Too much of that little switch near the top may make pilots less good. And what about car drivers? Photo by pysta on Flickr.

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

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

Tesla and the glass cockpit problem • ROUGH TYPE

Nick Carr:

»

When news spread last week about the fatal crash of a computer-driven Tesla, I thought of a conversation I had a couple of years ago with a top computer scientist at Google. We were talking about some recent airliner crashes caused by “automation complacency” — the tendency for even very skilled pilots to tune out from their work after turning on autopilot systems — and the Google scientist noted that the problem of automation complacency is even more acute for drivers than for pilots. If you’re flying a plane and something unexpected happens, you usually have several seconds or even minutes to respond before the situation becomes dire. If you’re driving a car, you may have only a second or a fraction of a second to take action before you collide with another car, or a bridge abutment, or a tree. There are far more obstacles on the ground than in the sky.

With the Tesla accident, the evidence suggests that the crash happened before the driver even realized that he was about to hit a truck. He seemed to be suffering from automation complacency up to the very moment of impact. He trusted the machine, and the machine failed him. Such complacency is a well-documented problem in human-factors research, and it’s what led Google to change the course of its self-driving car program a couple of years ago, shifting to a perhaps quixotic goal of total automation without any human involvement.

«

Carr is author of The Glass Cage, which notes how reliance on automation for systems which may pitch you back into control carries big risks.
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Moorfields announces research partnership • Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

»

Two million people are living with sight loss in the UK, of whom around 360,000 are registered as blind or partially sighted. At the moment, eye health professionals rely on digital scans of the eye to diagnose and determine the correct treatment for common eye conditions such as age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy.

These scans are highly complex and to date, traditional analysis tools have been unable to explore them fully. It also takes eye health professionals a long time to analyse eye scans, which can have an impact on how quickly they can meet patients to discuss diagnosis and treatment…

…Faster and more efficient diagnosis of eye disease could help prevent many thousands of cases of sight loss due to wet age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy, which together affect more than 625,000 people in the UK.

Moorfields Eye Hospital will share approximately one million anonymised digital eye scans, used by eye health professionals to detect and diagnose eye conditions. Anonymous clinical diagnoses, information on the treatment of eye diseases, model of the machine used to acquire the images and demographic information on age (shown to be associated with eye disease) is also being shared. This has been collected over time through routine care, which means it’s not possible to identify any individual patients from the scans. And they’re also historic scans, meaning that while the results of our research may be used to improve future care, they won’t affect the care any of our patients receive today.

«

What we want machines to do: take over tedious routine which conceals important data. I’m meantime wondering: is machine learning already being used for airport X-ray scanning?
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If you’re complaining about Facebook’s news feed changes, you’re missing its true marketing potential • The Drum

Jerry Daykin is global digital partner at Carat Global:

»

Promoted posts aren’t a tax on marketers, they’re a huge opportunity to reach well beyond a core existing audience and out to over a billion targeted consumers who can be exactly who you want them to be. Anyone fighting for an extra tiny percentage of their followers to see something should look up and see that they could be reaching 10,000% with a basic media strategy. In reality that’s the audience you need to be reaching to grow and if you’re not willing to invest to do so then you’d be better off spending your time elsewhere. Tweaks to Facebook’s news feed of this sort have absolutely no impact on the scale you achieve through promoted content, and these posts will still be inserted throughout the timeline.

News feed algorithms ultimately improve the experience for users, keep more of them coming back more often and for longer, and thus create an even bigger audience for advertisers to target. Helpfully this growth of time spent will also increase inventory, helping avoid escalating prices due to increased competition. The industry should be welcoming the change, alongside new algorithms from Twitter and Instagram. As Mondelez’s Sonia Carter says: “We wouldn’t have these headlines if ITV changed its schedule to include more popular programmes.”

«

That last point is a zinger. Getting people to read the newsfeed more, and perhaps disfavouring publishers’ posts, is rather like an advertising-funded TV channel replacing rolling news with reruns of favourites and auction shows and Jeremy Kyle. Nobody’s going to complain. But you won’t end up wiser.
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The 17 equations that changed the world • World Economic Forum

Andy Kiersz:

»

In 2012, Mathematician Ian Stewart came out with an excellent and deeply researched book titled “In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World.”

His book takes a look at the most pivotal equations of all time, and puts them in a human, rather than technical context.

“Equations definitely can be dull, and they can seem complicated, but that’s because they are often presented in a dull and complicated way,” Stewart told Business Insider. “I have an advantage over school math teachers: I’m not trying to show you how to do the sums yourself.”

He explained that anyone can “appreciate the beauty and importance of equations without knowing how to solve them … The intention is to locate them in their cultural and human context, and pull back the veil on their hidden effects on history.”

Stewart continued that “equations are a vital part of our culture. The stories behind them — the people who discovered or invented them and the periods in which they lived — are fascinating.”

«

They not only changed the world – they enable the world to continue working as it does. Though you could argue (feel free) that they existed all the time; what they really did was to change our understanding of the world. See how many you already know. And quote them at the kids who complain about maths making no sense.
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South African MPs sing for their supper • Indigo Trust

Matt O’Reilly:

»

Do you know how many debates your MP appears at? I don’t have a clue and I certainly don’t know what a good attendance rate looks like. South African voters now have a chance to compare the attendance record of their representative with that of other MPs to see who’s the hardest working and who’s sleeping on the job. Take a look at PMG’s attendance page and you’ll see attendance rates that vary between 0% and 100%. The following article – that recently appeared in South Africa’s Financial Mail – explains the work in more detail

«

I recall how after the UK MPs’ expenses row, when the Guardian built tools to analyse the huge amounts of data that came out, people from other countries were interested to use them. The tools built by Tom Steinberg’s MySociety were also looked at eagerly. This is a great implementation; though I suspect what it also needs, in a print-oriented country, is for this sort of stuff to be printed regularly in the papers. (Thanks William Perrin for the link.)
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Independence Day: How developer and customer revolt will dethrone Apple • ZDNet

Jason Perlow:

»

as iOS becomes more and more defined as a “luxury” product when comparable products from Chinese device manufacturers begin to cost 60% or 70% less, the end-user calculus points toward tossing the “tea” in Apple Harbor.

Presumably everyone who does business at the App Store will also do business at Google Play, or via a Android side-load, where it is less restrictive and innovation may not be as blocked.

Perhaps a new 3rd-party, truly independent app store that is not tied to Google or an existing player is called for. So that developers and end-users can truly self-determinate.

I don’t know if Spotify is going to break off from the Crown and decide to put up its permanent shingle at Android and Windows and as a 3rd-party Mac or web-only app.

It might back down. Then again it might not. It could be that a “Tea Party” protest in the traditional sense is at hand.

Is it time to throw the iOS tea into Apple harbor and declare independence from Evil King Tim? Talk Back and Let Me Know.

«

Agreeably nutty. (Also about three times too long.) One can reliably state that articles entitled “How X will dethrone Apple” are wrong per se.

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The WRT54GL: a 54Mbps router from 2005 still makes millions for Linksys • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

»

In a time when consumers routinely replace gadgets with new models after just two or three years, some products stand out for being built to last.

Witness the Linksys WRT54GL, the famous wireless router that came out in 2005 and is still for sale. At first glance, there seems to be little reason to buy the WRT54GL in the year 2016. It uses the 802.11g Wi-Fi standard, which has been surpassed by 802.11n and 802.11ac. It delivers data over the crowded 2.4GHz frequency band and is limited to speeds of 54Mbps. You can buy a new router—for less money—and get the benefit of modern standards, expansion into the 5GHz band, and data rates more than 20 times higher.

Despite all that, people still buy the WRT54GL in large enough numbers that Linksys continues to earn millions of dollars per year selling an 11-year-old product without ever changing its specs or design.

“To be honest, it somewhat baffles my mind,” Linksys Global Product Manager Vince La Duca told Ars. But production won’t stop any time soon as long as Linksys’ suppliers, including chipmaker Broadcom, keep selling the parts needed to build the WRT54GL. “We’ll keep building it because people keep buying it,” La Duca said.

Linksys doesn’t bother promoting the WRT54GL much. But La Duca mentioned the continued production of the WRT54GL recently when I interviewed him for a story on Linksys’ project to let users install open source firmware on new routers without breaking the latest FCC anti-interference rules. The WRT54GL was the first wireless router I ever purchased about a decade ago; I was surprised that Linksys still produces them, so I asked the company for more details.

«

A lovely piece of journalism and writing, where Brodkin puts his inspiration – the discovery it still sells – out front and then digs in. There’s even a cameo from Bill Gates. By the way, in my house there’s nothing “just” about 54Mbps. More like “if only our broadband could saturate our router, but it’s only managing 5%.”
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Hamburger menus and hidden navigation hurt UX metrics • Nielsen Norman Group

Kara Pernice and Raluca Budiu did an in-depth study of those things that are increasingly used on desktop as well as mobile screens:

»

The other three metrics that we collected focused on the quality of the user experience:
• Content discoverability. Our tasks were fairly simple and gave users a fair amount of freedom (e.g., “Find a technology article that interests you”), so people were actually able to complete them most of the time. However, given the focus of our study, we used a more nuanced measure of success (content discoverability) that took into account not only whether people completed the task, but also how they completed it. Thus, content discoverability measured whether users were able to find the content they were looking for by using navigation (and not search) in those cases when the content wasn’t directly linked from the homepage.
• Task-difficulty rating. At the end of each task, we asked participants to rate how easy or difficult the task was on a scale from 1 to 7, with 1 being easy and 7 being difficult. The task difficulty is a subjective metric; it measures users’ self-reported assessment of the task. It usually reflects their overall experience in using the site, so a high estimated difficulty rating will indirectly indicate actual difficulty in locating the navigation and navigating through the site.
• Time on task. This metric represented the time it took participants to complete the task, whether successfully or not. A menu can add or decrease task time, if it is easy or difficult to find, open, or use, so longer task times also reflect the added interaction cost due to a less usable navigation.

Our findings show that, across all three different metrics, hidden navigation significantly decreases user experience both on mobile and on desktop.

«

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Trump days • The New Yorker

George Saunders touted around a number of states watching Trump rallies and speaking to his supporters:

»

The Trump supporter comes out of the conservative tradition but is not a traditional conservative. He is less patient: something is bothering him and he wants it stopped now, by any means necessary. He seems less influenced by Goldwater and Reagan than by Fox News and reality TV, his understanding of history recent and selective; he is less religiously grounded and more willing, in his acceptance of Trump’s racist and misogynist excesses, to (let’s say) forgo the niceties.

As for Trump’s uncivil speech—the insults, the petty meanness, the crudeness, the talk about hand size, the assurance, on national TV, that his would-be Presidential dick is up to the job, his mastery of the jaw-droppingly untrue personal smear (Obama is Kenyan, Ted Cruz’s dad was in cahoots with Lee Harvey Oswald, U.S. Muslims knew what was “going on” pre-Orlando), which he often dishonorably eases into the world by attaching some form of the phrase “many people have said this” (The world is flat; many people have said this. People are saying that birds can play the cello: we need to look into that)—his supporters seem constitutionally reluctant to object, as if the act of objecting would mark them as fatally delicate. Objecting to this sort of thing is for the coddled, the liberal, the élite. “Yeah, he can really improve, in the way he says things,” one woman in Fountain Hills tells me. “But who gives a shit? Because if he’s going to get the job done? I’m just saying. You can’t let your feelings get hurt. It’s kind of like, get over it, you know what I mean? What’s the big picture here? The big picture is we’ve got to get America back on track.”

«

Again, I’d like to see a similar version, but with Hillary supporters/rallies.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

HTC has sold an estimated 100,000 Vive VR headsets. Is that good news? Photo by pestoverde 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. Feel free to pass this on to people who you think would like it, or enemies you want to annoy.

A selection of 10 links for you. You missed 14 yesterday, if you missed them. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Why tech support is (purposely) unbearable • The New York Times

Kate Murphy:

»

You can also find excellent tech support in competitive markets like domain name providers, where operators such as Hover and GoDaddy receive high marks. Also a good bet are hungry upstarts trying to break into markets traditionally dominated by large national companies. Take regional internet and phone service providers like Logix and WOW, which rank near the top in customer support surveys.

But tech support veterans and mental health experts said there were other ways to get better tech support or maybe just make it more bearable. First, do whatever it takes to control your temper. Take a deep breath. Count to 10. Losing your stack at a consumer support agent is not going to get your problem resolved any faster. Probably just the opposite.

“I definitely remember seeing parts of myself I didn’t know were there as far as getting irritated with people and using passive-aggressive behaviors,” said John Valenti, a video producer in Rochester, who worked as a tech support agent at an internet phone company from 2007 to 2012 to put himself through graduate school. He made an absurdist film about it for his master’s thesis at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

«

Here’s the film – 21 minutes of your time, perhaps to be watched while you’re on hold about something:

TECH SERVICE: A Memoir by John Valenti from John Valenti on Vimeo.

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The fallacy of job insecurity • The New Yorker

Mark Gimein:

»

our collective nostalgia misrepresents historical job security so completely that it gets it close to backward. We imagine a past where everyone had thirty-year careers (or, less pretentiously, jobs), tapering off into a work twilight and then retirement. This memory is surprisingly at odds with the data: the typical worker now stays at a job six months longer than the average worker did a decade ago. Taking an even longer-term view, the typical worker has stayed at the same job for more than four and a half years, versus just three and a half years in 1983.

Whether that increase in stability is wholly positive is arguable. In roaring economies, workers switch jobs more often, looking for higher pay or better bosses. The length of time spent at one job goes up in times of economic stress (such as the mid-aughts), when workers hang on for dear life. But whatever the cause, it’s clear that younger workers switch jobs less often than in the past. For women, also, the length of time at the average job has gone up markedly. (It’s now almost the same as for men.) To the extent that there was security in the past, it didn’t apply to women.

One group, however, has suffered in terms of job stability. You can probably guess which one: men in the later stages of their careers. The share of men older than fifty-five who have been at their jobs for twenty years or more has plummeted.

«

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China restricts online news sites from sourcing stories on social media • Ars Technica

Glyn Moody:

»

China’s Internet censorship body has warned online media not to use stories found on social networks as the basis of news reports without first asking permission from the authorities. The Cyberspace Administration of China said: “It is forbidden to use hearsay to create news or use conjecture and imagination to distort the facts.”

«

Imagine if this applied to the Daily Mail. It would barely have anything to write about.
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Startup Timelines

This is fun: tracking (via the Wayback Machine?) how many, many, many startups’ web pages looked, going right back to the start. And yes, including TheFacebook from February 2004.
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HTC Vive headset nearing 100,000 sales • Road to VR

Ben Lang:

»

Steamspy aggregates data from millions of Steam users into useful statistics about games sold on the platform. And though SteamSpy doesn’t track the number of HTC Vive headsets running on Steam, it does track the three VR games that come bundled with each Vive purchase: Tilt Brush, Fantastic Contraption, and Job Simulator. Thus, we can see the total number of owners of these games, giving us what appears to be a fairly accurate indication of Vive sales.

According to SteamSpy, Tilt Brush is the most popular of the Vive’s bundled games, now sitting at 94,911 (± 8,213 margin of error). Assuming each owner of Tilt Brush is also a Vive owner, the margin of error brings the headset’s sales as high as 103,124 or as low as 86,698 three months since launch. While that’s still far from ‘mainstream’, the steep $799 price means that with only 100,000 sales HTC has already pulled in nearly $89m in revenue.

«

Which then puts Oculus Rift CV1 at 36,000 and Oculus Rift DK2 at 8,700 in use. Encouraging for HTC? Well..
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Can we stop pretending HTC has a future in VR? • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

HTC is struggling mightily in the smartphone market and is still good for a 40% year-over-year decline in revenue every month. The Vive—a “joint effort” between HTC and Valve—is a rare bright spot in the company’s lineup, but I think it’s a temporary reprieve. Evidence shows HTC had little to do with the technology behind the Vive. HTC is more like Valve’s tool, and while the company is in charge of manufacturing the Vive right now, HTC won’t be left with any IP or competitive advantages once Valve is done with it.

“HTC Vive” makes about as much sense as “Foxconn iPhone.” The name “Valve Vive” would probably be more appropriate. HTC seems more like the contract manufacturer for the device, building the Vive for Valve the same way Foxconn builds iPhones for Apple. The Vive is a product of Valve research using licensed Valve technology and Valve software in an effort to kickstart Valve’s VR ecosystem. The only oddity is that, through a weird quirk of branding, HTC’s name ended up on the side of the device.

«

Amadeo makes a convincing case that all HTC brought to this is the outward design of the headset, and the supply chain to build and distribute it. Panels from Samsung, head tracking from Valve, and so on.
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Rimmel London releases a Shazam for makeup • Glossy

Grace Caffyn:

»

Rimmel’s social content is increasingly influencer-heavy. There are Snapchat takeovers and shoppable Youtube videos, but also a growing focus on micro-influencers. A recent #LondonLook competition flew 18 fans to the capital to create their own content around the brand. It received over 12,000 entries.

Besides tapping into the pulling power of those being zapped, Rimmel also wants Get The Look to pull in its own community of microinfluencers. Users on the app can share their virtual makeovers with friends on social media. They can also submit their photos to Rimmel’s gallery.

Downloads are important, but the key metric for Rimmel will be engagement. “If it uplifts sales as a consequence, then great. But it’s more than a sales tool. It’s about enhancing the consumer experience,” [Rimmel VP of global marketing Montse] Passolas said. 

«

“Microinfluencers”. Mm.
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A second US man pleads guilty to hacking celebrity accounts • Computer Weekly

Warwick Ashford:

»

A second US man has pleaded guilty to gaining authorised access to celebrity iCloud and Gmail accounts and stealing nude images that were leaked online in 2014.

Edward Majerczyk (28) of Chicago, Ilinois used similar methods as Ryan Collins (36) of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, but US authorities have not made any connections between the two men.

Although both used phishing emails to trick celebrities into divulging their passwords, neither have been linked to leaking stolen private images and videos online.

Police investigations into the online leaks that involved more than 100 celebrities, including Rihanna and Jennifer Lawrence, led to the arrest of Majerczyk and Collins.

Collins targeted victims with emails that appeared to come from Apple and Google to get their log-in details, while Majerczyk’s sent messages that looked like security warnings from internet service providers that tricked victims into visiting malicious websites designed to steal log-in information…

…Majerczyk is believed to have stolen the log-in credentials more than 300 Apple iCloud and Gmail accounts between November 2013 and August 2014, including those of around 30 celebrities, according to a statement by the US Attorney’s Office.

«

Note the ages; these weren’t, as the banter would have it, teens in their basement pounding the iCloud servers to exploit a weakness in the Find My iPhone password system. Security breaches are usually about the path of least resistance, not most complication.
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Gut bacteria spotted eating brain chemicals for the first time • New Scientist

Andy Coghlan:

»

Bacteria have been discovered in our guts that depend on one of our brain chemicals for survival. These bacteria consume GABA, a molecule crucial for calming the brain, and the fact that they gobble it up could help explain why the gut microbiome seems to affect mood.

Philip Strandwitz and his colleagues at Northeastern University in Boston discovered that they could only grow a species of recently discovered gut bacteria, called KLE1738, if they provide it with GABA molecules. “Nothing made it grow, except GABA,” Strandwitz said while announcing his findings at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Boston last month.

GABA acts by inhibiting signals from nerve cells, calming down the activity of the brain, so it’s surprising to learn that a gut bacterium needs it to grow and reproduce. Having abnormally low levels of GABA is linked to depression and mood disorders, and this finding adds to growing evidence that our gut bacteria may affect our brains.

«

We’re just starting to get an inkling of how important our microbiome (the bacteria etc in the gut) is to how we behave. (Of course, the Ramones had a song about this – GABA GABA hey.)
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The truth about Brexit didn’t stand a chance in the online bubble • The Guardian

Emily Bell:

»

After an active campaign to persuade publishers to use their platform more, Facebook saw engagement numbers drop and became concerned that news was “flooding” its users’ timelines; and therefore it boosted the idea that “friends and family” links and recommendations would now be the central organising principle for the platform.

This seems nothing more than a mild prophylactic against the world joining [deputy Labour party leader] Tom Watson on Snapchat, but it raises the same kinds of questions raised by [Leave campaign donor Aaron] Banks’s chilling assertion that facts don’t matter in political campaigns.

We saw in [Michael Gove’s columnist wife] Sarah Vine’s email the astonishing degree to which media titans like Rupert Murdoch and [Daily Mail editor] Paul Dacre are perceived to hold influence, when in fact Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter et al are the de facto organisers of much of the information we receive and discuss. Tweaking an algorithm to favour “family and friends” is the engineering equivalent of “people have had enough of experts”, in that it acknowledges that how people feel is a better driver of activity than what people think. For Facebook, and other social platforms, it is also good business. Facebook does not see itself as responsible for the information diet of the world, even though this is exactly what it is becoming.

«

The filter bubble is becoming harder, not easier, to escape; this has serious implications for us all.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: the name “Piper” for Google’s commit system predates the TV series “Silicon Valley” by a number of years.

Why is the world of these people so different from that of Star Wars? Photo by San Diego Shooter 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 14 links for you. American holiday? Read them slower. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google and Facebook also looked at buying LinkedIn • Recode

Kurt Wagner and Mark Bergen:

»Google and Facebook were among the suitors that looked at buying LinkedIn, which ultimately sold to Microsoft for $26bn last month.

A Securities and Exchange Commission document filed on Friday revealed that LinkedIn drew interest from as many as five possible buyers. We knew that Salesforce was one of them, as CEO Marc Benioff confirmed to Recode. But a source familiar with the deal says that both Google and Facebook held meetings with LinkedIn executives to discuss the idea of a possible acquisition.

The SEC filing does not list the other bidders, but instead refers to interested companies as Party A, Party B, Party C and Party D. We’re told that Party B is Google, and Party D is Facebook. Party A is Salesforce, and we were unable to identify Party C.

«

Record doesn’t link to the SEC document in this article, and only links to a version on Scribd in a linked article. Why not link to the real thing? There’s also the page with all the documents.

Worth reading for all the back and forth, and the way the share offer racks up. Also – seems unlikely that Apple would be a bidder.
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Why did the Stars Wars and Star Trek worlds turn out so differently? • Marginal Revolution

Tyler Cowen:

»That question came up briefly in my chat with Cass Sunstein, though we didn’t get much of a chance to address it.  In the Star Trek world there is virtual reality, personal replicators, powerful weapons, and, it seems, a very high standard of living for most of humanity.  The early portrayals of the planet Vulcan seem rather Spartan, but at least they might pass a basic needs test of sorts, plus there is always catch-up growth to hope for.  The bad conditions seem largely reserved for those enslaved by the bad guys, originally the Klingons and Romulans, with those stories growing more complicated as the series proceeds.

In Star Wars, the early episodes show some very prosperous societies.  Still, droids are abused, there is widespread slavery, lots of people seem to live at subsistence, and eventually much of the galaxy falls under the Jedi Reign of Terror.

Why the difference?  Should we consult Acemoglu and Robinson?  Or is it about economic geography?  I can find think of a few factors differentiating the world of Star Wars from that of Star Trek.

«

And they’re not as trivial as you might think this topic would mean.
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LG sacks executives amid mobile struggle • Korea Times

Kim Yoo-chul and Lee Min-hyung:

»LG Electronics has announced a major shake-up of senior executives in its mobile business division, as it struggles to rebrand itself in the highly competitive smartphone market.

On Friday, LG Electronics said it has created a program management office (PMO) in its troubled handset business and replaced some executives.

“Friday’s announcement is because LG Electronics’ latest flagship G5 smartphone failed to generate sales,” LG said, adding it hopes the shake-up will give its ailing mobile business “new momentum.”

«

But in the analysis part of the story we learn:

»In March, the company unveiled what it called the “game-changing” modular smartphone, expressing confidence the G5 would drive up weak profitability in the mobiles unit.

The device looked like meeting expectations in the first few weeks following its launch, garnering huge media attention and recording a threefold sales increase on its predecessor ― the G4.

But the G5’s initial attention is withering, as shipments continue to drop more steeply than expected, analysts said.

“The estimated G5 shipment for the second quarter of this year will remain 2.2m, below a previous expectation of some 3m,” Mirae Asset Securities analyst Cho jin-ho said in a report. “This is because the G5’s market response is getting weaker and the company failed to compete with the aggressive promotion campaigns of its rivals.”

«

LG’s mobile division has lost money since Q2 2015, and there’s no sign of things improving. My thoughts in February were that “modularity in the handset kills premium pricing even faster than OS modularity.” Not looking wrong so far.
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Neural networks in iOS 10 and macOS • Big Nerd Ranch

Bolot Kerimbaev:

»Each [neural network] layer needs to be configured with appropriate parameters. For example, the convolution layer needs information about the input and output images (dimensions, number of channels, etc.), as well as convolution layer parameters (kernel size, matrix, etc.). The fully connected layer is defined by the input and output vectors, activation function, and weights.

To obtain these parameters, the neural network has to be trained. This is accomplished by passing the inputs through the neural network, determining the output, measuring the error (i.e., how far off the actual result was from the predicted result), and adjusting the weights via backpropagation. Training a neural network may require hundreds, thousands, or even millions of examples.

At the moment, Apple’s new machine learning APIs can be used for building neural networks that only do inference, but not training. Good thing that Big Nerd Ranch does.

«

Good, accessible introduction to neural networks overall.
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Why Google stores billions of lines of code in a single repository • Communications of the ACM

Rachel Potvin and Josh Levenberg:

»In October 2012, Google’s central repository added support for Windows and Mac users (until then it was Linux-only), and the existing Windows and Mac repository was merged with the main repository. Google’s tooling for repository merges attributes all historical changes being merged to their original authors, hence the corresponding bump in the graph in Figure 2. The effect of this merge is also apparent in Figure 1.

The commits-per-week graph shows the commit rate was dominated by human users until 2012, at which point Google switched to a custom-source-control implementation for hosting the central repository, as discussed later. Following this transition, automated commits to the repository began to increase. Growth in the commit rate continues primarily due to automation.

Managing this scale of repository and activity on it has been an ongoing challenge for Google. Despite several years of experimentation, Google was not able to find a commercially available or open source version-control system to support such scale in a single repository. The Google proprietary system that was built to store, version, and vend this codebase is code-named Piper.

«

As in.. Pied Piper? Wouldn’t put it past Google to have named it after the fictional company in the TV series “Silicon Valley”. But the whole thing is amazing. Plus humans getting pushed out of the commits.
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Cartography comparison: Google Maps and Apple Maps, part 1 • Justin O’Beirne

O’Beirne takes an enormously deep dive into what things Google and Apple choose to highlight on their maps (because you can’t highlight everything and finds some fascinating key differences:

»It’s interesting, isn’t it? Google is prioritizing roads, while Apple is prioritizing places. And that’s why were seeing such noticable differences in the counts.

But even when it comes to places, the maps are prioritizing different things:

Above, Google is again prioritizing transit places, while Apple is prioritizing landmark places. And Apple is also showing a couple of hospitals and a famous bakery.

What’s more important on a map like this? Transit? Or landmarks and hospitals?

Each map voted with its pixels, and it’s interesting to see.

(And here we’re also seeing the argument for map personalization: Not everyone uses transit, so there might be places—such as landmarks—that are more important to some people. And when it’s life-and-death, hospitals are the most important places in the world. But how often does the average person visit a hospital? Personalized maps are better at surfacing the most appropriate places for each person; but for the default map, something still has to be chosen… and that’s what we saw above.)

«

Google’s tendency to prioritise transit stations does feel like the right one, to be honest – at least to this frequent user of public transport. But O’Beirne points out that it isn’t even that simple: there are places where Google leaves out stations.

And there’s a part 2 forthcoming. Definitely worth the wait if you’re the least bit interested in how to visualise large amounts of information.
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How to crack android full disk encryption on Qualcomm devices • Hacker News

Mohit Kumar:

»Android’s full-disk encryption can be cracked much more easily than expected with brute force attack and some patience, affecting potentially hundreds of millions of mobile devices.

And the worst part: there may not be a full fix available for current Android handsets in the market.

Google started implementing Full Disk Encryption on Android by default with Android 5.0 Lollipop. Full disk encryption (FDE) can prevent both hackers and even powerful law enforcement agencies from gaining unauthorized access to device’s data.

Android’s disk encryption, in short, is the process of encoding all user’s data on an Android device before ever written to disk using user’s authentication code. Once encrypted, the data is decrypted only if the user enters his/her password.

However, after thoroughly analyzing Android’s full disk encryption implementation, a security researcher came to the conclusion that the feature is not as secure as the company claims it is, and he has a working code to prove it.

«

88 lines of Python; see more details. Not absolutely proven – you’d need someone to replicate it – but believable (it relies on a kernel exploit).
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Yahoo exclamation mark, R.I.P. • Pando

Kevin Kelleher watched Yahoo’s shareholder meeting:

»Enough of Yahoo!’s history. This is about Yahoo!’s bleak present and whatever future stands before it. The shareholder meeting Yahoo! held yesterday was hardly a confrontational affair. It was more of a ritual of supplication. Mayer addressed the crowd in what can only be described in a cowed fashion. Her rehearsed hand gestures signaling awkwardness and defeat. Her pitch about “Mavens” ringing more hollow than ever. Her only substantial news being on the theme of retrenchment: The sunsetting of 130 properties. The sale of prime real estate in Silicon Valley for $250 million The nearly $10 billion in stock buybacks.

It’s hard to watch this performance by Mayer. It’s not easy finding the words to describe it.

The next time you find yourself in a stifling fit of self pity, watch it. Or, the next time you find yourself so gloriously high on top of the world your better self asks for a reality check, watch it. Or, the next time you need a reason to have a tall glass of whiskey, or a steaming-hot cup of chicken broth, or a moment in a fetal position with the blankets tugged over your head – whatever the urge is, just watch it. In my years of shareholder meetings and analyst calls – most of which are, I admit, dull to the general population but bizarrely interesting to me – I have never seen anything like it.

«

From Yahoo! to Yahoo?
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The deciders: Zeynep Tufekci at TEDSummit • TED Blog

David Colman:

»The idea of a company or college using an advanced algorithm to sort through mountains of job or school applicants is exactly the kind of thing that worries the Turkish-born technosociologist. “Hiring in a gender- and race-blind way certainly sounds good to me,” she says. “But these computational systems can infer all sorts of things about you from your digital crumbs, even if you did not disclose these things.”

Among the inferences computers can make even without an explicit mention: sexual preference, political leaning, ethnic background, social class and more. “What safeguards do you have that your black box isn’t doing something shady? What if [your hiring algorithm] is weeding out women most likely to be pregnant in the next year? With machine learning, there is no variable labeled ‘higher risk of pregnancy.’ So not only do you not know what your system is selecting on, you don’t even know where to look to find out.”

Tufekci is not a Luddite, though — far from it. “Such a system may even be less biased than human managers,” she points out. “And it could well make good monetary sense as well.  But is this the kind of society we want to build without even knowing we’ve done it? Because we’ve turned decision making over to machines we don’t totally understand?”

«

Tufekci is – as I’m sure I’ve said before – a must-follow on Twitter.
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The music industry buried more than 150 startups—now they are left to dance with the giants • Medium

David Pakman, VC at Venrock:

»The bleak outlook for profitability among standalone digital music companies is a direct result of the high royalty rates incumbent upon startups who wish to license digital music for use in their apps. Whether you negotiate voluntary agreements or avail yourself of the existing compulsory licenses, you will not turn a profit. At least, no one ever has. The few that refused to pay these rates were often sued out of existence.

Given these facts, digital music startups are unlikely to survive and thus unlikely to attract meaningful investment. The failure rate in this market segment dramatically exceeds that of SaaS, eCommerce, and mobile, to name just a few. More importantly, the success rate of digital music companies (4%) is far less than these other segments (mobile at 26.5%, SaaS at 28% and eCommerce at 23%).

It is no surprise, then, that far fewer digital music companies get funded. Only about 175 have been venture funded since 1997 by my count, compared to 5,175 (mobile), 7,987 (SaaS) and 1,800 (eCommerce).

The end result of these perilous market conditions is that the only companies who can afford to be involved with digital music are the internet giants prepared to subsidize their digital music services with profits from their other businesses.

«

I’m having trouble believing that Spotify is suddenly, and uniquely, profitable. That means it’s burning through its $1bn of debt.

Also explains why Tidal might be willing to listen to Apple offering to buy it. What’s the alternative? Keep losing money until you go bust?
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Apple slams Spotify for asking for “preferential treatment” • BuzzFeed News

John Paczkowski on the Apple-Spotify row, now in round two:

»Apple strongly disagrees.

“Our guidelines apply equally to all app developers, whether they are game developers, e-book sellers, video-streaming services or digital music distributors; and regardless of whether or not they compete against Apple. We did not alter our behavior or our rules when we introduced our own music streaming service or when Spotify became a competitor,” Sewell explains. “Ironically, it is now Spotify that wants things to be different by asking for preferential treatment from Apple.”

And as for Spotify’s suggestion that Apple is treading on dangerous, anticompetitive ground, well, Sewell doesn’t seem too concerned.

«

The takeaway for me was that there have been more than 160m downloads of the Spotify app from the App Store. That reads to me like “less than 170m”, and I think it’s comparable on the Play Store. (Spotify passed 100m downloads on Google Play in July 2015.) That, in turn, suggests that – given there are 100m users per month (Spotify’s number) and 30m subscribers, that there’s roughly a 2-in-3 abandonment rate.

(Assuming that downloads are to unique users, and that the average user has one device.)
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Smart pirates are fooling YouTube’s copyright bots by hiding movies in 360-degree videos • Quartz

Mike Murphy:

»YouTube has gotten very good at figuring out when people upload copyrighted material to the video-streaming site, and taking things down. Its program, Content ID, matches videos from the site against a database of video uploaded by content owners. If there’s a match, YouTube will move to take that video down. But what if you upload a video in a video?

An ingenious pirate, going by the name Thuy Pham on YouTube, managed to embed the entirety of the 1995 classic Clueless inside a 360-degree video. At first, it seems like you’re just watching the Alicia Silverstone vehicle as you would any other video on YouTube—albeit slightly sped-up—but if you move the video around, you’ll see that it’s actually injected into what appears to be some sort of dance studio, replete with three women facing away from the movie.

«

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Government retreats from Land Registry sale • UK Authority

Mark Say:

»A Conservative revolt appears to have killed off controversial Government plans to privatise the Land Registry.

Ministers slammed on the brakes after facing fierce criticism from a succession of Tory backbenchers in a Commons debate held against the turmoil of the party leadership race.

It leaves a final decision in the hands of a different prime minister and chancellor, after the resignation of David Cameron and almost certain departure of George Osborne.

Labour MPs sponsored the debate, but Conservatives also demanded a rethink, warning the sell-off would undermine the registry’s impartiality, hike fees and fail to create competition.

«

Good.
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Dell stops selling Android devices to focus on Windows • PCWorld

Agam Shah:

»Dell has stopped selling Android devices as it steps away from slate-style tablets to focus on Windows 2-in-1 devices.

The company isn’t refreshing the Venue line of Android tablets, and will no longer offer the Android-based Wyse Cloud Connect, a thumb-size computer that can turn a display into a PC. Other Android devices were discontinued some time ago.

“The slate tablet market is over-saturated and is experiencing declining demand from consumers, so we’ve decided to discontinue the Android-based Venue tablet line,” a Dell spokesman said in an email.

Though Dell has killed its Android devices, it made interesting products with the OS. One was the Venue 8 7000 tablet, which had an OLED screen and a 3D RealSense camera. Meanwhile, 2-in-1s can serve as both tablets and laptops.

“We are seeing 2-in-1s rising in popularity since they provide a more optimal blend of PC capabilities with tablet mobility. This is especially true in the commercial space,” the Dell spokesman said.

«

Unsurprising. The Android tablet market is going to get squeezed really hard – there was already barely any profit there (Samsung was largest, and well behind Apple on volume), and that’s going to get worse.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Could this unlock your phone? Would you want it to? Photo by Solar Mechanic on Flickr.

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

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

A tragic loss • Tesla Motors

»We learned yesterday evening that NHTSA is opening a preliminary evaluation into the performance of Autopilot during a recent fatal crash that occurred in a Model S. This is the first known fatality in just over 130 million miles where Autopilot was activated. Among all vehicles in the US, there is a fatality every 94 million miles. Worldwide, there is a fatality approximately every 60 million miles. It is important to emphasize that the NHTSA action is simply a preliminary evaluation to determine whether the system worked according to expectations.

Following our standard practice, Tesla informed NHTSA about the incident immediately after it occurred. What we know is that the vehicle was on a divided highway with Autopilot engaged when a tractor trailer drove across the highway perpendicular to the Model S. Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied. The high ride height of the trailer combined with its positioning across the road and the extremely rare circumstances of the impact caused the Model S to pass under the trailer, with the bottom of the trailer impacting the windshield of the Model S. Had the Model S impacted the front or rear of the trailer, even at high speed, its advanced crash safety system would likely have prevented serious injury as it has in numerous other similar incidents.

«

But it didn’t. The autopilot was in effect an accessory to the death. This was inevitable, eventually; what happens now?
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Exclusive: leaked Note 7 front panel confirms iris scanner • AndroidAuthority

Nirave Gondhia:

»A recent patent application by Samsung showed how its iris scanner would work and suggested that three lenses would be required for accurate recognition, which we can see by the three circular holes at the top of the Note 7. Considering that the iris scanner needs to be mounted above the display, the leak also reveals that Samsung is set to do-away with its logo on the front of the handset, in a bid to reduce the amount of bezel above the screen.

What else do we know about the Galaxy Note 7? Based on other reports, we can expect a 5.8-inch Quad HD dual-edge Super AMOLED display, 6GB of RAM, an improved 12-megapixel camera with dual-pixel phase detection autofocus, and a battery size of between 3,600mAh and 4,000mAh.

«

Iris scanner plus: should be pretty much impossible for someone else to get into your phone with you not there. Iris scanner minus: all they have to do is hold it to your face? Cool, but not necessarily perfect.
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The strategic importance of Apple Music • Technalyzer

Eduardo Archanco:

»
And the one for Apple Music:

There are two things I would like to highlight from these charts:

Spotify daily subscriber growth accelerated dramatically in January 2015. Despite this, claims from the company that Apple Music accelerated user adoption don’t hold water since it launched several months later. If you take a look at daily user addition, Spotify decelerated since the launch of its rival music service.

Apple Music experienced huge adoption in the first six months. It surely helped the one month free trial, but once it expired, users stuck with the service. Even now, when daily growth has relatively slowed, Apple Music has similar daily growth than that of Spotify today: one million new paid users per month.

«

Daily growth is a clever way to look at it.
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Spotify: Apple is holding up app approval to squash competition • Engadget

Billy Steele:

»How do you catch up with the biggest music streaming service? Well, not approving app updates is one tactic, and Spotify says Apple is doing just that. The streaming service sent a letter to Apple’s legal counsel this week claiming that the company is rejecting an update to Spotify’s iOS app and it’s “causing grave harm” to users by doing so. The letter explains that Apple won’t approve the new version because Spotify doesn’t use the company’s billing method for in-app purchases and subscription services. Apple announced the changes to app subscriptions in iTunes just before this month’s WWDC.

Like other apps, Spotify had been getting customers to foot the bill for Apple’s App Store billing fees by charging an extra $3 a month. It recently launched a promotion for the second time that gave new users three months of service for a dollar, if they signed up on the web. As you can imagine, that didn’t make Apple too happy, and the company reportedly threatened to pull the app entirely unless Spotify stopped pushing the deal for iPhone owners. It complied with the request, but it also nixed the iTunes billing option in the iOS version which lead to the current dispute.

«

Puzzled. Amazon similarly avoids letting you buy Kindle content via the App Store (you have to go to the web). Is the problem with Spotify mixing the abilities?
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ATM skimmer caught in the wild by a real security engineer • TechCrunch

John Biggs:

»Tourist/cybersecurity expert Benjamin Tedesco was hanging out in Vienna when he walked up to an ATM. Because he trusts no one he decided to give the reader a little tug and came away with a working skimmer designed to look exactly like the card slot on the original machine.

“It pays to be paranoid,” he said — and he’s right.

Tedesco pulled off the skimmer and took some pictures of it and will try to reverse engineer it when he heads back home (presumably with the credit card data still on it). Some Reddit users have spotted the pinhole camera that the hackers used to grab PIN codes, as well, a feature that lets full cards be stolen in seconds.

«

It is the holiday season, so beware. Get your cash inside a bank if you can.
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How to Compromise the Enterprise Endpoint • Google Project Zero

Tavis Ormandy at Google’s project to find bugs in all sorts of stuff:

»Symantec is a popular vendor in the enterprise security market, their flagship product is  Symantec Endpoint Protection. They sell various products using the same core engine in several markets, including a consumer version under the Norton brand.

Today we’re publishing details of multiple critical vulnerabilities that we discovered, including many wormable remote code execution flaws.

These vulnerabilities are as bad as it gets. They don’t require any user interaction, they affect the default configuration, and the software runs at the highest privilege levels possible. In certain cases on Windows, vulnerable code is even loaded into the kernel, resulting in remote kernel memory corruption.

«

How bad? This bad:

»Apparently,Tavis emailed the exploit to Symantec in a password protected zip file. He included the password in the body of the email. The email server, running Symantec, grabbed the password out of the email, decrypted the zip file, and upon reading the exploit code, crashed itself.

«

(Confirmed by Ormandy.)
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People aren’t spending at duty-free stores like they used to • Quartz

»Shoppers last year shelled out more than $62 billion on duty-free goods, which are imported but exempt from customs duties usually charged for bringing them across a border. While that was a decrease of just over 2% from the prior year, growth in duty-free and travel retail has slowed since 2011.

Last year’s drop wasn’t because consumers just soured on Toblerone chocolate bars, though confectionary and fine foods sales dropped 4%. They spent much less on watches and jewelry, with sales in that category tumbling more than 13.2% from 2014.

The organization chalked up the drop to economic and currency volatility as well as terrorism and geo-political issues.

«

Noted because tech products are also beneficiaries of duty-free spending. And notice how the previous drop was when there was a giant banking recession on.
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BlackBerry 10 devices discontinued, BlackBerry reportedly inform Verizon and AT&T • Rapid Mobile

“Rapid John”:

»An email sent to US Senate staffers yesterday has informed them that BlackBerry smartphones will no longer be officially issued. The email was sent to Administrative Managers, Chief Clerks, and System Administrators.

While many government bodies in a lot of countries have been giving up BlackBerry smartphones, what sticks out in the email is the following part:

»

“BlackBerry has informed Verizon and AT&T that production of all BlackBerry OS 10 devices has been discontinued.”

«

While BlackBerry 10 phones will apparently no longer be produced, the email continues:

»BlackBerry device support will continue  for the foreseeable future and that BlackBerry is committed to maintaining their support of existing devices to include uninterrupted warranty and technical support.

«

This is completely in line with what BlackBerry have been stating for quite some time – that they will continue to support BlackBerry 10.

«

The surprise is that BlackBerry has still been making BB10 phones – I’d have thought they would have stopped six months ago.

It was a billion-dollar effort to create another mobile OS; like many, it failed. Around 13m – perhaps 15m tops – sold over its lifespan since late 2012.
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We’re using technology wrong- how easy wins over better • LinkedIn

Tom Goodwin:

»From Twitter for customer service, a way to very quickly be totally unhelpful to people and give them a phone number to call, to Amazon, the world’s easiest way to not necessarily pay the best price, we’re taking average-quality pictures on phones, carelessly but it’s better than having to think — and a filter will probably make it good and if we take enough one will be OK. We’re consistently choosing sites, apps and experiences that are just about good enough, but totally easy.

It’s not totally new. We’ve done it for years with fast food, the easy but poor choice for decades. IKEA made billions on the back of “it will do,” but what was once exceptional moments have become the general pillar for life. Rather than looking at the channel guide or recording a show, or asking a friend, we’re watching the cute rabbit clip, the man falling down a hole or how did that not break her legs fed to us without a click by Facebook, YouTube or Snapchat.

We’re rushing around museums to find the money shot to put on Instagram, running around Barcelona to broadcast the cool Gaudi thing and checking into Soho house, life has become orienteering for status.

We’ve become passive, our lives endless easy experiences that don’t touch the sides. Where does it end? Will self-driving cars mean we no longer care about car performance? Will we be so transfixed by our phones that we don’t need to choose the posh hotel, or maybe even bother to fly somewhere? Will our lives become products we subscribe to on Amazon so we don’t need to think, music fed to us by software and shows that autostart?

«

The pursuit of “better” rather than “easier” is surprisingly hard, and usually – counterintuitively – more expensive. (You’d expect “easier” would have a price attached.)
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Never-never chip tech Memristor shuffles closer to death row • The Register

Chris Mellor:

»The Memristor always was a rich company’s technology toy, but Meg Whitman wants HPE to be lean and mean, not fat and wasteful, with HPE Labs producing blue sky tech that rarely becomes a product success.

Memristor was first reported by HPE Labs eight years ago, as a form of persistent memory. At the time HP Labs Fellow R. Stanley Williams compared it to flash: “It holds its memory longer. It’s simpler. It’s easier to make – which means it’s cheaper – and it can be switched a lot faster, with less energy.”

Unfortunately it isn’t simpler to make and still isn’t here. NVMe SSDs have boosted flash’s data access speed, reducing the memory-storage gap, and Intel/Micron’s 3D XPoint SSDs will arrive later this year as the first viable productised technology to fill that gap.

«

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European lawmakers want robots to pay taxes • CNN

Charles Riley:

»The proposal suggests that robots should have to register with authorities, and says laws should be written to hold machines liable for damage they cause, such as loss of jobs. Contact between humans and robots should be regulated, with a special emphasis “given to human safety, privacy, integrity, dignity and autonomy.”

If advanced robots start replacing human workers in large numbers, the report recommends the European Commission force their owners to pay taxes or contribute to social security. The establishment of a basic income, or guaranteed welfare program, is also suggested as a protection against human unemployment.

Should robots ever become self-aware, the report suggests that the moral code outlined by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov be observed. Asimov’s laws stipulate that a robot must never harm a human and always obey orders from its creator.

The draft report, which was written by Mady Delvaux, a member of the European Parliament from Luxembourg, could go before the full European Parliament for a vote later this year. Its approval would be largely symbolic, however, since EU legislation must originate with the European Commission. The Commission did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

«

Can’t immediately find a link to the report. But the idea of robot owners paying taxes makes a sort of sense.
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Video compression seeing slower improvement • EE Times

Rick Merritt:

»Video codecs will not deliver historic gains in the foreseeable future unless engineers come up with radical new techniques, according to experts from Google and Microsoft. The good news is pioneering work in areas such as augmented reality is opening new doors and one effort may produce a royalty-free codec in less than a year.

Improvements in video codecs reduce the amount of bandwidth needed to serve video over the Internet. The gains determine the quality of the experience for constrained devices such as smartphones on cellular networks and are key to supporting the business models of cloud-based video services such as Hulu, Netflix and YouTube.

Over the last 20 years, video codecs doubled gains in compression about every decade in a trade-off for ten-fold increases in encoder complexity. Looking forward, gains appear to peak at about 30% with practical results below 25%, said experts at an event here sponsored by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE).

«

First Moore’s Law, now this. And it’s not as if batteries are pulling their weight either.
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Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates • PNAS

»Functional MRI (fMRI) is 25 years old, yet surprisingly its most common statistical methods have not been validated using real data. Here, we used resting-state fMRI data from 499 healthy controls to conduct 3 million task group analyses. Using this null data with different experimental designs, we estimate the incidence of significant results. In theory, we should find 5% false positives (for a significance threshold of 5%), but instead we found that the most common software packages for fMRI analysis (SPM, FSL, AFNI) can result in false-positive rates of up to 70%. These results question the validity of some 40,000 fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of neuroimaging results.

«

Shorter version: “your brain lights up when..” studies aren’t to be trusted.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

No, Britons weren’t all “frantically” Googling “what is the EU” on Friday. Photo by Tjarko Busink on Flickr.

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

A selection of 13 links for you. It’s what happens. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Intel weighs sale of cyber security business • FT.com

Hannah Kuchler and James Fontanella-Khan:

»

Intel is looking at options for Intel Security, including potentially selling the antivirus software maker formerly known as McAfee which it bought for $7.7bn almost six years ago.

The Silicon Valley chipmaker has been talking to bankers about the future of its cyber security unit in a deal that would be one of the largest in the sector, according to people close to the discussions.

Intel declined to comment.

Private equity buyers are increasingly interested in cyber security companies, anticipating strong cash flow as corporate customers become increasingly worried about protecting their business from cyber attacks. A group of PE firms might club together to buy Intel Security if it is sold for the same price or higher than the $7.7bn Intel originally paid for it.

Earlier this month, Bain Capital sold Blue Coat Security to Symantec for almost twice what it paid the cyber defence company last year. Vista Equity Partners also bought Ping Identity, an authentication service, which had been planning an initial public offering at the start of June.

«

Because basically McAfee doesn’t add any value to Intel, six years on.
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Wearables shipments will grow nearly 30% this year: IDC • Twice

John Laposky:

»

Smart watches: The category is expected to increase from 41% of total wearables shipments in 2016 to 52.1% in 2020. However, not all watches are the same. While smart watches are in the spotlight today, future growth will come from basic watches that provide some sort of fitness/sleep tracking while not being sophisticated enough to run third-party applications on the watch itself. Traditional fashion brands like Fossil and health/fitness companies like Fitbit and Withings will help this segment grow.

«

That’s along with categories like wristbands, eyewear, clothing and “others”. Notable how they aren’t making specific forecasts for Apple v Android in this space.
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How Google is remaking itself as a “machine learning first” company • Backchannel

Steven Levy:

»

The example Giannandrea cites to demonstrate machine learning power is Google Photos, a product whose definitive feature is an uncanny — maybe even disturbing — ability to locate an image of something specified by the user. Show me pictures of border collies. “When people see that for the first time they think something different is happening because the computer is not just computing a preference for you or suggesting a video for you to watch,” says Giannandrea. “It’s actually understanding what’s in the picture.” He explains that through the learning process, the computer “knows” what a border collie looks like, and it will find pictures of it when it’s a puppy, when its old, when it’s long-haired, and when it’s been shorn. A person could do that, of course. But no human could sort through a million examples and simultaneously identify ten thousand dog breeds. But a machine learning system can. If it learns one breed, it can use the same technique to identify the other 9999 using the same technique. “That’s really what’s new here,” says Giannandrea. “For those narrow domains, you’re seeing what some people call superhuman performance in these learned systems.”

«

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After firestorm, Facebook training employees to check political biases • TheHill

David McCabe:

»

Facebook will train employees to deal with their political biases, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said at an event Wednesday evening.

“We think a lot about diversity at Facebook,” she said. “And we have a managing-bias class that all of our leaders and a lot of our employees have taken that I was part of helping to create, and we’ve focused on racial bias, age bias, gender bias, national bias, and we’re going to add in a scenario now on political bias.”

“So that, as part of [how] we think about helping people understand different points of view and being open to different points of view, we’re dealing with political bias as well going forward.”

Many Silicon Valley companies have turned to unconscious bias training in recent years as they seek to address the tech industry’s lack of diversity in hiring. Among other tactics, they have also started to disclose more about demographics of their workforces.

A spokesperson for Facebook said the training in question is mandatory for all employees.

The decision to include a segment on political biases was sparked by allegations, which Facebook says are unfounded, that editors for the social network’s trending topics feature systematically downplayed news stories and sources popular with conservatives.

«

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Stop using Google Trends • Medium

Danny Page

»

Remember, Trends is relative. And we can see this with the most recent Google Trends Freaking Outrage (GTFO):

“The British are frantically Googling what the EU is, hours after voting to leave it“

The Washington Post [driven by a tweet from Google Trends] notes that searches about the EU tripled. But how many people is that? Are they voters? Are they eligible to vote? Were they Leave or Remain? Trends doesn’t tell us, all it does is give us a nice graph with a huge peak. More likely, it’s a very small number of people, based on this graph that puts it in context with other searches in the region:

(From this tweet).

But it’s giving plenty of people cover to insult the entire country, when it’s likely just a few people searching for something in a way that they always search for something. It makes “The British are frantically Googling what the EU is, hours after voting to leave it” absurdly disingenuous without better numbers.

Remy Smith points out: The peak was merely ~1000 people! It’s ludicrous that so few people get turned into a massive story, but it underscores the need for context.

I’m disappointed that this is how data is being used, and really drives home the need for people to understand the data before they use it incorrectly. Google Trends is an interesting tool, but please do a bit more research before using it.

«

I considered linking fully to the Washington Post article but felt somehow that it just wasn’t right. People surely weren’t madly asking Google what the EU was/is. Not after years of subliminal coverage and months of upfront coverage from every media outlet. But I couldn’t quite see what was wrong – until this. It’s spot on.
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Headphone industry market share statistics • Statistic Brain

Wired headphones 69%, wireless 31% (by sales). The teen buying intention is quite remarkable, as is the device they get connected to – out of MP3 player, computer, smartphone, home theatre and tablet, which would you expect to be the leader and the laggard in terms of which one people connect to?
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Slicing into a point-of-sale botnet • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

»

Over the weekend, I heard from a source who said that since November 2015 he’s been tracking a collection of hacked cash registers. This point-of-sale botnet currently includes more than 100 infected systems, and according to the administrative panel for this crime machine at least half of the compromised systems are running a malicious Microsoft Windows process called cicipos.exe.

The admin panel shows the Internet address of a number of infected point-of-sale devices as of June 4, 2016. Many of these appear to be at Cici’s Pizza locations.

KrebsOnSecurity has not been able to conclusively tie the botnet to CiCi’s. Neither CiCi’s nor its outside public relations firm have responded to multiple requests for comment. However, the control panel for this botnet includes the full credit card number and name attached to the card, and several individuals whose names appeared in the botnet control panel confirmed having eaten at CiCi’s Pizza locations on the same date that their credit card data was siphoned by this botnet.

Among those was Richard Higgins of Prattville, Ala., whose card data was recorded in the botnet logs on June 4, 2016. Reached via phone, Higgins confirmed that he used his debit card to pay for a meal he and his family enjoyed at a CiCi’s location in Prattville on that same date.

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Of course, if they used chip/PIN.. then probably the PINs would get stolen too. 🤔
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Thoughts on the sociology of Brexit • Political Economy Research Centre

Will Davies:

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One of the most insightful things I saw in the run-up to the referendum was this video produced by openDemocracy’s Adam Ramsey and Anthony Barnett discussing their visit to Doncaster, another Labour heartland. They chose Doncaster because it looked set to be a strong pro-Leave location, and wanted to understand what was at work in this.

Crucially, they observed that – in strong contrast to the Scottish ‘Yes’ movement – Brexit was not fuelled by hope for a different future. On the contrary, many Leavers believed that withdrawing from the EU wouldn’t really change things one way or the other, but they still wanted to do it. I’ve long suspected that, on some unconscious level, things could be even stranger than this: the self-harm inflicted by Brexit could potentially be part of its appeal. It is now being reported that many Leave voters are aghast at what they’ve done, as if they never really intended for their actions to yield results.

This taps into a much broader cultural and political malaise, that also appears to be driving the rise of Donald Trump in the US. Amongst people who have utterly given up on the future, political movements don’t need to promise any desirable and realistic change. If anything, they are more comforting and trustworthy if predicated on the notion that the future is beyond rescue, for that chimes more closely with people’s private experiences.

The discovery of the ‘Deaton effect’ in the US (unexpected rising mortality rates amongst white working classes) is linked to rising alcohol and opiate abuse and to rising suicide rates. It has also been shown to correlate closely to geographic areas with the greatest support for Trump. I don’t know of any direct equivalent to this in the UK, but it seems clear that – beyond the rhetoric of ‘Great Britain’ and ‘democracy’ – Brexit was never really articulated as a viable policy, and only ever as a destructive urge, which some no doubt now feel guilty for giving way to…

…The Remain campaign continued to rely on forecasts, warnings and predictions, in the hope that eventually people would be dissuaded from ‘risking it’. But to those that have given up on the future already, this is all just more political rhetoric. In any case, the entire practice of modelling the future in terms of ‘risk’ has lost credibility, as evidenced by the now terminal decline of opinion polling as a tool for political control.

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Excellent analysis. Read it too for its take on “facts” v “data” and the claims in the campaign.
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An iPad Pro is not a Mac • getwired.com

Notorious traveller Wes Miller:

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I needed something smaller. Lighter. More efficient.

I’m not a developer. So I don’t need Xcode. I don’t work with Mac versions of most legacy multimedia software from Apple, Adobe, or others. I don’t even play games on my computers. But I work in Microsoft Office every single day. And there are things that I need there. There is the mobile version of the Office applications, and I have an E3 subscription that entitles me to using them.

So as I winnowed down my device options, I was seriously looking at the large iPad Pro. While I’m all thumbs when it comes to drawing (or hand-writing), the Smart Keyboard and iPad Pro make an acceptable (although compromising) combination.

In particular, as I pondered life with the iPad Pro, several caveats came up with the hardware, before I’d even considered the software capabilities.

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“Lappability” is infrequently used, but deserves more consideration.
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Why LaCroix sparkling water is suddenly everywhere – Vox

Libby Nelson and Javier Zarracina:

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Over the past decade, Americans have done something that would have once seemed downright un-American: They’ve given up soda [sugared carbonated drinks such as Coke]. And when you’re craving a can of pop, LaCroix is a decent substitute. Unlike tap water, it has carbonation and a little flavor. Unlike a countertop SodaStream, it’s cheap, readily available, and portable. Close your eyes, wrap your hand around the perspiring aluminum can, and you could be holding a Coca-Cola. LaCroix is succeeding as methadone for the soda addict.

LaCroix isn’t the only brand to benefit from the sparkling water boom. But it’s the one that’s risen to the coveted status of lifestyle brand, not just generating loyalty but becoming part of how we define ourselves. The secret behind LaCroix’s rise is a mix of old-fashioned business strategy and cutting-edge social marketing. When Americans wanted carbonated water, LaCroix was positioned to give them them fizzy water. Then, sometimes by accident, LaCroix developed fans among mommy bloggers, Paleo eaters, and Los Angeles writers who together pushed LaCroix into the zeitgeist.

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This article is suddenly everywhere, so I’m just helping out. If Americans are drinking less Coke/Pepsi/7Up/etc, then that’s good. Finally.
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Tech support scams target victims via their ISP • BBC News

Jane Wakefield, on a new wrinkle on the depressingly old “tech support” scam, which used to just involve cold-calling, but now includes audio messages which identify your ISP and say your machine is infected – which would scare the willies out of most non-techie people:

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How do scammers know your ISP?
In the case of cold calls it may just be a lucky case of guessing a common ISP but in the case of pop-ups, there is an altogether cleverer way for fraudsters to glean information that can help them.

How it works
• Big ad networks allow users to win ad space on websites by bidding at a particular price
• Criminals are taking advantage of this to place adverts which are infected with a single “bad” pixel
• This pixel can redirect users and infect them in the background when they are browsing on a perfectly legitimate site – they do not even need to click on the ad
• The malware in the ad redirects users to a website in the background – invisible to the user – which checks their computer and discovers their IP address
• From the IP address it is easy to find out which ISP owns which IP address
• Victims will be served a pop-up tailored for their specific ISP which warns them their computer is infected and gives them a number to call

Fraudsters do still use cold-calling but their methods here have also become more sophisticated – instead of a vague description of themselves as a Windows Support agent, many are now claiming to represent legitimate ISPs, with very believable answers when they are challenged.

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794 Ways in Which BuzzFeed Reminds Us of Impending Death • NYTimes.com

Heather Havrilesky:

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the more time you spend on BuzzFeed, the more the boundaries between “win” and “fail” seem to blur. After a while, it’s impossible not to slip into a disassociative trance, in which you surrender to the allure of some perpetual, trivial nowhereland, nestled somewhere between “15 Cats That You Don’t Want to Mess With” and the “44 Hong Kong Movie Subtitles Gone Wrong.”

The past is reduced to a slide show. The future is a YouTube video that won’t load. And the present is a jumble of jaunty yellow buttons blurting “omg” and “awww” and “tl;dr.”

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And then Havrilesky really hits her stride and the piece runs away into brilliance.
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Why we should expect algorithms to be biased • Technology Review

Nanette Byrnes:

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Fred Benenson, Kickstarter’s former data chief, calls [this] “mathwashing”: our tendency to idolize programs like Facebook’s as entirely objective because they have mathematics at their core.

One area of potential bias comes from the fact that so many of the programmers creating these programs, especially machine-learning experts, are male. In a recent Bloomberg article, Margaret Mitchell, a researcher at Microsoft, is quoted lamenting the dangers of a “sea of dudes” asking the questions central to creating these programs.

Concern has been building over this issue for some time, as studies found evidence of bias in online advertising, recruiting, and pricing strategies driven by presumably neutral algorithms.

In one study, Harvard professor Latanya Sweeney looked at the Google AdSense ads that came up during searches of names associated with white babies (Geoffrey, Jill, Emma) and names associated with black babies (DeShawn, Darnell, Jermaine). She found that ads containing the word “arrest” were shown next to more than 80% of “black” name searches but fewer than 30% of “white” name searches.

Sweeney worries that the ways Google’s advertising technology perpetuates racial bias could undermine a black person’s chances in a competition, whether it’s for an award, a date, or a job.

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Perennial topic, and worth keeping an eye on.
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