would be far more likely to succeed. Meanwhile, the report completely fails to defend the legal gamesmanship by which Airbnb avoids litigation on the merits when consumers complain about Airbnb, and the report equally fails to defend Airbnb’s continued prohibition on users conducting research to uncover and measure discrimination for themselves.

This article offers my critique.

«

Edelman is good at critiquing the subtle discrimination that big and small tech companies do. He pointed out the racial discrimination among AirBnB lettors back in December 2015; it’s still valid.
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New record low solar price in Abu Dhabi – costs plunging faster than expected • Ramez Naam

»

The price of solar power – in the very sunniest locations in particular – is plunging faster than I expected. I’ve been talking for years now about the exponential decline of solar power prices. I’ve often been called a wide-eyed optimist. Here’s what those projections (based on historical learning rates) look like.

In fact, if anything, my forecasts were too conservative. The solar prices I expected have been smashed by bids in the Middle East and in Latin America. I will need to update the model above in a future post.

The latest record is an incredibly low bid of 2.42 cents/kwh solar electricity in Abu Dhabi. That is an unsubsidized price.

«

If there’s anything to give us a little hope, it’s this: allied to electric cars, the almost unlimited supply of silicon (sand is plentiful), you could get towards a future where we use a great deal less fossil fuel.

Equally, this puts the crazily high price that the UK government has agreed to buy electricity from the new Chinese-built Hinkley C nuclear reactor – 9p per kWh, or about 12 cents/kWh – into perspective. It would almost be cheaper just to pay for solar panels on all the UK’s household and factory roofs.
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These unlucky people have names that break computers • BBC Future

Chris Baraniuk:

»

Jennifer Null’s husband had warned her before they got married that taking his name could lead to occasional frustrations in everyday life. She knew the sort of thing to expect – his family joked about it now and again, after all. And sure enough, right after the wedding, problems began.

“We moved almost immediately after we got married so it came up practically as soon as I changed my name, buying plane tickets,” she says. When Jennifer Null tries to buy a plane ticket, she gets an error message on most websites. The site will say she has left the surname field blank and ask her to try again.

Instead, she has to call the airline company by phone to book a ticket – but that’s not the end of the process.

«

And you thought “Robert’); DROP TABLE Students;” was a made-up name. (Of course the XKCD cartoon is worth the second hit of its alt text.)
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Apple still leads in smartwatch sales; sector growth slow • Kantar Worldpanel

»

“In the three months ending July 2016, 47% of wearable sales in the US occurred in the smartwatch category, versus the more basic fitness bands,” said Lauren Guenveur, Consumer Insight Director for Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. “Apple continues to dominate this segment with a 33.5% share, although that lead shrank slightly in the last three months as the market awaited the Apple Watch Series 2 announcement. The EU4 countries show a similar trend, with 38.6% of all sales coming in the smartwatch category, with Apple leading at 31.8%.”

“Looking ahead, 9.3% of the US-based non-owners we surveyed said they intend to purchase a wearable in the next 12 months, which came in slightly below the 11.3% figure from Great Britain,” Guenveur continued. “September 7th’s unveiling of the Apple Watch Series 2 showed Apple addressing the key considerations cited by those planning to buy, including GPS, one of the most-desired functionalities, and waterproofing, the most-desired feature.”

«

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Making sense of modern pornography • The New Yorker

Katrina Forrester:

»

The majority of the world’s [porn] tube sites are effectively a monopoly—owned by a company called MindGeek, whose bandwidth use exceeds that of Amazon or Facebook. Its C.E.O. until recently was a German named Fabian Thylmann, who earned a reported annual income of a hundred million dollars; he sold the company while being investigated for tax evasion.

The millions of people using these sites probably don’t care much about who produces their content. But those who work in porn in the United States tend to draw a firm line between the “amateur” porn that now proliferates online and the legal adult-film industry that took shape after the California Supreme Court ruled, in California v. Freeman (1989), that filmed sex did not count as prostitution. Since then, the industry has been based in Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley, where its professional norms and regulations have mimicked its more respectable Hollywood neighbors. In “The Pornography Industry: What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford), Shira Tarrant explains how that industry works in the new age of Internet porn, and sets out to provide neutral, “even-handed” information about its production and consumption.

It’s not an easy task.

«

But hey, someone’s got to do it. At least it was even-handed rather than.. ok, I’ll stop.
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Airpods – a speculative teardown • LinkedIn

Nick Hunn is chief technology officer of WiForce:

»

Companies have developed a number of proprietary ways to ensure [sound signals, especially music, in separate Bluetooth earbuds] are synchronised. The first was from Cambridge Silicon Radio (now part of Qualcomm), who developed a method where one chip receives the stereo signal, then separates out the left and right and resends one of the channels to a Bluetooth chip in the other earbud. They included synchronisation signals, so that the audio output of both chips could be coordinated in time. You also need to do this if one earbud is a music player, streaming data to the other ear, which is a particularly difficult use case. Others have streamed over Bluetooth A2DP to both earbuds and tried to use Bluetooth low energy to send synchronisation signals between the ears. Others have done the same thing using Near Field Magnetic Induction (NFMI). Some have even attempted to stream audio between earbuds using NFMI.

The problem with all ear-to-ear communication is that the head is remarkably effective in blocking 2.4GHz radio propagation. Designs which fit snugly within the ear have real problems in getting a signal across. The bigger the earbud, the easier this is, as you can include a bigger antenna, but the best solution is to put the antenna outside the ear. Apple’s design does exactly that. By locating the antenna in the long white battery and microphone boom, it moves it closer to the jaw where there’s a lot less attenuation from one side of the head to the other. So I surmise they’re using A2DP to stream audio from the phone to each Airpod and probably using BLE control signals between them to synchronise the audio rendering. So there’s no need for NFMI…

…So why would Apple make [the W1] chip? Developing a wireless chip with this spec isn’t cheap – it will probably cost at least $10m with a similar amount going on the stack. It is just a peripheral chip, which will never go into a phone, so the volumes are not that high. But it is interesting that Apple emphasised that this is their first wireless chip, in a tone suggesting it won’t be the only one. My guess is that Apple wants to incorporate Bluetooth and Wi-Fi into their next generation of processors, as that’s what their competitors are doing. Wireless can be difficult, so it’s a big step to do that in one go. Far better to design the wireless chip and evaluate it in an entirely new product category, as well as forcing one of your subsidiaries to use it. That way you get to test the chip as well as getting useful feedback for your next generation of earbuds.

«

This is the smartest thing you’ll read all week, and it contains a great deal about Bluetooth technology that wouldn’t be obvious. And he’s right – the longer tabs of the AirPods mean they can communicate through flesh (your neck) rather than bone (your skull).
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Yahoo is expected to confirm massive data breach, impacting hundreds of millions of users • Recode

Kara Swisher:

»

While sources were unspecific about the extent of the incursion, since there is the likelihood of government investigations and legal action related to the breach, they noted that it is widespread and serious.

Earlier this summer, Yahoo said it was investigating a data breach in which hackers claimed to have access to 200 million user accounts and was selling them online. “It’s as bad as that,” said one source. “Worse, really.”

The announcement, which is expected to come this week, also possible larger implications on the $4.8 billion sale of Yahoo’s core business — which is at the core of this hack — to Verizon. The scale of the liability could be large and bring untold headaches to the new owners. Shareholders are likely to worry that it could lead to an adjustment in the price of the transaction.

«

Turns out it was 500 million account details in 2014 by a suspected “state-sponsored actor”. Hard to defend against that. I’ve been getting malware emails from hacked Yahoo accounts for months now. No idea if it’s connected.
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The Galaxy Note 7 recall has nothing to do with removable batteries • SamMobile

“Deidre R” on the biggest of the Samsung-watching sites:

»

The batteries being shipped in the Galaxy Note 7 are faulty (at least some of them are; Samsung has never said that all the currently-shipped phones have faulty batteries, though mass hysteria can never be contained, unfortunately). The batteries are faulty because of issues within the battery itself. Nothing has been said to confirm that Samsung’s “sealing” the battery itself, or the battery and the phone together, are causing the conflict that is resulting in explosions worldwide. The issue has been found within the battery cells, an issue that mandates using a different, non-faulty battery that doesn’t suffer from the same defect.

This is the issue, but removable battery fanboys are switching topics, throwing out the real issue and planting a smokescreen from a different discussion. The topic concerns the batteries being defective, but removable battery fanboys want to get you off topic because they still can’t accept that removable batteries are going the way of the dodo and that, contrary to what they like, the old way of battery charging has been replaced with newer, more sophisticated methods of doing so.

«

“Removable battery fanboys”? Truly we have begun to segment the world into ever-smaller niches. What I find fascinating here, though, isn’t the fake row about whether the fault is removability (obviously, it’s in manufacture) but how what used to be near-religious dogma among, uh, boosters of Android devices (removability of batteries trumps the iPhone’s non-removability) has morphed into one where of course you don’t want to be able to swap the battery out.

But then, we have always been at war with Eastasia. Ever since the Galaxy S6.
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Mode Media collapse: the inside story • Business Insider

Nathan McAlone and Eugene Kim:

»

From the winding freeway that links Silicon Valley with San Francisco, the giant Mode Media sign gracing the company’s headquarters was a hard-to-miss proclamation alerting passing drivers to an internet success story with a rich, $1bn valuation.

But on the 11th floor of the gleaming building last week, the mood among employees was sour.

Those gathered in the office and patched in through a crackly teleconference suddenly learned that they had no more jobs, no more health insurance coverage, and no more access to the company email system. Mode Media, founded in 2003 and once known as Glam Media, was shutting down. Oh, and please hand in your laptops on the way out.

People were stunned and shocked, and the management team’s final Q&A session with the troops didn’t help.

Someone asked about severance, one former Mode employee recounted. John Small, the COO, simply responded: “There is no severance. There is no Cobra. There is no company.”

«

Great reportage – though there’s a lot of fingerpointing every which way about quite what went wrong. Programmatic advertising (aka adtech) seems to have been a key element in the downfall.
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You’re not alone: 51% of Amazon Echo owners have it in the kitchen • Recode

Jason Del Rey:

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Amazon’s Echo voice-controlled speaker can perform more than 3,000 skills today thanks to its Alexa technology, but the most common use case is still simply setting a timer, a recent survey of early adopters found.

And that makes sense when you consider that about half of Amazon Echo owners — 51%, to be exact — surveyed place the device in their kitchen. The second most popular location for the smart speaker is the living room, with about one out of three using the device in that gathering space.

The findings come from a survey of about 1,300 smartphone owners who have used voice-controlled virtual assistants from companies like Apple, Google and Amazon. Of that group, 180 respondents — or about 14% — said they own an Amazon Echo. The survey was a partnership between Experian and the market research firm Creative Strategies.

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