What if tobacco companies had had the same exemptions over consequences as social media companies enjoy today? CC-licensed photo by Jamie Anderson on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Another one down. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook allowed hundreds of misleading super PAC ads, activist group finds • CNN

Brian Fung:

»

Facebook (FB) has allowed political advertisers to target hundreds of misleading ads about Joe Biden and the US Postal Service to swing-state voters ranging from Florida to Wisconsin in recent weeks, in an apparent failure to enforce its own platform rules less than two months before Election Day.

The ads containing false or misleading information, primarily by a pro-Republican super PAC led by former Trump administration officials, have collectively been viewed more than 10 million times and some of the ads remain active on the service, according to an analysis of Facebook’s ad transparency data by the activist group Avaaz.

Two super PACs emerged as the worst offenders in Avaaz’s analysis: the pro-Trump group America First Action, and the pro-Democratic group Stop Republicans. But the report found that AFA’s activities far exceeded those of Stop Republicans, both in terms of money spent and impressions received.

While Facebook allows politicians to make false claims in their ads — arguing that voters deserve an unfiltered view of what candidates and elected officials say — advertisements by super PACs and other independent groups are subject to the company’s policies on misinformation.

«

The crucial point here is that the misinformation tends to be “dark” – it’s hard to find what going on because you have to dig into Facebook’s Ad Library, unlike monitoring TV stations or newspaper output.

But are we surprised by Facebook failing to enforce its own rules? Of course we aren’t. The point to bear in mind now about Facebook is that Facebook has lost control of Facebook. The network is metastasizing, and things that happen on it are completely beyond the ability of the people who moderate it to stop.
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Seven-year disqualification for Cambridge Analytica boss • GOV.UK

»

Effective from 5 October 2020, Alexander Nix is disqualified for seven years from acting as a director or directly or indirectly becoming involved, without the permission of the court, in the promotion, formation or management of a company.

Alexander Nix was a director of SCL Elections Ltd, a company that provided data analytics, marketing and communication services to political and commercial customers. He was also a director of five other connected UK companies: SCL Group Ltd, SCL Social Ltd, SCL Analytics Ltd, SCL Commercial Ltd, and Cambridge Analytica (UK) Ltd.

Investigators’ enquiries confirmed that Alexander Nix had caused or permitted SCL Elections or associated companies to act with a lack of commercial probity.

The unethical services offered by the companies included bribery or honey trap stings, voter disengagement campaigns, obtaining information to discredit political opponents and spreading information anonymously in political campaigns.

Mark Bruce, Chief Investigator for the Insolvency Service, said: “Following an extensive investigation, our conclusions were clear that SCL Elections had repeatedly offered shady political services to potential clients over a number of years.

“Company directors should act with commercial probity and this means acting honestly and correctly. Alexander Nix’s actions did not meet the appropriate standard for a company director and his disqualification from managing limited companies for a significant amount of time is justified in the public interest.”

«

Wow. I cannot recall any occasion when anything like this has happened without outright fraud on the part of the director. Absolutely astonishing. And yet: the UK government, which has signed off on this decision, thinks there’s absolutely nothing to consider around the 2016 referendum even though Cambridge Analytica played a key part in it.
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Black holes from the Big Bang could be the dark matter • Quanta Magazine

Joshua Sokol:

»

We know that dying stars can make black holes. But perhaps black holes were also born during the Big Bang itself. A hidden population of such “primordial” black holes could conceivably constitute dark matter, a hidden thumb on the cosmic scale. After all, no dark matter particle has shown itself, despite decades of searching. What if the ingredients we really needed — black holes — were under our noses the whole time?

“Yes, it was a crazy idea,” said Marc Kamionkowski, a cosmologist at Johns Hopkins University whose group came out with one of the many eye-catching papers that explored the possibility in 2016. “But it wasn’t necessarily crazier than anything else.”

Alas, the flirtation with primordial black holes soured in 2017, after a paper by Yacine Ali-Haïmoud, an astrophysicist at New York University who had previously been on the optimistic Kamionkowski team, examined how this type of black hole should affect LIGO’s detection rate. He calculated that if the baby universe spawned enough black holes to account for dark matter, then over time, these black holes would settle into binary pairs, orbit each other closer and closer, and merge at rates thousands of times higher than what LIGO observes. He urged other researchers to continue to investigate the idea using alternate approaches. But many lost hope. The argument was so damning that Kamionkowski said it quenched his own interest in the hypothesis.

Now, however, following a flurry of recent papers, the primordial black hole idea appears to have come back to life. In one of the latest, published last week in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Karsten Jedamzik, a cosmologist at the University of Montpellier, showed how a large population of primordial black holes could result in collisions that perfectly match what LIGO observes.

«

Must admit, it would be bloody good if we could sort the black matter question out, so we could move on to something new.
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Leak reveals $2tn of possibly corrupt US financial activity • The Guardian

David Pegg:

»

The documents were provided to BuzzFeed News, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

The documents are said to suggest major banks provided financial services to high-risk individuals from around the world, in some cases even after they had been placed under sanctions by the US government.

According to the ICIJ the documents relate to more than $2tn of transactions dating from between 1999 and 2017.

One of those named in the SARs is Paul Manafort, a political strategist who led Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign for several months.

He stepped down from the role after his consultancy work for former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych was exposed, and he was later convicted of fraud and tax evasion.

According to the ICIJ, banks began flagging activity linked to Manafort as suspicious beginning in 2012. In 2017 JP Morgan Chase filed a report on wire transfers worth over $300m involving shell companies in Cyprus that had done business with Manafort.

«

Isn’t it just amazing how pretty much everyone that Donald Trump comes in to any sort of close business contact with is revealed to have lied or otherwise been corrupt.
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To fight Apple and Google, smaller app rivals organize a coalition • The New York Times

Erin Griffith:

»

At the heart of the new alliance’s effort is opposition to Apple’s and Google’s tight grip on their app stores and the fortunes of the apps in them. The two companies control virtually all of the world’s smartphones through their software and the distribution of apps via their stores. Both also charge a 30% fee for payments made inside apps in their systems.

App makers have increasingly taken issue with the payment rules, arguing that a 30% fee is a tax that hobbles their ability to compete. In some cases, they have said, they are competing with Apple’s and Google’s own apps and their unfair advantages.

Apple has argued that its fee is standard across online marketplaces.

On Thursday, the coalition published a list of 10 principles, outlined on its website, for what it said were fairer app practices. They include a more transparent process for getting apps approved and the right to communicate directly with their users. The top principle states that developers should not be forced to exclusively use the payments systems of the app store publishers.

Each of the alliance’s members has agreed to contribute an undisclosed membership fee to the effort.

“Apple leverages its platform to give its own services an unfair advantage over competitors,” said Kirsten Daru, vice president and general counsel of Tile, a start-up that makes Bluetooth tracking devices and is part of the new nonprofit. “That’s bad for consumers, competition and innovation.”

Ms. Daru testified to lawmakers this year that Apple had begun making the permissions around Tile’s app more difficult for people to use after it developed a competing feature.

«

(Though of course subsequent to that Apple changed things so that Tile’s app can work competitively.) This is an interesting move: if it has any effect, it will probably occur well before any legislative action can.
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This $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss • AAAS

Christa Lesté-Lasserre:

»

Inspired by his grandparents and a hearing-impaired colleague—who is first author on the new paper—Bhamla and his team set out to develop a cheap hearing aid built with off-the-shelf parts. They soldered a microphone onto a small circuit board to capture nearby sound and added an amplifier and a frequency filter to specifically increase the volume of high-pitch sounds above 1000 hertz. Then they added a volume control, an on/off switch, and an audio jack for plugging in standard earphones, as well as a battery holder. The device, dubbed LoCHAid, is the size of a matchbox and can be worn like a necklace. At bulk rates, Bhamla says, it would cost just under $1 to make. But anyone with the freely available blueprints and a soldering iron can make their own for not much more—maybe $15 or $20, Bhamla says. The parts are easy to source, he says, and putting them together takes less than 30 minutes.

Next, Bhamla and his colleagues tested the device. They found that it boosted the volume of high-pitch sounds by 15 decibels while preserving volumes at lower pitches. It also filtered out interference and sudden, loud sounds like dog barks and car horns. Finally, tests with an artificial ear revealed that LoCHAid might improve speech recognition, by bringing conversations closer to the quality heard by healthy individuals. It complied with five out of six of the World Health Organization’s preferred product recommendations for hearing aids, the researchers report today in PLOS ONE.

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This is the sort of technology that can really change the world.
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Authoritative voting information on YouTube • YouTube blog

Leslie Miller is VP of government affairs and public policy at YouTube:

»

YouTube’s Community Guidelines protect the community from harmful content and we enforce these policies consistently, regardless of who expresses it. Our policies prohibit claims that mislead voters on how to vote or encourage interference in the democratic process. Additionally, we demonetize content with claims that could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process.
 
Alongside the consistent enforcement of our policies, we’re continuing to raise up authoritative voices and reduce harmful misinformation. One of the ways we do this is through our information panels, which provide relevant context alongside content. For example, in 2018, we started to show information panels linking to third-party sources around a small number of well-established topics that are subject to misinformation, such as the moon landing or COVID-19. We’re expanding this list of topics to include voting by mail. This means that under videos that discuss voting by mail, you’ll see an information panel directing you to authoritative information from the Bipartisan Policy Center, a bipartisan think tank.

«

“Demonetise” claims that could significantly undermine participation? Such half measures. What if the people who put such claims up aren’t interested in monetisation, just spread? What if YouTube is part of the problem, rather than (as it’s trying to pretend here) the solution?

Related: YouTube labelling (with AI) more age-restricted, ie over-18s, content. And: “former YouTube content moderator sues the company after developing symptoms of PTSD“.
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Ring’s latest security camera is a drone that flies around inside your house • The Verge

Dan Seifert:

»

Ring latest home security camera is taking flight — literally. The new Always Home Cam is an autonomous drone that can fly around inside your home to give you a perspective of any room you want when you’re not home. Once it’s done flying, the Always Home Cam returns to its dock to charge its battery. It is expected to cost $249.99 when it starts shipping next year.

Jamie Siminoff, Ring’s founder and “chief inventor,” says the idea behind the Always Home Cam is to provide multiple viewpoints throughout the home without requiring the use of multiple cameras. In an interview ahead of the announcement, he said the company has spent the past two years on focused development of the device, and that it is an “obvious product that is very hard to build.” Thanks to advancements in drone technology, the company is able to make a product like this and have it work as desired.

The Always Home Cam is fully autonomous, but owners can tell it what path it can take and where it can go. When you first get the device, you build a map of your home for it to follow, which allows you to ask it for specific viewpoints such as the kitchen or bedroom. The drone can be commanded to fly on demand or programmed to fly when a disturbance is detected by a linked Ring Alarm system.

The charging dock blocks the camera’s view, and the camera only records when it is in flight. Ring says the drone makes an audible noise when flying so it is obvious when footage is being recorded.

«

Clever. Where’s the place you don’t need permission to fly a drone? Your home. Where might you want random footage from? Your home. As with Alexa, Amazon has thought one step ahead. Whether this is really going to make a difference is harder to say. Ring probably has, Alexa (as a standalone) probably not. This seems to sit between those two. But it’s also a surveillance system.
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Written testimony to the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce

Tim Kendall:

»

When I started working in technology, my hope was to build products that brought people together in new and productive ways. I wanted to improve the world we all lived in.

Instead, the social media services that I and others have built over the past 15 years have served to tear people apart with alarming speed and intensity. At the very least, we have eroded our collective understanding – at worst, I fear we are pushing ourselves to the brink of a civil war.

I feel ashamed by this outcome. And I am deeply concerned. And to that end, I am compelled to talk to you about what we can do to limit further damage—and maybe even undo some of it.

My path in technology started at Facebook where I was the first Director of Monetization. I thought my job was to figure out the business model for the company, and presumably one that sought to balance the needs of its stakeholders – its advertisers, its users and its employees. Instead, we sought to mine as much attention as humanly possible and turn into historically unprecedented profits.

To do this, we didn’t simply create something useful and fun. We took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset.

Tobacco companies initially just sought to make nicotine more potent. But eventually that wasn’t enough to grow the business as fast as they wanted. And so they added sugar and menthol to cigarettes so you could hold the smoke in your lungs for longer periods. At Facebook, we added status updates, photo tagging, and likes, which made status and reputation primary and laid the groundwork for a teenage mental health crisis.

«

No punches pulled. He was at Facebook from 2006 to 2010. You can’t argue that things have improved since then. He extends the tobacco metaphor too: what if they’d had some version of Section 230? One to ponder.
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Facebook Oversight Board plans to launch ahead of US election • CNBC

Sam Shead:

»

Facebook’s much-anticipated Oversight Board has confirmed that it is planning to launch ahead of the US election on Nov. 3 after being criticized for a perceived lack of action. 

The board will rule on appeals from Facebook and Instagram users and questions from Facebook itself, although it will have to pick and choose which content moderation cases to take due to the sheer volume of them.

Following a report from The Financial Times, a spokesperson for the independent Oversight Board told CNBC that it expects to start in mid to late October. 

“We are currently testing the newly deployed technical systems that will allow users to appeal and the Board to review cases. Assuming those tests go to plan, we expect to open user appeals in mid to late October.”

They added: “Building a process that is thorough, principled and globally effective takes time and our members have been working aggressively to launch as soon as possible.”

The Oversight Board said it expects to decide on a case, and for Facebook to have acted on this decision, within a maximum of 90 days.

«

Good grief. Could we replace them with a machine learning system? It would be much faster and the results would be just as debatable.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

Will QR codes be the bug in the NHS’s new Test & Trace app launching today? CC-licensed photo by Steven Severinghaus on Flickr.

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

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

The NHS Test and Trace app’s biggest flaw? Botched QR codes • WIRED UK

Nicole Kobie on the T&T system, where you scan a QR code using the app on entering a commercial location such as a shop or gym:

»

Newham residents [who have been beta testing the UK app being launched on September 24 – today!] told WIRED that they’ve barely seen any of the official NHS QR codes in shops or restaurants. Others say they’re confused as to whether a QR code on the door is the right one to scan or not, as existing contact-tracing systems also use the codes – just wait until these codes are ubiquitous and scammers start putting up false ones. And some residents reported that the QR code throws up an error message in the app or simply takes too long to scan, causing queues to enter a shop — hardly ideal in these times of social distancing. “Although the app looks good, if I can’t use the QR scanner, it defeats the object of the app’s purpose,” wrote one app reviewer on Google Play.

The other challenge is downloading the app. Residents were sent out a detailed, four-page letter with instructions on how to install the app and use one-time codes to activate it for the trial, which residents said was off-putting – especially so for those who don’t speak English as a first language. The council has pushed for the app and online advice for it to be available in several languages, including Polish, Gujarati, Urdu and more, but as Fiaz notes, Newham has more than 100 languages and dialects spoken locally.

The residents who did head to the App Store or Google Play to download the app faced another hurdle: it only works on recent smartphones, running Android 6.0 or iOS 13.5 later; that’s iPhone 6S and newer. However, that risks leaving out people with older phones, in particular those without the money to buy a newer one. A story in the Newham Recorder quotes an 82-year-old resident of Manor Park as saying he couldn’t download the app because his smartphone was too old, with Age UK warning this could leave those most at risk of Covid being treated as “second-class citizens.”

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It’s going to be so much fun. The code is available, by the way.
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Twitter let dozens of tweets doxing Indian interfaith couples stay up for months • Buzzfeed News

Pranav Dixit:

»

For nearly two months, tweets by far-right Hindu nationalists in India doxing dozens of young interfaith couples — usually Muslim men marrying Hindu women — circulated on Twitter.

“This is going to be a long thread,” one of the accounts involved in the doxing said, following it up with 17 more tweets. Each tweet contained pictures of government documents including names, ages, occupations, addresses, and photographs of Hindu-Muslim couples in India. “Look at these pictures,” another tweet from the same account said. “Who instigates these couples to get together? It can’t be that they just ‘fall in love.’”

On Monday, as outrage mounted in India, Twitter finally took down some of the largest threads, even though people had been reporting them for weeks.

But more than half a dozen other tweets doxing interfaith couples remained after the first takedowns. One of them included a tweet from a politician from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, who tweeted the address of an Indian actor who allegedly converted to Islam. Twitter took down these posts after BuzzFeed News asked about them.

None of the accounts whose tweets were taken down were suspended.

«

The latter part is bad. Accounts which publish personal information like that are suspended as a matter of course. Once more there’s a suspicion that these companies are somehow beholden to, or scared of, the Indian government.
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Xenophobic Twitter campaigns orchestrated by a former South African soldier • Daily Maverick

Jean le Roux for DFRLab:

»

A South African Twitter account at the centre of a network of xenophobic hashtags and inciting statements has been linked to a former member of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF). 

Sifiso Jeffrey Gwala, a former lance corporal with the 121st SA Infantry Battalion in Mtubatuba in coastal KwaZulu-Natal, has been identified as the person behind the “anonymous” Twitter account previously known as @uLerato_pillay, which has been accused of inciting xenophobic tensions in South Africa. In recent weeks, these narratives have bubbled to the surface of mainstream media outlets as public officials from fringe political parties echoed these nationalist sentiments in what appears to be reckless political opportunism.

South Africa has a fatal history of violence against foreign nationals, particularly other Africans. In May 2008, 62 people died as a result of nationwide xenophobic riots that started near Johannesburg, and in April 2015, seven people were killed in similar protests in Durban. South Africa’s high unemployment rate and lacklustre service delivery are often blamed on the nearly four million foreign nationals staying in South Africa, and unfounded claims that foreign nationals are disproportionately responsible for crime are frequently used to justify these attacks. 

«

This is a long, long read but that’s the takeaway: taking advantage of Twitter’s algorithms to create discord.
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Facebook denies it will pull service in Europe over data transfer ban • TechCrunch

Natasha Lomas:

»

“We of course won’t [shut down in Europe] — and the reason we won’t of course is precisely because we want to continue to serve customers and small and medium sized businesses in Europe,” said Facebook VP Nick Clegg during a livestreamed EU policy debate yesterday.

However he also warned of “profound effects” on scores of digital businesses if a way is not found by lawmakers on both sides of the pond to resolve the legal uncertainty around US data transfers — making a pitch to politicians to come up with a new legal ‘sticking plaster’ for EU-US data transfers now that a flagship arrangement, called Privacy Shield, is dead.

“We have a major issue — which is that for various complex, legal, political and other reasons question marks are being raised about the current legal basis under which data transfers occur. If those legal means of data transfer are removed — not by us, but by regulators — then of course that will have a profound effect on how, not just our services, but countless other companies operate. We’re trying to avoid that.”

«

So if the legal means of transfer are removed then Facebook will have to shut down in Europe. Because he certainly doesn’t seem to be saying that Facebook is going to alter its behaviour.
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The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world • CNN

Nick Couldry and Bruce Schneier:

»

Acedia was a malady that apparently plagued many medieval monks. It’s a sense of no longer caring about caring, not because one had become apathetic, but because somehow the whole structure of care had become jammed up.

…Moving around is what we do as creatures, and for that we need horizons. Covid has erased many of the spatial and temporal horizons we rely on, even if we don’t notice them very often. We don’t know how the economy will look, how social life will go on, how our home routines will be changed, how work will be organized, how universities or the arts or local commerce will survive.

What unsettles us is not only fear of change. It’s that, if we can no longer trust in the future, many things become irrelevant, retrospectively pointless. And by that we mean from the perspective of a future whose basic shape we can no longer take for granted. This fundamentally disrupts how we weigh the value of what we are doing right now. It becomes especially hard under these conditions to hold on to the value in activities that, by their very nature, are future-directed, such as education or institution-building.

That’s what many of us are feeling. That’s today’s acedia.

«

(Couldry is a professor of media, communications and social theory. Bruce Schneier you should know as a security expert.)

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Casey Newton on leaving ‘The Verge’ for Substack and the future of tech journalism • OneZero

Sarah Jeong:

»

asey Newton, The Verge’s longtime Silicon Valley editor and the creator of The Interface newsletter, is leaving the publication to start a newsletter on Substack called Platformer.

Newton, who started at The Verge in 2013, has published more than 570 issues of The Interface since it launched in October 2017. The newsletter currently boasts more than 20,000 subscribers. The Interface usually follows the themes of content moderation, disinformation, and the negative effects of social media on society. The focus is frequently on the omnipresent and ever-controversial Facebook, but the newsletter also covers companies like TikTok, Apple, Google, Amazon, and more.

…Q: What does this deal look like?

Newton: When you look at the economics of newsletters, there are opportunities that are bigger for some writers than any media company can match. If you can find 10,000 people to pay you $100 a year, you’re making $1 million a year. No one in media is going to pay you that unless you’re the anchor of a popular news show or something.

I’m not going to get to 10,000 subscribers anytime soon, but if I can work toward that over time, not only will I be in a position where I’m doing well for myself, but I’ll be in a position where I can create media jobs. I can hire someone to go out and do more reporting. I can hire an editor. I can hire a graphics person. I can start to — in this tiny, tiny way — rebuild a little of what has been lost and figure some things out for the future. That just seemed like a really cool bet to make. Maybe I can actually start a tiny media company out of this and do some really cool stuff.

«

Speaking of Casey Newton…
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Facebook leaks show Mark Zuckerberg defending his decisions to angry employees • The Verge

Casey Newton:

»

On June 18th, Facebook employees asked Zuckerberg if they could hear from Kaplan directly:

Many people feel that Joel Kaplan has too much power over our decisions. Can we get him on a Q&A to learn more about his role, influence, and beliefs?

Zuckerberg said the company would work to provide more information about the operations of its policy team. But he dismissed the idea that Kaplan has undue influence at the company, saying that Monika Bickert, the company’s head of policy management, plays a stronger day-to-day role in policy development. And Zuckerberg bristled at the implication that Kaplan’s party affiliation should disqualify him from the job.

“I’ve seen a bunch of comments internally that — that I have to say bothered me a bit,” Zuckerberg said.  “That basically asked whether Joel can be in this role, or can be doing this role, on the basis of the fact that he is a Republican, or has beliefs that are more conservative than the average employee at the company. And I have to say that I find that line of questioning to be very troubling. In my work with Joel, I’ve found him to be … very rigorous and principled in his thinking.”

The controversy over Kaplan highlighted a growing and seemingly intractable gap within Facebook — between the values of its more progressive workforce and those of its user base at large.

«

There’s audio of Zuckerberg’s replies, if you wanted to hear his Kermit-like speaking voice. The fact that all this got leaked demonstrates that the internal consensus inside Facebook is breaking down. The problem with Kaplan isn’t so much his political bias, but the fact that he uses that political bias to help people he agrees with, as has been documented again and again.
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Video and education drive demand for bigger tablets as global sales increase for first time since 2014 • Strategy Analytics

»

Households are more crowded than ever at all times of the day with work, learning, and entertainment all occurring in the home as a result of COVID-19 counter-measures. To meet these needs consumers have been buying tablets at the fastest rate in six years, and as a result global sales are expected to increase…

«

Yes? YES?

»

…by 1% year-on-year to 160.8 million units in 2020, according to Strategy Analytics’ latest report. The analysis also shows that consumers are switching to larger displays, with a majority now larger than 10” for the first time.

«

OK, so there’s a replacement surge happening. But that’s hardly what you’d call dramatic, is it.
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Why Magic Leap failed: AR hype exceeded product’s capabilities • Bloomberg

Joshua Brustein and Ian King:

»

After Magic Leap’s $2,300 headset bombed, the startup narrowed its focus to professional applications, tried unsuccessfully to sell the company and fired more than half of its staff. Investors wrote down their stakes by an average of about 94% over a 12-month period ending in June, a steeper decline than WeWork, according to data collected by Zanbato, a research firm that tracks institutional investors.

The new CEO, Johnson, is trying to revive the business through partnerships. Magic Leap is engaged in discussions with Amazon.com Inc. about packaging the headsets with Amazon’s cloud services, according to three people familiar with the talks. The conversations are at an early stage and may not result in a deal. A spokeswoman for Magic Leap declined to comment, and Amazon didn’t respond to request for comment. 

Abovitz responded to an interview request with a message consisting entirely of link to a research report, which estimates long-term growth in the augmented reality market. His spokesman later clarified that there would be no interview and referred subsequent questions to Magic Leap, which declined to comment. People familiar with Abovitz’s next project said it centers on building entertainment content for smartphones and augmented reality devices, including Magic Leap.

The co-founder’s departure came as little surprise to those who worked with him. Interviews with over two dozen people familiar with Magic Leap’s operations, including current and former employees, investors and business partners, suggest Abovitz’s world-building aspirations had become increasingly disconnected from the company’s reality. When employees found they would be unable to deliver on Abovitz’s vision, Magic Leap went from being one of the most intriguing tech startups outside of Silicon Valley to a parable about believing one’s own hype.

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There’s a lovely quote from one ex-employee who says Abovitz “wasn’t equipped to run a company the size of Magic Leap.” It was a zero-billion dollar company, for god’s sake. Its size was his own fault.
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Internet: old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months • BBC News

»

The mystery of why an entire village lost its broadband every morning at 7am was solved when engineers discovered an old television was to blame.

An unnamed householder in Aberhosan, Powys, was unaware the old set would emit a signal which would interfere with the entire village’s broadband.

After 18 months engineers began an investigation after a cable replacement programme failed to fix the issue.

The embarrassed householder promised not to use the television again. The village now has a stable broadband signal.

Openreach engineers were baffled by the continuous problem and it wasn’t until they used a monitoring device that they found the fault.

The householder would switch their TV set on at 7am every morning – and electrical interference emitted by their second-hand television was affecting the broadband signal.

The owner, who does not want to be identified, was “mortified” to find out their old TV was causing the problem, according to Openreach.

«

What I learn from this is that Openreach hasn’t installed fibre in Aberhosan. The village’s broadband would be a lot faster and uninterrupted if it were.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

How many people would be needed to run a dogwalking app for the entire world? Probably fewer than you think. CC-licensed photo by Staffan Cederborg on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Not locked down. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

YouTube reverts to human moderators in fight against misinformation • Financial Times

Alex Barker and Hannah Murphy:

»

Google’s YouTube has reverted to using more human moderators to vet harmful content after the machines it relied on during lockdown proved to be overzealous censors of its video platform.

When some of YouTube’s 10,000-strong team filtering content were “put offline” by the pandemic, YouTube gave its machine systems greater autonomy to stop users seeing hate speech, violence or other forms of harmful content or misinformation.

But Neal Mohan, YouTube’s chief product officer, told the Financial Times that one of the results of reducing human oversight was a jump in the number of videos removed, including a significant proportion that broke no rules.

Almost 11m were taken down in the second quarter between April and June, double the usual rate. “Even 11m is a very, very small, tiny fraction of the overall videos on YouTube . . . but it was a larger number than in the past,” he said.

“One of the decisions we made [at the beginning of the pandemic] when it came to machines who couldn’t be as precise as humans, we were going to err on the side of making sure that our users were protected, even though that might have resulted in s slightly higher number of videos coming down.”

«

The implicit assumption there is that there’s a correct number of videos to be taken down – that it doesn’t vary, even in a situation where you have loads of people spreading conspiracy videos about 5G, bats, Chinese bioweapons, vaccines, and so on. That seems like an assumption that needs closer examination.
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I scanned the websites i visit with Blacklight, and it’s horrifying. Now what? • The Markup

Aaron Sankin:

»

Internet browsers have a “do not track” feature, which is a browser setting that signals to websites and third-party tracking companies that the user would prefer they refrain from collecting the person’s data.

But The Future of Privacy Forum says it has little effect: “Most sites do not currently change their practices when they receive a … [Do Not Track] signal.”

The Digital Advertising Alliance, an industry trade group, offers a tool allowing internet users to opt out of having their browsing history used to serve them targeted ads. Since the group is a consortium representing hundreds of companies, users can opt out of being targeted by all of them with a few clicks.

However, to even get the tool to work in the first place, users have to allow themselves to be tracked by third-party cookies, since those cookies are how the ad-tech companies are able to identify who has opted out. In addition, opting out like this isn’t guaranteed to stop companies from collecting your data; they only promise they won’t use that data to try to sell you stuff.

«

It’s a very, very, very, very detailed look at browser tracking and how to avoid it (you can’t entirely). Blacklight is a tool developed by The Markup which shows you what trackers are operating on what site.

This blog (as it’s run by WordPress) has a Facebook tracker – I’ve looked, and can’t seem to turn it off as it’s embedded somewhere in the code. If you know how I can, please let me know.
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No matter what the CDC says, here’s why many scientists think the coronavirus is airborne • The Washington Post

Ben Guarino, Chris Mooney and Tim Elfrink:

»

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday removed language from its website that said the novel coronavirus spreads via airborne transmission, the latest example of the agency backtracking from its own guidance.

The agency said the guidance, which went up on Friday and largely went without notice until late Sunday, should not have been posted because it was an early draft.

“Unfortunately an early draft of a revision went up without any technical review,” said Jay Butler, the CDC’s deputy director for infectious diseases. “We are returning to the earlier version and revisiting that process. It was a failure of process at CDC.”

Evidence that the virus floats in the air has mounted for months, with an increasingly loud chorus of aerosol biologists pointing to superspreading events in choirs, buses, bars and other poorly ventilated spaces. They cheered when the CDC seemed to join them in agreeing the coronavirus can be airborne.

Experts who reviewed the CDC’s Friday post had said the language change had the power to shift policy and drive a major rethinking on the need to better ventilate indoor air.

…If airborne spread was the main route, Butler said he would have expected the disease to travel even faster around the globe than it did. “The epidemiology seems pretty clear that the highest risk is in household contexts,” he said, meaning through the proximity of one family member or roommate to another.

Sudden flip-flops on public guidance is antithetical to the CDC’s own rules for crisis management. After disastrous communications during the 2001 anthrax attacks — when white powder in envelopes sparked widespread panic — the agency created a 450-page manual outlining how US leaders should talk to the public during crises.

«

I’m sure that manual is doing really great work propping up a table somewhere, given how much notice the current administration takes of such advice.
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Facebook vows to restrict users if US election descends into chaos • Financial Times

Hannah Murphy:

»

Facebook has said it will take aggressive and exceptional measures to “restrict the circulation of content” on its platform if November’s presidential election descends into chaos or violent civic unrest.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Nick Clegg, the company’s head of global affairs, said it had drawn up plans for how to handle a range of outcomes, including widespread civic unrest or “the political dilemmas” of having in-person votes counted more rapidly than mail-in ballots, which will play a larger role in this election due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“There are some break-glass options available to us if there really is an extremely chaotic and, worse still, violent set of circumstances,” Mr Clegg said, though he stopped short of elaborating further on what measures were on the table.

The proposed actions, which would probably go further than any previously taken by a US platform, come as the social media group is under increasing pressure to lay out how it plans to combat election-related misinformation, voter suppression and the incitement of violence on the November 3 election day and during the post-election period. 

It also comes as concerns mount that even US president Donald Trump himself could take to social media to contest the result or call for violent protest, potentially triggering a constitutional crisis.

«

I’m wary of believing Clegg’s talking up of “what Facebook would do” because Facebook always talks a lot bigger than it ever does; even when it wants to do something, the company’s own scale overwhelms it. (See yesterday’s item about trying and failing to rein in QAnon nonsense.) But ex-engineers at Facebook say there is an option to remove all news links from the News Feed. That would be a start, though just shutting the whole thing down for a few days might be a better option.
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Facebook says it will stop operating in Europe if regulators don’t back down • Vice

David Gilbert:

»

In a court filing in Dublin, Facebook said that a decision by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) would force the company to pull up stakes and leave the 410 million people who use Facebook and photo-sharing service Instagram in the lurch.

If the decision is upheld, “it is not clear to [Facebook] how, in those circumstances, it could continue to provide the Facebook and Instagram services in the EU,” Yvonne Cunnane, who is Facebook Ireland’s head of data protection and associate general counsel, wrote in a sworn affidavit.

The decision Facebook’s referring to is a preliminary order handed down last month to stop the transfer of data about European customers to servers in the US, over concerns about US government surveillance of the data.

Facebook hit back by filing a lawsuit challenging the Irish DPC’s ban, and in a sworn affidavit filed this week, the company leveled some very serious accusations about the Irish data-protection commissioner, including a lack of fairness and apparent bias in singling out Facebook.

Cunnane points out that Facebook was given only three weeks to respond to the decision, a period that is “manifestly inadequate,” adding that Facebook wasn’t contacted about the inquiry prior to judgment being handed down.

She also raises concerns about the decision being made “solely” by Helen Dixon, Ireland’s data protection commissioner.

«

This would be remarkable if it came to pass, though I think we all suspect that they will find some fuged middle path in which Facebook will promise not to transfer the data (but will) and Ireland will accept its white lie. After all, that’s what’s happened before.
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What to expect from Google’s 2020 Hardware event • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

Google’s big yearly hardware event is scheduled for September 30, and as usual, we’re expecting a big pile of products to be announced. Google has a hard time keeping anything under wraps before the event, so we’re doing a roundup of all the leaks so far. We’re expecting four products: the Pixel 5 (and Pixel 4a 5G), the “Nest Audio” smart speaker, a new Chromecast with a remote and Android TV, and maybe even a new Nest thermostat.

«

Fine thanks goodbye. Basically all the details have been leaked, so why turn up?
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Google is shutting down paid Chrome extensions • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

Google is shutting down paid Chrome extensions offered on the Chrome Web Store, the company announced today. That means that developers who are trying to monetize their extensions will have to do so with other payment-handling systems.

As of Monday, developers can no longer make new paid extensions, according to Google — though that’s cementing a policy that has already been in place since March. And that policy follows a temporary suspension of publishing paid extensions in January after Google noticed an uptick in fraudulent transactions that “aim[ed] to exploit users.”

«

Though in its blogpost, Google effectively says “it’s because there are lots of other ways to pay for extensions”, implying that it’s fine with you being ripped off as long as the ripoff doesn’t go through its payment systems. Possibly, though, that’s what it’s about: it doesn’t like having to deal with refund demands, rather than that it doesn’t like people being ripped off.
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Twitter investigating after users spot mobile app prefers White faces • CNBC

Sam Shead:

»

Twitter says it’s investigating why its picture-cropping algorithm sometimes prefers White faces to Black ones.

The investigation comes after Twitter users noticed Black faces were less likely to be shown than White ones in image previews on mobile when the image contains a Black face and a White face.

The micro-blogging platform said it didn’t find any evidence of racial and gender bias when it tested the algorithm but conceded it had more analysis to do.

Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s chief technology officer, said Twitter analyzed the model when it shipped it, but said that it needs continuous improvement.

“Love this public, open, and rigorous test — and eager to learn from this,” he said on the platform.

The issue came to light after Colin Madland, a university manager in Vancouver, noticed that his Black colleague’s head kept disappearing when using the video conferencing app Zoom. It appeared as though Zoom’s software thought the Black man’s head was part of the background and removed it as a result. Zoom did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. 

After tweeting about the issue to see if anyone knew what was going on, Madland then realized that Twitter was also guilty of hiding Black faces. Specifically, he noticed Twitter was choosing to preview his own White face over his colleague’s Black face on mobile.

«

I saw the original thread by Madland, and didn’t see the problems other people did; I was viewing it in a third-party app (Tweetbot) on both mobile and desktop. Clearly, it’s Twitter’s system at fault here.
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Just how many people do we need doing that job, anyway? • Rachel By The Bay

Rachel Kroll:

»

Think of your favorite “web 2.0” service or app. Maybe it’s something that sends dog walkers around to your house regularly. Perhaps it can be used to deliver your favorite kind of pizza or beer. It could even be something that lets you chat with other people. We’ll go with dog walking as the example here.

Now think about the entirety of humanity. At the moment, there seem to be about 7.8 billion people running around on this planet (plus a handful in orbit). For the sake of this thought experiment, assume all of them have Internet access and actually have some use for dog walking services.

Consider this: just how many really good people do you suppose it would take to saturate the market and provide service to the entirety of humanity for that dog walking dispatch?

Me? I think it’s about 100 people, tops. Granted, I’m talking about the top 100 people in the population for solving this specific problem: running apps that dispatch dog walkers to dogs… for all ~8 billion of us.

They need not work at the same company. For the sake of some realism, imagine them split up somehow. It could be 20 companies with 5 people each, 5 companies with 20 people each, or 10 companies with 10 people each. Whatever.

Now let’s say you looked at the actual marketplace and determined there were closer to 100,000 people actually working on these dog-walking apps. What do you suppose that means? What could possibly be going on there?

«

Kroll is widely admired in the web engineering community; what she describes in the rest of her post is probably much of what’s really happening. The classic cases of “a few people running a world-spanning service” are Instagram and WhatsApp, of course. Kroll presently works at Facebook.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The TikTok algorithm is watching you all the time. What does that presage about future apps? CC-licensed photo by Solen Feyissa on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Not growing exponentially. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Seeing like an algorithm • Remains of the Day

Eugene Wei with a very smart explanation of what TikTok is doing – which presages how we will probably see many following systems work. As he points out, TikTok shows you one video at a time, and notices your responses to determine what to show next. By contrast:

»

The default UI of our largest social networks today is the infinite vertically scrolling feed (I could have easily used a screenshot of Facebook [rather than Twitter, as in the post], for example). Instead of serving you one story at a time, these apps display multiple items on screen at once. As you scroll up and past many stories, the algorithm can’t “see” which story your eyes rest on. Even if it could, if the user doesn’t press any of the feedback buttons like the Like button, is their sentiment towards that story positive or negative? The signal of user sentiment isn’t clean.

If you subscribe to the idea that UIs should remove friction, the infinite scrolling feed is ideal. It offers a sense of uninhibited control of the pace of consumption. The simulated physics that result from flicking a feed with your thumb and seeing it scroll up like the drum of the Big Wheel from the Price is Right Showcase Showdown with the exact rotational velocity implied by the speed of your initial gesture, seeing that software wheel gradually slow down exactly as it would if encountering constant physical friction, is one of the most delightful user interactions of the touchscreen era. You can scroll past a half dozen tweets or Facebook feed items in no time. Wheeeeeeee!

A paginated design, in which you could only see one story at a time, where each flick of the finger would only advance the feed one item at a time, would be a literal and metaphoric drag.

On the other hand, maybe you wouldn’t mind reading one tweet at a time if they were better targeted, and maybe they would be better targeted if Twitter knew more about which types of tweets really interest you.

«

In 2016 Mark Zuckerberg said “I wouldn’t be surprised if you fast-forward five years and most of the content that people see on Facebook and are sharing on a day-to-day basis is video.” He couldn’t imagine TikTok, but that’s pretty much what’s happening there.

Next question we should ask: what potential drawbacks will this have?
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Nikola founder Trevor Milton steps down after fraud allegations • Financial Times

Peter Campbell, Harry Dempsey and Claire Bushey:

»

Nikola founder Trevor Milton is stepping down as executive chairman of the US electric truck maker, capping a tumultuous 10 days for the company after a short-seller alleged it was an “intricate fraud”.

Stephen Girsky, a former vice-chairman of General Motors and a Nikola board member, will take over as chairman, the company said on Monday.

Mr Milton’s exit follows a bruising period for Nikola after a report from short-seller Hindenburg Research claimed to have “extensive evidence” that the group’s proprietary technology was purchased from another company.

Shares in Nikola, already down heavily over the past week, fell almost 30% in early trading on Wall Street on Monday. Mr Milton remains Nikola’s largest shareholder, owning roughly a quarter of its stock.

…Nikola, which in June went public through a special purpose acquisition vehicle that avoids some of the scrutiny of a traditional initial public offering, has promised to “revolutionise” trucking and battery technology.

…The report from Hindenburg also raised questions about past businesses run by Mr Milton, several of which were mired by lawsuits or had collapsed.

«

Has battery technology finally found its very own Theranos?
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Why you should charge more for your app subscriptions • Matt Ronge

»

The reality is most people won’t sign up for your subscription even at a low price. Most people dislike subscriptions, and many won’t subscribe at any cost. The recurring nature of subscriptions provides a major mental hurdle and makes them hard to commit to.

However, you likely have a smaller set of users who get the most value out of your app and are willing to subscribe. These are your most devoted and die-hard users. When designing your subscription plan you want to focus on these users, they are the ones who will pay and stick around (see my post on churn for why this is critical). By going subscription, you are choosing to focus on fewer customers but your most dedicated customers. Given that this is a much smaller customer base, you need to charge a higher price.

There is such a mental barrier with subscriptions that once someone is willing to purchase, they are likely less price sensitive. If someone is willing to buy at $1.99/month, they are very likely to buy at $4.99/month or even $7.99/month. Our surveys conducted before launching Astropad Studio show this as well:

Price	$50 One-time	$20 Yearly	$50 Yearly	$100 Yearly
Conversion %	45%	38%	21%	15%
Revenue per 10k visitors	$223,549	$75,524	$106,007	$147,887

This is real data from a test on potential pricing schemes for a new app. The first thing you’ll notice is that people are much more willing to make a one-time purchase.

«

Much more revenue from the smaller number of people. Significant.
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Facebook tried to limit QAnon. It failed • The New York Times

Sheera Frankel and Tiffany Hsu:

»

Last month, Facebook said it was cracking down on activity tied to QAnon, a vast conspiracy theory that falsely claims that a satanic cabal runs the world, as well as other potentially violent extremist movements.

Since then, a militia movement on Facebook that called for armed conflict on the streets of U.S. cities has gained thousands of new followers. A QAnon Facebook group has also added hundreds of new followers while questioning common-sense pandemic medical practices, like wearing a mask in public and staying at home while sick. And a campaign that claimed to raise awareness of human trafficking has steered hundreds of thousands of people to conspiracy theory groups and pages on the social network.

Perhaps the most jarring part? At times, Facebook’s own recommendation engine — the algorithm that surfaces content for people on the site — has pushed users toward the very groups that were discussing QAnon conspiracies, according to research conducted by The New York Times, despite assurances from the company that that would not happen.

None of this was supposed to take place under new Facebook rules targeting QAnon and other extremist movements. The Silicon Valley company’s inability to quash extremist content, despite frequent flags from concerned users, is now renewing questions about the limits of its policing and whether it will be locked in an endless fight with QAnon…

«

Facebook can’t control Facebook. That’s what this is saying. The reason why: Facebook.
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Apple’s new iPad Air fingerprint sensor would be ideal for the iPhone 12 • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Android device makers have already embedded fingerprint sensors in displays and power buttons. The in-screen variants have been hit and miss, though, with reliability issues that could have held back Apple from adopting similar technology over the past couple of years. Early in-screen sensors were slow to authenticate, but newer devices seem to have caught up. All but the newest of button sensors have had issues, too. Apple’s reputation is to only introduce new tech once it’s ready, so I’m willing to assume the iPad’s sensor is just as fast and reliable as the company claims.

Even if a new form of Touch ID doesn’t appear on the iPhone 12, there are also other parts of Apple’s new iPad Air that I’d like to see on the new iPhones. Apple’s new A14 Bionic, a 5nm chip with a six-core CPU, had a starring role at the iPad Air announcement and will undoubtedly make an appearance on the iPhone 12. Apple is promising a 40% performance improvement over the previous iPad Air, labeling the chip its most advanced yet.

Apple has also switched to USB-C on the iPad Air, which is a move I’m sure many of us would love to see happen on the iPhone 12. It seems increasingly unlikely that USB-C will appear on the iPhone 12, though.

«

I think it’s at least 50-50 on Apple including Touch ID on the new iPhones. The situations where touch to unlock is more convenient than face to unlock are multiplying, and Apple will have noticed that in the past three years.

USB-C, though – not a chance. The mess of charging and data and all the other nonsense surrounding it is too awful.
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GE is getting out of the coal power business • CNN

Matt Egan:

»

General Electric is one of the world’s largest makers of coal-fired power plants. But now it plans to say goodbye to coal.

Struggling GE announced Monday it won’t build new coal-fuelled power plants, making it the latest major company to dump coal in an exit that may include asset sales, site closures and layoffs.

The move marks a dramatic reversal for GE. Just five years ago, the company doubled down on coal by acquiring Alstom’s power business, which makes coal-fuelled turbines.

That $10.6bn deal – GE’s biggest-ever industrial purchase – proved to be a disaster. Coal has been crushed by the rise of natural gas and a shift toward solar, wind and renewable energy. Since then, GE has laid off thousands of power workers, slashed its dividend to a penny, fired two CEOs and sharply written down the value of its power business.

“With the continued transformation of GE, we are focused on power generation businesses that have attractive economics and a growth trajectory,” GE Power CEO Russell Stokes said in a statement.
GE shares tumbled 6% Monday, leaving them down a whopping 42% on the year. The pandemic has dealt a damaging blow to GE’s jet engine business, which is reeling from a plunge in orders.

«

The Alstom power acquisition wasn’t just coal-powered turbines – there was a lot else – but there were already signs that the whole power market was oversupplied at the time of the acquisition. (Not quite in China, but that’s a tougher market.) Now that huge buy into fossil fuels is going wrong. Terrible forecasting gets its comeuppance.

By the way, Trump’s promise to get coal jobs back hasn’t panned out. There are fewer now than in 2016.
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Quibi explores strategic options including possible sale • WSJ

Amol Sharma, Benjamin Mullin and Cara Lombardo:

»

Streaming service Quibi is exploring several strategic options including a possible sale, according to people familiar with the situation, as the company founded by Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg struggles to sign up subscribers in a competitive online-video marketplace.

Quibi, which launched its short-form, mobile-focused video service in April, is also considering raising more money or going public through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC—essentially a blank-check company that helps fund deals, the people said. Quibi is working with advisers to review its options.

The review process is a sign of strain.

«

Sooooo… it’s very short, and now it’s mobile? Anyone who puts money into it would be properly bonkers.
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In 2005, Helios flight 522 crashed into a Greek hillside. Was it because one man forgot to flip a switch? • The Guardian

Sally Williams:

»

After the disaster, Greek air investigators determined that flight 522 had crashed because it had failed to pressurise properly. As it climbed, the air in the cabin had become too thin to breathe, causing most people to lose consciousness. The investigation quickly focused on the theory that the pressurisation selector switch had been left in “manual” rather than “auto”, and attributed this to human error – principally that of Irwin who, they said, had not returned the switch to its correct position after a safety check; and of incompetent pilots who had failed to spot the error.

This narrative was soon leaked to the press. “Alan Irwin… is at the centre of the inquiry after reports that a knob used to control cabin pressure was left in the wrong position after a safety check,” stated the Times.

Meanwhile, Boeing was also attributing the crash to human error. “Helios’s ground engineers did not follow Boeing’s correct procedure,” said Stephen Preston, a lawyer hired by the manufacturer, in a private deposition to the Greek courts seen by the Guardian. “At least 16 separate mistakes were made by the ground staff, the flight deck crew and the passenger cabin crew. If any one of these mistakes had not been made, the accident would not have happened.”

But the causes of the crash were more complicated.

«

Long but fascinating piece which revolves around what constitutes good and bad user interface design. If you’re a pilot in an ascending plane and you hear a warning horn go off, what does it mean? In the Boeing 737, it could mean at least two very different things.
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Low- to mid-range smartphones dominate worldwide smartphone forecast with the fastest growth expected in $400-600 price band • IDC

»

Economic uncertainties have increased the downward pressure on smartphone prices globally with 73% of shipments in 2020 expected to be priced below $400, according to a new price band forecast from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. Worldwide smartphone value is expected to decline 7.9% in 2020 to $422.4 billion, down from $458.5 billion in 2019. The downward trend is intensified by consumers turning to devices priced in the low-to-mid range as they prioritize spending on essentials.

Overall, the low-to-mid end segment ($100 to less than $400) dominated global smartphone shipments with 60% market share in the second quarter of 2020 (2Q20) and is expected to grow in the short term to 63% by next year. The mid-to-high end segment ($400 to less than $600) grew its share of the market by almost 4 points to 11.6% in 2Q20. Devices from Samsung, Huawei, and other Chinese vendors like Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo are the main vendors driving these segments. Apple also recently entered the mid segment with its new iPhone SE device, which has performed well, further validating the trend toward more budget-friendly devices.

«

Not surprising, but given that there are a billion-plus of these gizmos sold every year, there’s still plenty of room at the top. The question is how you make a profit on the cheap ones.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

Yes yes, but what are their views on big tech? CC-licensed photo by duncan c on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Also available left-handed. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

YouTube’s plot to silence conspiracy theories • WIRED

Clive Thompson:

»

After the Las Vegas shooting, executives began focusing more on the challenge [of preventing conspiracy content going being excessively recommended]. Google’s content moderators grew to 10,000, and YouTube created an “intelligence desk” of people who hunt for new trends in disinformation and other “inappropriate content.” YouTube’s definition of hate speech was expanded to include Alex Jones’ claim that the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School never occurred. The site had already created a “breaking-news shelf” that would run on the homepage and showcase links to content from news sources that Google News had previously vetted. The goal, as Neal Mohan, YouTube’s chief product officer, noted, was not just to delete the obviously bad stuff but to boost reliable, mainstream sources. Internally, they began to refer to this strategy as a set of R’s: “remove” violating material and “raise up” quality stuff.

But what about content that wasn’t quite bad enough to be deleted? Like alleged conspiracies or dubious information that doesn’t advocate violence or promote “dangerous remedies or cures” or otherwise explicitly violate policies? Those videos wouldn’t be removed by moderators or the content-blocking AI. And yet, some executives wondered if they were complicit by promoting them at all. “We noticed that some people were watching things that we weren’t happy with them watching,” says Johanna Wright, one of YouTube’s vice presidents of product management, “like flat-earth videos.” This was what executives began calling “borderline” content. “It’s near the policy but not against our policies,” as Wright said.

By early 2018, YouTube executives decided they wanted to tackle the borderline material too. It would require adding a third R to their strategy—“reduce.” They’d need to engineer a new AI system that would recognize conspiracy content and misinformation and down-rank it.

«

Which means, if you think about it, that there were now multiple AI systems chasing each other around the system: one doing the recommendations, and others trying to identify and categorise conspiracy content. One’s always going to be ahead of the other. Fascinating piece, though.
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Six people indicted in Amazon Marketplace bribery scheme to help third-party sellers • The Verge

Kim Lyons:

»

Six people have been indicted by a grand jury in Washington state on charges they bribed Amazon employees to manipulate third-party seller listings on the e-commerce site, including listings for defective or dangerous products, authorities said.

Starting in 2017, the people, including two former Amazon employees, paid more than $100,000 to have listings of products and accounts that Amazon had blocked or suspended from its Marketplace, which allows third-party sellers to promote and sell their products, the Department of Justice said. The former employees also provided internal Amazon information that allowed attacks on other third-party sellers and their accounts, including flooding the sellers’ product listings with fake negative reviews, authorities said.

The defendants accessed contact information for Amazon employees and customers, which they shared widely, according to authorities. Three of the people were based in New York, one in Georgia, one in California, and one was in India,

“Realizing they could not compete on a level playing field, the subjects turned to bribery and fraud in order to gain the upper hand. What’s equally concerning, not only did they attempt to increase sales of their own products, but sought to damage and discredit their competitors,” Raymond Duda, FBI Seattle Special agent in charge, said in a statement.

«

All these companies, too big to handle what goes on inside them.
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Trump celebrates TikTok deal that falls short of his key demands • Bloomberg via MSN

Nick Wadhams and Shelly Banjo:

»

Linking TikTok to Beijing’s handling of the raging coronavirus outbreak, Trump in July threatened to ban the app used by 100 million Americans unless China handed over control of the company, its algorithms and data to the U.S. Hearkening back to his New York real estate days, he also insisted the US government get compensated in the process.

The deal Trump signed off on Saturday, hours before a Sept. 20 deadline, does almost none of that.

Trump said he wanted the US part of the business owned by an American company. But China’s ByteDance remains the majority shareholder in a new US company that will include fresh investments by Oracle and Walmart in a future fundraising round.

Trump said he wanted the data to stay in American hands, for national security reasons. But the algorithm itself – the thing that makes TikTok TikTok – will still belong to ByteDance, so national security concerns remain, experts said.

And the government payout? That turned into a vaguely worded promise of $5bn in new tax dollars to the US Treasury. The company also said it would create a new “education initiative” to teach kids reading and math online. Still, Trump said he was satisfied.

“They’re going to be setting up a very large fund,” Trump said Saturday. “That’s their contribution that I’ve been asking for.”

«

As Banjo pointed out in a tweet, this is essentially a scam to funnel a big cloud contract to two Trump supporters.
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Gangster capitalism and the American theft of Chinese innovation • TechCrunch

Danny Crichton:

»

It used to be “easy” to tell the American and Chinese economies apart. One was innovative, one made clones. One was a free market while the other demanded payments to a political party and its leadership, a corrupt wealth generating scam that by some estimates has netted top leaders billions of dollars. One kept the talent borders porous acting as a magnet for the world’s top brains while the other interviewed you in a backroom at the airport before imprisoning you on sedition charges (okay, that might have been both).

…much as China protected its industry from overseas competitors like Google and Amazon through market-entry barriers, America is now protecting its entrenched incumbents from overseas competitors like TikTok. We’re demanding joint ventures and local cloud data sovereignty just as the Communist Party has demanded for years.

Hell, we’re apparently demanding a $5bn tax payment from ByteDance, which the president says will fund patriotic education for youth. The president says a lot of things of course, but at least the $5 billion price point has been confirmed by Oracle in its press release over night (what the tax revenue will actually be used for is anyone’s guess). If you followed the recent Hong Kong protests for a long time, you will remember that patriotic youth education was some of the original tinder for those demonstrations back in 2012. What comes around, goes around, I guess.

«

This is true, though Crichton doesn’t mention that the principal reason why this is now the case is that the US presently has the most corrupt administration in its entire history. Change the administration for one that respects the rule of law, and suddenly a lot of these things go away.
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Apple books TSMC’s entire 5-nanometre production capability • ExtremeTech

Joel Hruska:

»

TSMC won’t have to worry about finding additional customers for its 5nm line any time soon. If reports are true, Apple bought the entire production capacity for the iPhone, iPad, and other refreshed devices it has recently launched or will launch in the coming weeks. Apple hasn’t refreshed the iPhone yet this year, but it’s expected to do so in October, and the company has had a lock on TSMC’s 5nm production for months.

TSMC will build 5nm chips for the iPhone 12, iPad Air, 5G iPad Pro, and any future MacBook or iMac systems Apple launches with its own custom ARM silicon. In 2019, Apple is thought to have accounted for about 20% of TSMC’s monthly revenue, making it one of TSMC’s largest customers.

This sort of single-customer focus is unusual for a pure-play foundry, but it also makes sense given longstanding trends in the semiconductor market. Ten years ago, companies such as AMD, Nvidia, and Intel were typically the first manufacturers to deploy on leading-edge nodes. These firms used their high-end designs to function as “pipe-cleaners” for the node. More recently, however, that trend has shifted. Now, it’s the mobile manufacturers like Apple and Qualcomm that typically take the first launches.

…Apple is expected to produce between 74m and 80m iPhone 12’s this year. The biggest near-term impact of this is Qualcomm reportedly partnering with Samsung to build the Snapdragon 875 on that company’s 5nm, with a formal announcement expected in December.

«

Ambitious. About 5m per quarter will be going into the Apple Silicon machines. Compared to the iPhone plus iPad, not much – but they’re going to have heftier GPUs and CPUs, so the yields will be lower.
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Google and Facebook under pressure to ban children’s ads • BBC News

»

Tech firms have been urged to stop advertising to under-18s in an open letter signed by MPs, academics and children’s-rights advocates.

Behavioural advertising not only undermines privacy but puts “susceptible” youngsters under unfair marketing pressure, the letter says.

It is addressed to Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft.

In a separate move Google-owned YouTube is accused of unlawfully mining data from five million under-13s in the UK. European data protection laws forbid the mining of data of young children.

“The fact that ad-tech companies hold 72 million data points on a child by the time they turn 13 shows the extent of disregard for these laws, and the extraordinary surveillance to which children are subjected,” the letter reads. “There is no justification for targeting teenagers with personalised ads any more than there is for targeting 12-year-olds. You, the most powerful companies on the internet, have a responsibility to protect your users.”

Among the 23 signatories are MP Caroline Lucas and clinical psychologist Dr Elly Hanson. Friends of the Earth is also named on the letter.

…Separately, privacy advocate Duncan McCann is suing Google on behalf of five million British children, claiming it broke privacy laws by tracking children online, in breach of both UK and European data-protection laws.

The case, lodged with the UK High Court in July, will be strongly contested by YouTube which will argue its platform is not for children aged under 13.

«

No, that would be YouTube Kids, which, hmm, “has faced criticism from advocacy groups, particularly the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, for concerns surrounding the app’s use of commercial advertising”.
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Nikola outsourced batteries on truck prototype • Financial Times

Claire Bushey and Peter Campbell:

»

Nikola is relying on Californian manufacturer Romeo Power Technology for batteries for one of its prototype electric trucks, according to documents seen by the Financial Times and a person familiar with the work.

The use of an established industry supplier is the second example of the start-up outsourcing a key technology, months after it touted its own “game-changing” battery, which it said it would demonstrate this year.

Earlier this month, Nikola agreed to purchase General Motors’ Ultium battery for its Badger pick-up truck, as part of a $2bn deal in which GM is taking an 11% stake in the company.

Excitement for Nikola’s technology has helped propel its shares this year, to the point that it was briefly more valuable than Ford, but it is now fighting allegations that it repeatedly misrepresented its progress and does not have the proprietary technology it claimed.

«

This looks like a lawsuit in the making.
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The ad industry extends an olive branch to Apple

Andrew Blustein and Ronan Shields:

»

media buyers are still confused by what the impending policy change means for ad targeting, and many are unclear as to the exact date of the change. The eventual ambition of PRAM [Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media] is for Apple to engage more proactively with some of its working groups, Tucker told Adweek.

Stu Ingis, a partner at law firm Venable LLP, told Adweek that ad-tech companies “have nothing to hide” and that Apple commercials celebrating its privacy credentials depict data discrepancies that are not widely practiced in the industry.

“The idea is that we’re not trying to hide anything here,” he added. “It’s an olive branch to say, ‘If these are your concerns … then let’s sit down and identify what privacy concerns there are, and what solutions might work.’”

Apple has not formally responded to PRAM’s overture and declined to comment on record to Adweek, although it has made clear through its years-long efforts to minimize third-party ad targeting, tracking and data brokerage that it deems these practices invasive.

Apple has existing advertising offerings, and made its own failed play with iAd 10 years ago, but it characteristically makes unilateral policy decisions. While Apple employees are active in web standards bodies such as W3C, it hasn’t participated in trade orgs such as the IAB recently (Apple was a member of the IAB from 2007 until 2014). Although Apple was at one point a member of the ANA, a trade org that represents brand-side marketers, it canceled its 15-year membership in February, according to sources.

However, some state that Apple has changed its tack when it comes to cooperating with the rest of the industry. DigiDay reported that it is striking “a more conciliatory tone” with the industry, noting that Apple had agreed to meet with representatives of IAB Europe and the Tech Lab in early September.

This followed the trade group’s open letter urging Apple to consider interoperability with GDPR standards dating back to July.

«

Love how the online ad industry, responsible for continual invasion of privacy, is now terrified that Apple is going to clamp down on its practices. The line of “if these are your concerns…” is better translated as “we’re worried as hell about this”.
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Scientists may know where coronavirus originated, study says • Fox News

Amy McGorry:

»

The group of scientists from the United States, China, and Europe compared mutation patterns of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, to other viruses, and created an evolutionary history of the related viruses. They discovered the lineage responsible for producing the virus that created the COVID-19 pandemic has been present in bats, according to the study.

“Collectively our analyses point to bats being the primary reservoir for the SARS-CoV-2 lineage. While it is possible that pangolins, or another hitherto undiscovered species, may have acted as an intermediate host facilitating transmission to humans, current evidence is consistent with the virus having evolved in bats resulting in bat sarbecoviruses that can replicate in the upper respiratory tract of both humans and pangolins,” the study authors said in the published report.

The novel coronavirus evolved from other bat viruses from 40-70 years ago, the team of researchers said. “The lineage giving rise to SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating unnoticed in bats for decades,” the authors wrote.

In a news release provided to Fox News, the researchers said that SARS-CoV-2 is similar genetically (about 96%) to the RaTG13 coronavirus found in a sample of the Rhinolophus affinis horseshoe bat in 2013 in Yunnan province, China, but it diverged from RaTG13 back in 1969.

“The ability to estimate divergence times after disentangling recombination histories, which is something we developed in this collaboration, may lead to insights into the origins of many different viral pathogens,” principal investigator, Philippe Lemey, with the Department of Evolutionary and Computational Virology, KE Leuven, said in the release.

«

Yes, reported at Fox News, on its website. Meanwhile the TV station was running a wild conspiracy theory segment on Tucker Carlson’s show with a Hong Kong scientist who insists that SARS-Cov-2 is a Chinese bioweapon. (But if it’s a Chinese bioweapon, why did China make so much noise about it? Damn details screwing up our conspiracy theories.)
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Where Trump and Biden stand on big tech • WSJ

John D. McKinnon and Ryan Tracy:

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In a second term, Mr. Trump and his appointees likely would maintain—and possibly accelerate—the broad-scale regulatory scrutiny of technology companies that marked his first term. That effort has included allegations of anticonservative bias online, antitrust investigations of internet giants such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc., and actions against Chinese-owned apps such as TikTok and WeChat.

Mr. Biden, the Democratic nominee, has also been critical of Big Tech’s market power. He and running mate Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) say they would support stricter antitrust oversight and online privacy rules. But the Biden camp has emphasized forcing social-media companies to better police their sites against false information, and taking government action to help workers under threat from innovations such as self-driving cars.

…Mr. Biden has expressed concerns about the potential impacts of many tech innovations, such as self-driving vehicles, on people with middle-class jobs. “Whether your predictions are true about automation and self-driving trucks, these folks aren’t stupid,” he said in a speech in 2018 at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “They listen, they understand and they’re scared to death.” Among Mr. Biden’s proposed solutions are such ideas as providing extra government aid to help workers who have been dislocated by tech.

…In a New York Times interview early this year, Mr. Biden described meeting as vice president with tech leaders—“little creeps,” he called them—touting their industry’s economic benefit.

“‘You have fewer people on your payroll than all the losses that General Motors just faced in the last quarter, of employees. So don’t lecture me about how you’ve created all this employment,’” Mr. Biden said he responded.

«

Notice how the WSJ actually has no idea what a second Trump administration would do, because Trump doesn’t. I’ll take a stab at how this story originated. A news editor wandered over (in real life or virtually) to the writers and said “hey, with the election coming up.. how about we do a piece contrasting where Trump and Biden stand on Big Tech?” Writers groaned inwardly. Then replied cheerily “Sure!”
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The internal email says there’s a car with its lights on – so should you click the link to the photo? CC-licensed photo by oatsy40 on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Closer than ever. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Phishing tricks: the top ten treacheries of 2020 • Naked Security

Paul Ducklin:

»

the Phish Threat team asked themselves, “Which phishing templates give the best, or perhaps more accurately, the worst results?”

Are business email users more likely to fall for sticks or carrots? For threats or free offers? For explicit instructions or helpful suggestions? For “you must” or “you might like”?

The answers covered a broad range of phishing themes, but had a common thread: not one of them was a threat.

Most of them dealt with issues that were mundane and undramatic, while at the same time apparently being interesting, important, or both.

Nothing on this list was truly urgent or terrifying, and they all sounded likely and uncomplicated enough to be worth getting out of the way quickly.

«

The examples here are so generic, yet brilliant: emails claiming to be new HR rules of conduct, tax summaries, “scheduled server maintenance”, “task assigned to you”, email tests, vacation policies, the utterly brilliant “car lights left on – I uploaded the picture *here*” (which leads to the malware), and more.

Don’t think you’ll be perfect. Some years back a military group which had been briefed to watch out for phishing all eagerly clicked on an attachment in an email which said “BIN LADEN KILLED BY SPECIAL FORCES”. (Before OBL was really killed, obviously.) Luckily for them it was just a test run by the security team to show how vulnerable people are.
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Is Apple One a bargain? It’s complicated • The Verge

Chaim Gartenberg:

»

in most cases, Apple One only makes sense if you’re already subscribing to Apple’s most in-demand services: iCloud storage, which is essential for backing up most iPhones given Apple’s increasingly absurd (and stingy) 5GB allowance for new devices, and Apple Music. And at the end of the day, Apple One doesn’t make subscribing to those two key services dramatically cheaper — it just provides a discount for subscribing to Apple’s less popular services. It’s a good discount, mind you, but one that still results in most customers paying more than they are right now.

The hard numbers confirm this. According to Counterpoint Research, Apple Music had an estimated 68 million users by the end of 2019. Barclays Analysts estimated that the company had 170 million paid iCloud customers in 2018. Comparatively, Apple had just 10 million subscribers as of February 2020 for Apple TV Plus — many of whom were riding along on the free one-year trial that Apple offers for the service, which will coincidentally start to expire for the earliest customers next month. And while estimates for Arcade are harder to come by, it’s likely far below Apple Music and iCloud.

In other words: the number of customers who already subscribe to Apple services beyond Music and iCloud––the ones who would actually get the benefits of the discounted pricing––are far outnumbered by those that don’t. And that’s the real point of Apple One: not to save you money, but to get you to spend more on services like Apple Arcade and Apple TV Plus that you might not have been considering subscribing to before.

«

That numbers for iCloud customers is about one-fifth of the iPhone installed base. Apple clearly thinks there’s some room for expansion, particularly with the lowest-tier “Personal” offering as a way either to get people to sign up for Apple Music, or to get more iCloud storage. Something of a problem if they’re using Spotify, though.
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Facebook to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord • WSJ

Jeff Horwitz:

»

Facebook is moving to curb internal debate around divisive political and social topics, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday, after a spate of disputes and criticism that has fueled discord among staff.

The steps will include delineating which parts of its internal company messaging platform are acceptable for such discussions, and careful moderation of the discussions when they occur, Mr. Zuckerberg told employees at a company meeting, according to a spokesman. Employees shouldn’t have to confront social issues in their day-to-day work unless they want to, the CEO said.

«

Kevin Roose of the NYT pointed out that this is due to Facebook using Facebook internally for its communications. Which means that all the amplification of polarising content happens same as it does for people outside. That’s really dogfooding. (In a followup tweet, Roose said “A FB employee told me once that they often made their Workplace posts sharper and more opinionated than their actual beliefs, so they’d have a better chance of appearing in managers’ feeds.”)

So the answer is “careful moderation”? Looking forward to that for the other billion-odd users. Separately, Facebook said it’s going to try harder to moderate Groups. Only a few years too late; Zuckerberg began promoting them in 2017 because he thought we were all too lonely. Turned out that included terrorists too.
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When you browse Instagram and find former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s passport number • Mango

@mangopdf:

»

Tony Abbott is one of Australia’s many former Prime Ministers.

(For security reasons, we try to change our Prime Minister every six months, and to never use the same Prime Minister on multiple websites.)

This particular former PM had just posted a picture of his boarding pass on Instagram (Instagram, in case you don’t know it, is an app you can open up on your phone any time to look at ads).

The since-deleted Instagram post showing the boarding pass and baggage receipt. The caption reads “coming back home from japan 😍😍 looking forward to seeing everyone! climate change isn’t real 😌 ok byeee”

“Can you hack this man?” [came the request]

«

Entertaining post about how to discover a vulnerability that lets you capture personal information (and a lot more) while keeping out of trouble. Who knew that airline websites have so much data – including employee discussions about you – hung around your own boarding pass login.
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Thread by @TubeTimeUS on Thread Reader App • Thread Reader App

»

This electrical transmission tower has a little problem. Can you spot it? Actually, it’s not a small problem–it cost us 16.65 *billion* dollars and caused the deaths of 85 people.

«

Thus (illustrated with a picture of what is technically known as a transposition tower, but looks to most people like an electricity pylon) begins a fascinating thread which reveals the creaking infrastructure of the US and how you need really strong financial incentives to keep utilities in line. You don’t need to be on Twitter to read it.
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Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg need Trump even more than Trump needs Facebook • Bloomberg

Sarah Frier and Kurt Wagner:

»

after Republicans complained about the voter registration efforts, Facebook seemed to back off further, according to emails obtained by the Tech Transparency Project. The company had planned a two-day promotion over the July 4th holiday on Facebook, as well as on Instagram and Messenger, but then cut that down to a one-day push on Facebook alone.

Facebook has said that the suggestion that the company scaled down its voter registration plans for political reasons is “pure fabrication.” Another spokesman, replying to a Twitter user who suggested the same, responded with a picture of a woman in a tin foil hat.

The company, of course, knows lots about conspiracy theorists, who thrive on the site. There’s QAnon, a far-right movement that espouses a complex theory involving a cabal of elites engaged in child sex trafficking. The FBI deemed it a form of domestic terrorism in August 2019, but Facebook only started removing accounts in May. The company also initially ignored posts tied to a Kenosha, Wis., militia in which users discussed shooting Black Lives Matter protesters. The militia’s event page was flagged more than 400 times, but moderators allowed it to stay up, according to BuzzFeed. Not long after the posts began appearing, a 17-year-old with an assault rifle shot and killed two people at a protest in the city.

…Biden, meanwhile, has said he also favors removing Section 230 protections and holding executives personally liable. “I’ve never been a big Zuckerberg fan,” he told the New York Times in January. Zuckerberg seems keenly aware of the risks of a Trump loss. He’s told employees that Facebook is likely to fare better under Republicans, according to people familiar with the conversations.

«

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TikTok accepts deal revisions as Trump prepares to review proposal • The New York Times

David McCabe, Erin Griffith, Ana Swanson and Mike Isaac:

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Some Republican lawmakers, such as Senators Marco Rubio of Florida, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, have criticized any deal that would leave ByteDance in control of TikTok’s code or algorithms as inadequate in addressing national security concerns. That has raised questions of whether Mr. Trump could face criticism for the Oracle-TikTok proposal while running for re-election.

…While rushing to secure a deal, TikTok is also hunting for a permanent chief executive to replace Kevin Mayer, who resigned in late August, citing the changing political pressures of the role. Vanessa Pappas, the general manager of TikTok in North America, took over in the interim.

Among those whom TikTok has talked to about the job is Kevin Systrom, a founder and former chief executive of Instagram, people briefed on the matter said. Talks are preliminary, and no final decisions have been made, they said.

The parties to a deal expect to name an American chief executive of the new TikTok entity, one person familiar with the matter said.

«

Criticism of Trump while he’s running for re-election? I thought he was running for that right now. And I could find plenty of people who are critical of him. As ever, the NYT manages to pretend that Trump is some sort of vaguely normal politician who cares what people think, rather than a corrupt real estate broker with narcissistic personality disorder.

Kevin Systrom would be a fascinating choice for TikTok’s CEO.
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QArmyJapanFlynn (QAJF): the collective delusion is global • Medium

Geoff Golberg:

»

According to the account’s bio description, Eri is the “sole [Japanese] translator” for QMap, in addition to being the “founder” of QAJFlynn (aka QArmyJapanFlynn). Moreover, the official QAJF site is listed in the account’s bio description, as are three Twitter accounts that, in our research, have emerged as being central to QAnon (@StormIsUponUs, @GenFlynn, and @intheMatrixxx). The @StormIsUponUs account, aka JoeM, was one of the largest QAnon supporting accounts prior to its suspension on April 9th, 2020. At the time of suspension, @StormIsUponUs reflected having 273 thousand Followers.

Given Eri(QMapJapan)’s Followers count is approaching 80 thousand, it would be easy for one to conclude that QAnon is wildly popular among Japanese speakers.

Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that the vast majority of accounts following @okabaeri9111 are fake accounts.

Twitter’s refusal to enforce their own rules not only results in advertisers like Rolex wasting their advertising dollars on useless inventory (i.e. Rolex is a victim of blatant ad fraud and where their brand appears adjacent QAnon), but also functions to create the illusion that QAnon has a massive following among Japanese speakers.

Social Forensics has contacted Mounia Mechbal, Rolex’s VP of Marketing and Communications, to inform her that Twitter is engaging in ad fraud that presents Rolex’s brand adjacent QAnon (we will update this post should we receive a response):

«

“Half of what I spend on advertising is wasted. I just don’t know which half,” goes the famous saying. With online advertising you know: more than half.
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Exclusive: AT&T considers cellphone plans subsidized by ads • Reuters

Sheila Dang, Helen Coster, Krystal Hu, Kenneth Li:

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AT&T is considering offering wireless phone plans partially subsidized by advertising as soon as a year from now, chief executive John Stankey said in an interview on Tuesday.

The consideration, which has not been previously disclosed, underscores AT&T’s commitment to the advertising business as the US phone carrier reviews its portfolio to identify assets to sell in order to reduce its debt load. AT&T is considering selling its advertising-technology unit Xandr, sources familiar with the matter have told Reuters.

“I believe there’s a segment of our customer base where given a choice, they would take some load of advertising for a $5 or $10 reduction in their mobile bill,” Stankey said.

«

I wonder if Stankey would be willing to suffer advertising that tracked and targeted him for the sake of a few dollars off his phone bill. You might say: of course not, and he doesn’t have to because he can afford to pay more. But if the CEO isn’t willing to use his own product, why should others have to tolerate having their privacy invaded and ads barked at them all the time?

I wonder too how many spam calls Stankey gets to his mobile number. If that number were to go up rapidly, perhaps AT&T would start figuring out how to block them more effectively. Again: it’s a matter of getting the CEO to use the product, not live in a bubble of exception.
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Listen to an unheard Steve Jobs NeXT keynote from 1988 • Fast Company

Harry McCracken:

»

“The Macintosh architecture is going to peak next year sometime. And that means that there’s enough cracks in the wall already, and enough limitations to the architecture, that the Mac’s pretty much going to be everything it’s ever going to be sometime next year.”

A tech CEO is onstage helpfully explaining that the Mac’s expiration date is imminent. More important, he’s about to introduce us to a new computer designed for the next decade. I am in a distant seat among his audience of more than 2,000 at Boston’s Symphony Hall, where the anticipation in the air is thick enough to induce a contact high.

After all, we are among the lucky few who will hear about the NeXT computer directly from Steve Jobs himself.

What we were witnessing on the evening of November 30, 1988 wasn’t the NeXT launch event. That had happened seven weeks earlier at San Francisco’s Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, before 3,000 invited developers, educators, and reporters. Jobs was now giving a second performance of the same basic presentation at the monthly general meeting of the Boston Computer Society. It was open to all members, and therefore a much more public affair than the exclusive San Francisco version.

«

What McCracken is excited about – and historians of computing will be excited about – is a huge trove of audio recordings of many of the big names from the dawn of personal computing speaking about important moments there. If that’s the sort of thing you like, you’ll like this.
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Swedish consortium unveils mammoth wind-powered car carrier • The Driven

Joshua Hill:

»

A Swedish consortium including ship design firm Wallenius Marine has unveiled a modern-day sailing ship which will be capable of carrying 6-7,000 vehicles and be able to reduce emissions for the trans-Atlantic crossing by 90%.

The wPCC – wind Powered Car Carrier – is a Swedish collaborative project led and overseen by Wallenius Marine and including the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and maritime consulting firm SSPA.

Heralded as a “Swedish project for truly sustainable shipping,” the wPCC is currently being developed by the consortium and is expected to be sailing by the end of 2024.

The world’s largest sailing vessel, the wPCC is billed as being able to reduce emissions by 90% as compared to other ocean-going freighters. A transatlantic crossing aboard the wPCC would take twelve days, instead of the current seven days it takes a conventional freighter.

Conversely, the current fleet of around 450 large car transporters currently use 40 tonnes of fossil fuel per day, opening the door for significant reductions to shipping emissions.

«

That’s splendid news! Although these, er, vehicles that you’re sail-shipping. What sort of fuel do they run on, precisely?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Who’s unafraid of Apple’s new Fitness+ offering? These people. CC-licensed photo by Tony Webster on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Spin, but in a good way. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Oracle’s TikTok bid leaves US security concerns unaddressed • Bloomberg

Saleha Mohsin , Nick Wadhams, and Jennifer Jacobs:

»

Oracle’s bid for TikTok falls short of resolving concerns of Trump administration officials that the Chinese-owned video-sharing app poses a risk to US national security, according to people familiar with the matter.

President Donald Trump has the authority to sign off on a deal, but continuing concerns from national security officials could sway his decision. The agreement remains on the table, with discussions continuing between administration officials and the companies, said the people, who asked not to be named because the talks are confidential.

Addressing those remaining issues could pave the way for US approval, the people said.

The officials, including Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, are concerned that after a potential transaction, TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, could still have access to user data from its nearly 100 million users in America, said the people. The officials remain wary about the proposed new ownership structure and how much influence that would give China over the company.

«

I wonder if ByteDance is just trying as best it can to string this out beyond the election date. The reality is still that if the algorithm isn’t part of the deal, it’s just a hosting deal – just the same as Apple being obliged to store iCloud data for Chinese users in China (so the Chinese government can inspect it). We have met the enemy, and he is us. Though quite what the NSA hopes to find out from 100 million American kids dancing, who knows. WSJ reports overnight that US wants over 50% of ownership. Good luck with that.
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Peloton CEO on Apple launching workouts: ‘a legitimization of fitness content’ • CNBC

Lauren Thomas:

»

Peloton CEO John Foley said Tuesday that Apple launching a fitness platform is a “legitimization” of this type of content. 

Foley’s remarks were made during the bike maker’s first-ever investor meeting as a public company, and coincided with Apple’s splashy unveiling of the fitness platform, which will allow users to access a catalog of workout videos on iPhones, iPads, or on an Apple TV that sync to an Apple Watch. 

Peloton shares dipped slightly on the news and recently were up about 4%. 

“We’re just digesting the announcement like everybody,” Foley said. “The biggest thing I will say is it’s quite a legitimization of fitness content, to the extent the biggest company in the word, a $2 trillion company, is coming in and saying fitness content matters. It’s meaningful enough for Apple.” 

However, he said, Peloton separates itself from Apple with its high-tech spin bikes and treadmills, which Apple isn’t planning to offer customers.

«

Peloton kit is flipping expensive. Like £2,000 for a bike and then a subscription for the service. But this is not a Swiss watch v Apple Watch situation. Peloton users love their kit and the experience, so aren’t going to abandon it. If you can afford it, you’ll probably go for Peloton rather than something cheaper. Apple though is going to mop up a significant number of people for whom Fitness+ will be a gym membership on their wrist (you need an Apple Watch to use it).
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Spotify steps up antitrust war over Apple One bundling • Yahoo

»

Sweden’s global number one music streamer Spotify is urging EU competition authorities to probe Apple’s One bundled subscription services as it steps up its antitrust criticisms of the US tech titan.

“Once again, Apple is using its dominant position and unfair practices to disadvantage competitors and deprive consumers by favoring its own services,” said Spotify in a statement.

“We call on competition authorities to act urgently to restrict Apple’s anti-competitive behavior, which if left unchecked, will cause irreparable harm to the developer community and threaten our collective freedoms to listen, learn, create, and connect,” the firm added in a Tuesday statement.

Spotify has already been involved in two other competition face-offs with Apple surrounding the latter’s Apple Store and Apple Pay.

The Swedish company says that a low-priced bundle including music streaming from Apple Music, a key rival, skews the market.

Spotify is by a distance the global leader in music streaming, with 299 million users according to latest data from June – including 138 million subscription holders – and sales of €1.89bn ($2.2bn).

«

As Ben Thompson pointed out, there’s nothing stopping Spotify bundling itself with some offering from Google or an Android OEM or a carrier or.. Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s done a few of those. Spotify might have a case the cost of signing people up through the App Store, but this is thin gruel. Apple’s nowhere near a monopoly of smartphones.

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Apple releases iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 with home screen redesign, App Library, compact UI, Translate app, Scribble support, App Clips, and more • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

Apple has released iOS 14 and iPadOS 14, the newest operating system updates designed for the iPhone and iPad. As with all of Apple’s software updates, iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 can be downloaded for free. iOS 14 is available on the iPhone 6s and later, while iPadOS 14 is available on the iPad Air 2 and later.

«

Good rundown of what’s new. I think the instantly most popular thing will be pinning message recipients to the top of the screen for quick access to people or groups you often communicate with.

And people are going to be quite puzzled for a while by incoming calls not taking over the screen. Expect lots of people to miss calls for a while.

Plus you can change your default browser and mail app. Say goodbye to your battery if you choose Chrome and Gmail, I suspect.
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Oregon GOP senator who walked out to stop climate vote loses house to wildfire • Labour 411

Sahid Fawaz:

»

Oregon Republican state senator Fred Girod was one of 11 Republicans who made headlines when they walked out of the senate – some even leaving the state – so that a quorum could not be achieved for a climate change bill.

As Wikipedia states:

“From June 20, 2019, all 11 Republican state senators for Oregon, including Girod, refused to show up for work at the Oregon State Capitol, instead going into hiding, some even fleeing the state. Their aim was to push the vote on a cap-and-trade proposal that would dramatically lower greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to combat climate change to voters instead of being instituted by lawmakers. The Senate holds 30 seats, but 1 is vacant due to a death. Without the Republican senators, the remaining 18 Democratic state senators could not reach a quorum of 20 to hold a vote…”

…Now with wildfires raging in Oregon, climate change has come to Girod’s doorstep. Literally.

Oregon Live reports:

“Fred Girod stood near the edge of a steep drop between what remained of his house and the Santiam River, grasping the destruction days after the Beachie Creek wildfire destroyed homes, businesses and landmarks along the canyon.

The walls of the one-story home had collapsed, leaving two stone columns and a chimney that rose out of the rubble. The heat and flames had twisted the frame of the deck where he would sit to watch bald eagles, ospreys and sunrises.”

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Oregon Live somehow omits the point about preventing the vote.
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Climate science contrarian installed in upper-level NOAA position • Ars Technica

Scott Johnson:

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The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently hired a new person in an upper-level deputy assistant secretary position. Normally, this would not be too surprising or newsworthy, but this is an exception. Joining NOAA as the “Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Environmental Observation and Prediction” is University of Delaware Professor David Legates—a well-known contrarian who rejects the science of human-caused climate change.

The position apparently reports to acting head of NOAA Neil Jacobs, although the circumstances of the hire are unknown. Ars asked NOAA about the duties of this position, but the agency has not responded. Jacobs was entangled in the fallout from President Trump’s inaccurate tweets about Hurricane Dorian that culminated in a forecast map doctored with a black marker. A pair of investigations found that Jacobs capitulated to directives from the office of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and the White House, releasing an unsigned NOAA statement that sought to rescue the president’s inaccurate statements by mildly admonishing the forecasters who corrected him.

…Legates was Delaware’s State Climatologist between 2005 and 2011. Although he started his career working on precipitation data and patterns, he is primarily known for rejecting, at every opportunity, the human role in climate change. He’s a frequent contributor to work by the Heartland Institute—a “think tank” that opposes the facts of climate science. When Ars visited a Heartland conference in 2015, Legates was there, presenting a talk that waved away trends in US rainfall extremes as an artifact of measurement changes.

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No, it’s fine, checks and balances, norms of behaviour, standards, etc.

In reality there’s very little time left for the US. If this goes on it will effectively become a rogue state acting to destroy the world’s climate. Which might sound extreme. But there’s very little time before things get bad all over.
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Facebook’s first ‘smart glasses’ will be Ray-Bans, coming next year • The Verge

Nick Statt:

»

The company has talked for years about its plans to build AR devices that resemble a standard pair of glasses, and the company is now working with Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica to design the frames of its first consumer smart glasses, confirming rumors last fall that the company had partnered with the Italian eyewear brand.

“We’re passionate about exploring devices that can give people better ways to connect with those closest to them. Wearables have the potential to do that. With EssilorLuxottica we have an equally ambitious partner who’ll lend their expertise and world-class brand catalogue to the first truly fashionable smart glasses,” Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s vice president of the Reality Labs division, said in a statement.

We don’t have any details on what Facebook’s eventual AR glasses will be called, what they look like beyond the Aria prototype, or how much they might cost (or for that matter how much the Ray-Ban designed smart glasses will cost).

But AR and smart glasses designed to look like standard pieces of eyewear have become more common in recent years, with companies like North (now owned by Google) and Nreal developing pretty impressive devices. Meanwhile, all the major tech giants — including Amazon, Apple, Google, Intel, and others — have either already released a device in the smart glasses or AR category, or are said to be actively working on something.

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Colour me continually sceptical about these things. There won’t be a display, so what’s the point? To take photos? Snap tried that and lost a bucketload of money. If it doesn’t have a display and so can’t provide any useful info, hardly anyone is going to tolerate the nerd factor of wearing them.
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Amazon Music jumps into the podcasting game with original and exclusive shows • Android Police

Jules Wang:

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Spotify is pushing nearly all of its chips onto podcast browsing and production as a way to drive its revenues. Amazon may be looking to do the same for its Amazon Music service as it has enabled podcast streaming and is making a splash with what it can call its own shows including “Disgraceland,” “That Scene with Dan Patrick,” and new shows from Will Smith.

Free and paid Amazon Music users in the Germany, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. can listen to widely-available podcasts right now through its website. We weren’t immediately able to find podcasts on the Android app — there is a supporting update and changelog for that feature — but it’ll also be there as well as iOS, Google Assistant, and Echo devices. Listeners will be able to download shows for offline listening and follow their favorite series as well.

The company is also claiming production credit and exclusive rights to a number of shows…

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Podcasts are the perfect way for music streaming services to get away from having to pay per-play (as with music tracks) and into lump sums, so that they can benefit from the zero marginal cost of serving every extra podcast. In Spotify’s case it’s evident that it really wants to push that; now that Amazon is doing the same, is Apple going to be able to hold back from doing it too?
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What newsrooms can learn from threat modeling at Facebook • The Verge

Alex Stamos, former security chief at Facebook (interviewed by Jay Rosen):

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So, let’s imagine The New York Times has hired me to help them threat model and practice for 2020. This is a highly unlikely scenario, so I’ll give them the advice here for free.

First, you think about your likely adversaries in 2020. You still have the Russian security services. FSB, GRU, and SVR. So I would help gather up all of the examples of their disinformation operations from the last four years.

This would include the GRU’s tactic of hacking into websites to plant fake documents, and then pointing their press outlets at those documents. When the documents are inevitably removed, they spin it as a conspiracy. This is something they did to Poland’s equivalent of West Point, and there has been some recent activity that looks like the planting of fake documents to muddy the waters on the poisoning of Navalny.

You have the Russian Internet Research Agency, and their current activities. They have also pivoted and now hire people in-country to create content. Facebook broke open one of these networks this week.

This year, however, we have new players! You have the Chinese. China is really coming from behind on combined hacking / disinformation operations, but man are they making up time fast. COVID and the Hong Kong crisis has motivated them to build much more capable overt and covert capabilities in English. And most importantly, in 2020, you have the domestic actors.

The Russian activity in 2016, from both the security services and troll farms, has been really well documented.

JR: And breakdowns created by government, like an overwhelmed Post Office.

Yes, true!

I wrote a piece for Lawfare imagining foreign actors using hacking to cause chaos in the election and then spreading that with disinfo. It’s quaint now, as the election has been pre-hacked by COVID.

The struggles that states and local governments are having to prepare for pandemic voting and the intentional knee-capping of the response by the Administration and Republican Senate has effectively pre-hacked the election — in that there is already going to be huge confusion about how to vote, when to vote, and whether the rules are being applied fairly.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Smoke from the fires in the western US is playing havoc with automated weather forecasts too. CC-licensed photo by Joe Wilcox on Flickr.

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

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

How to (actually) save time when you’re working remotely • Harvard Business Review

Lauren Howe , Ashley Whillans and Jochen Menges:

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While the widespread shift to remote work hasn’t been without its challenges, it does offer a major silver lining: For many of us, commuting has become a thing of the past. In the United States alone, eliminating the daily commute has saved workers around 89 million hours each week — equivalent to time savings of more than 44.5 million full workdays since the pandemic began! These numbers suggest that working remotely could be a deus ex machina for reclaiming one of our most precious and limited resources: time.

But despite the potential for staggering time savings, many have struggled to achieve everything they hoped the pandemic would finally make time for: baking sourdough, meditating, or writing the next great literary masterpiece. On the contrary, data we collected from 12,000 people across the U.S. and Europe during the pandemic show that the additional time is often burned on unproductive work and unsatisfying leisure activities. Having more time does not necessarily mean that we use it wisely. So, what are we doing wrong?

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Definitely good recommendations in here (as freelances will tell you). I’m very much in favour of the Feierabend. (It’s a German compound word, of course.)
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Is America a myth? • The New Yorker

Robin Wright:

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Today, America is littered with prideful secessionist movements. Mirroring Brexit—Britain’s exit from the European Union—they advocate for Texit (Texas), Calexit (California), and Verexit (Vermont). In 2017, a Vermont poll found that more than twenty% of Vermonters believed that the state should consider “peaceably leaving the United States and becoming an independent republic, as it was from 1777 to 1791.”

The Texas Nationalist Movement, which claims hundreds of thousands of members, is demanding a state referendum on secession. Then there’s the more fanciful proposal for Cascadia, a progressive bio-republic carved out of northern California, Oregon, Washington, and the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta. The trend is bipartisan and transregional; secessionist sentiment has even emerged in the last two states to join the union—Alaska and Hawaii.

The need for internal trade and the dangers of external threats have helped hold America together. Disparate factions throughout the country rallied to counter British aggression in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the Germans and the Japanese, in the twentieth; and Al Qaeda, after the 9/11 attacks, in the twenty-first.

But, now, without outside threats, the nation is increasingly turning on itself. “We are definitely not united,” Blight said. “Are we on the brink of secession of some kind? No, not in a sectional sense. But, in the interior of our minds and our communities, we are already in a period of slow-evolving secession” in ways that are deeper than ideology and political beliefs. “We are tribes with at least two or more sources of information, facts, narratives, and stories we live in.” The United States today, Blight said, is a “house divided about what holds the house up.”

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I can’t decide whether to feel anxious for America, or just accept that it’s going to turn into an utter pudding. Not long before we find out, I guess.
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Apple’s ‘Time Flies’ event: the nine biggest announcements • The Verge

• New Apple Watch
• new cheaper less featured Apple Watch
•no USB adapter in the Watch boxes
• Family Setup for Watches (so you can track your kids..)
• new iPad Air
• new cheaper iPad
• Fitness subscription service
• Apple One bundling lots of services such as iCloud, Music, T+ and News+ (which is interesting if, like me, you’ve got a family setup)
• the new version of iOS and iPadOS and WatchOS being released today.

Read the whole thing for the finer detail.
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Scientists find gas linked to life in atmosphere of Venus • The Guardian

Ian Sample:

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Traces of a pungent gas that waft through the clouds of Venus may be emanations from aerial organisms – microbial life, but not as we know it.

Astronomers detected phosphine 30 miles up in the planet’s atmosphere and have failed to identify a process other than life that could account for its presence.

The discovery raises the possibility that life gained a foothold on Earth’s inner neighbour and remnants clung on – or floated on, at least – as Venus suffered runaway global warming that made the planet hellish.

For 2bn years, Venus was temperate and harboured an ocean. But today, a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere blankets a near-waterless surface where temperatures top 450C. The clouds in the sky are hardly inviting, containing droplets of 90% sulphuric acid.

The conditions on Venus are so deeply unpleasant that many scientists believe the planet is dead. Rather than coming from floating Venusians, they suspect phosphine arises from more mundane processes.

“It’s completely startling to say life could survive surrounded by so much sulphuric acid,” said Prof Jane Greaves, an astronomer at Cardiff University, leader of the team who made the discovery. “But all the geological and photochemical routes we can think of are far too underproductive to make the phosphine we see.”

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Faintly exciting: this has been predicted for decades. There are flybys by existing spacecraft due over the next few months; not clear whether they have the telemetry to analyse this. Fingers crossed.
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Facebook climate change hub to fight misinformation • CNBC

Salvador Rodriguez:

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The climate change hub comes after the company dealt with a rash of misinformation across its services regarding the cause of the wildfires raging across the Western U.S. One article containing false information blaming the wildfires on antifa arsonists had been shared more than 63,000 times on Facebook, according to The Guardian.

The new feature is called the Climate Science Information Center, and it will provide Facebook users with facts, figures and data from factual sources, the company said in a blog post. These sources include the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, U.N. Environment Programme, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, World Meteorological Organization and the Met Office.

In addition to the information center, Facebook said it will continue to reduce the distribution of posts containing false information on its News Feed feature and it will label those posts as false. Facebook, however, did not say it would remove those posts. The company also did not say if it would remove or label posts within private Facebook groups that contain misinformation about climate change.

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Why oh why oh flipping why won’t Facebook remove false information, but will do for spam and female nipples? We can be sure that this “climate change hub” is going to make a big difference; look how well it worked for coronavirus. Yes, I’m being sarcastic.
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Oracle doesn’t buy TikTok, but gets a lucrative hosting deal, and Trump & friends will pretend this means something • Techdirt

Mike Masnick:

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Oracle put out a very short press release saying that it will “serve as the trusted technology provider” to TikTok. That’s not how you describe a sale. This is a hosting deal.

Oracle will just host TikTok on its wannabe, way-behind-the-competition, cloud platform. And Trump and his cult-like supporters will pretend this actually accomplishes something. Oracle’s executive suite has long been vocal Trump supporters, so this basically dumps a giant hosting contract into Oracle’s lap. ByteDance will effectively still own TikTok, and Trump will pretend he’s done something. For what it’s worth, this is the second big Oracle cloud deal done in the last few months, with the previous one being with videoconferencing company Zoom.

As Russell Brandom over at the Verge notes, this deal “accomplished nothing.” ByteDance still owns TikTok (and, according to reports, retains full control over TikTok’s algorithm). As former Yahoo and Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos points out, literally none of the concerns people have raised about TikTok (most of which were bogus in the first place) are solved by an Oracle hosting deal.

(On Twitter, Stamos said that “A deal where Oracle takes over hosting without source code and significant operational changes would not address any of the legitimate concerns about TikTok, and the White House accepting such a deal would demonstrate that this exercise was pure grift.”)

As Stamos points out, accepting this deal would show that it’s nothing but “pure grift,” basically dumping a forced contract into Oracle’s lap, a company which (again) has had an executive licking Trump’s boots since day one.

And people can’t even truly argue that Oracle will somehow make whatever little “private” data there is on TikTok “more secure.” It’s not like it was just months ago that an Oracle-owned subsidiary, BlueKai, leaked data that tracked users all over the web, exposing billions of records.

In other words, the whole thing was a joke. Like so much of this administration it was performative nonsense by Trump, who was mad that some kids made him look foolish on TikTok, combined with anti-Chinese racism, to push for a deal he had no legal right to push for, resulting in a weird scramble that doesn’t accomplish what he wanted, but does shift a bunch of money to some of his vocal and wealthy supporters. The “Art of the Grift.”

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The SwiftOnSecurity account, which is wise, pointed out that Oracle’s claim that the deal would create 25,000 jobs in the US is beyond ridiculous: “Gmail has 1.5 billion users and is engineered by a team of a few hundred people,” it noted. Snapchat: 2,000 people. Total.
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Kim Kardashian to freeze Facebook, Instagram accounts in #StopHateForProfit effort • Axios

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Kim Kardashian West announced that she will temporarily freeze her Instagram and Facebook accounts on Wednesday because the platforms “continue to allow the spreading of hate, propaganda and misinformation — created by groups to sow division and split America apart.”

Why it matters: The announcement from such a high-profile user is likely to be a PR disaster for Instagram and Facebook, as well as a boost to the #StopHateForProfit campaign. Kardashian West is the 7th most followed account on Instagram with 188 million followers. She currently has 30 million followers on Facebook.

What she’s saying: “I love that I can connect directly with you through Instagram and Facebook, but I can’t sit by and stay silent while these platforms continue to allow the spreading of hate, propaganda and misinformation – created by groups to sow division and split America apart – only to take steps after people are killed,” Kardashian West wrote.

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She announced it on Twitter. Though of course with Facebook and Instagram, if you don’t post on these platforms, all that happens is that you subside beneath the waves; other people will come and fill the space.

A style note about Axios, which loves to think that it’s being edgy and different with its paragraph introductions of “Why it matters” and “What she’s saying”: if you remove them (which I usually do when quoting Axios stories), it makes absolutely no difference to how the story reads.
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Beware rigged China fever cameras • IPVM

Ethan Ace and John Honovich:

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how do these China systems get near ‘normal’ temperatures of a person zooming by on a skateboard?

Many China systems we tested rig measurements using “compensation” algorithms to estimate skin temperature. So for example, when the measured max temperature of a person is ~91°F, the camera might add 6 degrees reporting them at 97°, but when measured at 94°, it might add just 4 degrees, reporting them at 98°.

The chart below shows our findings from one of our tests:

This is clever but dangerous. It is clever since these algorithms correctly assume most people have normal temperatures, so they disproportionately increase low readings into more normal ones. And since almost no one has a fever at any given time, it is typically right even if the process is wrong / rigged.

It is dangerous because when the system has an obvious bad reading (like a guy zooming by on a skateboard) it gives a false sense of accuracy. The guy on the skateboard probably does not have a fever since very few have fevers but a thermal system can not determine that directly, since the angle of incident and the speed of the skateboarder makes that impossible.

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Don’t miss the example in the post of what happened when they had skateboard guy walk past one of these “fever cameras” holding a piece of cardboard over his forehead. And the diagnosis of a printout of someone’s face. (Via Benedict Evans’s newsletter.)
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Why Goodreads is bad for books • New Statesman

Sarah Manavis:

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Ten years ago, Tom Critchlow, an independent strategy consultant from the UK (now based in New York), mounted his own challenger to Goodreads: 7books, launched in 2010 and now offline, having peaked at 6,000 users. Since then, Critchlow has been analysing why Goodreads competitors tend not to work. Earlier this year, he published a blog post called “A Proposal for a Decentralized Goodreads”.  In it, he outlined the fundamental challenges behind creating a serious Goodreads competitor. 

“In my mind, there’s three core reasons that Goodreads remains dominant,” he tells me. “Firstly, they are the incumbent with a large user base.” Secondly, he explains, the sheer mass of books data Amazon holds is unparalleled. Goodreads and Amazon dominate web searches for books, which allows them to account for a large proportion of book-related internet traffic. While Amazon’s product API, which catalogues huge numbers of books, can be used by anyone, it is also the only repository of its kind, meaning any new competitor would almost certainly have to use the same tools Goodreads has been working with for many years. 

“Amazon,” Critchlow tells me, “has showed no mercy when dealing with competitors before.”

The final issue Critchlow cites is monetisation: margins on books are already “razor-thin”, and most demand goes via Amazon. “If you were to compete you would need significant scale,” he says, to make any money – and the most likely way to make money in the short term would be through affiliate links, which pay commission on sending readers to online stores – and one online store in particular. “Again,” notes Critchlow, ”you’d be dealing with Amazon directly.”

Critchlow believes all of this all contributes to Amazon doing next to nothing to improve Goodreads’s functionality.

…Critchlow may be sceptical, but new competitors continue to enter the book-tech fray, and one in particular is beginning to make waves.

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That would be The StoryGraph (which bought the URL from a creative writing site for undergraduates; web searches are thus a bit puzzling.) The example of Goodreads is a classic case of how the internet doesn’t necessarily solve for global equilibria; its faults are legion but tolerated because whaddya gonna do, huh?
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Smoke has caused temperature forecasts to go crazy (plus an update) • Cliff Mass Weather Blog

Clifford Mass:

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The wildfire smoke has a profound impact on surface temperature, causing cooling by reflecting the sun’s rays back to space and absorbing some of it aloft. That is probably obvious to most of you from being outside yesterday, but consider the radiation measurements on the roof of my building at the University of Washington (see top panel below).  Much less radiation yesterday (a drop of 22% from 19.83 to 15.49).

The temperature plot is shown right below – highs dropping from 95 to 73.

Now here is the problem.  Most weather prediction systems are not including smoke and thus are missing its profound cooling effect.  Thus, their forecasts are too warm–and too warm by as much as 20F in areas of dense smoke. On my smartphone right now, Portland is predicted to get to 79F and Eugene, Oregon to 82F. In truth, they won’t get out of the 60s. These forecasts are coming from Weather.com.

The automated services are all too warm because the modelling systems on which they are based do not include smoke. That is also true of many of the National Weather Service models. The NOAA/NWS HRRR smoke modeling system is still experimental and will go operational this year. And I expect all modeling systems will include smoke within the next few years.

This situation shows why it is good we have skilful human forecasters minding the shop at the National Weather Service: they are manually correcting the model predictions so that accurate forecasts are still available

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Hurrah for humans at times of maximum disaster, I guess. (If you live in the US northwest, Mass’s blog looks like a useful resource on weather.)
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USB-C was supposed to simplify our lives. Instead, it’s a total mess • OneZero

Owen Williams:

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Anyone going all-in on USB-C will run into problems with an optional standard called Power Delivery. The standard allows devices to charge at a much higher wattage relative to older connectors, therefore allowing them to charge faster. But it requires the right combination of charger, cables, and device to actually achieve this.

If you buy a USB-C charger that doesn’t support Power Delivery and try to use it with a Microsoft Surface, for example, the laptop will complain that it’s “not charging” despite receiving some power. Fixing this requires figuring out whether or not it’s the cable or wall charger that doesn’t support Power Delivery, and replacing it with something that does support it. There would be no way for a layperson to hold two USB-C chargers and know the difference between one that supports Power Delivery and one that doesn’t.

Furthering the confusion, some devices actually can’t be charged with chargers supporting Power Delivery, despite sporting a USB-C port — because they weren’t designed to negotiate the higher wattage being delivered by the Power Delivery standard. A pair of cheap Anker headphones I own, for example, refuse to charge when plugged into a MacBook charger. Other devices, like the Nintendo Switch, only partially support the standard, and some unsupported chargers have bricked devices, reportedly due to the Switch’s maximum voltage being exceeded.

Then there’s DisplayPort and Thunderbolt, another set of standards supported by some USB-C devices. DisplayPort allows the use of an external display, such as a 4K monitor, but only supports one at a time at full resolution.

Thunderbolt, yet another optional standard, is a much faster layer on top of USB-C that allows additional possibilities, like the use of multiple displays daisy-chained from a single port, or the use of an external graphics card. It uses the exact same connector, but can be identified with an additional “lightning” symbol when supported.

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The standards committees must have thought that they were doing just the right thing by bringing all of these different things – Data! Power! Video! Audio! – into one plug. Too clever by half. And too late now to undo the mess. We’re stuck with USB-C and this incomprehensible mess until someone splits them up again.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Plastic recycling is mostly unrecyclable. The industry knew that… but didn’t admit it CC-licensed photo by Adam Cohn on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Remember, not iPhones. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook turned blind eye to global political manipulation, whistleblower says • Buzzfeed News

Craig Silverman, Ryan Mac and Pranav Dixit:

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Facebook ignored or was slow to act on evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been undermining elections and political affairs around the world, according to an explosive memo sent by a recently fired Facebook employee and obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The 6,600-word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion. In countries including India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes, though she did not always conclude who was behind them.

“In the three years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions,” wrote Zhang, who declined to talk to BuzzFeed News. Her Linkedin profile said she “worked as the data scientist for the Facebook Site Integrity fake engagement team” and dealt with “bots influencing elections and the like.”

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There is example after example. At this point it’s impossible to deny that Facebook is harmful to democratic politics. The ease with which people in power can sway it in particular countries, and influence elections and voters, just can’t be ignored.

Which is unlike what Facebook’s senior leadership did. Zhang says they ignored her again and again. And: she was fired.
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Is plastic recycling a lie? Oil companies touted recycling to sell more plastic • NPR

Laura Sullivan:

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NPR and PBS Frontline spent months digging into internal industry documents and interviewing top former officials. We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn’t work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic.

The industry’s awareness that recycling wouldn’t keep plastic out of landfills and the environment dates to the program’s earliest days, we found. “There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis,” one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech.

Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn’t true.

“If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment,” Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry’s most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR.

In response, industry representative Steve Russell, until recently the vice president of plastics for the trade group the American Chemistry Council, said the industry has never intentionally misled the public about recycling and is committed to ensuring all plastic is recycled.

“The proof is the dramatic amount of investment that is happening right now,” Russell said.

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The investment happening now? Plastic’s been on sale for decades. The first report quoted in the piece dates back to 1973. Of course – of course! – it’s the fossil fuel industry pushing the not-actually-true idea.
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It’s the biggest job in tech. So why can’t they find anyone to do it? • ZDNet

Daphne Leprince-Ringuet:

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An exciting new vacancy has opened up that will likely tempt some IT leaders into freshening up their CV: the UK is recruiting a Government Chief Digital Officer (GCDO), who will be working at the highest levels of the Cabinet Office to lead the digital transformation of public services in the country. All of this and more, for £200,000 a year.

The job is the biggest one in government tech so you’d expect the recruiters at the Cabinet Office to be deluged with applications from hyper-qualified aspiring GCDOs, who got tech goosebumps from just reading the role description.

Yet strangely enough, the GCDO job has been open for almost a year now. 

“We sought out candidates for a similar role last autumn,” confirmed Alex Chisholm, the chief operating officer of the civil service, as he announced the new vacancy. And indeed, a similar vacancy went live last October albeit with a slightly different name – Government Chief Digital Information Officer (GCDIO) – but almost exactly the same responsibilities. 

In both versions of the job, the successful candidate is expected to “enhance Her Majesty’s government’s reputation as the world’s most digitally-advanced government.” This includes leading the Government Digital Service (GDS), a branch of the UK Cabinet Office dedicated to the digital transformation of government, and heading the 18,000-strong Digital, Data and Technology Profession department.

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Cabinet Office means crossing swords (almost literally) with Dominic Cummings, with his dreams of trillion-dollar companies. That’s not going to end well.
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How algorithms are changing what we read online • The Walrus

Russell Smith was a columnist about arts and culture at the Globe & Mail, the most widely read (in print) paper in Canada:

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Both at the Globe and across Canada, there wasn’t a lot of competition for what I was doing. I was providing a lot of content—content that helped maintain the paper’s literary brand—for very cheap. But a new arts editor, who came on board around 2016, displayed increasing concern for me. My guess, based on all his talk about “engagement,” was that he was getting pressure from management about my weak numbers. The Globe had, by then, developed Sophi, its own analytic software. Sophi tallies how much of an article is read, how many times it is shared and commented on, and most importantly, whether it being behind a paywall spurs anyone to buy a subscription.

Articles that show low engagement typically get sidelined in favour of pieces that show more, a measurement that, along with all of the above, takes into account the click-through rate, or CTR. “You’re looking at your analytics,” Gorham explained to me, “and you’re saying, Holy shit, this story’s got a high CTR, let’s move it forward. Surface it—share it on Facebook, put it on the home page, release a news alert, put it in the newsletter.” That support is key to keeping engagement up. “If we don’t juice it,” he said, “it just evaporates.”

In practice, this ensures the less read become even less read. It creates what one might call popularity polarization: a few pieces rise to the top, leaving the rest to fend for themselves. With print, this didn’t happen as much. Flipping pages, you would see every article somewhere. But, on your phone, you scroll through what’s been selected for you.

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That’s why Smith’s Globe & Mail columnist days are in the past tense now. We live in populist times: it’s not about the idea of the quality, it’s about “popularity”. Something of a problem for the arts.
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Feds seize almost $400K of ‘counterfeit Apple AirPods’ that are actually OnePlus Buds • The Verge

Chris Welch:

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It can be hard to tell a difference between AirPods and the many earbuds that resemble them, but checking the box is always a good start. US Customs and Border Protection tonight tweeted that its officers had “recently seized 2,000 counterfeit Apple AirPods from Hong Kong, valued at $398K had they been genuine.” There’s also this press release on the situation, which praises CBP officers for “protecting the American public from various dangers on a daily basis” and says that “the interception of these counterfeit earbuds is a direct reflection of the vigilance and commitment to mission success by our CBP officers daily.”

The only problem is, based on the agency’s own photos, the seized products appear to be legitimate OnePlus Buds — transported in a box that plainly says as much. But CBP proudly tweeted “THAT’S NOT AN APPLE,” as if its people had astutely detected a forged piece of 18th-century art. It’s not clear if all of the 2,000 blocked units were OnePlus Buds, though the CBP images are unmistakable.

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If you look at the pictures in the press release, you realise that the Customs officers probably thought they had a good case. And, in fact, they do. OnePlus hardly put a lot of effort into putting clear water between its design and Apple’s; pretty much zero, in fact.

Plenty of people on Twitter saying that it’s not the Customs’ job to enforce counterfeiting laws. No, but it is their job to prevent counterfeits – or what they think are – from coming into whichever country.
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UK tech giant Arm Holdings to be sold to US company Nvidia in $40bn deal • The Guardian

Martin Farrer, Julia Kollewe and Rob Davies:

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Nvidia, a US company, will pay SoftBank $21.5bn in shares and $12bn in cash for the chip designer, although the deal is still subject to regulatory approval in the UK and could face opposition from its new owners’ rivals and British politicians concerned about foreign takeovers.

It is expected that Nvidia will face tough conditions on protecting jobs and the status of Arm’s headquarters in Cambridge as part of the deal.

Arm co-founder Hermann Hauser described the takeover as an “absolute disaster” and said it would destroy the company’s business model and lead to job losses at its Cambridge headquarters and elsewhere in the UK.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4 on Monday morning, he said any promises made on jobs were “meaningless unless they are legally enforceable”, pointing to the takeover of Cadbury by US company Kraft in 2010.

Mike Clancy, general secretary of science and technology union Prospect, called on the government to intervene in a deal he described as a “worrying development”.

“If the UK tech sector is to flourish and create the jobs of the future here in Britain, then we need our crown jewels to be owned and managed in a sustainable way that prioritises investment in the workforce and in research and development.

“It is not too late for the government to take a more hands-on approach to this deal and impose some binding conditions to secure a stable future for Arm that benefits the whole country.”

SoftBank paid $32bn for the company four years ago in a deal that pledged to keep the headquarters in Cambridge. It also netted a fortune for Arm’s executives, and this time around Arm employees will share $1.5bn in Nvidia shares.

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The Kraft/Cadbury takeover is notorious: US company Kraft promised to preserve jobs at Cadbury, a famous British brand. A week after the takeover, it closed a key factory.

How do you stop Nvidia doing what it wants with Arm? The government would need to take a “golden share”. Even then, the reality is that Arm’s real value walks in and out of the door every day. Without new designs, it’s nothing.
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Oracle wins bid for TikTok in US, beating Microsoft • WSJ

Georgia Wells and Aaron Tilley:

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Oracle is set to be announced as TikTok’s “trusted tech partner” in the US, and the deal is likely not to be structured as an outright sale, the people said.

The next step is for the White House and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US to approve the deal, said one of the people, adding that the participants believe it satisfies the concerns around data security that have been previously raised by the US government.

On Monday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin confirmed that his office received a bid proposal from Oracle for TikTok’s operations over the weekend and said that the Treasury-led Committee on Foreign Investment in the US would review it this week.

“We will be reviewing that at the CFIUS committee this week and then will be making a recommendation to the president and reviewing it with him,” Mr. Mnuchin said on CNBC. “From our standpoint, we’ll need to make sure that the code is, one, secure, Americans’ data is secure, that the phones are secure and we’ll be looking to have discussions with Oracle over the next few days with our technical teams.”

Mr. Mnuchin also said the Oracle deal includes a commitment to establish TikTok as a global company headquartered in the US, which he said would mean 20,000 new jobs.

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This is just ridiculous from top to bottom. The US has never specified precisely what the “risk” of TikTok is compared to, say, any other company; it’s even more vague than the claims about Huawei. The suspicion is that it’s another of Trump’s psychotic rages for claiming to have screwed up one of his rallies. Oracle will stuff things up, and there will be a lot of angry young folks out there.
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Addicted to losing: how casino-like apps have drained people of millions • NBC News

Cyrus Farivar:

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Jackpot Magic is an app made by Big Fish Games of Seattle, one of the leaders in an industry of “free-to-play” social games into which some people have plowed thousands of dollars. Big Fish Games also operates a similar app, Big Fish Casino. Both are labeled as videogames, which allows the company and others like it to skirt the tightly regulated U.S. gambling market.

But unlike the gambling market, apps like Jackpot Magic and Big Fish Casino are under little oversight to determine whether they are fair or whether their business practices are predatory.

NBC News spoke to 21 people, including Shellz and her husband, who said they were hooked on the casino-style games and had spent significant sums of money. They described feelings of helplessness and wanting to quit but found themselves addicted to the games and tempted by the company’s aggressive marketing tactics.

Most of the 21 players wished to remain anonymous, as they were ashamed of their addictions and did not want their loved ones to find out about their behavior.

A 42-year-old Pennsylvania woman said she felt saddened that she spent $40,000 on Big Fish Casino while working as an addiction counselor.

“The whole time I was working as an addiction counselor, I was addicted to gambling and with no hope of winning any money back,” she said.

Big Fish Games did not make anyone available for an interview, nor did the company respond to detailed questions. The company has said in previous court filings that only a fraction of the game’s players actually spend money.

In a response to NBC News’ inquiries, the company issued a statement saying its games are not gambling and should not be regulated as such.

“These games are not gambling because, among other reasons, they offer no opportunity for players to win money or anything of value,” the statement said in part.

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Well that’s sort of true. No matter how much money you put in or seem to win, it never pays out. Put like that, it’s astonishing that anyone would put money in.

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Google says its carbon footprint is now zero • BBC News

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Google says it has wiped out its entire carbon footprint by investing in “high-quality carbon offsets”.

It became carbon-neutral in 2007 and says it has now compensated for all of the carbon it has ever created. It also aimed to run all of its data centres and offices on carbon-free energy by 2030, chief executive Sundar Pichai has announced.

Other large technology companies have also committed to reducing or eliminating their carbon use.

• In January Microsoft revealed plans to become “carbon negative” by 2030
• In July, Apple announced a target of becoming carbon neutral across its entire business and manufacturing supply chain by 2030
• Amazon has set a 2040 target to go carbon neutral

Mr Pichai said Google’s pledge to be using only carbon-free energy by 2030 was its “biggest sustainability moonshot yet”. “We’ll do things like pairing wind and solar power sources together and increasing our use of battery storage,” he said.

“And we’re working on ways to apply AI [artificial intelligence] to optimise our electricity demand and forecasting.”

…Greenpeace said Google was setting “a new high-bar for the sector” with its ambition.

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Hate speech on Facebook is pushing Ethiopia dangerously close to a genocide • Vice

David Gilbert:

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[The popular Ethiopian singer Hachalu] Hundessa’s death at age 34 set off a wave of violence in the capital and his home region of Oromia. Hundreds of people were killed, with minorities like Christian Amharas, Christian Oromos, and Gurage people suffering the biggest losses.

This bloodshed was supercharged by the almost-instant and widespread sharing of hate speech and incitement to violence on Facebook, which whipped up people’s anger. Mobs destroyed and burned property. They lynched, beheaded, and dismembered their victims.

The calls for violence against a variety of ethnic and religious groups happened despite the government shutting down the internet within hours of Hundessa’s murder. Soon, the same people who’d been calling for genocide and attacks against specific religous or ethnic groups were openly posting photographs of burned-out cars, buildings, schools and houses, the Network Against Hate Speech, a volunteer group tracking hate speech in Ethiopia, told VICE News.

These attacks reflect the volatile nature of ethnic politics in Ethiopia. [President] Abiy’s rise to power in 2018 led to a brief period of hope that Ethiopia could be unified under the first Oromo to lead the country. But that quickly evaporated, and the country has since been wracked by violence, coinciding with a rapid increase in access to the internet, where Facebook dominates. And rather than helping to unify the country, Facebook has simply amplified existing tensions on a massive scale.

“When the violence erupts offline, online content that calls for ethnic attacks, discrimination, and destruction of property goes viral,” Berhan Taye, Africa policy lead at digital rights group Access Now, told VICE News.

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Ethiopia has one of the lowest social media penetrations in the world. Yet Facebook has twice been warned about the risks it poses, including posts that have incited violence and killings.

We’ve seen this story before.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Britain’s Arm Holdings is about to be snapped up by America’s Nvidia, reportedly for $40bn CC-licensed photo by Adam Greig on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. And we’re back. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The Arctic is burning like never before — and that’s bad news for climate change • Nature

Alexandra Witze:

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Wildfires blazed along the Arctic Circle this summer, incinerating tundra, blanketing Siberian cities in smoke and capping the second extraordinary fire season in a row. By the time the fire season waned at the end of last month, the blazes had emitted a record 244 megatonnes of carbon dioxide — that’s 35% more than last year, which also set records. One culprit, scientists say, could be peatlands that are burning as the top of the world melts.

Peatlands are carbon-rich soils that accumulate as waterlogged plants slowly decay, sometimes over thousands of years. They are the most carbon-dense ecosystems on Earth; a typical northern peatland packs in roughly ten times as much carbon as a boreal forest. When peat burns, it releases its ancient carbon to the atmosphere, adding to the heat-trapping gases that cause climate change.

Nearly half the world’s peatland-stored carbon lies between 60 and 70 degrees north, along the Arctic Circle. The problem with this is that historically frozen carbon-rich soils are expected to thaw as the planet warms, making them even more vulnerable to wildfires and more likely to release large amounts of carbon. It’s a feedback loop: as peatlands release more carbon, global warming increases, which thaws more peat and causes more wildfires (see ‘Peatlands burning’). A study published last month1 shows that northern peatlands could eventually shift from being a net sink for carbon to a net source of carbon, further accelerating climate change.

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I’ve been reading a sci-fi series dubbed the “Lady Astronaut” books which opens in 1952 with a meteor impact destroying Washington and putting so much water vapour into the atmosphere that runaway heating becomes inevitable, so that escaping Earth becomes the only solution.

Not sure that’s our best option, even with nearly 60 years’ more technology experience. What we really need is technology to remove carbon dioxide and methane from the atmosphere in gigantic amounts. It would be the most valuable breakthrough imaginable.
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They know how to prevent megafires. Why won’t anybody listen? • ProPublica

Elizabeth Weil:

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in 2005, frustrated by the huge gap between what he was learning about fire management and seeing on the fire line,[Tim Ingalsbee] started Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. Since then FUSEE has been lobbying Congress, and trying to educate anybody who will listen, about the misguided fire policy that is leading to the megafires we are seeing today.

So what’s it like? “It’s just … well … it’s horrible. Horrible to see this happening when the science is so clear and has been clear for years. I suffer from Cassandra syndrome,” Ingalsbee said. “Every year I warn people: Disaster’s coming. We got to change. And no one listens. And then it happens.”

The pattern is a form of insanity: We keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures. As a result, wildland fuels keep building up. At the same time, the climate grows hotter and drier. Then, boom: the inevitable. The wind blows down a power line, or lightning strikes dry grass, and an inferno ensues. This week we’ve seen both the second- and third-largest fires in California history. “The fire community, the progressives, are almost in a state of panic,” Ingalsbee said. There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.”

Yes, there’s been talk across the U.S. Forest Service and California state agencies about doing more prescribed burns and managed burns. The point of that “good fire” would be to create a black-and-green checkerboard across the state. The black burned parcels would then provide a series of dampers and dead ends to keep the fire intensity lower when flames spark in hot, dry conditions, as they did this past week.

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“Sclerotic” seems an apt word for the inability to make effective decisions.
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Why email registration is dead, and how removing it improved retention by a surprising 4.5% • Solitaired

“Neal”:

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I was watching my sister play, who had become a solitaire addict after she QAd [did quality assurance on] the game. She was obsessed with beating her personal bests and getting high scores for the game of the day. When I watched her play though, quizzically, she had not registered for an account.

I asked her why, she said she just didn’t want to give her email away and get bombarded by more emails. I was dumbfounded, because after all, her brother (me), was the co-founder of the site and yet she still had these concerns.

The lightbulb went off. Since sending emails did not provide value, and if anything was an additional cost, what if we just asked for a username. While this creates issues with password recovery, we thought this would drive up registrations and improve retention. We also have a long term cookie so users wouldn’t have to login again.

When we changed email sign ups simply to usernames, we saw registrations increase by a huge 36%! More importantly, we saw return users increase another 4.5%.

This meant email registration was holding us back from driving retention.

Digging in further, we’re also seeing return visitors playing more games like Freecell and Spider. Leaderboards and simple registration have encouraged users to try new games.

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A long time ago at The Guardian, another startup wrote an article for me about how his startup had struggled (it was aimed at teens) until they stopped asking for email registration. Then user numbers rocketed. Generally now your computer will remember these details for you.
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What I found out when I blocked apps from tracking my iPhone for one week • Pando

Rob Sturgeon:

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I tried a little experiment: blocked apps from tracking my iPhone for just one week

And during that time I was tracked 4,341 times by 33 tracking platforms.

Some highlights:
• Google tracked me nearly twice as much as all others combined
• Facebook and Amazon tracked me more than any other company (except Google)
• The rest of the data goes to 29 companies, most of which I’ve never heard of

Let’s remember this was just one week. If we assume the rate of tracking has always been somewhat similar, we can extrapolate from there. If all 52 weeks in a year are the same, I’m being tracked 225,732 times a year. And I’ve been using iPhones exclusively for 10 years, which means…

My iPhone has been tracked 2,257,320 times. [Surely less, since not all of those trackers will have been running all those ten years – CA.]

…Analytics are far more popular than any other category of tracker

This is more than a little disturbing, because the defenders of trackers tend to claim that they exist for reasons that ultimately benefit the user. If an app we regularly use crashes, we can at least be reassured that the developer has probably been notified. Though the developer failed to catch the crash in testing, they get a second chance at finding it and fixing it with crash management.

Apparently advertising is more useful to users if it’s personalised, as we’re more likely to take an action like buying a product or downloading an app. That makes it sound a lot more useful to the advertisers if you ask me. I often hear the defense that if we have to see ads everywhere, they might as well be for things we want. I don’t really have that need as a user, as I have plenty of ways of discovering new things without being targeted based on the most personal information I possess.

Instead of fixing crashes or providing targeted advertising, the majority of trackers on my iPhone are just plain old analytics. 

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Ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt says US ‘dropped the ball’ on innovation • BBC News

Karishma Vaswani:

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In the battle for tech supremacy between the US and China, America has “dropped the ball” in funding for basic research, according to former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.

And that’s one of the key reasons why China has been able to catch up.

Dr Schmidt, who is currently the Chair of the US Department of Defense’s innovation board, said he thinks the US is still ahead of China in tech innovation, for now. But that the gap is narrowing fast.

“There’s a real focus in China around invention and new AI techniques,” he told the BBC’s Talking Business Asia programme. “In the race for publishing papers China has now caught up.”

China displaced the US as the world’s top research publisher in science and engineering in 2018, according to data from the World Economic Forum. That’s significant because it shows how much China is focusing on research and development in comparison to the US.

For example, Chinese telecoms infrastructure giant Huawei spends as much as $20bn (£15.6bn) on research and development – one of the highest budgets in the world.

…Dr Schmidt blames the narrowing of the innovation gap between the US and China on the lack of funding in the US.

“For my whole life, the US has been the unquestioned leader of R&D,” the former Google boss said. “Funding was the equivalent of 2% or so of GDP of the country. Recently R&D has fallen to a lower percentage number than was there before Sputnik.”

According to Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a US lobby group for technology, the US government now invests less in R&D compared to the size of the economy than it has in more than 60 years.

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San Francisco lets just one person delay eco-friendly projects in the midst of a climate crisis. How is that fair? • SFChronicle.com

Heather Knight:

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in supposedly environmentally conscious San Francisco, we’re fighting over bike lanes and prohibiting through traffic on a tiny percentage of our streets. Even though making it easier and more appealing for people to leave their cars at home to walk, bike, carpool or take public transit instead is one of the main ways cities can fight climate change.

Two San Franciscans seem to have made it their pandemic hobby to file appeals for just about every emergency action taken by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency in the past six months. They’re gadfly David Pilpel and attorney Mary Miles, who says she represents the Coalition for Adequate Review. Yes, she’s sticking up for CAR. They’re both well known at City Hall for trying to thwart various projects over the years, and they’re at it again.

Pilpel could not be reached for comment. Miles did not return a call, but did email copies of her appeal letters.

Because of them, the next phase of the Slow Streets program is on hold. That program shuts some streets to through traffic so people can walk and bike safely while social distancing. Temporary emergency changes to streets to make way for coronavirus testing sites and pop-up food pantries are also on hold.

Emergency transit lanes for buses operating at reduced capacity for social distancing to whisk essential workers to their jobs without getting stuck in traffic are on hold. A protected bike lane on Fell Street to alleviate the crush of exercisers in the crowded Panhandle is also being fought over.

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I don’t think the question is whether it’s “fair” but whether it’s “sensible”. (It’s not.)
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Nvidia reportedly to acquire ARM Holdings from SoftBank for $40bn • FT via Ars Technica

Arash Massoudi, Robert Smith, and James Fontanella-Khan:

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SoftBank is set to sell the UK’s Arm Holdings to US chip company Nvidia for more than $40bn, just four years after its founder Masayoshi Son bought the chip designer and said it would be the linchpin for the future of the Japanese technology group.

Multiple people with direct knowledge of the matter said a cash-and-stock takeover of Arm by Nvidia may be announced as soon as Monday, and that SoftBank will become the largest shareholder in the US chip company.

The announcement of the deal hinged on SoftBank ending a messy dispute between Arm and the head of its China joint venture, Allen Wu, who earlier rebuffed an attempt to remove him and claimed legal control of the unit.

…Nvidia had a market valuation of roughly similar to that of Arm’s at the time of the 2016 deal, but now trades with a market value of $300bn, or roughly 10 times the amount SoftBank paid in cash for Arm. By paying for a large portion of the deals with its own shares, it is also passing part of the risk of the transaction to SoftBank.

For Nvidia, which recently overtook Intel to become the world’s most valuable chipmaker, the deal will further consolidate the US company’s position at the centre of the semiconductor industry. The British chip designer’s technology is starting to find broader applications beyond mobile devices, in data centres and personal computers including Apple’s Macs.

Arm would transform Nvidia’s product line-up, which until now has largely focused on the high end of the chips market. Its powerful graphics processors—which are designed to handle focused, data-intensive tasks—are typically sold to PC gamers, scientific researchers and developers of artificial intelligence and self-driving cars, as well as cryptocurrency miners.

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Question is, could Arm have been made more valuable? Companies take its designs as they come. Should it crank out more? Then it becomes harder for chip foundries to meet the design needs. I’ve never quite understood how Arm makes itself more valuable. Obviously, if it doesn’t come up with enough designs, the value will fall. But there must be some balance.

The British government won’t get in the way of this, though.

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🇨🇦 Marshall Ferguson 🏈 on Twitter

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I’d like to nominate cardboard humans watching baseball in a dystopian hell scape for photo of the year, thanks.

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You can view the tweet. This is the picture. One must agree. There are no visible clocks, but the sun is clearly up (on the right hand side).

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Leaked figures reveal scale of coronavirus test shortage • The Sunday Times

Gabriel Pogrund, Tom Calver and Caroline Wheeler:

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The government’s “world-beating” testing programme has a backlog of 185,000 swabs and is so overstretched that it is sending tests to laboratories in Italy and Germany, according to leaked documents.

A Department of Health and Social Care report marked “Official: sensitive” also confirms that most British laboratories are clearing fewer tests than their stated capacity, as they are hit by “chaos” in supply chains.

The government claims that it has capacity for 375,000 tests a day. However, the actual number of people being tested for the coronavirus stalled to just 437,000 people a week at the start of the month — equivalent to just 62,000 a day.

Throughout last week, people in Covid-19 hotspots across the north of England struggled to get tests and were told to travel hundreds of miles for an appointment. In Bolton, which has the highest infection rate in Britain of more than 180 weekly cases per 100,000 people, no tests were available on the government’s online booking system between Thursday and Saturday.

…Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, pledged last week that testing would be available in schools so that pupils could return safely. But schools of any size are receiving just 10 test kits each, and are being told to use them only in “exceptional circumstances” and where the pupils could not otherwise access tests at home.

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The UK government is obscuring this through data which doesn’t clarify the number of test per person.
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Why the Taboola-Outbrain deal fell apart and what it means for publishers • Digiday

Lara O’Reilly on the merger that didn’t happen between the two companies which provide most (though not quite all) of the “chumboxes” of junk links (“People Who Look Like Fish!”) that you see beneath otherwise respectable stories in otherwise respectable publishers’ sites:

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Taboola and Outbrain have now clearly shifted back into their familiar position of old foes. Both companies now have the added benefit of having peeled back the curtain on one another’s finances — even if only at a high level, given the disclosure rules surrounding mergers and acquisitions — said Richard Marques, CEO of Taboola and Outbrain rival Revcontent.

“The way this business works is if I’m a huge publisher, I get two to three [content recommendation] companies to start a bidding war against each other and sell the deal to the highest bidder,” said Marques. “From a vendor side [it’s about] how high can you go where you are as solvent as can be; there’s a real art threading that needle to find as close to breakeven as possible.”

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Taboola and Outbrain get billions of clicks per month. (I know, I know.) They pay publishers handsomely. The deal fell apart because competition authorities reckoned if there was one big player rather than two competitors, the market would be worse served.

They’re also responsible for undermining peoples’ confidence in news sites: if you see one of their links on a site, your respect for that site goes down at once. And they used to be everywhere.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified