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Peter Thiel: the new public enemy No.1? Photo by apostolosp on Flickr.

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

Revealed: How copyright law is being misused to remove material from the internet • The Guardian

Alex Hern, with a story that starts when Annabelle Narey complained on Mumsnet about the work done by BuildTeam Holborn Ltd of London; the company complained, she and Mumsnet declined to remove it. But:

in April, the decision was made for her, in a very peculiar way. Mumsnet received a warning from Google: a takedown request had been made under the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), alleging that copyrighted material was posted without a licence on the thread. As soon as the DMCA takedown request had been filed, Google de-listed the entire thread. All 126 posts are now not discoverable when a user searches Google for BuildTeam – or any other terms. The search company told Mumsnet it could make a counterclaim, if it was certain no infringement had taken place, but since the site couldn’t verify that its users weren’t actually posting copyrighted material, it would have opened it up to further legal pressure. In fact, no copyright infringement had occurred at all. Instead, something weirder had happened. At some point after Narey posted her comments on Mumsnet, someone had copied the entire text of one of her posts and pasted it, verbatim, to a spammy blog titled “Home Improvement Tips and Tricks”. The post, headlined “Buildteam interior designers” was backdated to September 14 2015, three months before Narey had written it, and was signed by a “Douglas Bush” of South Bend, Indiana. The website was registered to someone quite different, though: Muhammed Ashraf, from Faisalabad, Pakistan.

Obviously, shenanigans. The question is by who, for what, and when. Any more details on that website or its operators welcomed. (Or other examples of similar backdate-and-DMCA.)

Startup employees invoke obscure law to open up books • WSJ

Rolfe Winkler:

For more than a year, Jay Biederman has pestered Domo Inc. for its financial statements. The former manager wants to estimate how much his tens of thousands of shares in the tech startup are worth. Domo, whose software analyzes corporate data, has rejected those requests, he said, keeping its financial records under wraps like most privately held startups. But the law may be on Mr. Biederman’s side. He recently discovered section 220 of Delaware’s corporate law, which can compel locally incorporated companies such as Domo to open up their books to shareholders. The law, little known in Silicon Valley, is a potentially valuable tool for thousands of tech workers who received stock awards to join fast-growing startups, as well as other small investors, who now question their shares’ worth… …Some companies are now pushing employees to waive their right to inspect the books as a condition for receiving stock awards, says Richard Grimm, an executive compensation attorney. Fitness tracking company Fitbit Inc. and online dating site Zoosk Inc. both did so as private companies, according to their IPO filings. Fitbit declined to comment. Zoosk didn’t respond to questions.

You just have to ask. Another tricky thing: lots of startup employees are given options to buy, not actual shares.

Xiaomi – Broken engagement • Radio Free Mobile

Richard Windsor thinks Xiaomi has poor engagement with its ecosystem and is struggling on the smartphone side:

I think that there is real risk that in Xiaomi’s 2016 [smartphone] units decline YoY on the back of a much softer market and much tougher competition. The edge that Xiaomi carved out for itself did not last long and I see it having to cut prices in order to minimise market share losses. Hence, it is not difficult to see revenues declining by 10% or more in 2016. In this instance, Xiaomi will have to act quickly and trim its operations back in order to avoid a loss both at the EBIT level and in terms of cash flow.

He puts a price tag of $5bn on it – rather than the $50bn others did last year when investing. Seems more reasonable.

Molekule ::

Welcome to a whole new air purification experience—unobtrusive, portable, and 100% effective. From the inside out, Molekule has reimagined what clean air ought to look and feel like.

Yours for $800. Let me think for a moment about what air should look like. And feel like. Still, good to know we’re not in a bubble.

Parsing Spotify’s financials • Beyond Devices

Jan Dawson does a deep dive:

The other interesting aspect of Spotify’s results is the split in its revenue sources, among which paid subscriptions and advertising account for over 99%. The split between those two has remained relatively constant over the last three years, with subscribers generating roughly 90% of revenue, and advertising the other 10%. That’s notable, because Spotify has over two times as many free subscribers as paid subscribers, but those paid subscribers generate nine times as much revenue. To look at it another way, the paid subscribers generate roughly 80 euros a year in revenue each, while the free subscribers generate just $3-4. This has been a matter of some controversy within the music industry, but in that podcast episode I referred to earlier, we discussed this, and Ryan Wright’s take was that the existence of free streaming is actually important from a perspective of creating a funnel for future paid subscribers.

I’ll have “paying subscribers”, please. Spotify’s problem filling its ad inventory, even as it does it better, is how poorly they pay relative to the costs they impose through licensing payments to labels. Fun exercise which only Spotify can do: what if you removed the cost of the label payouts for free streamers? How does that affect the costs v revenues? That’s where Apple Music is. (I think it’s “a lot less lossmaking”.) The other point to look at is how much of the IFPI’s paid streaming money comes from Spotify. It’s surprising.

Pointless features add to browser bloat and insecurity • The Register

Richard Chirgwin:

It might be time for the warlocks of the Web and brewers of JavaScript to revisit their ever-burgeoning developer wish-lists and sweep away the rubbish. Researchers from the University of Illinois have looked at how users and Website designers respond to the feature-list, and their study suggests there’s a whole lot of kruft that nobody – site owners or end users – are using. Or, as El Reg would put it: your browsers and Web servers are bloating with features nobody wants, and contribute nothing but extra lines of code. As they write at Arxiv: “We find, for example, that 50 per cent of the JavaScript provided features in the web browser are never used by the top ten thousand most popular websites,” the paper states. It’ll surprise nobody that at least some of the non-execution of features is down to site ad-blockers and the like, but the end result is: “83 per cent of available features are executed on less than 1 per cent of the most popular 10,000 websites.”

Examples: “ambient light events” (lets browser react to light level around machine; used by 14 of 10,000 in the study – and why do they use it? Isn’t that an OS thing?); “Encoding standard” which converts between encodings. One site uses it. And guess what? Those extra features also create security vulnerabilities. Clearly there’s a space for a new, lightweight browser. Again.

Sunk • The Atavist Magazine

Mitch Moxley with an epic tale of what sounds like the modern Heaven’s Gate:

The script called for an epic battle. In the movie’s third act, the forces of the Eight Faery Kingdoms defend their aquatic empires from annihilation by the evil Demon Mage and his spectral legions. Five hundred extras would play the opposing armies. But in January 2010, when Jonathan Lawrence, the director of Empires of the Deep, showed up for the shoot, in Qinyu, a resort town in coastal China, he saw only about 20 extras, mostly ornery Russians complaining that they hadn’t been paid in weeks. How would he turn 20 people into 500? On top of that, their costumes—swamp green rubber suits decorated with scales, octopus suckers, and shells—looked like poorly made Halloween getups. Some of them had fins glued to their heads. Lawrence was in most ways a strange choice to be running a massive film set in China. A 40-something director from Los Angeles with just one feature-film credit, he made his living directing shorts, commercials, and music videos. But then again, ever since he saw Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark as a teenager in 1981, he had waited for this chance.

Then again, remember how everyone thought John Carter (the daft sorta-sci-fi film from 2012 which cost $264m to make) would bankrupt its studio? Took $284m at the box office. Nobody knows anything.

Microsoft announces streamlining of smartphone hardware business • Microsoft News Center

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday announced plans to streamline the company’s smartphone hardware business, which will impact up to 1,850 jobs. As a result, the company will record an impairment and restructuring charge of approximately $950m, of which approximately $200m will relate to severance payments. “We are focusing our phone efforts where we have differentiation — with enterprises that value security, manageability and our Continuum capability, and consumers who value the same,” said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “We will continue to innovate across devices and on our cloud services across all mobile platforms.” Microsoft anticipates this will result in the reduction of up to 1,350 jobs at Microsoft Mobile Oy in Finland, as well as up to 500 additional jobs globally. Employees working for Microsoft Oy, a separate Microsoft sales subsidiary based in Espoo, are not in scope for the planned reductions. As a result of the action, Microsoft will record a charge in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2016 for the impairment of assets in its More Personal Computing segment, related to these phone decisions.

I take it that “Enterprises that value security, manageability and our Continuum capability” requires the intersection of all three elements, since you can get the first two all over the place. And “consumers who value the same” seem to be in short supply. Microsoft is going to be selling so few of these phones it may as well deliver them by courier.

Avoiding BlackBerry’s fate • The Brooks Review

Ben Brooks responds to Marco Arment’s “this looks bad for Apple” re AI:

Let’s assume that Marco is right and Apple isn’t even fucking trying big data or AI. (I personally feel there is little chance this is a correct assumption, but whatever. It actually doesn’t matter.) Let’s say, for shits and giggles, that Facebook wins at AI and Google wins at big data and Amazon does something else we don’t care about for this post. Does Apple become irrelevant? If you assume that they do, then essentially you think the iPhone paved the way. You think that the iPod was the first MP3 player, you think OS X was state of the art — and on and on. Apple rarely does it first. None of those things did it first. It’s not a zero-sum game. Apple succeeds right now because they do it better. Will it be hard to catch up? Maybe, but so far it’s not been hard for Apple at all. Not under Steve Jobs, and not under Tim Cook. Let’s also not forget Maps. When the iPhone came out, I don’t think Apple was prepared for just how crucial mapping would be. They just relied on Google to get it right. And then, Apple Maps. Is it better? That’s subjective. But it is most certainly good enough. The Apple Watch wasn’t even close to being the first. Is it amazing? Depends. But is it better than any other smart watch? Yes. So, even if Facebook, Google, and Amazon beat Apple to something, they would all very much want their something on the iPhone. Because: iPhone.

Tricky argument. A lot of the doomsaying is predicated on the idea that nobody can catch up on Google in machine learning (likely) *and* that nobody can make an adequate ML system even if they try to catch up. The latter doesn’t quite hold up when you think about it.

Inside Disney’s messy (and now closed) video game business • Tech Insider

Ben Gilbert:

One of the most common refrains among ex-Disney staffers was that Disney had a strong aversion to risk. They say Disney was rarely willing to make the investment — both financial and philosophical — required to become a major player in the video game business. “Disney is very buttoned up, financially, to an extent that was surprising to me,” former Disney Interactive senior VP and general manager Alex Seropian told Tech Insider. Seropian was the guy in charge of running Disney’s “core” game group from 2009 until 2012. He was the guy who oversaw various game studios that Disney bought, who worked with external development studios to create games that could be made in-house. He’s also a co-founder of Bungie Studios, the development studio that created blockbusters like “Halo” and “Destiny.” After nearly twelve years as CEO, Seropian moved over to Microsoft after its purchase of Bungie to oversee the launch of the first ever “Halo” game. Seropian understands how to create major new video games within a large corporation. But his knowledge and experience only got him so far at Disney. “Any big company has a finance department, has financial folks embedded in the product units, or business units will take the finances of the business very seriously, etc.” Seropian said. “But I found at Microsoft that there was a little more of a focus on the product, at least from the business decision-making aspect, with a little bit more of, ‘If we make the right thing the profits will come.'” Not at Disney.

Culture.

Champerty, Gawker and Peter Thiel • Caterina.net

Caterina Fake (who co-founded Flickr and many others):

It’s hard to pick a side in the Gawker-Thiel-Hogan lawsuit, reported today in Forbes, but the lawsuit and its outcome are a mere sideshow to the main story, which is that this case is a terrifying development for those of us who value a free, democratic media. What is most frightening about this lawsuit is that the press has always played a significant role in defending the small and powerless against the big and powerful. Gawker has played this role in its own tabloid style, but Thiel’s funding of this lawsuit shows how money can protect that power through third-party litigation funding.

Nah, it’s not hard to pick a side. Gawker were arses in putting up the Hulk Hogan content, but under the law that applies in the US it had a perfectly valid First Amendment right to do so. (A court has already ruled to that effect; the Hogan win elsewhere will be struck down on appeal.) That would have been different elsewhere with tougher privacy laws. But Gawker’s in the US, and it pokes usefully at the pompous in tech. Thiel, meanwhile, has made himself as welcome as the proverbial turd in the swimming pool. There’s some discussion as to whether Gawker became a target for Thiel because of this story. (Which is also unimportant – but that’s how the First Amendment works.)

No, you’re meant to use it in your house. Photo by Global X on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Because reasons. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

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

Nothing but the truth • The Marshall Project

Robert Kolker:

Gabriel Campos-Martinez — 35, unassuming, and dour, with a shock of black hair and an intense stare — had been living with Medellin for about six months, and everything about his story raised suspicion. He told police that Medellin woke up one December morning and said he was leaving for Mexico, and that was the last Campos-Martinez had seen of him. But police could find no evidence that Medellin had gone anywhere in the weeks before the gruesome discovery — no ticket purchases, no gas station visits on his credit card. They learned that someone had transferred Medellin’s Social Security direct-deposit to an account controlled by both Medellin and Campos-Martinez. The latter’s browser history showed searches for diamond and gold websites, which made the cops wonder whether he’d been trying to sell some of Medellin’s belongings. Then there was the article that Campos-Martinez had apparently viewed online on December 27 — the last day Medellin was seen alive — about the best way to dismember a human carcass. All that evidence, however, was maddeningly circumstantial. A search of the Hollywood apartment the two men had shared turned up very little: no murder weapon, no incriminating physical evidence. Their interrogations didn’t yield much either.

It’s a deep dive into how US police have changed interrogation techniques. You can read pretty much the same piece (though with a different example) in the New Yorker from 2013. Either is fascinating. My key takeaway? Liars find it hard to tell their made-up story in reverse chronological order, and lack detail.

Coming soon: express even more in 140 characters • Twitter Blogs

Todd Sherman, senior product manager:

So, you can already do a lot in a Tweet, but we want you to be able to do even more. In the coming months we’ll make changes to simplify Tweets including what counts toward your 140 characters, so for instance, @names in replies and media attachments (like photos, GIFs, videos, and polls) will no longer “use up” valuable characters. Here’s what will change:…

Two biggest changes: @names won’t be part of the character count (include up to 50 people in your Twitter canoe! To 48 peoples’ annoyance!) and @-replies will be visible to everyone, not just those who follow the @-replied person and yourself. The latter is a reversion to how Twitter worked before May 2009.

Google Maps directions may soon lead you to … more ads • Associated Press

Michael Liedtke:

You might start seeing more ads when getting directions from Google’s popular mapping service. The ads, called “promoted pins,” will highlight restaurants and other merchants located along your way. They’ll show up inside the directions map as Google routes you to your destination. Google has displayed text ads alongside its online maps for several years. But the change announced Tuesday marks the first time the Internet company has inserted the equivalent of a digital billboard into the directions map itself. Google is importing the concept to its Maps app from Waze, a smaller traffic-navigation service that the company also runs. Google Maps boasts more than 1 billion users worldwide, but not everyone will see the new ads right away.

Images started getting ads a few weeks ago. Once ads come in, it’s irreversible. Choose for yourself whether you want to view companies’ reliance on them as an addiction, or an infection (along the lines of a retrovirus which inserts itself into the DNA – like HIV).

Apple opening Siri, developing Echo rival • The Information

Amir Efrati:

Apple hopes to make the Siri SDK available in time for its annual conference for developers in June. To work with Siri, the third-party apps will need some kind of search-query box that Siri could fill with the user’s verbal request once the app is accessed. It’s unclear what would happen if an iPhone or Apple Watch owner had multiple apps that did the same thing, like Uber and Lyft, and then asked Siri to “book me a ride home.” (Don’t bother asking Siri to book an Uber ride today; the results are typically terrible.) An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment. As for its Echo-competitor, Apple has been working on the device since long before the $180 Echo launched in mid-2015, according to a person with direct knowledge and another person briefed on the project. The Echo has been a surprise hit even among some non-tech-savvy English speakers. Like the iPhone already does today, the Web-connected Apple speaker in development would allow people to turn on/off or change settings for home appliances and other devices that support Apple’s “HomeKit” software, says the person with direct knowledge of the project. Such items include lights, sensors, thermostats, plugs and locks. Making a speaker won’t be a stretch for Apple—it has made speakers before, including speakers designed for the iPod music player.

Oddly enough, I was listening today to John Gruber’s Talk Show with Rene Ritchie, where both these ideas were discussed: Ritchie suggested the Echo idea had been one path that Apple tried with the Apple TV in experimentation. My question is, what use is a voice-operated gewgaw if you don’t have internet lights etc?

How to escape that forced Windows 10 upgrade you mistakenly agreed to • PCWorld

Mark Hachman:

On Monday, hordes of angry Windows users pelted Microsoft with complaints about being lured into upgrading their PCs over the weekend. For months, Microsoft has been urging users running Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 to upgrade to Windows 10 before the free offer expires on July 29. But the series of dialog boxes and other messages that Microsoft has sent users have become increasingly deceptive, burying the opt-out links amid text that appears to commit users to the upgrade. Normally, closing the dialog box by clicking the red box in the upper righthand corner automatically opted out. Over the weekend, clicking that red box started opting users in to the upgrade. That not only flies in the face of years of user-interface design, it contradicts Microsoft’s own advice for dealing with suspicious dialog boxes. “Never click ‘Agree’ or ‘OK’ to close a window that you suspect might be spyware,” states Microsoft’s page on viruses and malware. “Instead, click the red ‘x’ in the corner of the window or press Alt + F4 on your keyboard to close a window.”

The explanations of how to opt out are like one of those text Adventure games: you’re in a twisty passageway, with taskbar popups behind and in front of you.

Samsung is done with the Android Wear OS • Fast Company

Mark Sullivan:

It was at Google I/O two years ago that Samsung announced its Gear Live smartwatch (now discontinued) running the Android Wear OS. Two years later the collaboration is over. Samsung executives told Fast Company today that no more Samsung Android Wear devices are in development or being planned. The executives said Samsung’s own Tizen OS, used in almost all the company’s wearables now, is far more battery-efficient than Android Wear. Also, Tizen is becoming the standard OS on other Samsung products from TVs to refrigerators, the executives said.

One is slightly tempted to call Android Wear a little bit dead (even though Android Wear 2 brings a keyboard! For a watch!). By my calculations, in the past week it crossed a lifetime install figure of 4m, based on the number of downloads from the Google Play Store.

Facebook’s troubling one-way mirror • NYTimes.com

Jim Rutenberg:

For outlets like The Daily Caller, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post or The New York Times — for whom Facebook’s audience is vital to growth — any algorithmic change can affect how many people see their journalism. A cautionary tale came in 2014. The news site Upworthy was successfully surfing the Facebook formula with click bait headlines that won many eyeballs. Then a change in the Facebook algorithm punished click bait, which can tend to overpromise on what it links to. Steep traffic drops followed. (Upworthy has recovered, in part by relying on more on video.) Throughout the media, a regular guessing game takes place in which editors seek to divine how the Facebook formula may have changed, and what it might mean for them. Facebook will often give general guidance, such as announcing last month that it had adjusted its programming to favor news articles that readers engage with deeply — rather than shallow quick hits — or saying that it would give priority to live Facebook Live videos, which it is also paying media companies, including The New York Times, to experiment with.

News outlets as rats in Skinner boxes. So much for the internet as the great leveller which would allow anyone to flourish.

Pittsburgh offers ultimate test for Uber’s self-driving Fusions • TribLIVE

Aaron Aupperlee:

The car took control with the click of a button. Mathew Priest, the Uber employee in the driver’s seat who was no more than a passenger at this point, took his hands off the wheel and foot off the pedal as the car drove itself east on the 31st Street Bridge. The Ford Fusion slowed to a stop behind several cars at a red light and turned left onto River Avenue. Uber is testing its fleet of self-driving cars on the streets, bridges and hills of Pittsburgh, the ride-sharing company confirmed Wednesday. The San Francisco-based firm has said little about its progress in developing autonomous vehicles since it opened the Advanced Technology Center 15 months ago in Pittsburgh’s Strip District. John Bares, head of Uber’s Pittsburgh lab, took a Tribune-Review reporter on a ride in a Fusion hybrid that drove itself for portions of the trip. It was the first time Uber allowed a member of the media to ride in a test car in self-driving mode, he said.

Autonomous cabs? Very Total Recall. Uber is thinking just over the horizon, and this is it bringing that closer.

This newspaper used an algorithm to play a nasty trick on readers in comments section • Adweek

Gabriel Beltrone:

A publication in Pakistan is taking an aggressive approach to stressing the importance of press freedoms—by helping readers better understand the unpleasantness of having their own words inverted. The Daily Times and agency Grey Singapore wanted to drive home the dangers of censorship with their “Free My Voice” campaign. They wrote an algorithm that automatically flipped the meaning of commenters’ posts, and applied it to comments beneath a controversial article about the Islamic country’s blasphemy law (which includes such punishments as life imprisonment for desecration of the Quran—but often finds accused parties murdered before their trials are complete). Commenters praising the article or its subject automatically found themselves criticizing it, and vice versa, with the site changing their intent over and over. Eventually, the gimmick bounced them to a landing page for the publication’s campaign, where they could sign a petition supporting it, or donate.

This is AWFUL. No, I meant AWFUL. Dammit – I typed AWFUL.

How to recover from an Alpha ransomware attack • Graham Cluley

David Bisson:

Alpha is the third ransomware to ask for gift cards as ransom payment in recent weeks. Last week, I reported on TrueCrypter and Cyber.Police, two ransomware variants which asked that victims pay them in Amazon and iTunes gift cards, respectively. Both TrueCrypter and Cyber.Police suffered from design flaws which largely rendered them as little more than a nuisance. It would appear the same is true for Alpha. A bug in the ransomware’s code prevented the emails to which victims are supposed to send payments from being listed. But that doesn’t even matter anymore. Michael Gillespie has since spotted a more significant coding vulnerability, which he has used to develop a decryption tool for the ransomware. Any victim who has been affected by Alpha should download Gillespie’s utility here.

The choice of notionally untraceable gift card codes rather than the notionally untraceable bitcoin suggests that either bitcoin’s value has been too variable (unlikely – it’s ransomware, who cares about the precise value?), or victims have found it too hard to get bitcoin accounts (possible), or that it’s just a lot less hassle to sell gift card codes than bitcoin. Leaning toward a mixture of the last two.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

How can an unsafe car be safe? It’s all in the framing. Photo by Arslan 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.

Machine bias: there’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks • ProPublica

Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu and Lauren Kirchner:

»Borden and her friend [both aged 18, who had stolen two bicycles] were arrested and charged with burglary and petty theft for the items, which were valued at a total of $80.

Prater was the more seasoned criminal. He had already been convicted of armed robbery and attempted armed robbery, for which he served five years in prison, in addition to another armed robbery charge. Borden had a record, too, but it was for misdemeanors committed when she was a juvenile.

Yet something odd happened when Borden and Prater were booked into jail: A computer program spat out a score predicting the likelihood of each committing a future crime. Borden — who is black — was rated a high risk. Prater — who is white — was rated a low risk.

Two years later, we know the computer algorithm got it exactly backward. Borden has not been charged with any new crimes. Prater is serving an eight-year prison term for subsequently breaking into a warehouse and stealing thousands of dollars’ worth of electronics.

«

You can read how the analysed the data, and download the dataset.
link to this extract

Unsafe cars can save lives • Marginal REVOLUTION

Alex Tabarrok:

»David Ward, secretary general of Global NCAP told the Wall Street Journal:

»

Global NCAP strongly believes that no manufacturer anywhere in the world should be developing new models that are so clearly sub-standard,” he said. “Car makers must ensure that their new models pass the UN’s minimum crash test regulations, and support use of an airbag.

«

Let’s take a closer look. These cars are very inexpensive. A Renault Kwid, for example, can be had for under $4000. In the Indian market these cars are competing against motorcycles. Only 6 percent of Indian households own a car but 47% own a motorcycle. Overall, there are more than five times as many motorcycles as cars in India.

Motorcycles are also much more dangerous than cars.

«

So easy to overlook the prevailing market conditions. How many motorbikes have airbags? A car without one is still safer.
link to this extract

Spotify revenues topped $2bn last year as losses hit $194m • Music Business Worldwide

Great scoop by Tim Ingham delving into Luxembourg filings:

»Spotify brought in a whopping $2.18bn (€1.95bn) in revenues in 2015, growing its income by 80% in the year.

Net losses stood at a painful  $194m (€173.1m), but these grew much slower – widening by just 6.7% compared to 2014.

In a financial filing in Luxembourg uncovered by MBW, Spotify told its investors that “in many ways, [2015] was our best year ever”.

Advertising revenues nearly doubled in the 12 months, up 98% to $219m (€195.8m).

Meanwhile, subscription revenues grew by a slightly slower pace, up 78% to $1.95bn (€1.74bn).

In terms of Spotify’s total $2bn+ income (negligible ‘other’ revenues aside), ads therefore claimed 10.1% – an improvement on the 9.2% share seen in 2014, but another reminder of how heavily the company relies on people paying for premium accounts.

«

The costs of sales and marketing, and general and administrative, are growing very fast. R+D not so much. Is there a point where it can swing to profitability?
link to this extract

Adblocking puts $32bn at risk globally by 2019 • Optimal

Rob Leathern:

»We recently collaborated with Wells Fargo Securities on a survey of US smartphone users, asking them about their ad blocking preferences, and as a result we produced a US model of display ad revenue lost to blocking ($12.1 billion by 2020, the full model is available with registration here). The data we shared also assisted Wells Fargo (along with MagnaGlobal figures) to produce the following estimates of global ad spend at risk from ad-blocking. You’ll need to be an accredited investor to read their report and see their reasoning, but they gave us permission to reproduce the top-level figures here ($ in millions):

«

Leathern thinks those figures are “conservative”.
link to this extract

Fraudulent claims made by IBM about Watson and AI • Roger Schank

»I started a company called Cognitive Systems in 1981. The things I was talking about then clearly have not been read by IBM (although they seem to like the words I used.) Watson is not reasoning. You can only reason if you have goals, plans, and ways of attaining them, and a comprehension of the beliefs that others may have and a knowledge of past experiences to reason from. A point f view helps too. What is Watson’s view on ISIS for example?

Dumb question? Actual thinking entities have a point of view about ISIS. Dog’s don’t but Watson isn’t as smart as a dog either. (The dog knows how to get my attention for example.)

I invented a field called Case Based Reasoning in the 80’s which was meant to enable computers to compare new situations to old ones and then modify what the computer knew as a result. We were able to build some useful systems. And we learned a lot about human learning. Did I think we had created computers that were now going to outthink people or soon become conscious? Of course not. I thought we had begun to create computers that would be more useful to people.

It would be nice if IBM would tone down the hype and let people know what Watson can actually do can and stop making up nonsense about love fading and out thinking cancer. IBM is simply lying now and they need to stop.

AI winter is coming soon.

«

link to this extract

Why the virtual reality hype is about to come crashing down • WSJ

Christopher Mims:

»Makers of virtual reality headsets think 2016 will be the year of VR. The experience “is radically different than any computing experience you’ve had before,” says Marc Metis, a vice president at HTC Corp., maker of the Vive headset.

Content creators, however, tell a different story. VR isn’t ready for prime time.

This gap between expectations and reality means the VR hype train is about to crash into a wall.

In my experience, VR demos can be very impressive. The problem is that most are just that—demos.

As new, highly touted headsets arrive this year, how much content will be available, and how deep will these experiences be? The short answers: not much, and fairly shallow…

…Unfortunately, much nongame VR content, including so-called “360 video,” doesn’t support that illusion. Rather than feeling that you are in a place, experiencing an event, current 360 video tends to make you feel like your head is “in a fishbowl of video,” as Mr. Pinnell puts it. Such experiences make me fear that 360 video will be the next 3-D TV, something nobody asked for and few will use.

«

By definition, hype crashes at some point. But this points to an essential thing about VR: it’s content-based. Without the content – or unless you can create the content yourself easily – it’s completely wasted. Imagine if the web had had to rely on professionals to create content, and we were in 1995; that’s sort of where VR is now.
link to this extract

CMA response to BIS consultation on the future of the Land Registry • Publications – GOV.UK

The Competition and Markets Authority is the UK’s monopolies regulator. Here is its summary on the government’s proposals to sell of Land Registry:

»Government’s preferred option would create a privatised vertically-integrated business engaged in both monopoly and commercial activities. The CMA believes that as a result, the business may fail to maintain or improve access to its monopoly data, and may seek to weaken competition to its own commercial products, despite the best efforts of oversight bodies to regulate prices and impose safeguards.

«

There’s more detail in this PDF. I find this amazing: a government oversight body essentially criticising government policy.

I hope that it will affect that policy, but it needs the right minister to hear it. I don’t know if there’s anyone listening beyond the dogma whistle.
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Tim Cook acknowledges iPhone cost high in India • Business Insider

Jim Edwards:

»Apple CEO Tim Cook just gave his most detailed commentary yet on the effect the high price of the iPhone has on the device’s declining sales. In an interview with NDTV’s Vikram Chandra in India, Cook was asked a tough question about whether the iPhone — which costs about $600 in the US but is more expensive almost everywhere else in the world — was really worth its price.

iPhone sales fell 16% in the most recent quarter, and the iPhone is losing market share to Android almost everywhere. Analysts believe iPhone sales will continue to decline all through this year.

Cook replied that he did think the iPhone might be priced too high in India, and he said the company would consider lowering the price: “I recognise that prices are high. We want to do things that lower that over time to the degree that we can.”

That is a significant acknowledgement.

«

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Apple’s Touch ID rules may be designed to protect human rights • Macworld

Glenn Fleishman:

»Consider a restriction to Touch ID’s continuous use that I just uncovered. Apple didn’t intend for this addition to be a secret, but it somehow added it in September 2015 and didn’t document the change until a few days ago. (Apple confirmed the change for me.)

You can read about it in detail, but the gist is that on top of the 48-hour countdown between Touch ID uses before a passcode is required, the “new” change adds a separate timer.

After six days of unlocking with just Touch ID (and not restarting), the 48-hour clock is replaced with an eight-hour one. If you go eight hours or more between unlocking with Touch ID, you’re required to unlock with the passcode. As soon as you enter the passcode, the 48-hour and 6-day countdowns are reset.

Why add an eight-hour timer? Apple declined to offer any insight into why it was added, nor why it wasn’t documented until last week. I have some thoughts, mostly in the form of analogy.

«

I’d wondered, like many, why TouchID was being more pernickety about wanting my passcode. Fleishman’s argument makes a lot of sense.
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Exclusive: Xiaomi revenues were flat in 2015 • Fortune

Scott Cendrowski:

»Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone maker and second highest-valued startup in the world at $45 billion, barely grew sales at all last year.

Revenue for 2015 reached 78 billion yuan ($12.5bn), a 5% rise from 2014’s 74.3bn yuan, a person in the company’s public affairs office said for the first time over the weekend. Taking into account the falling value of the Chinese currency, the yuan, sales rose 3% in US dollar terms.

Xiaomi has been mum about the 2015 sales total since founder Lei Jun gave a revenue target of 100 billion yuan ($16bn at the time) at a government meeting in March last year. The Xiaomi public affairs official, Ge Liang, announced the 2015 figure in an interview this weekend at a Beijing tech conference. The interview later ran on a few Chinese news sites, including the conference’s own. (One of the news sites, China News Net, has since deleted it.)

A Xiaomi spokeswoman says, “We have never shared the revenue figure and we are not able to comment on the figure that you shared. What we have shared is we sold over 70 million smartphones in 2015 despite the shrinking of the smartphone market.”

«

Xiaomi’s smartphone shipments were up 14.5%, so if its revenues – which now also include TVs and set-top boxes and air conditioners and so on – rose 5%, that’s not a healthy sign. Could it just be that all the money pumped into Xiaomi was chasing the wrong business model?
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The definitive guide to decoding Washington’s anonymous sources • Huffington Post

Ryan Grim and Jason Linkins:

»You have surely noticed that story after story is powered by the musings of anonymous congressional aides, lawmakers and White House officials. Can you believe any of this? Yes. But it depends. To a non-initiated reader, the description of these anonymous creatures may appear to be quite random. But embedded within them are major giveaways about the reliability of the information being passed on, and how much credit you should give it. For example, if the author of the story you’re reading is an experienced Capitol Hill reporter, the description of the source you’re reading is likely the result of an explicit agreement between the source and the reporter.

«

Useful primer for the US elections; roughly the same works for UK politics too.
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How Thync, startup behind brain-zapping gadget, almost died • Bloomberg

Ellen Huet:

»Khosla Ventures, a VC firm known for investing in out-there businesses like plant-based egg substitutes, biofuels and artificially intelligent toys, made an early investment in Thync when it led the Los Gatos, Calif., startup’s $13 million funding round in 2014. Thync, which created one of the first consumer brain-stimulation devices on the market, advertised a $199 white dongle that sticks to a person’s forehead with an accompanying strip on the back of their neck. The wearer presses a button on their phone and gets a 10- to 20-minute “vibe session.” The electric current that followed would give them quick energy or calmness, helping them perk up without coffee or sleep without drugs.

The concept drew in tech’s early adopters and quantified-self devotees, eager to try the Valley’s newest frontier-busting trend. Industry socialite Susan MacTavish Best hosted an “evening of vibes” last year at her Victorian home in San Francisco, where startup founders, executives and artists could sample Thync’s electrical pulses alongside a buffet of grilled romaine, pork-belly candy and blackberry-smash cocktails while jazz pianist ELEW performed live.

«

Note that: one of the *first* brain-stimulation devices. This makes Silicon Valley, the TV series, look more and more like a documentary.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Your smartphone’s apps and software uses distraction like a magician – but is that a good thing for you? Photo by ThaQeLa 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. Unlucky for some (principally those who work in base 12). I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

For the first time, Google beat Apple in US PC sales — and that’s really bad news for Microsoft • Business Insider

Matt Weinberger achieves the trifecta of all three of the big names in a headline:

»Today, two very important things happened for the future of the PC as we know it.

First: For the first time ever, low-cost Google Chromebook laptops outsold Apple’s Macs during the most recent quarter, analyst firm IDC tells The Verge.

Manufacturers including Dell, Lenovo, and HP sold over 2 million Google-powered Chromebooks combined, versus around 1.76 million Macs, IDC estimates.

Second: those same Google Chromebooks are getting full access to Android’s Google Play store, opening the door for those laptops to run a significant portion of the 1.5 million Android apps out in the wild.

For Apple, it’s not necessarily great news, but it’s not the end of the world, either. Quarter after quarter, Macs have shown sales growth, bucking the overall shrinkage of the PC industry. And Apple has always been a company that’s content to completely and profitably own a small piece of a much larger pie.

But for Microsoft, it means that the pressure is on — Google’s slow-but-steady attack is bearing some real results, and it’s not great news for Windows 10.

«

Weinberger’s right; that 2m is over 10% of the US market (of 13.6m). And PC OEMs get better margins on Chromebooks (no Windows licence to pay). And soon those machines will be attractive to younger users because they’ll be able to run Android apps. (In passing: potentially a problem for Apple unless it can get iOS apps to run on Macs.)
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Tech support locker scam poses as failed Microsoft Update • The Register

John Leyden:

»Cybercrooks have put together a new scam that falls halfway between ransomware and old school browser lockup ruses.

The new class of “tech support lockers” rely on tricking users into installing either a fake PC optimiser or bogus Adobe Flash update. Once loaded the malware mimicks ransomware and locks users out of their computers. Unlike Locky, CryptoWall and their ilk it doesn’t actually encrypt files on compromised Windows PCs, however.

Jérôme Segura, a senior security researcher at Malwarebytes, said “tech support lockers” represent a class of malware more advanced than browser locks and fake anti-virus alerts of the pre-ransomware past.

“This is not a fake browser pop up that can easily be terminated by killing the application or restarting the PC,” Segura writes in a blog post. “No, this is essentially a piece of malware that starts automatically, and typical Alt+F4 or Windows key tricks will not get rid of it.”

One strain of tech support locker employs a subtle piece of social engineering trickery by waiting until a users restarts their computer before confronting users with a fake Windows update screen. Users are told their computers can’t be restarted normally supposedly because of an “expired license key”. Thereafter a screen locks a user out of their computer in an attempt to trick marks into phoning a support number, staffed by scammers.

«

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The strange science of why airport security lines spiral out of control • NY Mag

Drake Baer:

»Queues are governed by Little’s Law, which states that the number of items in a queuing system (the length of a queue) is equal to the average waiting time per item (how long each interaction takes) times the number of items arriving per unit time (how many people/things are coming in).

For queues with “servers” — someone handling transactions with whomever’s at the front of the line — the server needs to have some idle time, otherwise the queue, according to the math, could grow without limit. For a queue with only a single server, the rule of thumb is about 15 percent to 20 percent idle time. If there’s lots of servers (like a call bank with hundreds of people taking calls), then they don’t need as much idle time, because there’s less of a chance of every server being occupied at once, causing the line to build and leading to the inevitable viral videos.

A lot of this, Larson says, has to do with the profoundly human quality of variability. If queues were mechanical — like in a well-run factory, where the time of arrival and the time of service for each transaction were highly predictable — then a server could be super busy and queues still wouldn’t form.

But people are neither predictable nor identical in how they approach airline travel.

«

Damn people.
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The hack at ShapeShift • Money And State

Erik Vorhees:

»Last fall, we realized the “minimum viable product” server architecture established originally for ShapeShift was insufficient. We needed a professional to join the small team, and craft a scalable, and secure, server apparatus upon which our technology could grow.

We hired such a person, and patted ourselves on the back for our proactive decision. On paper, he looked great; the reference we called confirmed his prior role and responsibility. He’d even been into Bitcoin since 2011/2012 and had built miners in his room. Awesome. We’ll call this new employee Bob… indeed his real name starts with a B.

Over the next months, Bob built and managed ShapeShift’s infrastructure. He did okay, nothing special, but we were content to have a professional taking care of devops at least well enough to enable our engineers to build upon the architecture.

In the first quarter of this year, as the market discovered what we already knew – that our world will be one of many blockchain assets each needing liquidity with the other – exchange volumes surged at ShapeShift. Ethereum was on the rise, specifically. Our infrastructure was not ready for the pace of growth. It was like riding a bicycle upon which jet engines suddenly appear full-thrust.

Unfortunately, Bob did little to be helpful. He puttered around aimlessly while the team worked long hours to keep the ship together.

Scratch that, actually, Bob was not aimless.

He was preparing to steal from us.

«

This is a riveting read – not short, but thorough and worthwhile.
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Avoiding BlackBerry’s fate • Marco.org

»Becoming a major big-data AI services company doesn’t happen completely in secret and suddenly get released to the world, completed, in a keynote. It’s a massive undertaking, spanning many years, many people, and a lot of noticeable interaction with the world. It’s easier to conceal the development of an entire car than a major presence in AI and services.

Google is extremely well-placed for where they think the puck is going. They could be wrong — these AI services could be a socially awkward fad like Google Glass or a tonedeaf annoyance like Clippy. Google launches a lot of weird, geeky, technologically impressive things that go nowhere.

If Google is wrong, and computing continues to be defined by a tightly controlled grid of siloed apps that you poke a thousand times a day on a smooth rectangle of manufacturing excellence, Apple is fine. They’re doing a great job of what computing is today, and what it will probably continue to be for a long time.

But if Google is right, that’s a big problem for Apple.

«

Apple is pretty busy in AI and machine learning systems; it has been hiring. I think there’s a more subtle threat to Apple: what if you don’t use “things” to interact with these systems any more?
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Mirrors blamed for fire at world’s largest solar plant • Associated Press

»A small fire shut down a generating tower Thursday at the world’s largest solar power plant, leaving the sprawling facility on the California-Nevada border operating at only a third of its capacity, authorities said.

Firefighters had to climb some 300 feet up a boiler tower at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in California after fire was reported on an upper level around 9:30 a.m., fire officials said.

The plant works by using mirrors to focus sunlight on boilers at the top of three 459-foot towers, creating steam that drive turbines to produce electricity.

But some misaligned mirrors instead focused sunbeams on a different level of Unit 3, causing electrical cables to catch fire, San Bernardino County, California fire Capt. Mike McClintock said.

David Knox, spokesman for plant operator NRG Energy, said it was too early to comment on the cause, which was under investigation.

«

Pretty dramatic fire – it melted lots of stuff.
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How technology hijacks peoples’ minds — from a magician and Google’s design ethicist • Medium

Tristan Harris, who leaves you in no doubt from this article’s first line, which is “I’m an expert in how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities”:

»If you’re an app, how do you keep people hooked? Turn yourself into a slot machine.

The average person checks their phone 150 times a day. Why do we do this? Are we making 150 conscious choices?

How often do you check your email per day?

One major reason why is the #1 psychological ingredient in slot machines: intermittent variable rewards.
If you want to maximize addictiveness, all tech designers need to do is link a user’s action (like pulling a lever) with a variable reward. You pull a lever and immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing. Addictiveness is maximized when the rate of reward is most variable.

Does this effect really work on people? Yes. Slot machines make more money in the United States than baseball, movies, and theme parks combined. Relative to other kinds of gambling, people get ‘problematically involved’ with slot machines 3–4x faster according to NYU professor Natasha Dow Shull, author of Addiction by Design.

But here’s the unfortunate truth — several billion people have a slot machine their pocket:
•When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we got.
•When we pull to refresh our email, we’re playing a slot machine to see what new email we got.
•When we swipe down our finger to scroll the Instagram feed, we’re playing a slot machine to see what photo comes next.
•When we swipe faces left/right on dating apps like Tinder, we’re playing a slot machine to see if we got a match.
•When we tap the # of red notifications, we’re playing a slot machine to what’s underneath.

«

That’s only the addiction side, and some of that is accidental; what Harris points to is that much of what gets us glued to distractions is intentional by the companies involved (including, as he points out, YouTube, owned by his ex-employer). His website is http://timewellspent.io
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Modular phone Ara to finally launch • The Register

Kieren McCarthy:

»The Ara project was originally announced in October 2013 and was part of the acquired Motorola Mobility business. Since then it has become part of Google’s Advanced Technology and Products (ATAP) division.

Despite periodically putting out videos touting Ara’s possibilities, however, little has been heard about the project and many assumed it was going the way of so many other Google projects: into the trash.

Not so. And ATAP Head of Creative, Blaise Bertrand, said at Google’s I/O conference on Friday that the phone will launch to developers in the fourth quarter of this year, with a consumer version put out sometime in 2017.

The phone even has a website, complete with more videos, so it must be happening.

«

Except, as one of the commenters points out, the modularity won’t extend to the screen, GPU, CPU, RAM or sensors. So basically all the things that were meant to make this useful if modular won’t be modular.
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Google built a tiny radar system into a smartwatch for gesture controls • The Verge

Dieter Bohn:

»”How are you going to interact with an invisible computer?”

When you hear a question like that posted in a conference room at a major tech corporation like Google, you expect you’re going to be in for an hour or two of technophizing with few tangible results at the end of it.

But then somebody sets a smartwatch on the table in front of you. You snap your fingers in the air just a couple of inches away from it. And the digital watch face starts spinning.

Ivan Poupyrev, who posed that question (and many more) works at Google’s ATAP [Advanced Technology and Projects] research lab and is the technical project lead for Project Soli, which is designed to prove that we can embed tiny radar chips into electronics so that we can use minute hand gestures to control the digital world around us. Why on earth would you want radar in a smartwatch?

To prove that you can interact with an invisible computer. Duh…

…By comparison to the electronics and the machine learning algorithms, actually deciding which gestures should do what seems easy. But if you think about it a minute, maybe it’s not. With a touchscreen, you can see buttons and sliders. With physical switch, you can feel the snick when you flick it on. But if there’s nothing but air, how do you guide the user?

“Is everything going to have its own interface?” Poupyrev asks. “Is every switch, every smart sprinkler, or cup going to have its own? It’s going to create confusion.” One of Soli’s goals is to create a common design language that’s easy to learn but flexible enough to control a lot of things.

«

I got the impression, reading the article, that neither Bohn nor the Googlers could figure out what the killer use case for this technology would be – or even if there is one.
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December 2015: How Theranos misled me • Fortune

Roger Parloff, in December 2015, after the Wall Street Journal exposed how Theranos wasn’t doing what it claimed, tried to figure out why he had come away convinced, for an article in 2014, that it was doing all those things – including “more than 200” types of blood test:

»After Theranos’s Oct. 22 statement, I contacted officials there to inquire how many tests it had actually been commercially performing by proprietary means in June 2014, when I had reported that it was offering more than 200. A spokesperson acknowledged to me that it was fewer than 200, but declined to specify how many. She said she’d send a statement.

The company’s statement arrived Nov. 3. “As discussed when you visited Theranos,” it said, “Theranos could perform hundreds of tests (more than 200) using its proprietary technologies. The reports you reviewed at Theranos covered many of those tests Theranos developed for use with finger-stick samples.”

(The company had, indeed, provided me in the Spring of 2014 with what it said were—and what looked to be—validation studies for scores of different diagnostic tests, though, in truth, I lacked the expertise to assess their significance.)

The statement then went on to address my followup question, which was basically: If you were capable of doing 200-plus tests using your proprietary methods, why weren’t you in fact doing them?

Here, with trademark, Theranos-ian opacity, is the reply: “Over time, we’ve been optimizing our clinical lab to bring up tests that are more commonly ordered, and in some cases move resources off the proprietary tests that are less commonly ordered to get to a point where the ordering patterns we are seeing can all be accommodated through our finger-stick technology.”

Got that?

«

Parloff’s walk back through his notes, and Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes’s opaque replies, are a laudable attempt to try to figure out what happened. It’s something that can – has – happened to many journalists: you think you understand it, and you let them whitewash you. Only by repeatedly asking “just explain that to me in more detail” do you finally get to the core. Or in Theranos’s case, the void where the core should be.
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Guns replaced with selfie sticks • Tumblr

For example:

Though the Schwarzenegger one that heads the site actually captures something about Arnie that had always been only implied.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Google’s Instant Apps concept could make parking in unfamiliar cities much, much simpler. Photo by arbyreed on Flickr.

Reading this on the web? You could sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. No, really.

A selection of 11 links for you. Free as in “the first month costs $90 payable in daily instalments, followed by 400 payments of $100”. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

I worked on Facebook’s Trending team – the most toxic work experience of my life • The Guardian

“Anonymous” (you’ll realise why):

»Working at Facebook, even as a contractor, was supposed to be the opportunity of a lifetime. It was, instead, the most toxic work experience of my life.

As a curator, my job was to choose what links would appear on the Facebook “trending” box on the right side of a user’s newsfeed. Every day, I sifted through hundreds of topics (or “keywords”) that Facebook told me were trending on the platform. Then I’d choose a story about the keyword, and come up with a headline and a short summary that would appear on the trending box.

Most, if not all, of what you’ve read about Facebook’s Trending team in Gizmodo over the past few weeks has been mischaracterized or taken out of context. There is no political bias that I know of and we were never told to suppress conservative news. There is an extraordinary amount of talent on the team, but poor management, coupled with intimidation, favoritism and sexism, has resulted in a deeply uncomfortable work environment. Employees I worked with were angry, depressed and left voiceless – especially women.

«

Hell of an article. But it’s not just formal work environments that can be toxic in the new era…
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Wikipedia editor says site’s toxic community has him contemplating suicide • Motherboard

Jason Koebler:

»Some people on the Wikipedia-L listed echoed the editor’s woes. “This editor and their editing may be an extreme case, but they are not alone,” one person response. “Yup. It’s very, very toxic at times. And nobody really cares,” another person wrote.

I am not a Wikipedia editor, but I monitor the community closely, and it’s increasingly obvious that there is a lack of civility even at higher levels. For months, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and former Wikimedia Foundation board member James Heilman have been engaged in a public argument about Heilman’s ousting that has often devolved into name-calling and hearsay. Earlier this year, the community was in open revolt against former Wikimedia Foundation director Lila Tretikov. Many threads in the mailing list are about people not doing their jobs properly or internal factions that have formed; “transparency” and openness give people license to be jerks to each other.

«

Wikipedia is a remarkable body of work, but perhaps has hit the age where it needs a more formal structure. (The editor was contacted by police, and says he’s “feeling better”.)
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Tech startups come up with some creative definitions for ‘profitable’ • Bloomberg

Ellen Huet:

»After just a few months, SpoonRocket retreated from its new markets and focused on improving the economics of its business. “For a long time, we were like, ‘Let’s get profitable; let’s get profitable; let’s show the margin can get profitable,'” said Anson Tsui, co-founder and chief technical officer.

Their efforts failed to achieve profitability by conventional definitions. However, the startup calculated that the business had become “contribution margin positive,” meaning that it sells an item—in this case, pre-made meals delivered to customers—for more than the cost to manufacture, distribute, and sell it. There is, apparently, some wiggle room in what expenses can be left out. Tsui said SpoonRocket’s definition included the costs of food, delivery worker pay, utensils, food waste, distribution center rental, and certain marketing programs. It excluded costs of customer service, central employees, office rent, and marketing to drivers.

After all that careful math, SpoonRocket’s contribution margin was 50 cents to $1 per order, Tsui said. The founders prepared a new pitch for investors highlighting this milestone. “We showed them, and they were just like, ‘Oh my goodness, you guys spent $13m to squeeze a $1 margin out of every order?'” Tsui recalled. SpoonRocket shut down in March and sold some assets to a food delivery company in Brazil.

«

Operating margin.. gross margin.. contribution margin?

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Google takes a new approach to native apps with Instant Apps for Android • TechCrunch

Frederic Lardinois got a prebrief:

»Typically, downloading and installing an app would take a while, but with Instant Apps, developers will have to partition their apps into small, runnable parts that can start within a few seconds.

“Instant Apps is really about re-thinking where apps are going,” Google VP of Engineering for Android Dave Burke told me. The idea behind Instant Apps is to make the native app experience as convenient as surfing to a web site. “Web pages are ephemeral,” he said. “They appear, you use them, and never think about them again.” Apps, he argued, have lots of friction and often you only want an app to perform one action or to get a specific piece of information.

As Google’s Michael Siliski and Ficus Kirkpatrick told me, the idea here is to allow a mobile experience to start in about the same time it would take to render a standard mobile web page. While the team is still working out the limits, Siliski and Kirkpatrick expects downloads for Instant Apps to clock in at under 4 megabytes.

Here is what that would look like in practice: say you are in a new city and want to pay for parking with whatever parking app the local municipality is using. You hold your phone to the parking meter, the built-in NFC chip reads the info, and the native app appears almost instantaneously. There is no need to download the app or even log in (or to uninstall it later).

«

This does recall industry analyst Benedict Evans wondering a year or so ago “what will it mean in 2020 to say ‘I installed an app’?”
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Saying 👋 to Allo and Duo: new apps for smart messaging and video calling • Official Google Blog

Amit Fulay, group product manager at Google:

»Whether it’s welcoming a new baby, celebrating the winning shot in overtime, or discovering the best taco stand ever—we all want to share these moments with friends and family the instant they happen. Most of the time, this means picking up our phones and sending a message or starting a call. Today we’re sharing a preview of two new apps that take a fresh look at how people connect.

Allo is a smart messaging app that makes your conversations easier and more expressive. It’s based on your phone number, so you can get in touch with anyone in your phonebook. And with deeply integrated machine learning, Allo has smart features to keep your conversations flowing and help you get things done.

Allo has Smart Reply built in (similar to Inbox), so you can respond to messages without typing a single word. Smart Reply learns over time and will show suggestions that are in your style. For example, it will learn whether you’re more of a “haha” vs. “lol” kind of person. The more you use Allo the more “you” the suggestions will become. Smart Reply also works with photos, providing intelligent suggestions related to the content of the photo. If your friend sends you a photo of tacos, for example, you may see Smart Reply suggestions like “yummy” or “I love tacos.”

«

So.. you have Google Hangouts, GChat (is that Hangouts too?), and now you have these too? Is Google just trying to create a primordial bath of messaging apps where curious scientists experiment to see which ones survive?
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Android Pay comes to the UK with Transport for London support • Ars Technica

Megan Geuss:

»Google announced today that its mobile payments app, Android Pay, will be rolling out in the UK.

Android Pay is the company’s re-vamped version of Google Wallet, which launched in 2011 and used near-field communications (NFC) to send payment information from an Android phone to a contactless terminal. Alphabet decided to update and re-brand the service last September after Apple launched Apple Pay in 2014 with a stronger business model due to some key alliances with banks.

Android Pay’s launch in the UK will arrive with support for Visa or MasterCard debit or credit cards from a variety of supported banks including Bank of Scotland, First Direct, Halifax, HSBC, Lloyds Bank, M&S Bank, MBNA, and Nationwide Building Society.

Barclays said earlier this week that it is “not planning on participating in Android Pay in the UK.” The bank just launched its own contactless payment app (which is available on Android) that allows a user to make payments of up to £30 with just a tap of their phone and payments of between £30 and £100 with a tap and a PIN entry.

Google is promising that businesses that already have contactless terminals need do nothing to accept payments from Android Pay.

«

Two oddities about this: 1) Barclays continues its quixotic attempts to plough its own furrow, despite having give up on iOS to Apple Pay; 2) this article was written by someone in the US, because the official blogpost came from Google US. Google UK couldn’t brief people in the UK with an embargoed story?
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Apple sent two men to my house. No, they weren’t assassins. • vellumatlanta

James Pinkstone lost a catastrophic amount of music in an iTunes/iTunes Match/Apple Music FUBAR:

»“I hope something goes wrong tonight,” said Tom, as he met my eye. He’d just finished petting my dog, and he was on his way out the door.

“Well, not really, but you know what I mean,” he continued. I did, indeed, know what he meant.

Tom, along with his boss Ezra, had just spent most of Saturday at my dining room table with me, trying to recreate a disaster like we were Netflix green-lighting Fuller House. So far, no luck.

In the days leading up to our face-to-face encounter, they’d earned more of my trust when they acknowledged that A), they’d read the phone transcripts, and although they maintained that she was mistaken, they did not dispute my account of what Amber had told me, and B), they, too, were convinced this was not user error. Before allowing them into my home, though, I’d laid out some conditions. Their research would be strictly limited to Apple Music, iTunes, and my iTunes library, and I would always be in the room to watch them work. Any information gleaned would be used solely for iTunes and Apple Music troubleshooting. If I had a document on my desktop called “Zapruder Film Unedited,” for example, they would still leave it alone. They agreed, both on the phone and in person, so we began…

…One of the things on which Tom, Ezra, and I seemed to agree was that Apple is not off of the hook yet. Their software failed me in a spectacular, destructive way; and since I rang that bell, many people have come forward with similar stories. Some may be a result of user error, but I have a hard time believing all are. I think Apple does, too; which is why, as of this writing, they have stated they are currently working on an iTunes update with additional safeguards added.

«

Oh, iTunes. You really are starting to show your age: a bit slow, confusing, and you can’t remember quite where you put things. First incarnation 2000, which makes it 112 years old in internet years.
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Twitter, Trump’s trusty weapon, could backfire • The New York Times

Farhad Manjoo:

»But don’t bet that Mr. Trump’s mastery over social media will help him in November. He has used Twitter as a tool to foment culturewide rage — it’s his big, inescapable bullhorn. Yet winning a presidential campaign involves more than simply whipping up unfocused outrage. It also requires more discrete, personalized messaging targeted to specific sets of voters and potential volunteers, a goal for which Twitter is spectacularly ill suited.

The point of a modern American presidential campaign is to inspire and turn out as many of your voters as possible while avoiding inspiring similar passion for your opponent. In 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama’s campaign pioneered some of the most effective ways to use social media and Internet-based organizing to win political campaigns. The Obama operation turned unfocused online passion into a data-driven, on-the-ground, get-out-the-vote operation whose effectiveness surprised longtime political observers.

Mr. Trump has eschewed many of the Obama team’s get-out-the-vote efforts. In contrast, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has doubled down on the data-heavy approach.

Veterans of the Obama campaign say this could be Mr. Trump’s costliest mistake in the election. If the Internet has been Mr. Trump’s secret weapon so far, it may soon turn into his Achilles’ heel.

«

“…we really, really hope.”
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Fitbit buys Coin to help with mobile payments • Engadget

Daniel Cooper:

»Fitbit is purchasing (almost all of) Coin, the payments startup that developed a universal credit card replacement. The world’s biggest maker of wearable technology can now leverage Coin’s know-how and integrate NFC-based commerce to its hardware. Fitbit has already said that there are “no plans” to integrate Coin’s setup into the products it’ll launch in 2016, so you can be damn sure it’ll be there for 2017. It’s not going to be a big leap for either party, as Coin was working on some form of payments watch earlier this year. At the time, it had signed up Atlas Wearables, Omate and Moov, as well as MasterCard to handle the processing.

The deal specifically excludes the Coin 2.0 hardware, the “universal card” that integrated every credit card you owned into one, wallet-friendly gizmo. If you own one of the units, your hardware will last for the duration of the built-in battery, which is expected to be two years. After that, however, you’re SOL. In addition, Coin Rewards and the Coin Developer Program are being retired following the announcement.

«

Inching upwards to more functionality. Where it will meet Android Wear and Apple Watch.
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Why don’t magnets work on some stainless steels? • Scientific American

Let Thomas Devine, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, provide you with some deathless conversation for the next time things go a bit quiet in the pub:

»Stainless steels are iron-based alloys primarily known for their generally excellent corrosion resistance, which is largely due to the steel’s chromium concentration. There are several different types of stainless steels. The two main types are austenitic and ferritic, each of which exhibits a different atomic arrangement. Due to this difference, ferritic stainless steels are generally magnetic while austenitic stainless steels usually are not. A ferritic stainless steel owes its magnetism to two factors: its high concentration of iron and its fundamental structure.

The metallic atoms in an austenitic stainless steel are arranged on a face-centered cubic (fcc) lattice. The unit cell of an fcc crystal consists of a cube with an atom at each of the cube’s eight corners and an atom at the center of each of the six faces. In a ferritic stainless steel, however, the metallic atoms are located on a body-centered (bcc) lattice. The unit cell of a bcc crystal is a cube with one atom at each of the eight corners and a single atom at the geometric center of the cube. Alloying the stainless steel with elements such as nickel, manganese, carbon and nitrogen increases the likelihood that the alloy will possess the fcc crystal structure at room temperature. Chromium, molybdenum and silicon make it more likely that the alloy will exhibit the bcc crystal structure at room temperature.

«

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Microsoft selling feature phone business to FIH Mobile Ltd. and HMD Global, Oy • Microsoft

»REDMOND, Wash. — May 18, 2016 — Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday announced it reached an agreement to sell the company’s entry-level feature phone assets to FIH Mobile Ltd., a subsidiary of Hon Hai/Foxconn Technology Group, and HMD Global, Oy for $350 million. As part of the deal, FIH Mobile Ltd. will also acquire Microsoft Mobile Vietnam — the company’s Hanoi, Vietnam, manufacturing facility. Upon close of this deal, approximately 4,500 employees will transfer to, or have the opportunity to join, FIH Mobile Ltd. or HMD Global, Oy, subject to compliance with local law.

Microsoft will continue to develop Windows 10 Mobile and support Lumia phones such as the Lumia 650, Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL, and phones from OEM partners like Acer, Alcatel, HP, Trinity and VAIO.

«

The wording of that second paragraph is subtle. I read it to mean that there won’t be any new Lumia phones.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Well, at least they left something. Photo by iirraa 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.

China’s home-grown smartphone startups face very difficult choices • Tech In Asia

Charlie Custer:

»In the early days of a company like Xiaomi, just being a Chinese smartphone startup was enough to build hype and sell phones. But a half-decade later, the Chinese smartphone market is practically overflowing with domestic competitors, and Xiaomi seems to be struggling. And while that’s arguably due in part to some poor decisions – like its new gigantic phone – I don’t envy the choices Xiaomi, or any Chinese smartphone company, has to make in the current market.

When it comes to deciding what your product strategy is going to be, there are really only four options, and none of them look appealing.

«

China, which is the world’s biggest smartphone market.
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Confessions of a former bike thief • Brixton Blog

Richard Cantle interviews an ex-bike thief:

»Q: So, you are an ex-bike thief from London?  When and why did you begin stealing bikes?

I started stealing push bikes when I was 16. Motivation was money; bikes are quick and easy money. There were two of us who stole pedal bikes and high performance motorbikes.

Q: Did you target specific types of bicycles and locations in London? What was the thought process?

High value bikes were the main targets like Carrera racers, no-logo fixie bikes, Boardman racers and Ridgeback bikes. These were the popular quick sale bikes that were called golds (because of the payback to time value of them).

Bike locations – there is a thing what we would call London rings or hotspots, where bike security seemed to be less of a problem. The more central you got the worse the locks, where people let their guard down more. Going out of London, locks would get better and locations fewer, so the time and effort put in would not be worth it. Borough of Islington, Hackney, West End and the central mile were our hunting grounds. The more CCTV and people the better. People are like sheep, they feel safe and pay less attention when they’re together.

At first it was a hit and miss game. Grab the bike and go kind of thing, but as time moved on and we worked out there was money to be made, we stepped up our approach. For example, if it wouldn’t sell for more than £200, it wouldn’t be taken…

…From the moment you pull up to the moment the bike is cut and bolt cutters are back on the motorbike would be 10 seconds at the most. so no one really knew what was going on. Almost, I imagine, like you have to question yourself like, did I really just see that?

No one ever confronted us or said: “What are you doing?”

«

Lots to absorb if you’ve got a bike in any city. But also note his motivations, which are noted elsewhere in the piece.
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London leads on open transport data • UK Authority

Mark Say:

»London has come out on top of an analysis of the performance of several major cities in providing open data on transport and mapping.

The Future Spaces Foundation, a charity that studies living spaces, has said in its Vital Cities: Transport Systems Scorecard that London’s record of providing open access to real time transport data is the best example of data sharing.

The Scorecard analyses the transport networks of 12 cities around the world on indicators ranging from breathability to the density of cycle and pedestrian networks to the use of data and apps.

London scored top marks for facilitating the creation of multi-modal apps with the open availability of its live transit feeds. But it came second to Singapore in converting data into the most user-friendly and informative travel apps.

«

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Shiva Ayyadurai wants my emails • Thomas Haigh

Haigh is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Ayyadurai is suing Gawker for millions for saying that he didn’t invent the concept of email:

»Shiva Ayyadurai really, really wants to look through my emails. Remember Shiva Ayyadurai? The man who has been engaged for five years on a quixotic but energetic public relations campaign to convince the world that he, and he alone, is the true “inventor of email”? Ayyadurai literally wrote the book on internet publicity. His big problem is that you can’t invent something that’s already in widespread use. Ayyadurai said that he “designed and deployed” a prototype in 1980, but historians knew very well that electronic mail had been around since at least 1965 and by the mid-1970s was the main source of traffic on what evolved to become the Internet.

I’m a historian of information technology, working in the School of Information Studies of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. As chair of SIGCIS, the group for historians of information technology, I coordinated the response of the historical community to his bizarre claim. This included creating a report (www.sigcis.org/Ayyadurai) documenting what Ayyadurai was saying and comparing it to what we knew about actual email history. He rarely names me or any of the other historians who have worked on documenting the actual history of email, though his campaign has denounced the members of SIGCIS as paid stooges for Raytheon, revisionists, a cabal, and “sophisticated public relations agents that manufacture and package ‘histories,’ no different than clever propaganda, to perpetuate lies of the pre-eminence of the military-industrial-academic complex.” By this theory the entire academic history of computing community is “unconsciously cutting and copying” the work of Gizmodo blogger Sam Biddle, “believing Biddle’s sensationalistic article to be the truth.”

«

Ayyadurai is wasting the court’s time; I bet he thought that Gawker would fold easily after the Hulk Hogan verdict. On that, he’ll be wrong.
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The mobile-ad world sucks, and Vungle’s chief wants to make it better • VentureBeat

Dean Takahashi:

»The popularity of so many ad blockers means one thing to Zain Jaffer, chief executive of Vungle, which helps mobile game and app publishers acquire more users and make money via in-app video ads

“It tells us the advertising world sucks,” said Jaffer in an interview with VentureBeat. “Consumers are so sick of ads being intrusive that a website doesn’t even load. You need an ad blocker just to browse the Web. Advertising has become a game of … it’s the opposite of transparency.”

Vungle tries to generate more revenue for mobile-app makers and get better exposure for brands as they follow consumers into the huge mobile-apps market and the $34 billion mobile-game market. Roughly half of Vungle’s business is in games. Vungle’s video ad technology is used in apps that generate billions of views a month. And Jaffer wants to keep improving return on investment and performance so that the value of the advertising is transparent.

«

I’m puzzled by how people who want other people to see more adverts always start from those who use adblockers, and say “clearly, people are sick of ads! So we need to figure out how to show them ads.”
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No, eBook sales have not fallen in the UK • The Digital Reader

Nate Hoffelder:

»Like the NYTimes last fall, The Telegraph has misinterpreted data collected by a trade group and assumed that it represented the entire market. As the UK Publishers Association explained when I followed up, this is simply not true:

The figures related to publisher invoiced sales, grossed up from the PA sales monitor which represents 75% of UK publishing industry turnover (both members and non –members ) and involves both publishers and distributors.

And the PA’s data is even less than complete when it comes to ebook sales. Remember, the Author Earnings report showed that 30% of the ebook sales in the UK Kindle Store went to indie authors, and another 15% went to Amazon.

This means that 45% or more of the ebooks sold in the UK’s dominant ebook store do not show up in the PA’s annual stats. And the figure is probably worse than that given that the PA has said that their data is not complete.

Furthermore, The Telegraph’s report offers a misleading take on the market. According to The Bookseller, the PA’s stats showed that overall digital revenues rose last year.

«

Amazon doesn’t care if people get those stats wrong or not; it has cornered the market in ebooks.
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The world is designed for men • Medium

Kat Ely of HH Design:

»If you work an office in the U.S., you’ve probably noticed that women often find that they’re too cold, while men report being perfectly comfortable.

This is because the algorithms that dictate temperature regulation in many office buildings were designed in the 1960s for a 154 pound male. Women, who typically have smaller frames and less muscle mass, naturally feel a bit colder than men do. This, along with faulty climate control systems, leads to many women feeling uncomfortably cold at the office.

The effects of temperature go beyond comfort and have a measurable impact on performance. A 2004 Cornell Study found “that when ambient office temperature [was] increased from 68 degrees to 77 degrees Fahrenheit, typing errors fell by 44 percent and typing productivity increased by 150%”.

Women in the U.S. on average make 78 cents to every dollar their male counterparts make. There are many factors that contribute to the pay gap but it seems the unintended effect of workplace climates designed for men’s comfort could be a piece of the puzzle.

«

Also applies – as she demonstrates – to crash test dummies, power tools, and smartwatches. Unconscious bias in design is so subtle, yet far-reaching; remember how the first version of Apple’s Health app didn’t have anything for recording menstrual periods?
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When websites won’t take no for an answer • NYTimes.com

Natasha Singer looks at anti-customer “dark at terms” practices:

»or instance, when ride-hailing apps run promotions offering customers free rides to sign up their friends — and the friends get free rides as well — both the company and consumers benefit.

And then there’s JustFab, an e-commerce start-up that runs subscription apparel sites including Fabletics.com, which sells fitness clothing. BuzzFeed has pilloried the site’s practices.

Last week, Fabletics was offering a “new V.I.P. membership exclusive” in which it discounts various outfits to $25. When first-time shoppers choose clothing and check out, the site gives them a pricing choice that highlights the discounted V.I.P. membership offer in black and red — while displaying the regular, non-V.I.P. price in gray.

But this initial choice page does not inform consumers that the membership involves a $49.95 monthly subscription fee for clothing. That disclosure comes at the bottom of a subsequent membership page, where the site explains that it emails members a personalized selection of clothing on the first of every month.

To avoid the $49.95 clothing fee, members must opt out online by the 5th of each month. To cancel their membership, they must call customer service.

«

LinkedIn also makes an appearance.
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Forbes tests new tactics to combat adblocking • WSJ

Jack Marshall:

»For the past couple of weeks, users with ad blockers turned on have gotten another option: they can still access Forbes.com so long as they register for a Forbes account, providing personal information, or log in via Facebook or Google. Forbes might not be able to deliver ads to those users, but obtaining that information instead might be a valuable alternative.

Users who sign in via Facebook agree to share information with Forbes including their email address, name, profile picture, age range, gender and other information that’s “public” from their Facebook profiles.

Users who sign in via Google give Forbes access to their email address, full name and any publicly available information from their Google+ profiles. Forbes is also granted permission to manage users’ Google contacts.

“Email address is always very valuable and, with proper terms of service, figuring out a way to monetize these things in the right way could be interesting,” Mr. DVorkin [of Forbes] said.

«

“Interesting”. Can these people not hear what they sound like?
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Exclusive: Google’s NHS deal does not have regulatory approval • New Scientist

Hal Hodson:

»Google does not have regulatory approval for its NHS healthcare deal. Two weeks ago, New Scientist revealed that Google’s artificial intelligence company DeepMind has access to the personal medical information of millions of UK patients through a data-sharing agreement with the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust. But that’s only part of the story.

A New Scientist investigation has found that the project is being carried out without the ethical and regulatory approval that experts say are required.

Google and the Royal Free both claim to be acting in compliance with the rules as they interpret them.

A collaboration between DeepMind and the NHS has the potential to do great things. Let loose on patient data, Google’s technology could lead to earlier diagnoses of disease, saving lives. DeepMind and the Royal Free are using the patient data to develop a medical app called Streams for monitoring kidney conditions.

Yet they do not have regulatory approval:

● Google and the Royal Free have neither applied for nor obtained ethical approval for handling patient data.
● Google has not registered its Streams app as a medical device with the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency

DeepMind announced in February that it was working on Streams in partnership with clinicians at three London hospitals run by the Royal Free Trust – Barnet, Chase Farm and the Royal Free. The partnership gives Google access to data consisting of fully identifiable information – including names, addresses and details of medical conditions – for the 1.6 million patients treated at the three hospitals each year. It also includes data for all patients treated in the past five years.

However, development of the app started without first going through the ethical and regulatory approval process run by the Confidentiality Advisory Group, set up by the NHS. This was set up to ensure that such systems are safe, and to protect the interests of patients whose data is being shared.

«

I also want to know who owns the information and lessons from the deal. Does the NHS get to keep it?
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Theft of Kickstarter-raised funds • Peachy Printer

Ryland Grayston:

»On September 20th 2013 me and my investor David Boe launched a Kickstarter campaign for the Peachy Printer – The World’s First $100 3D Printer. The campaign was a monumental success, raising $651,091 from 4,420 backers in just 30 days.

It is important to note that David’s role in the company was Business Administration & Financial Management, while my role was Product Development & Technical Team Management. David hired an Accounting and Financial Consulting firm to assist in the management of Peachy Printer’s finances. I was confident that with my partner David, and a reputable firm watching the business end of Peachy, I had delegated the right people to ensure things were done properly, so I went to the shop and buried my head into R&D.

Peachy Printer Inc. was not established until November 6th of 2013 – weeks after the campaign had ended. At the time of incorporation myself and David each held equal shares in the company as 50% owners. Due to the fact that the Kickstarter campaign was over before Peachy Printer existed as a corporation, we did not have a corporate bank account set up to receive the funds. As a result, David’s personal account was set up to receive the funds. David promised to hold the Kickstarter funds in trust until the company account had been created. After the company account was in place, our bank manager recommended that we move the money in smaller chunks to avoid having our funds tied up if something were to go wrong with the transfer. David then transferred $200,000 to cover initial operating expenses.

It was David’s responsibility to transfer the remainder of the funds to the corporate account. This was never accomplished. Instead, the funds remained in David’s personal account, and by March 5th – just five months after receiving the funds – he had spent every penny. The total amount of stolen funds – $324,716.01

David claims that he intended to pay the money back before I could realize it was gone, but evidently he failed to do so.

«

Evidently. Grayston is now encouraging people to get the Canadian police to investigate.
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Bangladesh Bank heist similar to Sony hack; second bank hit by malware • Reuters

Jim Finkle and Sanjeev Miglani:

»In Bangladesh, cyber-security experts hired by the central bank said in a report that hackers were still inside the bank’s network, monitoring the investigation into one of the biggest cyber heists in the world. Reuters reviewed parts of the report, but the source who shared the document declined to provide access to its full contents, saying the release of some details could hamper a multinational effort to catch the criminals.

Asked about the report, a Bangladesh Bank spokesman said: “We have engaged forensic experts to investigate the whole thing, including this.” He did not elaborate.

Investigators have determined that one team of hackers, dubbed Group Zero in the report, was responsible for the heist and remained inside the network. Group Zero may be seeking to monitor the ongoing cyber investigations or cause other damage, but is unlikely to be able to order fraudulent fund transfers, the investigators wrote.

Two other groups are also inside the bank’s network, which is linked to the SWIFT international transaction system, the report found. One of the two is a “nation-state actor” engaged in stealing information in attacks that are stealthy but “not known to be destructive”, it said.

«

That’s three separate hacking groups inside the system. They make it sound like having mice rather than people intent on stealing all your money.
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.Blog • Matt Mullenweg

»It’s now public that Automattic [the company behind WordPress.com] is the company behind Knock Knock Whois There LLC, the registry for the new .blog TLD. (And a great pun.) We wanted to stay stealth while in the bidding process and afterward in order not to draw too much attention, but nonetheless the cost of the .blog auction got up there (people are estimating around $20m).

«

Trademark registrations start August, the free-for-all in October. Might this be he TLD that people actually want?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: