Looking for the Broomway? Just follow the footpath that has killed around a hundred people. CC-licensed photo by Adrian Miller 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.

The government’s mass testing Moonshot project looks like a 90s Silicon Valley PowerPoint nightmare • Diginomica

Derek du Preez:

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The idea is that if millions and millions of tests are readily available and results can be delivered in minutes, rather than days, then people can live a fairly normal life knowing their COVID-19 status. That’s all well and good, but this major project is being pushed by the same government that has still failed to deliver a contact tracing app and also didn’t have the foresight to recognise that maybe using algorithms to predict students’ grades would be a disaster. Amongst a litany of other technology blunders over the years…

Not to mention that the testing technology in question isn’t yet available and the alleged cost of the project is almost the equivalent of the entire NHS budget.

But hey, we like ambition! And no one ever did anything worthwhile without breaking new ground and trying something new. And as everyone knows, these are ‘unprecedented times’ and we’d all like to be able to go to the pub with our mates…

Well, that might be your thinking until you glance over the leaked briefing documents for project Moonshot. A quick scan over the slides – which are full of Venn diagrams, misaligned text, unexplained colour coding, BS consultancy catchphrases – and even the most optimistic amongst us will start to lose confidence.

It honestly looks and reads like a 90s Silicon Valley PowerPoint presentation from a sales exec that knows they’re pitching a piece of technology and an idea that doesn’t yet exist and isn’t achievable.

So, let’s take a look at how taxpayer money could be used to deliver 70 million COVID-19 tests a week. Because, you’d imagine that if the government was considering forking out £100bn it would want a clear, understandable, workable plan in place to instil public confidence and stand up to peer review.

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I think this idea will quietly sink under the waves. Meanwhile Dominic Cummings had told the Department of Culture, Media and For Some Reason Sport that he wants the UK to have a trillion-dollar company. Perhaps they could set up a company with a million shares and buy one of them for million pounds. Voila! (American trillion.)
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Twitter expands misinformation rules to cover premature election results • The Verge

Makena Kelly:

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Starting September 17th, the platform will label or remove tweets involving election rigging or premature election results, treating those categories as particularly likely to cause immediate harm.

“The conversation happening on Twitter is never more important than during elections,” Twitter said in a blog post rolling out the new policy. “Twitter is where people come to hear directly from elected officials and candidates for office, it’s where they come to find breaking news, and increasingly, it’s an integral source for information on when and how to vote in elections.”

Twitter’s new rules will likely bring the platform into conflict with President Trump. Over the last few months, Trump has sent out numerous tweets making false or misleading statements about the November election and voting process. Under this new policy, confusing posts regarding ballot box tampering, elections results, and election rigging will either be fact-checked or removed.

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Looking forward to Twitter trying to keep up with Trump’s sure-to-be-bonkers tweets on November 3 and afterwards. Perhaps just put his account in Twitter jail for a bit.

A wider question: assuming the best outcome, should Twitter delete his account after next January?
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This desolate English footpath has killed more than 100 people • BBC Travel

Robert Macfarlane:

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If you consult a large-scale map of the Essex coastline between the River Crouch and the River Thames, you will see a footpath – its route marked with a stitch-line of crosses and dashes – leaving the land at a place called Wakering Stairs and then heading due east, straight out to sea. Several hundred yards offshore, it curls northeast and runs in this direction for around three miles, still offshore, before cutting back to make landfall at Fisherman’s Head, the uppermost tip of a large, low-lying and little-known marshy island called Foulness.

This is the Broomway, allegedly “the deadliest” path in Britain, and certainly the unearthliest path I have ever walked. The Broomway is thought to have killed more than 100 people over the centuries; it seems likely that there were other victims whose fates went unrecorded. Sixty-six of its dead are buried in the little Foulness churchyard; the other bodies were not recovered. Edwardian newspapers, alert to the path’s reputation, rechristened it “The Doomway”.

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You start out thinking “oh, it can’t be that bad can it?” and then he heads out onto it and you realise that yes, a hundred people could have been killed on it.
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How America’s war on Huawei may boost Chinese technology • The Economist

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According to IC Insights, a firm of analysts, HiSilicon broke into the global top-ten design companies by revenue in the first half of 2020, the first Chinese firm to do so. Since it will no longer be able to design chips for its owner [Huawei] after September 14th, HiSilicon could profitably focus on doing so for third parties in China. That would generate a new revenue stream for Huawei. If instead Huawei were forced to shut HiSilicon, its laid-off engineers would be snapped up by chip-design teams at other Chinese technology giants like Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance. Or they could start new design firms of their own; many are said to be slipping out pre-emptively.

Each scenario worries firms like Qualcomm. The big American chip-designer lists Chinese competition as a risk in its annual filings. Last year Chinese sales made up $11.6bn out of Qualcomm’s $24.3bn in revenue. A HiSilicon liberated from Huawei would threaten those sales.

Huawei is putting on a brave face. It says it will spend over $20bn on research and development this year, $5.8bn more than in 2019 and about as much as Amazon, a firm with double its sales. It hopes to gain new revenue streams less vulnerable to American attacks. These are unlikely to let up even if Joe Biden becomes president next year. But as Uncle Sam tightens the grip, it risks squeezing Chinese technology into a form which it no longer controls. Huawei hopes to hang on until then.

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Economist articles are typically unsigned, but this was written by Hal Hodson, the Asia technology correspondent. His tweets have a lot more thoughts about the situation.
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Hate social media? You’ll love this documentary • WIRED

Arielle Pardes:

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the documentary carries an air of gravitas. It prosecutes its case like a trial lawyer, calling one witness after another up to the stand. They include many of the great architects of social media as we know it today—people like Tim Kendall, Facebook’s former director of monetization; Justin Rosenstein, who invented the Like button; and Guillaume Chaslot, who created the recommended-video infrastructure for YouTube—all of whom denounce their former work.

But while The Social Dilemma establishes that there is a problem, it struggles to locate the source of the stink. The film begins with an offscreen producer asking technologists what, exactly, is wrong with social media. It ends with those same technologists offering their prophecies for the future. Mostly, it shows the technologists squirming in their seats, unsure of where to begin.

Eventually, though, they start talking. According to them, the problems are thus: We spend too much time on social media. We do this because, in essence, we have no choice. The people who work at tech companies have invested infinite money, time, and engineering power to design systems that keep us hooked, and which predict our every move. It’s how they make money: We are not the user, we are the product (such clichés are repeated frequently). Mark Zuckerberg and Susan Wojcicki are billionaires; meanwhile, everyone else has given up happiness, knowledge, intimacy, spontaneity, time with our families, free will.

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On Netflix now. I haven’t seen it yet, but certainly sounds intriguing.
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Russian intelligence hackers are back, Microsoft warns, aiming at officials of both parties • The New York Times

David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth:

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The Russian military intelligence unit that attacked the Democratic National Committee four years ago is back with a series of new, more stealthy hacks aimed at campaign staff, consultants and think tanks associated with both Democrats and Republicans.

That warning was issued on Thursday by the Microsoft Corporation, in an assessment that is far more detailed than any yet made public by American intelligence agencies.

The findings come one day after a government whistle-blower claimed that officials at the White House and the Department of Homeland Security suppressed intelligence concerning Russia’s continuing interference because it “made the president look bad,” and instructed government analysts to instead focus on interference by China and Iran.

Microsoft did find that Chinese and Iranian hackers have been active — but often not in the way that President Trump and his aides have suggested.

Contrary to an assessment by the director of national intelligence last month that said China preferred former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. win the election, Microsoft found that Chinese hackers have been attacking the private email accounts of Mr. Biden’s campaign staff, along with a range of other prominent individuals in academia and the national security establishment, including groups like the Atlantic Council and the Stimson Center.

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Microsoft Surface Duo review: two screens, too many problems • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

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With OneNote, I’ve loved brainstorming and taking notes with the $100 Surface Pen (sold separately). I’d love it even more if the pen could keep up with my writing. Another performance issue. Unfortunately, key Microsoft apps like Excel and Skype haven’t been optimized for two screens.

Microsoft and Google are also working with third-party app developers. The Kindle app, for instance, places a page on each screen to make this one adorable little e-reader. (Or at least it should. It glitched midway through testing, but began working again later, after I complained to Microsoft.)

You can also launch one app on each screen—Edge browser on left, Word on right, for instance. One of my favorite features is App Groups, which lets you pair two apps together to simultaneously launch. I have Twitter and TikTok in one with the label, “Bad for My Brain.”

One screen is still better suited to many of our current needs, and that makes this wide device feel awkward more often than not. Talking phone-style on the folded Duo is like holding a baking pan up to your head (cue sales pitch for $200 Surface Earbuds), and the display definitely gets in the way when you’re just responding to a quick text or snapping a quick photo. (And don’t get me started on the 11-megapixel camera and its position on the top left screen.)

Mr. Barlow said he often keeps his Duo in single-screen mode so he doesn’t have to unfold it when he wants to do something quickly.

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The review video is five minutes, but they zip by. There are definitely quite a few tablet-y things that it does well, and quite a few phone-y things (particularly taking photos and making calls) that it does badly. A folding tablet? That wouldn’t be so bad. Dieter Bohn’s review at The Verge is worth reading for the software section too.
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How Google and Microsoft teamed up to try to reinvent smartphones • Protocol

David Pierce with the story of how the Surface Duo came to be; the most interesting details being how the two organisations struggled to mesh:

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A few weeks after their initial meeting, [Microsoft’s chief product officer Panos] Panay brought a small team to Mountain View and redid his pitch for a team of Microsoft and Google employees, this time with [Google head of Android, Hiroshi] Lockheimer by his side. From that point on, things kicked into gear. There was no hands-in moment, no signing on the dotted line. The two teams just started building a product together. Small cultural differences — should meetings happen on Teams or Meet? Do they last 25 minutes (Google’s way) or 30 (Microsoft’s)? — mostly fell by the wayside.

The hardest part of the project, both Lockheimer and Panay said, was getting the rest of their companies on board. It was a bit easier for Google, Lockheimer said, since the Android team is used to working with partners that look suspiciously like competitors. Still, every time a new team within either company got involved, it took time and convincing to bring them up to speed. Panay described it this way: “It starts with, ‘Hey, we’re building this new Surface.’ And they’re like, ‘Whoa, that’s awesome, what are we doing?’ ‘We’re building it on Android.’ And then … there’s a pause.” People would ask Panay, you know you’re in charge of Windows, right? And he’d say, yes, but we’re doing this with Android. “That’s a hurdle” for people, Panay said, “and an emotional one.”

Current and former employees said Microsoft remains mostly a top-down culture, driven by leaders and corporate edicts, while Google allows employees huge latitude to make and ship stuff. In theory that would make it easier for Panay to get buy-in from the rest of Microsoft, who might be expected to fall in line with the big new product. And it could make it harder within Google, where an Android exec might have trouble persuading a Maps or Gmail product manager to make dual-screen devices a priority.

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Apps for children must offer privacy by default • BBC News

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Apps, social media platforms and online games that are specifically targeted at children will now have to put privacy at the heart of their design.

A code of practice outlining how children’s data should be protected has come into force and firms have 12 months to comply with the new rules. If they do not, they could face huge fines imposed by the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Some questioned whether the code would bring about real change. Information commissioner Elizabeth Denham said it was an important step towards protecting children online. “A generation from now we will all be astonished that there was ever a time when there wasn’t specific regulation to protect kids online. It will be as normal as putting on a seatbelt.

“This code makes clear that kids are not like adults online, and their data needs greater protections.”
She said the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) recognised that it could be difficult for smaller businesses to comply with the code and would offer “help and support” over the coming year.

…The scope of protections needed for children online was huge and the ICO might not be up to the job, said one digital rights campaigner, Jen Persson.

“The code is well-intentioned, and if enforced, may bring about some more focused change in the approach of some apps and platforms to stop collecting excessive data from children for example, and start to meet the requirements of core data protection law in place for over 20 years.

“The key risks are that since the ICO has not enforced to date on behalf of children in its current remit of concrete data protection law, that it may be seen as not having the capability to enforce those new things in the code that go beyond that and are subjective, such as the best interests of the child, or that outstrip the ICO technical knowledge and capacity.”

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Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook won’t remove anti-vaccine posts despite Covid concerns • The Guardian

Edward Helmore:

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Zuckerberg acknowledged [in the interview on Axios on HBO] that conservative voices and opinions ranked as Facebook’s most engaged content.

“It’s true that partisan content often has kind of a higher% of people … engaging with it, commenting on it, liking it,” Zuckerberg said. “But I think it’s important to differentiate that from, broadly, what people are seeing and reading and learning about on our service.”

Also in the Axios interview, the Facebook chief said he would not remove anti-vaxxer posts, even as the leading virus experts express cautious optimism that a Covid-19 vaccination may become available late this year or early next year.

“If someone is pointing out a case where a vaccine caused harm or that they’re worried about it – you know, that’s a difficult thing to say from my perspective that you shouldn’t be allowed to express at all,” Zuckerberg said.

But he denied that Facebook’s algorithms are designed to push viewpoints “that are going to kind of enrage people somehow, and that’s what we try to show people”.

“That’s not actually how our systems work,” he added.

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Zuckerberg is being so absurdly disingenuous here. He knows, because the point has been made to him so often, that this isn’t about “a case” where “a vaccine caused harm”. It’s about anti-scientific propaganda allied to people selling harmful “cures”. Facebook is derelict. I haven’t used the original Axios writeup because it’s all over the place. Rather than a transcript, it’s bite-size junk.
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TikTok admits restricting some LGBT hashtags • BBC News

Chris Fox:

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TikTok has acknowledged that it restricts LGBT-related hashtags in some countries as part of its “localised” approach to moderation.

A report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) think-tank said many LGBT hashtags were “shadow-banned” in Bosnia, Jordan and Russia.

A shadow ban limits the discovery of content without indicating that a particular hashtag is on a ban list. TikTok said that some hashtags were restricted to comply with local laws.

According to the ASPI, terms that were not linking to content included:
• “gay” in Russian and Arabic
• “I am a lesbian” and “I am gay” in Russian
• “transgender” in Arabic

TikTok said that while some terms were restricted to comply with local laws, others were limited because they were primarily used to discover pornographic content.

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There’s that Chinese censorship/moderation (one of those irregular verbs: I moderate, you censor), just as you might expect. What you don’t know is what else gets banned.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Does this make you think of a Google Pixel photo? The man behind that liked Caravaggio’s style. CC-licensed photo by jean louis mazieres 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. Recordings, you say? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook engineer Ashok Chandwaney quits, slamming Zuckerberg’s stances on hateful and racist speech • The Washington Post

Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin:

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Facebook software engineer Ashok Chandwaney has watched with growing unease as the platform has become a haven for hate. On Tuesday morning, it came time to take a stand.

“I’m quitting because I can no longer stomach contributing to an organization that is profiting off hate in the US and globally,” Chandwaney wrote in a letter posted on Facebook’s internal employee network shortly after 8 a.m. Pacific time. The nearly 1,300-word document was detailed, bristling with links to bolster its claims and scathing in its conclusions.

“We don’t benefit from hate,” Facebook spokeswoman Liz Bourgeois said. “We invest billions of dollars each year to keep our community safe and are in deep partnership with outside experts to review and update our policies. This summer we launched an industry leading policy to go after QAnon, grew our fact-checking program, and removed millions of posts tied to hate organizations — over 96% of which we found before anyone reported them to us.”

Tuesday’s resignation made Chandwaney the latest Facebook employee to quit amid rising discontent within a company that, just a few years ago, was considered an ideal employer — exciting, deep-pocketed and, as chief executive Mark Zuckerberg frequently said, animated by the seemingly benevolent mission of connecting the world together. Worker frustration with Facebook’s policies on hate and racist speech has risen as protests against racial injustice have swept the country, with thousands of employees demanding that Zuckerberg, who controls a majority of Facebook’s voting shares, change his stances.

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Guess I picked the wrong week to go for my “no Facebook links” attempt.
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Apple to start producing first 5G iPhones in mid-September • Nikkei Asian Review

Lauly Li and Cheng Ting-Fang:

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Apple has overcome travel curbs and other coronavirus disruptions to begin initial production of its 5G iPhones in mid-September, narrowing the production delay to just weeks instead of months, the Nikkei Asian Review has learned.

Manufacturing will begin on a limited scale, with mass production expected to begin gradually between the end of September and early October. This timetable is still behind Apple’s usual schedule over the past few years, when mass production began in August for lineups released in September, but it is a large improvement compared with the situation a few months ago, two sources familiar with the matter said.

Given the lost time, however, Apple may fall short of its production target for the year. The California tech giant ordered components for up to 80 million 5G iPhones, but sources say the actual number produced this year may end up being between 73 million and 74 million, with the rest deferred into early 2021, two sources with knowledge of the matter said. 

At the same time, Apple has also significantly boosted manufacturing orders for the upcoming iPads to meet demand for teleworking and remote learning, sources said…

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So that’s mid-October for the phones confirmed. Who’s spending all the money on iPads for remote learning, though?
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Marc Levoy on the balance of camera hardware, software, and artistic expression • The Verge

Nilay Patel talks to the man who led Google’s camera team for its Pixel phones:

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Q: Marques Brownlee does these challenges every so often where he asks people to vote “blind Pepsi challenges” of smartphone photos. I think every time he’s done it, it doesn’t matter how good the photo is, the brightest photo always wins. That’s the easiest cheat that any camera maker has, is just to overexpose it a little bit and then you’ll win on Twitter. How do you solve for that in a moment like this?

That was a debate that at Google we had all the time. At Adobe, I’m hoping to put it more in the hands of the consumer or the creative professional. Let them decide what the look will be.

But of course, that was a constant debate because you’re right, brighter would often win in a one-to-one comparison. One factor that you haven’t mentioned that I should add in here is the tuning of the displays on these smartphones. Most smartphones are a little bit cranked relative to a calibrated so-called SRGB display. They’re more saturated. They’re more contrasty. You could argue that that’s probably the right thing to do on the small screen. It would be a terrible thing to do on a large screen. It would look very cartoony, but that kind of contributes to what people want to see and to taste, especially since most photographs are looked at only on the small screen.

Yeah, it’s a constant debate, a constant emerging trend.

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He cites Caravaggio and Titian as influences. Not kidding.
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AstraZeneca halting COVID-19 vaccine trial is “one of the safety valves,” Dr. Fauci says • CBS News

Nicole Brown:

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The halting of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine trial is “not uncommon,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said Wednesday. Being alert for potential adverse reactions is part of the process, he explained. 

“It’s really one of the safety valves that you have on clinical trials such as this,” he said on “CBS This Morning.” “So it’s unfortunate that it happened. Hopefully they’ll work it out and be able to proceed along with the remainder of the trial.”

AstraZeneca paused its Phase 3 trial on Tuesday after one participant became ill. It was not clear what symptoms the participant had. AstraZeneca is one of three companies currently in the final phase of vaccine trials. 

“This is a routine action which has to happen whenever there is a potentially unexplained illness in one of the trials, while it is investigated, ensuring we maintain the integrity of the trials,” AstraZeneca said in a statement.

Fauci said “generally,” the adverse event is related to something else, not the vaccine, but those running the trial can’t presume that. 

“You always make the presumption that it’s due directly to the actual vaccine or therapeutic or whatever it is that’s in the clinical trial,” he said.

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Bob Woodward book ‘Rage:’ Trump admits to concealing true threat of coronavirus • CNNPolitics

Jamie Gangel, Jeremy Herb and Elizabeth Stuart:

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In a series of interviews with Woodward, Trump revealed that he had a surprising level of detail about the threat of the virus earlier than previously known. “Pretty amazing,” Trump told Woodward, adding that the coronavirus was maybe five times “more deadly” than the flu.

Trump’s admissions are in stark contrast to his frequent public comments at the time insisting that the virus was “going to disappear” and “all work out fine.”

The book, using Trump’s own words, depicts a President who has betrayed the public trust and the most fundamental responsibilities of his office. In “Rage,” Trump says the job of a president is “to keep our country safe.” But in early February, Trump told Woodward he knew how deadly the virus was, and in March, admitted he kept that knowledge hidden from the public.

“I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward on March 19, even as he had declared a national emergency over the virus days earlier. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

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Predictable: people will rage at Woodward for not releasing this at the time. Also: they will roll their eyes because it’s so unsurprising that Trump would say this.

In any other election year this would be seen as an early “October surprise”. This year? It will be rolled over to something else in a day. Remember that time when everyone was scandalised by Trump’s indifference to the military dead? That was the weekend.
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HSMC promised China’a first 7 nm chips. It didn’t go well • TechNode

Wei Sheng:

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“The strange thing about HSMC is that it’s unclear where its money is from… It seems that the company didn’t actually receive as much money as it claimed to have,” Gu Wenjun, chief analyst at Shanghai-based semiconductor research company ICwise, told TechNode (our translation).

Chen Rang, a semiconductor investor cited by the National Business Daily, hinted that the Wuhan municipal government may have leveraged land resources to attract private capital to back the project. “But the semiconductor industry has a high standard on investment and it is far from enough to just utilize land resources [to raise money],” Chen said.

HSMC’s goal was to make China’s first 7-nanometer chips. All it has to show for it is a few uncompleted buildings. It did buy a high-end machine needed for bleeding-edge semiconductor production, but it was put up as collateral for a loan.

The semi-annual report by the Dongxihu District government also said that HSMC had bought “China’s only mask aligner that can produce 7-nm chips” from Dutch company ASML, referring to an instrument that enables photolithography in the fabrication process.

If true, it would be quite a coup—the US government has been campaigning since 2018 to prevent ASML from selling the most advanced machine required to make high-end chips to Chinese companies, according to Reuters.

Chinese media Caixin tried to find the unique 7-nm machine, and it does seem to exist. But they found that it was under mortgage; is good only for 14-nm chips, not 7-nm; and, citing an anonymous semiconductor industry insider, that SMIC has around 10 units of the same model.

Court files show that the machine had never been used when it was held as security for the RMB 582 million loan in January. “You will need at least two mask aligners and nearly 100 pieces of other machinery to make chips,” said Gu of ICwise. He added that no Chinese chipmaker has realized the mass production of 7 nm chips.

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A strange story, but the key point is that China is – for now – behind Taiwan’s work in chipmaking.
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Report: Now Samsung and LG are halting display supply to Huawei • Android Authority

Hadlee Simons:

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Huawei has endured a torrid 18 months, as the US ban means it’s lost Google Mobile Services, chipset supplies from various third parties, and the services of chipmaker TSMC. If it looks like things couldn’t get any worse for the company, well, they can.

South Korean news outlet Chosun Biz reports that LG and Samsung have decided to suspend the supply of “premium” smartphone displays to Huawei. The suspension is said to go into effect from September 15.

Huawei has generally turned to LG and Samsung, along with China’s own BOE for its display needs. So removing LG and Samsung from the equation means that BOE will likely need to pick up the slack. However, Chosun Biz also adds that Huawei is testing displays from local companies like Visionox, Tianma, and CSOT.

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At this point, there aren’t many outside suppliers left to cut off supply.
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Jalisco cartel adopts new tactic: drones armed with C-4 explosive • Mexico News Daily

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A citizens’ militia group in Tepalcatepec, Michoacán, reports finding two drones inside an armored car that cartel hitmen had abandoned after an attempted raid on the city, which borders Jalisco, on July 25. 

The C4 was packed with ball bearings to serve as shrapnel in Tupperware-like containers that were equipped with a remote detonation system and duct-taped to the drones, militia members explained. The drones were found in a cardboard box that was soaked in blood, indicating to the militia members that whoever was intending to fly the drones was injured before they could be launched. 

The new tactic represents the cartel’s determination to wrest control of the western Michoacán municipality from the self-defense militia and an evolution of their air attack strategy. In April, the cartel used small planes to drop explosives on Tepalcatepec, but after authorities increased aerial surveillance in the region the CJNG opted for drones, which cannot be detected on radar. 

Militia members say that loud explosions have been heard across the municipality, but no one thus far has been injured in a drone attack. They believe the cartel has not yet learned how to fly and detonate them with precision.

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They’re probably all stuck in trees and on roofs. More seriously, this seems like a version of the tactics that Isis tried in 2016 when it was being driven out of Syria and Iraq.
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Inside the secret plan to reboot Isis from a huge digital backup • WIRED UK

Carl Miller:

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It all began on October 27, 2019. Rumour was, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the leader of Isis, was dead. Nothing was confirmed, but already the jihadist world online was thrumming with excitement and trepidation.

“I was walking through an airport,” Moustafa Ayad tells me. “Jet-lagged out of my mind.” A deputy director of the counter-extremism think tank Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD), Ayad tries to stay on top of the constant struggles and skirmishes, retreats and resurgences between Isis and their many enemies online. That day, as he scrolled through his phone, a blitz of Isis propaganda stared back at him. The digital Jihad was raising a dirge to Baghdadi on Twitter.

Flitting from account to pro-Isis account, Ayad noticed something strange. Some accounts carried short, discreet links, not within their tweets, but nestled in their biographies. He clicked.

The link, he realised, was not quite like any other he’d ever followed before. On his phone, Ayad saw folder after folder of meticulously catalogued terrorist content. “I thought it was a joke,” Ayad says. “Some kind of scam.” In the echoing marbled expanse of Dubai International Airport, on public Wi-Fi, in a Starbucks queue, he had stumbled upon a gigantic, sprawling cache of Isis material.

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Strange: an entire movement can now effectively bury everything it needs on the web, so that it can revive – cicada-like – when the situation is right. Or, more likely, the ideology becomes outdated and the tactics are taken up and evolved by another group. As above.
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Highlights of the day: TSMC to start making Apple Silicon in 4Q20 • Digitimes

TSMC is expected to start making Apple Silicon in fourth-quarter 2020. Apple’s growing adopting of SiP [System-in-Package] technology is setting a trend that many in the semiconductor sector are keen to follow. And leading backend services providers expect sales from their SiP businesses to climb about 30% in 2020.

Apple will kick off its 5nm wafer starts at TSMC for its new Apple Silicon processors starting the fourth quarter of 2020, with monthly output estimated at 5,000-6,000 wafers, according to industry sources.

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The rest of the Digitimes story is behind a paywall. SiP means you’ve got everything – CPU and GPU and other things – in a single chip. One wafer would contain hundreds of chips. For comparison: AMD has ordered 200,000 wafers from TSMC for 2021. At the rate cited above, Apple would have 60,000-72,000 wafers in a year.
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Overcast’s latest beta update tells listeners which podcasts are tracking them • The Verge

Ashley Carman:

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The latest update to Overcast, a popular iOS podcast app, is bringing new transparency to podcast ads. Listeners who are in the beta can now view the services their favorite podcasts use to serve ads and track listeners. This means listeners will be able to tell when a podcast is using dynamic advertising, which allows networks to swap and target ads based on the specific person listening. For most people, this likely won’t change the shows they enjoy, but for the audience that cares or wants more information about how a podcast serves them ads, it’s a notable transparency feature that isn’t yet available in any of the other major podcasting apps.

This distinguishes Overcast particularly from Spotify, which gathers more information than any other platform with little transparency. Because Spotify users listen to music and podcasts under the same account, the platform knows what content they consume outside of an individual show as well as where they’re based, how old they are, their billing info, and their actual name. The same could eventually go for Google when and if it builds out its Google Podcasts analytics dashboard or gets into serving podcast ads. Google already runs a vast ad-serving platform that pulls from a wide range of data, notably information from users’ Gmail accounts, search history, and browsing activity to target them with ads.

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This is a little over a week old, but still notable. Making how you’re tracked a bit more explicit is a worthwhile endeavour. Though it then raises the question: what if you’d like to have podcasts recommended to you and adverts targeted to you? (Personally I subscribe to a number of paid-hence-ad-free podcasts. When I don’t, I skip ads: hurrah for the Apple Watch’s onscreen controls.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The biker event at Sturgis, South Dakota, spread Covid-19 to multiple states and thousands of people. CC-licensed photo by Chris Heald 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 12 links for you. Can I take it to the bridge? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

London’s bridges really are falling down • The New York Times

Mark Landler:

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Philip Englefield, a professional magician who lives in Barnes [on the river in south-west London], pointed out that when a suspension bridge collapsed in Genoa, Italy, in 2018, killing 43 people, the Italians worked tirelessly, even as the country battled the coronavirus pandemic, to build a replacement. It was inaugurated last month.

“Why can’t we do that?” Mr. Englefield asked the crowd, as a gentle rain further dampened their spirits. “For goodness’ sake, this is England.”

It turns out that is precisely the problem: Hammersmith Bridge is an apt metaphor for all the ways the country has changed after a decade of economic austerity, years of political wars over Brexit, and months of lockdown to combat the pandemic, the last of which has decimated already-stressed public finances.
Like other London roads and bridges, Hammersmith Bridge had been neglected for decades. Fully repairing it would cost an estimated £141m ($187m) — funds that neither Hammersmith & Fulham Council, which owns the bridge, nor London’s transportation authority, which depends on it, currently have.

Transport for London, which runs the subway and bus system and some major roads, has already had to negotiate a nearly £2bn bailout from the government to make up for a shortfall in revenue after ridership plummeted during the lockdown. Except for rush hour, London’s subways are still largely ghost trains.

Hammersmith has appealed for help to Prime Minister Boris Johnson. But he won election by promising to spend money on marquee projects like a $130bn-plus high-speed railway, not a cast-iron relic of Queen Victoria’s reign.

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Classic case of the ha’porth of tar. It probably will take the complete collapse of a bridge for anything to get done. Hammersmith is a beautiful bridge, but neglect is cheaper than care – for a while. And what a metaphor for the state the country finds itself in.
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iPhone 12 and AirTags appear to be on track for October launch • BGR

Jacob Siegal:

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Apple announced its first digital event since WWDC 2020 on Tuesday, but all signs point to the event focusing entirely on new Apple Watch and iPad models rather than the highly-anticipated iPhone 12. After Apple confirmed that its next iPhone would be delayed by “a few weeks,” rumors began to pop up claiming that Apple wouldn’t announce its latest iPhone until October. Since then, the evidence of an October launch has continued to pile up.

Nikkei Asian Review is the latest publication to add fuel to the fire, reporting that Apple has finally overcome all of the issues and disruptions related to the novel coronavirus pandemic and plans to begin production of the 5G iPhone 12 models in mid-September. This lines up with recent reports pointing to a mid-October launch.

Sources familiar with Apple’s plans tell Nikkei that the company is planning to start manufacturing iPhone 12 units on a limited scale in the coming days, while mass production will ramp up later in the month and in early October. Mass production of new iPhone models typically begins in August ahead of a late September launch, but this timetable is said to be a significant improvement over the delays that Apple was looking at just months ago.

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Seems that next Tuesday’s virtual event is going to be for the Apple Watch, iPad and perhaps Apple TV. Other stuff will have to wait.
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Samsung reportedly cutting off chip sales to Huawei • The Verge

Adi Robertson:

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Samsung and SK Hynix will reportedly stop selling components to Huawei as the Trump administration tightens sanctions on the Chinese phone maker. According to Chosun Ilbo and other Korean news outlets, the companies will suspend trade on September 15th, the day a new set of rules limits dealing with Huawei.

These sanctions were introduced in August, following a string of other restrictions implemented since last year. They ban non-American companies from selling components that were developed with US technology unless these companies obtain special approval. This poses a serious threat to Huawei, which has said it may no longer be able to make its Kirin chipsets. Conversely, Huawei’s business is valuable to many other companies, as it recently became the top-selling smartphone manufacturer. Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC reportedly suspended sales to Huawei this May after an earlier round of restrictions. Huawei called those rules “arbitrary and pernicious.”

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The plug comes out; the water starts draining away.
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Android 11 update: When will your phone get it? • Android Authority

Mitja Rutnik:

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The stable Android 11 update is finally here for select devices. Google officially released the OS today and is rolling it out to its Pixel phones. The search giant is joined by OnePlus, Xiaomi, Oppo, and Realme this year, all of which are releasing the update for a few of its phones on day one.

But what about other handsets from companies like Samsung, Sony, and LG? Which models will get the Android 11 update and when? While most manufacturers haven’t announced their release schedules yet, we can get a good idea of what to expect by looking at how fast they shipped out previous versions of Android.

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I notice the presence of the phrases “don’t hold your breath” and “you’re in for a wait”.
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How to infect your state in three easy steps • Dr Bob Morris

Bob:

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It takes a special kind of magic to make South Dakota the pandemic poster child. With only eleven people per square mile, the state has almost the lowest population density in the country (46th out of 50).  That translates to an average social distance of about 1,500 feet.  Sounds like an easy place to keep a pandemic in check.

Enter Governor Kristi Noem.

Not only was Noem one of the few governors to refuse to issue either stay-at-home or mandatory mask orders, she has actively encouraged unmasked public gatherings without social distancing.  Even an outbreak of 450 cases at a meatpacking plant in Sioux Falls wasn’t enough to sway her. Instead, she hosted the President at a Mt. Rushmore 4th of July event. No masks. No distance. No problem.

What was she thinking? As she put it in her recent speech to the Republican National Convention, no “elite class of so-called experts” was going to infringe on the “God given liberties and civil rights” of her constituents.  For a while, she seemed to be getting away with it. Then, two weeks after the Trump rally, the story began to change. Between July 18 and August 8, the average number of cases per day in South Dakota rose by 80%.

And then, there was Sturgis.

There is general consensus among epidemiologists that the following steps will control the spread of SARS-COV-2 and minimize its impact.

• Avoid large gatherings
• Minimize the time spent in close proximity to people outside your household
• Protect older adults
• Wear a mask when away from home
• Do not share food and drink with others
• If you may have been exposed to the virus, do not travel.

So maybe, just maybe, bringing together hundreds of thousands of people with an average age of 54 for a ten day booze-soaked party in a state where the Governor calls masks a waste of time, and then, when it’s all over, sending them to their homes in every state in the country, is a bad idea. Welcome to Sturgis. Violating all six rules for ten days struck most epidemiologists as a bad idea. Now, the data seem to confirm this concern.

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Truly astonishing that there are still, so many months in, people who think that the virus respects your beliefs. Again, the outcomes aren’t die/survive untouched; we’re still discovering the aftereffects of Covid. Sturgis caused 250,000 cases and an estimated $12.2bn in healthcare costs.
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Pasco’s sheriff created a futuristic program to stop crime before it happens. It monitors and harasses families • Tampa Bay Times

Kathleen McGrory and Neil Bedi:

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Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco took office in 2011 with a bold plan: to create a cutting-edge intelligence program that could stop crime before it happened.

What he actually built was a system to continuously monitor and harass Pasco County [in Florida] residents, a Tampa Bay Times investigation has found.

First the Sheriff’s Office generates lists of people it considers likely to break the law, based on arrest histories, unspecified intelligence and arbitrary decisions by police analysts.

Then it sends deputies to find and interrogate anyone whose name appears, often without probable cause, a search warrant or evidence of a specific crime.

They swarm homes in the middle of the night, waking families and embarrassing people in front of their neighbors. They write tickets for missing mailbox numbers and overgrown grass, saddling residents with court dates and fines. They come again and again, making arrests for any reason they can.

One former deputy described the directive like this: “Make their lives miserable until they move or sue.”

…Pasco’s drop in property crimes was similar to the decline in the seven-largest nearby police jurisdictions. Over the same time period, violent crime increased only in Pasco.

Criminal justice experts said they were stunned by the agency’s practices. They compared the tactics to child abuse, mafia harassment and surveillance that could be expected under an authoritarian regime.

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“Or America”, thinks everyone outside America. What about the “move or sue”? The families or people would be too poor to sue. A terrible overreach, though there is a lawsuit against it in progress. (Via @benedictevans.)
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At 31, I have just weeks to live. Here’s what I want to pass on • The Guardian

Elliot Dallen:

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At this point I should say a word to my friends. Being this ill complicates all relationships. The rut I found myself in a few weeks back hasn’t lifted. I’ve definitely been “feeling the victim” a lot more than usual. My acceptance that my time and energy is now limited comes with the knowledge that I won’t be able to catch you all properly to give our relationships the time and appreciation they deserve. I get so many messages from you all, which often exceed the energy I have to reply. Where I am able to see people, I’d just say keeping me company and being positive is helpful. I want fun, laughter, happiness, joy. I think it’s very possible to have this kind of death – there is likely to be a shadow of sadness hanging over proceedings, but for the most part I want everyone relaxed and to be able to feel the love.

Because I know that that moment isn’t too far away. I haven’t asked for a specific prognosis, as I don’t believe there’s much to gain from doing so, but I think it’s a matter of weeks. Medicine has luckily turned this into quite a gentle process. That really does take a lot of the fear away. And I’m hoping impending death now grants me the licence to sound prematurely wise and overly grandiose. Because I’ve had time to think about the things that are really important to me, and I want to share what I’ve discovered.

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The points he shares may seem obvious (depending on your age, I guess). No less worth noting.
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True kindness is locking a friend out of their social media accounts • Mel Magazine

Madeleine Holden:

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knowing you should be spending less time online isn’t the same thing as actually doing it, and that’s where the friend lockout can be an ingenious tool. As Franklin suggests, there are plenty of apps and plug-ins available for people wanting to go on a social media detox, but they often prove minimally useful in comparison.

Demi says Screen Time is useless because it allows you the option of 15 more minutes, and Beth, a 30-year-old editor from New Zealand, had limited success with Focus. “I quickly worked out that it doesn’t work in incognito mode, and I just circumvent the plug-in whenever I want to waste lots of time online,” she says, adding that she sometimes deletes all the social media apps on her phone, only to find herself checking the same sites on her web browser. “The only thing that actually works is being locked out.”

The way a lockout works is simple: You entrust a loved one with the password to whichever social media platform is causing you the most angst; they log in and change your password, ideally without doing any DM snooping along the way; and then they log you out, rendering you unable to access your own account — until you come crawling back, that is.

Demi says that the indignity of having to plead to be logged back in is part of what makes this method work. “There’s an element of shame or like, abasing myself,” he says. “If I have to ask someone for the password, I immediately think, ‘I better have a good reason for it or else this will be stupid.’” 

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Hate to disappoint Demi and the others, but all these apps offer a thing called “Forgot your password?” which sends a reset to your email. Then you can create a new password and log in.

Maybe they need to get their friend to do the second step: change the email on the account. (To their email, ideally?)
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Drug companies issue rare joint pledge on vaccine safety amid political fears • TheHill

Peter Sullivan:

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FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn has also offered reassurances that his agency will base vaccine decisions only on science and not on politics. 

But the statement from the pharmaceutical companies is an illustration of how deep the fears are about politicization of the process and the need for companies to try make their own reassurance about science guiding the process. 

An NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist poll last month found that a significant portion of the public, 35 percent, said they would not take a coronavirus vaccine. 

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla reiterated Tuesday on NBC that his company’s vaccine could have results from the phase 3 trial by the end of October, a faster timeline than other experts have predicted.

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The Pfizer trial (which is a joint one with a German company and, don’t tell Trump, a Chinese company) moved to phase 3 at the end of July with 30,000 people in the US and other countries. The end of October would be pretty rapid for any sort of useful analysis, and anyway it couldn’t be made and distributed in time for the US elections. (Check on the vaccine tracker.)

Hahn, by the way, is the guy who stood beside Trump and completely misrepresented the data about “convalescent plasma” (which is not a miracle cure, and certainly not as efficacious as he made it out to be). So he can say that it will be science and not politics, but his track record indicates otherwise. Also, don’t count your chickens: the AstraZeneca/Oxford University phase 3 trial has been halted after an adverse reaction.
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Apple seeks damages from Epic Games for breach of App Store contract • The Verge

Russell Brandom:

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Apple will seek damages against Epic Games for allegedly breaching its contract with the iOS App Store, in a new escalation of the two companies’ ongoing legal fight. The move came in a filing entered on Tuesday, alongside counterclaims for unjust enrichment and tortious interference with Apple’s relationship with its customers.

“Epic’s flagrant disregard for its contractual commitments and other misconduct has caused significant harm to Apple,” the filing reads. “Left unchecked, Epic’s conduct threatens the very existence of the iOS ecosystem and its tremendous value to consumers.”

Epic Games sued Apple in August, after the company’s hit game Fortnite was removed from the iOS App Store over the implementation of an unauthorized payment system. The complaint, filed August 13th, alleges that Apple is violating antitrust law, using its total control over iOS to extract a commission for all software that passes through the App Store.

Apple’s filing comes in response to an exhaustive motion for a preliminary injunction, filed by Epic over the weekend. Tuesday’s filing lays out a range of defenses against that motion. Among other claims, Apple maintains there were legitimate business justifications for all of the actions it undertook, which would undercut a broader antitrust claim.

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Apple’s claim for harm is that Epic has “reaped millions of dollars in in-app purchases through its unauthorised external purchase mechanism” and also harmed the App Store’s reputation as a place where you can download apps you want. (Might have explained that in the intro, Vergefolk.) Epic can’t argue it was accidental. This could be expensive.
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SoftBank, Robinhood and a Margins singularity • Margins by Ranjan Roy and Can Duruk

Ranjan Roy, who used to work on a trading floor, explains what SoftBank was up to with its ginormous purchase of call options on tech stocks:

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Let’s say my co-host Can and me have taken Margins public (maybe via a reverse merger with the Mergence Corp to get the ticker $MRGN). $MRGN stock is now worth $10, because this free newsletter is such a great business.

Robin H. the investor thinks MRGN will go up a lot and very soon. But instead of buying the stock itself, she buys a call option – which is the right to buy the stock at a given price on a set date.

• Robin buys call with a strike price of 20 that expires on October 16th, 2020 for $1.
• If on October 16th MRGN is trading at $30, that contract/option is now worth $10 and happy days, Robin H. has made $9.

Where things get interesting is Robin had to buy that option from someone. Enter the market maker who we’ll call Ditacel.

• When the market-maker ‘writes’ the option and sells it to Robin they make $1 upfront. They now have the obligation to sell MRGN to Robin at 20 on Oct 16th.
• But if our MRGN stock goes up to $30 when that option expires, they have now effectively lost $9.
• If free newsletters get even hotter and MRGN is at $100, Ditacel after taking $1 upfront to sell that option to Robin, has lost $80.

Again, Robin has the right to buy at a certain price while Ditacel has the obligation to sell at that price.

The most important dynamic to understand is the people selling the call options have theoretically infinite losses.

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I’ve never understood how people keep their cool when they’re dealing with calls and puts. It’s what melted the market in 1929, after all. (The Margins, meanwhile, is consistently excellent.)
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The ‘brushing’ scam that’s behind mystery parcels • BBC News

Zoe Kleinman:

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If you’ve ever received a parcel from a shopping platform that you didn’t order, and nobody you know seems to have bought it for you, you might have been caught up in a “brushing” scam.

It has hit the headlines after thousands of Americans received unsolicited packets of seeds in the post, but it is not new.

It’s an illicit way for sellers to get reviews for their products. And it doesn’t mean your account has been hacked.

Here’s an example of how it works: let’s say I set myself up as a seller on Amazon, for my product, Kleinman Candles, which cost £2 each. I then set up a load of fake accounts, and I find random names and addresses either from publicly available information or from a leaked database that’s doing the rounds from a previous data breach.

I order Kleinman Candles from my fake accounts and have them delivered to the addresses I have found, with no information about where they have been sent from. I then leave positive reviews for Kleinman Candles from each fake account – which has genuinely made a purchase.

This way my candle shop page gets filled with glowing reviews (sorry), my sales figures give me an algorithmic popularity boost as a credible merchant – and nobody knows that the only person buying and reviewing my candles is myself.

It tends to happen with low-cost products, including cheap electronics. It’s more a case of fake marketing than cyber-crime, but “brushing” and fake reviews are against Amazon’s policies.

Campaign group Which? advises that you inform the platform if sent any unsolicited goods.

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So now you know. A couple of days ago I was going to include a link to a WSJ story about the seeds stuff, but this clears it up. More reading at Vice, which reckons “hundreds” of Americans planted the seeds. Oh no.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Unfortunately, some venture capitalists think “tabletop” games like Dungeons & Dragons are ripe for disruption. Or something. CC-licensed photo by hal_99 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. Untested, untraced. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

COVID 19: Why Senegal is outpacing the US in tackling pandemic • USA Today

Deirdre Shesgreen:

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COVID-19 test results come back within 24 hours – or even faster. Hotels have been transformed into quarantine units. Scientists are racing to develop a cutting-edge, low-cost ventilator.

This isn’t the pandemic response in South Korea, New Zealand or another country held up as a model of coronavirus containment success.  

It’s Senegal, a west African country with a fragile health care system, a scarcity of hospital beds and about seven doctors for every 100,000 people. And yet Senegal, with a population of 16 million, has tackled COVID-19 aggressively and, so far, effectively. More than six months into the pandemic, the country has about 14,000 cases and 284 deaths.  

“You see Senegal moving out on all fronts: following science, acting quickly, working the communication side of the equation, and then thinking about innovation,” said Judd Devermont, director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan foreign policy think tank. 

Senegal deserves “to be in the pantheon of countries that have … responded well to this crisis, even given its low resource base,” Devermont said.

Senegal snagged the No. 2 slot in a recent analysis looking at how 36 countries have handled the pandemic. The United States landed near the bottom: 31st of the 36 countries examined by Foreign Policy magazine, which included a mix of wealthy, middle income and developing nations.

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Learnt the lesson from Ebola, kept those public health measures in place, don’t have culture wars about masks, have a public health system. Basically the polar opposite of the US.
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Who lost Lucent?: The decline of America’s telecom equipment industry • American Affairs Journal

Robert Atkinson:

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in the 1970s the two largest telecom equipment manufacturers were U.S. companies: Western Electric and ITT. Even in the late 1990s, the two largest were still based in North America: Lucent and Nortel (headquartered in Canada but employing tens of thousands of workers in the United States). In 1999, Lucent was almost three times larger than its next two rivals and was the sixth largest company in America in terms of capitalization. Nortel ac counted for over one-third of the capitalization of the Toronto Stock Exchange. By 2008, however, Nortel was bankrupt, and Lucent was a sliver of its former self, having been sold off to Alcatel, a French company, which was later bought by Finland’s Nokia.

What happened? How did America go from the world’s leader to not even an also-ran in the span of just two decades? Equally troub ling, why did no one sound the alarm bell when there was still time for action?

Economists say America lost its telecom equipment industry (firms that make the hardware and software that enable wireline and wireless telecommunications) because it naturally lost comparative advantage as the economy shifted to industries like internet services. Business administration scholars blame bad management. Neither view explains what really happened.

The answer lies in the fact that other nations saw the industry as strate gic and they fought to protect and promote their own companies within this sector. Nowhere is this more true than in China, where, without “innovation mercantilist” policies, Huawei and ZTE (the other major Chinese competitor) would not exist today. Indeed, as Huawei’s founder Ren Zhengfei himself admitted in 2002, without Beijing’s policy of protecting Chinese companies from aggressive foreign competition at home, “Huawei would no longer exist.” And if Huawei did not exist, Nortel and possibly Lucent would still be with us today.

While other nations were promoting and defending their industry, U.S. policymakers put their abiding faith in free markets.

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Essentially, the whole article is a plaint about the US’s mistake in not subsidising its telecoms companies, and having antitrust laws. Even so, the management culture and the stock market didn’t help.
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Apple: how app developers manipulate your mood to boost ranking • Financial Times

Patrick McGee:

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Gaming apps will solicit a rating just after you reach a high score. Banking apps will ask when they know it’s payday. Gambling apps will prompt users after they are dealt the perfect Blackjack hand. A sporting app will give the nudge only when a user’s team is winning. 

Apple has for a decade clamped down on “ratings farms” and “download bots” that companies use to fraudulently garner five-star scores and manipulate App Store rankings. And it has had some success. But these are blunt instruments trying to cheat the system in clear violation of Apple’s rules. The more sophisticated techniques stay within the rules but draw on behavioural psychology to understand your mood, emotions and behaviour — they are not hacking the system; they are hacking your brain.

“The algorithms that are used are very hush-hush,” says Saoud Khalifah, chief executive of Fakespot, a service that analyses the authenticity of reviews on the web. “They can target you when you are euphoric, when you have a lot of dopamine . . . They can use machine learning to determine [when] a user will be more inclined to leave positive reviews.”

Conversely, developers know when not to ask: a news app won’t solicit reviews from someone reading a story about death and destruction. The person who keeps getting their password wrong will certainly not be asked. This helps to prevent negative scores from becoming public, raising the overall average. “We call it latent value sensing,” says Michael Sikorsky, chief executive of Robots and Pencils, which helps businesses in the mobile economy. “When you think you’ve got someone into a dark corner of the app, that is not the time to ask for a review.”

Such tactics — hidden from the public but an open secret among developers — have sparked widespread ratings inflation and become so prevalent that “among major enterprises, it’s hard to find ones that don’t do this”, says Brian Levine, vice-president of strategy and analytics at Mobiquity, a consultancy. 

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The digital future of tabletop games • Andreeseen Horowitz

Jonathan Lai and Andrew Chen:

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Today, more than 40 million people play D&D around the world and sales have grown by double-digit percentages for the last five consecutive years. No longer a fringe hobby, D&D features prominently in mainstream and celebrity culture (call it the “Stranger Things” bump).

D&D’s growth is illustrative of a larger trend. Tabletop games—a quintessentially analog experience that encompasses board games, card games, and parlor games—are being dramatically improved by digital tools. While the first attempts at modernizing tabletop games sought to merely replicate games in the digital realm, the next generation of games goes a step further, integrating tools such as live-streaming, user generated content (UGC), audio products, and community platforms. This digital transformation is reinventing the way we learn, play, and connect with one another over tabletop games.

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I liked the comment by Alex Hern, the Guardian’s UK technology editor, about this post (which is pretty long, and meanders off into how you’ll have audio-enhanced tabletop games and boards that can do anything and become anything and you’ll have parts that can be anything, praise the digital gods): “God, it takes a VC writing about an area you know real well to see the hollowness of their thought.” (Hern plays a lot of “tabletop” games, or what we used to call “board games”.)
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What we didn’t get • Noahpinion

Noah Smith:

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Why did mid-20th-century sci fi whiff so badly? Why didn’t we get the Star Trek future, or the Jetsons future, or the Asimov future?

Two things happened. First, we ran out of theoretical physics. Second, we ran out of energy.

If you watch Star Trek or Star Wars, or read any of the innumerable space operas of the mid-20th century, they all depend on a bunch of fancy physics. Faster-than-light travel, artificial gravity, force fields of various kinds. In 1960, that sort of prediction might have made sense. Humanity had just experienced one of the most amazing sequences of physics advancements ever. In the space of a few short decades, humankind discovered relativity and quantum mechanics, invented the nuclear bomb and nuclear power, and created the x-ray, the laser, superconductors, radar and the space program. The early 20th century was really a physics bonanza, driven in large part by advances in fundamental theory. And in the 1950s and 1960s, those advances still seemed to be going strong, with the development of quantum field theories.

Then it all came to a halt. After the Standard Model was completed in the 1970s, there were no big breakthroughs in fundamental physics. There was a brief period of excitement in the 80s and 90s, when it seemed like string theory was going to unify quantum mechanics and gravity, and propel us into a new era to match the time of Einstein and Bohr and Dirac. But by the 2000s, people were writing pop books about how string theory has failed. Meanwhile, the largest, most expensive particle collider ever built has merely confirmed the theories of the 1970s, leaving little direction for where to go next. Physicists have certainly invented some more cool stuff (quantum teleporation! quantum computers!), but there have been no theoretical breakthroughs that would allow us to cruise from star to star or harness the force of gravity.

The second thing that happened was that we stopped getting better sources of energy.

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From a couple of years ago, but still true, and a good read in its forecast about what we’ll see next.
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Morrison warns Facebook and Google he won’t respond well to any threats over news code • The Guardian

Paul Karp:

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The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission proposed a mandatory industry code to apply to search engine and social media giants in April after negotiations stalled over issues including the media’s access to data. The overriding sticking point was Google and Facebook’s stonewalling on payment for content, the ACCC told the government.

Morrison told reporters in Canberra on Monday that he supported the Australian competition regulator’s work on the code. “I have had engagement with very senior-level executives,” he said. “I spoke to the CEO of Google just last week, and continue to invite them to participate in that process.

“I remember Amazon said to me once, ‘Well, we’re not going to pay this tax’, when it comes to the low-value threshold, and they threatened to pull Amazon, and they did, and they were back three months later.

“So, look, I think people from these companies understand that when I say something, I mean it. And that I intend to follow through with it.”

In mid-2018 while Morrison was treasurer, Amazon retaliated against changes in the collection of Australia’s goods and services tax on low-value imported items by directing Australians to amazon.com.au and barring them from purchasing items from its US store. It backed down in November 2018.

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Over the falls we gooooooooo!
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Epic Games is getting desperate in its failed ‘Fortnite’ battle with Apple • BGR

Yoni Heisler:

»

Epic Games recently filed for a preliminary injunction that would force Apple to keep Fortnite in the App Store. In its filing, Epic argues that keeping the game out of the App Store while the case goes through the legal system would cause the company “irreparable harm.” Of course, the irony of Epic claiming that it’s not looking for special treatment while at the same time demanding that Apple give it a benefit no other developer gets is rich, to say the least.

As part of its filing, Epic details some of the harm it’s suffered already:

»

Fortnite is more than just a game. It is an intensely social community whose value to its users depends in large part on the ability to connect with other users. Epic has built a community that people rely on. By removing Fortnite from the App Store, Apple has cleaved millions of users from their friends and family in the Fortnite community, which entirely depends on connectivity. The user outcry has been deafening, showing real harm to the public interest.

Daily active users on iOS have declined by over 60% since Fortnite’s removal from the App Store. And removal already has resulted in a loss of goodwill and irreparable damage to Epic’s reputation. The continued loss of Fortnite as a gathering place for users on all platforms will lead Epic’s customers to defect. Epic may never see these users again. It will also be denied the opportunity to access even a single new user among the one-billion-plus iOS users for at least the next year.

«

«

That 60% figure is dramatic, but are those lost users not logging in on any other platform either? Epic doesn’t say. Other data in the filing: 116m of Fortnite’s registered users, or nearly one-third of the 350m total, play on iOS at some time. Also, 63% of those 116m (that’s 73m) play only on iOS. The numbers are hard to parse, but clearly some iOS users have just logged off entirely.

As to Epic’s woe-is-me – as the judge in the first TRO pointed out, it’s their own fault. And where’s their TRO against Google, precisely?
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TikTok estimated to generate $88.1m in revenue in August • Tech In Asia

Doris Yu:

»

It’s estimated that the Chinese video-sharing platform TikTok generated more than US$88.1m in revenue last month, 6.3x higher than its earnings for the same period last year, Caixin reported, citing statistics from SensorTower.

It attributed the year-on-year growth to the strong performance of TikTok’s Chinese version, Douyin, which accounted for about 85% of the app’s August revenue. Meanwhile, the US market, being its second-largest revenue source, took up 7.8%.

The app’s August revenue, however, represented a decline when compared with the months of July, June, and May, with US$102.5m, US$90.7m, and US$95.7m, respectively.

«

OK, so that’s about a billion dollars over the course of the year, which is respectable. But that must pale into insignificance compared to its costs. Growth first, profits later; no wonder Facebook is terrified.
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Brexit: the reason why Boris Johnson is jeopardising an EU free trade deal • ITV News

Robert Peston:

»

if the government of Boris Johnson has an ideology, it is that of Dominic Cummings and his Vote Leave crew. And Cummings’s passionate conviction is that Johnson’s government MUST have the discretion to invest without fetter in hi-tech, digital, artificial intelligence and the full gamut of the so-called fourth industrial revolution.

How so? Well here is the Cummings/Vote Leave fundamental article of faith for this era: “Countries that were late to industrialisation were owned/coerced by those early (to it). The same will happen to countries without trillion dollar tech companies over the next 20 years.”

The whole point of being in government for Cummings – and he would say for his Vote Leave team who work with him in Downing Street – is “to try to change what happens on these questions”, I am told.

This is a remarkable and important statement.

It won’t escape you, if you did an O level or GCSE in history, that the UK was one of those few nations early to the first industrial revolution, which then did indeed own and coerce those that were late.

But more importantly, it says that Cummings – and we have to assume his boss Johnson too – are obsessed about not being bossed around by the two superpowers that already have trillion dollar tech companies, namely the US and China (and James Forsyth in The Times elaborated on all this in his column on Friday).

To be honest, it is moot whether there is any chance for the UK to catch up in this latest industrial revolution with China and America, even if every penny of taxpayers’ money was devoted to backing tech innovation. But it certainly matters that this government feels it is an imperative not to be fatalistic and to have a go.

«

So let’s consider this. There are currently four trillion-dollar companies: Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft. Apple and Microsoft took more than 30 years to reach this level, Google and Amazon more than 20. There are zero trillion dollar companies in Europe; zero that are halfway there (SAP is the largest, worth $190bn; most people have no idea what it does). The UK will not have a trillion-dollar-value company in 20 years. If it blocks external acquisitions (such as DeepMind and ARM.. perhaps not Accenture?), it might have a tech sector with that value in that time.
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Are radioactive diamond batteries a cure for nuclear waste? • WIRED

Daniel Oberhaus:

»

In the summer of 2018, a hobby drone dropped a small package near the lip of Stromboli, a volcano off the coast of Sicily that has been erupting almost constantly for the past century. As one of the most active volcanoes on the planet, Stromboli is a source of fascination for geologists, but collecting data near the roiling vent is fraught with peril. So a team of researchers from the University of Bristol built a robot volcanologist and used a drone to ferry it to the top of the volcano, where it could passively monitor its every quake and quiver until it was inevitably destroyed by an eruption. The robot was a softball-sized sensor pod powered by microdoses of nuclear energy from a radioactive battery the size of a square of chocolate. The researchers called their creation a “dragon egg”.

Dragon eggs can help scientists study violent natural processes in unprecedented detail, but for Tom Scott, a materials scientist at Bristol, volcanoes were just the beginning. For the past few years, Scott and a small group of collaborators have been developing a souped-up version of the dragon egg’s nuclear battery that can last for thousands of years without ever being charged or replaced. Unlike the batteries in most modern electronics, which generate electricity from chemical reactions, the Bristol battery collects particles spit out by radioactive diamonds that can be made from reformed nuclear waste.

Earlier this month, Scott and his collaborator, a chemist at Bristol named Neil Fox, created a company called Arkenlight to commercialise their nuclear diamond battery.

«

Now this seems the sort of thing that would make far more sense to invest in – but is the government the right body to do the investing? We want governments to build roads, not cars, traintracks not trains.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Despite disappointing sales, Samsung is prepping another folding phone. Maybe on the diagonal this time? CC-licensed photo by Kārlis Dambrāns on Flickr.

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These students figured out their tests were graded by AI — and the easy way to cheat • The Verge

Monica Chin:

»

On Monday, Dana Simmons came downstairs to find her 12-year-old son, Lazare, in tears. He’d completed the first assignment for his seventh-grade history class on Edgenuity, an online platform for virtual learning. He’d received a 50 out of 100. That wasn’t on a practice test — it was his real grade.

“He was like, I’m gonna have to get a 100 on all the rest of this to make up for this,” said Simmons in a phone interview with The Verge. “He was totally dejected.”

At first, Simmons tried to console her son. “I was like well, you know, some teachers grade really harshly at the beginning,” said Simmons, who is a history professor herself. Then, Lazare clarified that he’d received his grade less than a second after submitting his answers. A teacher couldn’t have read his response in that time, Simmons knew — her son was being graded by an algorithm.

Simmons watched Lazare complete more assignments. She looked at the correct answers, which Edgenuity revealed at the end. She surmised that Edgenuity’s AI was scanning for specific keywords that it expected to see in students’ answers. And she decided to game it.

Now, for every short-answer question, Lazare writes two long sentences followed by a disjointed list of keywords — anything that seems relevant to the question. “The questions are things like… ‘What was the advantage of Constantinople’s location for the power of the Byzantine empire,’” Simmons says. “So you go through, okay, what are the possible keywords that are associated with this? Wealth, caravan, ship, India, China, Middle East, he just threw all of those words in.”

«

I feel we will be hearing more and more of these stories as schools (and universities) start to implement more systems that aren’t really “smart” (as in human smart), but those up against them are.
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Shelved: Pink Floyd’s Household Objects • Long Reads

Tom Maxwell:

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Listening to a renowned album as cohesive as The Dark Side of the Moon, you would never guess that the follow-up to that historic release was going to be made using everyday items. Household Objects, recorded during several desultory sessions over a two-year time frame, was constructed with rubber bands, wine glasses, spray cans, newspapers, brooms, and other such utilitarian gear. It was shelved.

When people talk about Household Objects — including the members of Pink Floyd themselves — it’s usually described as a wasteful and pointless distraction, a primary example of mid-70s rock star indulgence. This is not the case. Household Objects may not have turned into an album, but it was entirely consistent with the band’s previous use of found sound on The Dark Side of the Moon. What initially appears as a stylistic deviation from its powerhouse predecessor — or worse, full-blown self-sabotage — is, in fact, a return to form. Moreover, the mournful tone of one of its experimental tracks became the emotional center of Wish You Were Here, the highly successful follow-up to Dark Side. Most interesting of all, the work on Household Objects can be seen as the musicians’ affirmative attempt at reconnection to the “non-musical” world, to their past, and ultimately to each other.

«

Here’s “Wine Glasses”, which was one of the tracks – sort of – that was going to be part of Household Objects. If you have any familiarity with Wish You Were Here, you’ll recognise this immediately; you’ll almost be expecting the four-note guitar line to come in.

More than that, though, this is a thoughtful essay about how one rediscovers creativity, and how imposing limitations makes it flow.

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Huawei to launch phone with Kirin 9000 chips in limited numbers • Global Times

»

Huawei has a stockpile of about 10 million Kirin 9000 chips that will support shipments for about half a year, one telecom expert said, as the “deadline” for production of the Kirin 9000 is drawing near after the US government moved to block shipments of semiconductors to Huawei Technologies from global chipmakers. 

Richard Yu Chengdong, chief executive of Huawei’s consumer business group, disclosed recently that Huawei plans to launch its smartphone equipment with Kirin smartphone chips, but only in “limited numbers.” He also confirmed that production of the chip will stop after September 15 due to US sanctions.

This has left the market guessing about the soon-to-be launched Mate 40 series, which is expected to be Huawei’s last smartphone to carry Kirin chips. There have also been worries as to when Huawei will run out of Kirin 9000 chips and what solutions it will have.  

Huang Haifeng, a veteran high-tech observer, said that based on his knowledge, Huawei’s Kirin 9000 chip supplier, Taiwan-based TSMC, is working “day and night” to produce the chips for Huawei. The company earlier confirmed that it will stop shipping semiconductors to Huawei after mid-September to comply with the US sanctions.

“Huawei has about 10 million Kirin 9000 chips on hand, which means that about 10 million Mate40/Pro phones installed with the chip will be available, and I believe they will sell out very quickly,” Huang told the Global Times on Sunday. 

«

Now it’s really starting to bite. First it will be the smartphones, then it will be the network kit. Speaking of which…
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It will cost $1.8 billion to pull Huawei and ZTE out of US networks, FCC says • The Verge

Russell Brandom:

»

Removing Chinese equipment will cost small carriers as much as $1.8bn, according to a new report from the Federal Communications Commission. The report estimates that as much as $1.6bn of the cost would be eligible for federal reimbursement — but Congress has yet to appropriate the necessary funds.

Significant national security concerns have been raised about the use of Huawei and ZTE equipment in US networks — but many small carriers are still struggling with the cost of replacing it. In one instance, Eastern Oregon Telecom told The Verge that replacing the $500,000 of Huawei equipment was likely to cost as much as $1.5m — a cost too high for the small carrier to shoulder on its own. Today’s report makes clear that story is all too common among US providers.

The FCC report looks specifically at carriers who receive support from the Universal Service Fund, meant to subsidize coverage of underserved areas. It does not cover all carriers in the US using Huawei or ZTE equipment, and there may also be eligible carriers who have yet to report their equipment. As a result, the total cost of replacing Chinese equipment is likely even higher than the reported $1.8bn.

«

The reason so many of those carriers plumped for Huawei is because again and again it is the cheapest. So naturally it’s going to cost more to replace. And to the delight of Nokia and Ericsson, this is going to be spent with them.
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KryptoCibule malware has been stealing and mining cryptocurrency • Tripwire

Graham Cluley:

»

Security researchers at Slovak security firm ESET have discovered a new family of malware that they say has been using a variety of techniques to steal cryptocurrency from unsuspecting users since at least December 2018.

The malware, which has been named KryptoCibule, uses a variety of legitimate technology – including Tor and the Transmission torrent client – as part of its scheme to mine cryptocurrency, divert digital currency transactions into its creators’ own accounts, and plant a backdoor for hackers to remotely access infected systems.

KryptoCibule poses a three-pronged threat when it comes to cryptocurrency.

Firstly, it exploits the CPU and GPU of infected computers to mine for Monero and Ethereum. In an attempt to avoid detection by the legitimate user of the computer, KryptoCibule monitors the battery level of infected devices and will not do any mining if the battery is at less than 10% capacity.

If the battery level status is between 10% and 30%, however, Ethereum-mining via the GPU is suspended and only Monero-mining via the CPU takes place, albeit limited to one thread.

However, if the battery level is 30% or more and there has been no user activity for the last three minutes, “both the GPU and CPU miners are run without limits.”

«

It’s a bit like SETI, really, but with even less utility. At least if we’d found alien life maybe they could have lent us some money.
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Foldable phones have flopped, but Samsung hopes its new model will flip the script • WSJ

Elizabeth Koh

»

The foldable phone was supposed to upend the smartphone industry, but so far it has flopped.

Pitched last year as novel introductions to a staid industry over the past decade, folding phones promised portability with displays that opened up to the size of tablets yet when closed could still perform most functions of a smartphone.

But just as device makers were expecting sales to surge, the global coronavirus pandemic hit and sheared away early enthusiasm. Buyers stuck at home didn’t need a multifunctional gadget on-the-go, while lockdowns closed many retail shops where buyers could be wooed by the flashy phones up close. The economic shocks also have left fewer people craving a high-price device.

Globally, 1.74m foldable devices were shipped from the first launch last September through June 30, according to market tracker Canalys. That is a fraction of prepandemic forecasts and a rounding error in an industry that shipped 1.28bn smartphones during the 12 months ended that same date.

The latest entrant arrives Tuesday with Samsung Electronics Co.’s unveiling of the Galaxy Z Fold 2, the second iteration of its flagship foldable-screen model. It has a reinforced folding hinge and an even larger 7.6in main display. The price remains the same as its predecessor at $2,000.

«

Hang on, I think I just saw the reason why the foldable market isn’t making an impact on the wider business. To be honest, I still don’t see what the attraction would be.

But also:

»

Phone makers had expected initially modest sales, but even those forecasts have proven to be lofty. Samsung had originally aimed for 6 million foldable-device shipments in 2020; halfway through the year, they have hit one-tenth of that target.

The disappointment comes at a tough time for the industry. Overall smartphone sales slumped 20% in the first half of the year, according to research firm Strategy Analytics.

«

OK, other people don’t see the attraction either – especially not at that price.
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Amazon deletes 20,000 reviews after evidence of profits for posts • Financial Times

Dave Lee:

»

Amazon has deleted approximately 20,000 product reviews, written by seven of its top 10 UK reviewers, following a Financial Times investigation into suspicious activity.

The FT found evidence the users were profiting from posting thousands of five-star ratings.

Those who had their reviews deleted included Justin Fryer, the number one-ranked reviewer on Amazon.co.uk, who in August alone reviewed £15,000 worth of products, from smartphones to electric scooters to gym equipment, giving his five-star approval on average once every four hours.

Overwhelmingly, those products were from little-known Chinese brands, who often offer to send reviewers products for free in return for positive posts. Mr Fryer then appears to have sold many of the goods on eBay, making nearly £20,000 since June.

When contacted by the FT, Mr Fryer denied posting paid-for reviews — before deleting his review history from his Amazon profile page. Mr Fryer said the eBay listings, which described products as “unused” and “unopened”, were for duplicates.

«

What I particularly like about this story is that Dave Lee is based in San Francisco, from which he carried out his investigation into let’s-not-call-it-dodgy reviews by people apparently in Britain.

But also: this is crap, Amazon. All these years on and you still have no handle on your ratings system.
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Privately built border wall will fail, engineering report says • The Texas Tribune

Jeremy Schwartz and Perla Trevizo, The Texas Tribune and ProPublica:

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Company president Tommy Fisher, a frequent guest on Fox News, had called the [three-mile] Rio Grande fence [his company built] the “Lamborghini” of border walls and bragged that his company’s methods could help Trump reach his Election Day goal of about 500 new miles of barriers along the southern border.

Instead, one engineer who reviewed the two reports on behalf of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune likened Fisher’s fence to a used Toyota Yaris.

“It seems like they are cutting corners everywhere,” said Alex Mayer, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso. “It’s not a Lamborghini, it’s a $500 used car.”

Since Fisher’s companies embarked on construction of the Rio Grande fence, the Trump administration has awarded about $2bn in federal contracts to the firms to build segments of the border wall in other locations.

Fisher agreed to the inspection as part of ongoing lawsuits against Fisher Sand and Gravel filed last year by the National Butterfly Center and the International Boundary and Water Commission. They unsuccessfully sought to convince a federal judge to stop the construction of the project until the potential impacts of the wall on the Rio Grande could be determined.

Mark Tompkins, an environmental engineer hired by the wildlife refuge, noted in his report that widespread erosion and scouring occurred after heavy rain events such as Hurricane Hanna in July, but that the fence has yet to experience a flood of the Rio Grande.

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Certain to fail; scammed. Trump said he was going to build a wall and that Mexico would pay for it. Hasn’t happened either.
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SoftBank unmasked as ‘Nasdaq whale’ that stoked tech rally • Financial Times

Kana Inagaki, Katie Martin, Robert Smith and Robin Wigglesworth :

»

The surge in purchases of call options — derivatives that give the user the right to buy a stock at a pre-agreed price — has been the talk of Wall Street, as the sheer size of the trades appears to have exacerbated a “melt-up” in many big technology stocks over the past few months. In August alone, Tesla’s share price shot up 74%, while Apple gained 21%, Google’s parent Alphabet rose 10% and Amazon 9%.

One person familiar with SoftBank’s trades said it was “gobbling up” options on a scale that was even making some people within the organisation nervous. “People are caught with their pants down, massively short. This can continue. The whale is still hungry.”

SoftBank declined to comment.

The Nasdaq was at one point on Friday down 10% from its peak — the common definition of a correction — yet the options boom means that the US stock market remains vulnerable to further bursts of volatility, according to Charlie McElligott, a strategist at Nomura. “The street is still very much in a dangerous space, and that flow is still out there,” he wrote in a note on Friday.

…The size and aggressiveness of the mysterious call buyer, coupled with the summer trading lull, has been a big factor in the buoyant performance of many big tech names as well as the broader US stock market, according to Mr McElligott. This week, he warned that dynamics around options meant the heavy purchases forced banks on the other side of the trades to hedge themselves by buying stocks, in a “classic ‘tail wags the dog’ feedback loop”.

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Great to know that money is being used so productively to… buy notional things.

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Facebook’s political ad ban also threatens ability to spread accurate information on how to vote • ProPublica

Jeremy Merrill:

»

For elections administrators, the last few days before an election can be the most stressful and when communication is needed most. They remind voters to mail back their absentee ballots and when Election Day voting begins and ends. Many of these ads can still be run under Facebook’s new rules, as long as they’re set up more than a week before the election.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, local election offices are scrambling to find new ways for eligible voters to cast their ballots. Voting methods and locations will be changing fast, even within the seven-day window included in Facebook’s ban.

A few days before Connecticut’s primary election on Aug. 11, Hurricane Isaias struck the state, knocking out power to more than a million people. That led Connecticut’s governor to make a subtle, but crucial, change to the state’s election rules on the day before the election. He instructed elections officials to count mail-in ballots that had been postmarked by election day, instead of only those that had arrived by election day.

With power still out to tens of thousands of people and businesses, “it was really important that we told people that they only needed to postmark their ballots by election day, because the little bit of news they were getting was that the Postal Service was down,” Rosenberg said. The Postal Service’s sorting hub in Hartford had lost power for a time after the storm.

“The only way we can notify people of something changing that late in the process is via Facebook and Instagram,” he said

«

Should we expect Facebook to make a tweak to its “ban” to allow for this?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Huawei 5G kit is being stripped out of European networks just as new iPhones can handle it. CC-licensed photo by Vodafone Enterprise Plenum e.V. 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. Unenhanced. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Justice Dept. plans to file antitrust charges against Google in coming weeks • The New York Times

Katie Benner and Cecilia Kang:

»

The Google case could also give Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr an election-season achievement on an issue that both Democrats and Republicans see as a major problem: the influence of the biggest tech companies over consumers and the possibility that their business practices have stifled new competitors and hobbled legacy industries like telecom and media.

A coalition of 50 states and territories support antitrust action against Google, a reflection of the broad bipartisan support that a Justice Department case might have. But state attorneys general conducting their own investigations into the company are split on how to move forward, with Democrats perceived by Republicans as slow-walking the work so that cases can be brought under a potential Biden administration, and Democrats accusing Republicans of rushing it out under Mr. Trump. That disagreement could limit the number of states that join a Justice Department lawsuit and imperil the bipartisan nature of the investigation.

Some lawyers in the department worry that Mr. Barr’s determination to bring a complaint this month could weaken their case and ultimately strengthen Google’s hand, according to interviews with 15 lawyers who worked on the case or were briefed on the department’s strategy. They asked not to be named for fear of retribution.

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This really is an amazingly clueless story. First: the Google case, if filed, won’t be an “election-season achievement”. It will take years to come to court. Also, maybe ask yourself: which does the average American like more, Google or the government? I’ll guess at Google. So what’s the average American’s response going to be when it hears that the government is going after Google?

By contrast, the 1998 DoJ antitrust case against Microsoft was a popular president (Bill Clinton) against a company which made your computer crash and lose your work. None of that is in the story.

Third, and also not in the story: what the basis of the antitrust complaint would be. They spoke to all those lawyers yet never asked “and how should we explain this to the average reader?”

Still, at least you know that there might soon be an antitrust suit against Google. Or, you know, not.
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Huawei’s struggles in European telecoms • Counterpoint Research

Jan Stryjak:

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Across the rest of Europe, a growing list of carriers are also [like the UK] considering their options, and the removal of Huawei from their core networks is already underway. But doing so is not easy…or cheap. Vodafone for example is spending €200m ($224m) to extract Huawei from the core of its entire European operation. It will also take time: some carriers are much more reliant on Huawei than others (Sunrise Switzerland, for example, has a 100% Huawei 5G network) and issues around vendor incompatibility need to be carefully considered.

Huawei’s position in RAN is also at risk. European carriers may well follow the UK’s decision to remove Huawei from their RAN too, and there is growing momentum behind Open RAN technologies which aim to increase vendor competition: Telefónica has announced it will launch 4G and 5G Open RAN trials across its European operations this year, while Vodafone plans to open its entire European footprint up to tender in order to expand its supplier options and explore Open RAN technology. The Huawei saga will act as a catalyst to accelerate open RAN technology development, and adoption and may be further boosted by the introduction of statutory open RAN mandates by European governments.

The direction of travel, therefore, is clear: Huawei’s expulsion from all of Europe’s core networks seems to be a question of when, not if, and its European RAN business may be on the way out too. This will likely result in Europe playing catch-up in its 5G race with China and the US.

…[And] why would European carriers want to stock Huawei devices? In the past, Huawei’s deep pockets ensured European carrier portfolios were chock full of Huawei smartphones, the most popular being the P30 which still accounts for a significant proportion of Huawei’s sales. However, this device is now over a year old, and with inventory running low, a lack of a worthy successor in the pipeline and consumer sentiment waning, Huawei is being squeezed out.

«

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Online privacy should be modeled on real-world privacy • Daring Fireball

John Gruber:

»

Imagine if you were out shopping, went into a drug store, examined a few bottles of sunscreen, but left the store without purchasing anything. And then immediately a stranger approached you with an offer for sunscreen. Such an encounter would trigger a fight or flight reaction — the needle on your innate creepometer would shoot right into the red. (Not to mention that if real-world tracking were like online tracking, you’d get the same creepy offer to buy sunscreen even if you just bought some. Tracking-based offers are both creepy, and, at times, annoyingly stupid.)

Or imagine if you found out that public billboards were taking photos of people who glance at them, logging those photos to a database, and using facial recognition to match them with photos taken at point-of-sale terminals in retail stores. That way, if, say, you were photographed looking at an ad for a soft drink, and later — hours, days, weeks — purchased that same soft drink, the billboard advertisement you glanced at hours, days, or weeks before could get “credit” for your purchase.

We wouldn’t tolerate it. But that’s basically how online ad tracking works.

«

Gruber is writing about the Apple ad below, which seems to be nudging us to be thinking about iPhones, as there’s a launch coming up some time in the next few weeks.

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5G iPhones: Kuo says we can expect fewer super-fast 5G ones • 9to5Mac

Ben Lovejoy:

»

Offering mmWave 5G is expensive, one recent report suggesting it will add as much as $50 per iPhone to Apple’s costs. That being the case, the expectation is that not all iPhone 12 models will support the faster 5G standard.

There have been conflicting reports about what that might mean. Some believe mmWave 5G will be limited to the flagship models (the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max, if Apple uses iPhone 11 nomenclature). Others think all models will get it, but only in certain countries.

Noted Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has a new report today suggesting that Apple supplier Xuande will see lower growth thanks to reduced mmWave 5G orders from the iPhone maker.

»

We estimate that the shipments of millimeter wave iPhones in 2020 and 2021 will be about 4-6 million and 25-5 million, respectively. , Which is lower than the market consensus of 10-20 million and 40-50 million units. Therefore, Xuande’s contribution from millimeter-wave iPhone high single-piece components will be lower than expected.

«

The report still sheds no direct light on whether mmWave 5G will be limited by model or by country, but one sentence in it may give a clue.

»

We believe that due to the impact of COVID-19, the global 5G millimeter wave base stations are lower than expected.

«

«

The 5G question actually becomes something to think about this year. Unlike years past when we had the transition to 4G, the smartphone market is saturated, so people are hanging on to their phones for two or even three years. Two years from now you’d expect 5G will be well developed. So might it be worth paying more now to get that functionality as your phone reaches its middle or late age?
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Facebook, under pressure in India, bans politician for hate speech • WSJ

Newley Purnell and Rajesh Roy:

»

Facebook banned a member of India’s ruling party for violating its policies against hate speech, amid a growing political storm over its handling of extremist content on its platform.

The removal of the politician, T. Raja Singh, is an about-face for the company and one that will be politically tricky in India, its biggest market by number of users.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Facebook’s head of public policy in the country, Ankhi Das, had opposed banning Mr. Singh under Facebook’s “dangerous individual” prohibitions. In communications to Facebook staffers, she said punishing violations by politicians from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party could hurt the company’s business interests in the country.

At the same time, Facebook is under pressure around the world to crack down on alleged hate speech.

Lawmakers in India’s opposition Congress party earlier called for hearings to examine whether Facebook has bent its own rules to favor Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

In Facebook posts and public appearances, Mr. Singh, a member of Mr. Modi’s BJP, has said Rohingya Muslim immigrants should be shot, called Muslims traitors and threatened to destroy mosques. He had hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook and its Instagram service.

«

This has only happened because the WSJ has exposed it and pressed on it. Facebook obviously didn’t do anything itself, because this is longstanding (and quite possibly enabled by the high-ranking Facebook India executive). More evidence that Facebook’s self-regulation is inadequate.
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A tale of two stores • Digital First

Youngjin Yoo:

»

I went to Office Max to pick up chairs that I ordered earlier. The store was almost empty. I was happy to see my chairs stacked up in the cash register area. I thought it would a quick stop at the cash register to pay for the chairs and leave. Perhaps 5 minutes total. 

There were two employees at the cash register. One was dealing with a customer who tried to get a refund. The other was trying to find a product that a customer wants to buy (if you buy a big item there, you bring a card from the floor to the cash register and they will bring to you). I was the first one behind these two customers. Lucky me, I thought! Well, not quite.

«

Quite an old story (from November 2017!) but more relevant than ever. (Via John Naughton’s Memex.)
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Official campaign website statement by Vice President Biden on the poisoning of Alexey Navalny • Official Biden website

»

This outrageous and brazen attempt on Mr. Navalny’s life is just the latest incident in a long history of murder and poisoning of dissidents, investigative journalists, anti-corruption activists, and opposition leaders under the Putin regime. It is the mark of a Russian regime that is so paranoid that it is unwilling to tolerate any criticism or dissent.

The Kremlin no doubt thinks that it can act with impunity. Donald Trump has refused to confront Putin, calling him a “terrific person.” He has said nothing about intelligence reports that Putin placed bounties on the heads of American soldiers in Afghanistan. He has yet to condemn the attack on Mr. Navalny. His silence is complicity. Americans are less safe with Donald Trump in the White House.

As president, I will do what Donald Trump refuses to do: work with our allies and partners to hold the Putin regime accountable for its crimes.

«

I always find it weird how once you’ve been vice-president you get to call yourself that all the time. It’s like being a peer in the UK, except they don’t notionally run the country.

The US government’s response was to have a National Security flack call it “completely reprehensible” on Twitter. Too hard for Trump to criticise Putin? Is he scared, or something?
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Facebook wants its AR glasses to give wearers superhearing • The Verge

Adi Robertson:

»

Facebook has pursued high-quality virtual sound for years, largely through its Oculus virtual reality headsets. FRL Research’s latest work focuses on AR applications. To give one example, “imagine being able to hold a conversation in a crowded restaurant or bar without having to raise your voice to be heard or straining to understand what others are saying,” the company explains.

AR glasses could do this by picking up audio with microphones, using contextual clues to gauge which sounds are important, and feeding those sounds through a noise-canceling earpiece. Conversely, if you’re on a phone or video call, improved spatial sound could project participants’ voices or other audio to specific parts of the room, increasing the sense that you’re really with somebody else — or “audio presence,” in FRL Research’s terms.

As Facebook acknowledges, the lab’s “perceptual superpowers” pitch is very similar to the function of existing hearing aids, which also amplify sound and reduce background noise. (One experimental system even uses brain implants to focus on specific voices.)

«

Being able to focus your listening on someone in a noisy environment is an amazing capability we have in normal hearing, but it gets harder with age. Do you need glasses to enhance that? Couldn’t you just have earphones that focussed in the sound ahead of you?
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Large antibody study offers hope for virus vaccine efforts • Associated Press

Marilynn Marchione:

»

Antibodies that people make to fight the new coronavirus last for at least four months after diagnosis and do not fade quickly as some earlier reports suggested, scientists have found.

Tuesday’s report, from tests on more than 30,000 people in Iceland, is the most extensive work yet on the immune system’s response to the virus over time, and is good news for efforts to develop vaccines.

If a vaccine can spur production of long-lasting antibodies as natural infection seems to do, it gives hope that “immunity to this unpredictable and highly contagious virus may not be fleeting,” scientists from Harvard University and the U.S. National Institutes of Health wrote in a commentary published with the study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

…The study also found:

— Testing through the bits-of-virus method that’s commonly done in community settings missed nearly half of people who were found to have had the virus by blood antibody testing. That means the blood tests are far more reliable and better for tracking spread of the disease in a region and for guiding decisions and returning to work or school, researchers say.

— Nearly a third of infections were in people who reported no symptoms.

— Nearly 1% of Iceland’s population was infected in this first wave of the pandemic, meaning the other 99% are still vulnerable to the virus.

— The infection fatality rate was 0.3%. That’s about three times the fatality rate of seasonal flu and in keeping with some other more recent estimates, said Dr. Derek Angus, critical care chief at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

«

Infection fatality rate v case fatality rate is quite different. CFR is higher – given that half the infections were missed by testing, you’d have a CFR at least twice as high.
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Facebook complains, Apple responds: iOS 14’s big privacy change gets postponed • Ars Technica

Samuel Axon:

»

The feature, announced at Apple’s annual developer conference in June, would require app developers to notify a user of an app’s intent to track the user’s IDFA (ID for Advertisers). IDFA is used to track the user’s behavior across multiple apps and deliver targeted ads based on that behavior. The change would also require the user to opt in to that tracking.

Apple now says that, while developers will be able to implement this notification and request for permission, doing so will no longer be mandatory when iOS 14 launches sometime in the next couple of months. However, Apple was careful to clarify that it still intends to establish the requirement in the future, and that this is only a delay “to give developers time to make necessary changes.”

Here’s Apple’s statement on the matter, which was published to its developer portal today:

»

In addition, on iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and tvOS 14, apps will be required to receive user permission to track users across apps or websites owned by other companies, or to access the device’s advertising identifier. We are committed to ensuring users can choose whether or not they allow an app to track them. To give developers time to make necessary changes, apps will be required to obtain permission to track users starting early next year. More information, including an update to the App Store Review Guidelines, will follow this fall.

«

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The FBI finds these unsettling. CC-licensed photo by Steve Garfield on Flickr.

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“F**k the algorithm?”: what the world can learn from the UK’s A-level grading fiasco • Impact of Social Sciences

Daan Kolman:

»

Last month, hundreds of students in UK gathered in front of the Department for Education and chanted “f**k the algorithm”. Within days, their protests prompted officials to reverse course and throw out test scores that an algorithm had generated for students who never sat their exams due to the pandemic.

This incident has shone the media spotlight on the question of AI bias. However, previous cases of AI bias have already led to well-intentioned efforts by data scientists, statisticians, and machine learning experts to look beyond the technical and also consider the fairness, accountability, confidentiality, and transparency of their algorithms.

What the A-level grading fiasco demonstrates is that this work may be misdirected. There is a key lesson to be learned from this algorithmic grading fiasco. A lesson that will only become more relevant as governments and organizations increasingly use automated systems to inform or make decisions: There can be no algorithmic accountability without a critical audience. By this, I mean that, unless it draws the attention of people who critically engage with it, technical and non-technical quality assurance of algorithms is a token gesture and will fail to have the desired effect.

«

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It’s (still) time to end ‘Trending’ on Twitter • The Verge

Casey Newton:

»

During the Epstein mania, for example, #ClintonBodyCount trended, and President Trump — who is known to trawl Twitter trends for material — retweeted an account that sought to link Epstein’s death to the former president.

To me, the incident offered reasons to bring an end to trending topics altogether. One, the Twitter was seemingly powerless to stop bad actors from gaming the algorithm and inserting fringe ideas into mainstream discussion. And two, the feature had been made largely redundant by Moments, a 5-year-old product that uses human curators to find items of interest on Twitter each day and organize meaningful discussions around them.

In conversations with Twitter around that time, executives told me that they knew their trends had problems, but ensured me that fixes were coming. On Tuesday — more than a year after the disinformation World Cup — the first such fix arrived. The company announced it in a blog post:

»

Sometimes the right Tweet can help make sense of a trend. Starting today, some trends will have a representative Tweet pinned to them to give you more insight about a trend right away.

«

…now when something trends, you’ll see a tweet that explains why, plus maybe a short explanation from Twitter. If nothing else, this should resolve what might be the most common complaint about trends for the past decade or so: whenever a celebrity’s name is trending, everyone assumes they are dead, and has to frantically search through tweets to see whether that is in fact the case.

…Reading through the list of conspiracy topics that have surfaced in Twitter trends over the past year, it’s hard to imagine how the changes announced on Tuesday will much improve the product. Will trends be worthy when a human curator picks a “representative tweet” for, uh, #JewishPrivilege? What about #SaveTheChildren?

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Google wants to remix news radio just for you • WIRED

Boone Ashworth:

»

Most of us know how delightful it is to hear a computer-generated song playlist that feels entirely personal. Now, Google wants to create a similar type of bespoke audio experience—not with music, but with news.

The company is adding some new features to its existing news aggregation service called Your News Update, which gathers news clips from different outlets and plays them in one continuous audio feed. Think of it like a Feedly or Flipboard-type service for spoken stories from your preferred news publications.

Google has updated the service to create a more fluid listening experience, so that sitting through an entire session doesn’t feel like you’re just working your way through a hodgepodge of disparate stories. Each personalized playlist is structured to mimic a news program typical of what you’d hear on public radio: short clips about the big headlines up front that gradually shift into longer, more detailed stories. The goal is to create a seamless 90-minute broadcast—a mix of radio, podcast snippets, and text-to-speech article translations—tailored to an audience of one.

«

Or you could listen to the news, which would give you information about the whole world and take you out of your filter bubble? This is one of those ideas that must sound brilliant in the product meeting, but which doesn’t actually have good outcomes if adopted widely.
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A supercomputer’s Covid-19 analysis yields a new way to understand the virus • Elemental

Thomas Smith:

»

once Covid-19 has established itself in the body, things start to get really interesting. According to Jacobson’s group, the data Summit analyzed shows that Covid-19 isn’t content to simply infect cells that already express lots of ACE2 receptors.

Instead, it actively hijacks the body’s own systems, tricking it into upregulating ACE2 receptors in places where they’re usually expressed at low or medium levels, including the lungs.
In this sense, Covid-19 is like a burglar who slips in your unlocked second-floor window and starts to ransack your house. Once inside, though, they don’t just take your stuff — they also throw open all your doors and windows so their accomplices can rush in and help pillage more efficiently.

The renin–angiotensin system (RAS) controls many aspects of the circulatory system, including the body’s levels of a chemical called bradykinin, which normally helps to regulate blood pressure. According to the team’s analysis, when the virus tweaks the RAS, it causes the body’s mechanisms for regulating bradykinin to go haywire. Bradykinin receptors are resensitized, and the body also stops effectively breaking down bradykinin. (ACE normally degrades bradykinin, but when the virus downregulates it, it can’t do this as effectively.)

The end result, the researchers say, is to release a bradykinin storm — a massive, runaway buildup of bradykinin in the body. According to the bradykinin hypothesis, it’s this storm that is ultimately responsible for many of Covid-19’s deadly effects.

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PUBG Mobile, 117 other Chinese apps now banned in India • Android Authority

Hadlee Simons:

»

The Indian government has banned 118 more Chinese mobile apps in the country, including mega-popular action title PUBG Mobile.

In a press release explaining the move, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology said they chose to ban the apps as they “are engaged in activities which is prejudicial (sic) to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order.”

More specifically, the ministry claims that it received many complaints about these mobile apps “stealing and surreptitiously” sending user data to servers outside of India.

Aside from PUBG Mobile, some of the other notable names in this latest list of banned apps includes PUBG Mobile Lite, AFK Arena, AliPay, Baidu, several WeChat-branded apps, APUS Launcher, and Rules of Survival.

«

Not much noticed on this side of the world, but the cold war going on between India and China is pretty intense.
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how reels undercuts facebook’s standoff with australia • The World Is Yours*

Alex Hern on the impasse in Australia, under which Facebook says it will stop including news links because of a new payment requirement:

»

One of the problems with technology regulation is that “that would be bad”, “that would be bad for tech” and “that would be bad for tech companies” are often treated as interchangeable pieces of advice. 

One solution is to build up your technical expertise so that you can distinguish between those different types of advice, learning from the experts where they are helpful while dismissing their input when it is self-serving.

Another solution – the Australian federal solution – is to ignore the experts entirely and throw yourself over the waterfall in a barrel. Maybe you’ll be fine! Maybe you won’t be! Either way, everyone watching will have a grand old time, and we’ll probably learn something in the process.

… one thing I have liked about the Australian approach, as I so frequently do, is the fact that completely ignoring the experts does at least highlight some of the problems with the expert advice.

…Facebook’s point is that if the Australian news companies want to charge it per (say) headline on Facebook, while also retaining the ability to post their own headlines on Facebook… the company is signing a blank cheque. I can see why it would be against that!

Except.

Grab your phone, open Instagram, click add to Your Story, and flick over to Reels. You’ll see a little musical note. Click that, and you can search for almost any song you like, and add it to your Reel.

It’s a feature lifted wholesale from TikTok, of course, but that’s not important here; what is important is that it’s a feature for which Facebook has, almost certainly, negotiated a small fee per stream to be paid back to the labels.

In other words, Facebook has signed a blank cheque in order to allow excerpts of music be posted on Instagram

«

Throw yourself over the waterfall in a barrel. That’s 2020 in a nutshell. Or a barrel.
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Google’s advertisers will take the hit from UK digital service tax • The Guardian

Mark Sweney:

»

Google has told its tens of thousands of clients that from November it will charge an additional fee for ads served on Google and YouTube. The move will increase advertisers’ costs in line with the amount the tech giant is set to pay in new digital services taxes as they come into force: 2% in the UK, and 5% in Austria and Turkey.

Earlier this month, Amazon said that it would be passing on the 2% tax to sellers on its platform. With Google doing the same, Facebook, which makes an estimated £4.2bn in ad revenue in the UK, is expected to follow suit.

“Digital service taxes increase the cost of digital advertising,” said a Google spokeswoman. “Typically, these kinds of cost increases are borne by customers and like other companies affected by this tax, we will be adding a fee to our invoices, from November. We will continue to pay all the taxes due in the UK, and to encourage governments globally to focus on international tax reform rather than implementing new, unilateral levies.”

Google UK reported £1.6bn in revenues last year, up from £1.2bn, but paid just £44m in UK corporation tax as it does not report big profits.

However, this does not reflect how much it makes in total advertising revenues as they are reported in other jurisdictions. The research firm eMarketer estimates that in reality Google made about £5.7bn in ad revenue in the the UK last year, accounting for 39% of that total digital ad market, and will make over £6bn this year. The 2% tax equates to about £122m on those revenues.

«

Apple following suit by increasing the cost of its developer accounts by 2% in the UK (before it puts on the 20% VAT). Not sure that’s how taxes are meant to play out.
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Doorbell cameras like Ring give early warning of police searches, FBI warned • The Intercept

Sam Biddle:

»

The downside for police, who have rushed to embrace Ring usage nationwide as the Amazon subsidiary aggressively marketed itself to and sealed partnerships with local departments, is that networked cameras record cops just as easily as the rest of us. Ring’s cameras are so popular in part because of how the company markets their ability to detect motion at your doorstep, providing convenient phone alerts of “suspicious activity,” however you might define it, even when you’re out of the house.

But sometimes the police are the unannounced, unwanted visitor: “Subjects likely use IoT devices to hinder LE [law enforcement] investigations and possibly monitor LE activity,” the bulletin states. “If used during the execution of a search, potential subjects could learn of LE’s presence nearby, and LE personnel could have their images captured, thereby presenting a risk to their present and future safety.”

The document describes a 2017 incident in which FBI agents approached a New Orleans home to serve a search warrant and were caught on video. “Through the Wi-Fi doorbell system, the subject of the warrant remotely viewed the activity at his residence from another location and contacted his neighbor and landlord regarding the FBI’s presence there,” it states.

«

Sauce for the goose turns out to serve gander as well.
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Intel announces its new 11th Gen Tiger Lake CPUs, available on laptops this fall • The Verge

Chaim Gartenberg:

»

Intel has officially announced its first 11th Gen Tiger Lake processors for laptops, which will feature the company’s new integrated Xe graphics, Thunderbolt 4 support, Wi-Fi 6, and a big leap in performance and battery life over the previous Ice Lake chips. The company claims that the new 11th Gen lineup offers the “best processor for thin-&-light” laptops.

Intel is launching nine new 11th Gen designs for both its U-series (which Intel is now referring to as UP3) and Y-series class chips (aka UP4), led by the Core i7-1185G7, which offer base speeds of 3.0GHz, a maximum single core turbo boost of up to 4.8GHz, and a maximum all-core boost of up to 4.3GHz. It also features the most powerful version of Intel’s Iris Xe integrated graphics, with 96 CUs and a maximum graphics speed of 1.35GHz.

…Intel isn’t being too specific on what those increases will be, but it promises that the new chips will offer a 20% faster speeds for day-to-day “office productivity” tasks, along with a similar 20% increase in “system-level power,” which is says results in more than an extra hour of battery life for things like video streaming.

…Also new is support for 8K HDR displays, along with the option to use up to four 4K HDR displays at once. There’s also improvements to the built-in AI engine, which Intel says will offer specific improvements for video calls (like background blurring) — tasks which ARM-based computers like the Surface Pro X have previously excelled at.

«

Gauntlet thrown down to Apple. It’s a bold strategy, Cotton, let’s see if it pays off for ’em.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Liu Caixin’s Three-Body Problem is being adapted into a TV series for Netflix. Before the end of the universe. CC-licensed photo by Philip Pace 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.

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Amazon drivers are hanging smartphones in trees to get more work • Bloomberg

Spencer Soper:

»

A strange phenomenon has emerged near Amazon.com Inc. delivery stations and Whole Foods stores in the Chicago suburbs: smartphones dangling from trees. Contract delivery drivers are putting them there to get a jump on rivals seeking orders, according to people familiar with the matter.

Someone places several devices in a tree located close to the station where deliveries originate. Drivers in on the plot then sync their own phones with the ones in the tree and wait nearby for an order pickup. The reason for the odd placement, according to experts and people with direct knowledge of Amazon’s operations, is to take advantage of the handsets’ proximity to the station, combined with software that constantly monitors Amazon’s dispatch network, to get a split-second jump on competing drivers.

That drivers resort to such extreme methods is emblematic of the ferocious competition for work in a pandemic-ravaged U.S. economy suffering from double-digit unemployment. Much the way milliseconds can mean millions to hedge funds using robotraders, a smartphone perched in a tree can be the key to getting a $15 delivery route before someone else.

«

The gig economy was presented as a way to mobilise assets that weren’t being used. Instead it’s fast becoming a way of squeezing every asset up to and beyond its breaking point.

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GoT’s Benioff & Weiss and Netflix team for sci-fi epic Three-Body Problem • Polygon

Matt Patches:

»

After striking up a development deal with the streamer last August, reportedly to the tune of $200m, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss departed HBO and ditched an assignment to write their own Star Wars trilogy. On Tuesday, Netflix VP of Original Series, Peter Friedlander unveiled the first fruits of the deal: a new live-action series inspired by Chinese author Liu Cixin’s acclaimed science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem.

“Liu Cixin’s trilogy is the most ambitious science-fiction series we’ve read, taking readers on a journey from the 1960s until the end of time, from life on our pale blue dot to the distant fringes of the universe,” Benioff and Weiss said in a news release for the announcement. “We look forward to spending the next years of our lives bringing this to life for audiences around the world.”

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The Three-Body Problem is an amazing trilogy. It would make a terrific, say, 64-hour series. You’d just about get the nuance in there, as it spans the time from the Cultural Revolution to the heat death of the universe.
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Facebook removes Russian disinformation network • The Washington Post

Elizabeth Dwoskin and Craig Timberg:

»

Facebook removed a network of fake accounts and pages created by Russian operatives who had recruited US journalists to write articles critical of Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his running mate Sen. Kamala Harris, an apparent bid to undermine their support among liberal voters.

Facebook said it caught the network of 13 fake accounts and two pages early, before it had a chance to build a large audience — an action that the company said was evidence of its growing effectiveness at targeting foreign disinformation operations ahead of the 2020 election. The takedown emerged as a result of a tip from the FBI and was one of a dozen operations tied to the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) or individuals affiliated with it that Facebook has disrupted since the last presidential election, when IRA-backed pages amassed millions of views on the platform. The pages had about 14,000 followers.

…One of the journalists who wrote columns for Peace Data, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his career, said that an editor reached out to him through a direct message on Twitter in July offering $200 per article.

He pursued the opportunity in part because he had lost his job in the pandemic. He wrote articles about the conspiracy movement QAnon, covid, and on US militarism driving climate change.

«

Used AI-faked photos, the whole nine yards. Small but still determined.
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Republicans are flooding the internet with deceptive videos and Big Tech isn’t keeping up • CNN

Donie O’Sullivan and Daniel Dale:

»

A series of deceptively edited and misleading videos shared by prominent Republicans have run up millions of views across Facebook and Twitter in just the past few days. And while both companies have pledged to combat misinformation, their responses to these videos followed a familiar pattern: often they act too late, do too little, or don’t do anything at all.

Between Sunday and Monday, high-profile Republicans, including President Donald Trump, shared at least four misleading videos online.

One that circulated widely was a false video about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden posted to the Twitter account of House Minority Whip Steve Scalise. After an outcry, including from a person in the video who had words put in his mouth in order to distort what Biden was saying, Twitter took the action it takes in such instances, labelling the video as “manipulated media.”

The manipulated media label is just that, however – a label appearing below the video when people look at the specific tweet to which it has been applied. It’s small and potentially missed by users, and though it may potentially make some users pause before sharing a given video, it does not actually stop them if they decide to go ahead anyway.

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The latter point is always what amazes me. If the platform has decided that something is misleading and a problem, then why allow it to keep spreading around your platform? It’s bizarre.
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Stolen Fortnite accounts earn hackers millions per year • Threatpost

Lindsey O’Donnell:

»

Hackers are scoring more than a million dollars annually selling compromised accounts for the popular Fortnite video game in underground forums.

With Fortnite’s immense popularity skyrocketing over the past few years – it currently has more than 350 million global players – the game is a lucrative target for cybercriminals. After tallying the auction sales for several high-end and low-end Fortnite account sellers over a three month period, researchers found that on the high end, sellers averaged $25,000 per week in account sales — roughly $1.2m per year.

“The market for stolen account sales is much larger than just the gaming industry…However, from our research, the black market for the buying and selling of stolen Fortnite accounts is among the most expansive, and also the most lucrative,” said researchers with Night Lion Security in a report last week.

The value of a hacked Fortnite account is centralized around a character’s in-game “skin” (essentially a digital costume), researchers said.

«

Yeah, well figured out, researchers. I guess it’s not really in Epic’s interests to enforce two-factor authentication or anything, because the people who get hacked will just… create a new account and spend the money again. Win-win for Epic.
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Mask wearers are “dramatically less likely” to get a severe case of Covid-19 • The Conversation

Monica Gandhi:

»

I am an infectious disease doctor and a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. As governments and workplaces began to recommend or mandate mask-wearing, my colleagues and I noticed an interesting trend. In places where most people wore masks, those who did get infected seemed dramatically less likely to get severely ill compared to places with less mask-wearing.

It seems people get less sick if they wear a mask.

When you wear a mask – even a cloth mask – you typically are exposed to a lower dose of the coronavirus than if you didn’t. Both recent experiments in animal models using coronavirus and nearly a hundred years of viral research show that lower viral doses usually means less severe disease.

No mask is perfect, and wearing one might not prevent you from getting infected. But it might be the difference between a case of Covid-19 that sends you to the hospital and a case so mild you don’t even realize you’re infected.

«

Feels like common sense; illness is all about the viral load, after all. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Facebook threatens to block Australians from sharing news in battle over landmark media law • The Guardian

Amanda Meade:

»

Tuesday’s statement [by Facebook] marked the company’s first comment since Google also took an aggressive approach to the looming legislation, although the search giant has stopped short of saying it would block search functions in Australia.

The director of the the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology, Peter Lewis, said Facebook is prepared to remove trusted journalism from its site but will allow disinformation and conspiracy theories to flourish.

“As a big advertising company, Facebook would do well to realise its success is only as strong as its network of users,” Lewis said. “Bullying their elected representatives seems a strange way to build long-term trust.

The announcement blindsided Australian media following a long silence from Facebook in Australia. Facebook chose to brief American journalists ahead of the release of the news about the ban, while ignoring Australian media. Sources said the targeting of the US media indicated Facebook’s main concern was that the mandatory code set an “international precedent”.

…[Facebook Australia manager Will] Easton denied the ACCC’s claim that the digital giants make money from news, saying “the reverse is true” in the case of Facebook.

He said in the first five months of 2020 Facebook sent two billion clicks from Facebook’s News Feed back to Australian news websites “at no charge”, traffic that was worth an estimated $200m to Australian publishers.

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Trump ban on Chinese drone parts risks worsening wildfires • Financial Times

Kiran Stacey:

»

The US interior department’s decision not to buy more drones with Chinese parts has made it more difficult to fight wildfires, according to an internal departmental memo, which lays bare one cost of the Trump administration’s crackdown on Chinese technology.

The memo, which was written by the department’s Office of Aviation Services earlier this year, found that by the end of the year, the department will have carried out only a quarter of the controlled burning it might otherwise have done had it gone ahead with planned drone purchases.

The US is experiencing one of its worst years for wildfire outbreaks thanks to hot weather and a lack of firefighters. And while none of those appear to have happened on federal land, government insiders warn the de facto ban on buying drones with Chinese components risks making the situation worse.

«

Unintended consequences.
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Apple showing signs it may soon launch a search engine to compete against Google Search • Coywolf

Jon Henshaw:

»

Based on Apple’s numerous search engineer job descriptions, and the continued consolidation of web and app results in Spotlight Search, an Apple search engine will likely function as a highly personalized data hub. It will be similar to Google Assistant on Android, but different since it (initially) won’t have ads, will be completely private, and have significantly deeper integrations with the OS.

One can imagine getting easy buy-in from users if they benefit from privacy, coupled with the seamless integration and personalization of their iCloud data. Apple can leverage AI and ML to deliver search results based on their email, messages, maps, events, reminders, notes, photos, files, contacts, music, news, TV shows and movies, third-party apps, documents, and more. And they can do it without ads and with the promise of real data privacy.

Apple has a lot to gain from this model. Some of the main benefits include:

• The promotion of apps in search results that will benefit Apple’s services and detract from Google’s push towards PWAs• A weakening of Google’s monopoly on search and a significant blow to its ad revenue and data mining• The promotion of Apple products and services. Including struggling services like Apple News+ and Apple TV+• Continued control and lock down of the Apple ecosystem. Users will become dependent on personalized search results with deep service and product integrations that are only possible via their search engine• The extension of their ad serving platform will allow app developers to promote their apps in search results.

«

Certainly rational. But can Apple turn down the $20bn or so Google pays for its special place in the Safari search bar?

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Chinese-made smartphones are secretly stealing money from people around the world • Buzzfeed News

Craig Silverman:

»

Mxolosi, an unemployed 41-year-old, became frustrated with his Tecno W2. Pop-up ads interrupted his calls and chats. He’d wake up to find his prepaid data mysteriously used up and messages about paid subscriptions to apps he’d never asked for.

“It was expensive for me, and at some point I ended up not buying data because I didn’t know what was eating it up,” he said.

He thought it might be his fault, but according to an investigation by Secure-D, a mobile security service, and BuzzFeed News, software embedded in his phone right out of the box was draining his data while trying to steal his money. Mxolosi’s Tecno W2 was infected with xHelper and Triada, malware that secretly downloaded apps and attempted to subscribe him to paid services without his knowledge.

…Along with South Africa, Tecno W2 phones in Ethiopia, Cameroon, Egypt, Ghana, Indonesia, and Myanmar were infected.

…Michael Kwet, a visiting fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School who received his doctorate in South Africa, called the idea of Chinese-made phones extracting data and money from people living in poverty “digital colonialism.”

“If you have no disposable income, you’re basically left with people preying on your data,” he told BuzzFed News. “The problem we have here is that we don’t have a rational business model for a digital society.”

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You’re looking at the most reliably valuable territory on the Monopoly board. CC-licensed photo by Paul Wolfenden 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. September? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook project will study its impact on the 2020 election • Protocol

David Pierce:

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Facebook is teaming up with academics across the country to determine once and for all whether Facebook is in fact influencing the 2020 election. The only catch: They won’t know the answer until well after it’s over.

The new research project, which Facebook announced Monday, will study how the 2020 election is playing out on the world’s largest social network, and how the platform affects things like political polarization, voter participation, trust in democracy and the spread of misinformation. A 17-person research team, which includes leading academics in the fields of media and politics, will work with some two dozen Facebook staffers to design the experiments.

Once users opt in to be part of the study, the research team will deidentify their data, split them into groups and begin tinkering with their News Feeds, switch up their ad experiences and, in some cases, even ask them to stop using Facebook temporarily, all while surveying participants to see how their experiences and viewpoints evolve and stack up against control groups. The findings, which Facebook will have no veto power over, will be published for free to the public beginning next summer.

In some ways, the undertaking demonstrates how far Facebook has come since 2016, when it eagerly courted political clients with the promise of influence, then, following President Trump’s victory, just as eagerly denied that it had any influence at all. Mark Zuckerberg himself famously called it a “pretty crazy idea.” But the fact that this sort of research is only now getting underway also demonstrates just how little we actually know four years later.

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There were studies about the effect of Facebook on the 2018 election. One of them paid people not to use Facebook for the month before and after the November 2018 voting days. Those who didn’t use it, compared to a control group, became less politically polarised, better informed about news, and spent more time with their family. After the experiment, they were also more likely to remain off Facebook.
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Report: super-lightweight 12in MacBook powered by Apple Silicon to launch this year • Mac Rumors

Tim Hardwick:

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Apple’s first ARM-based Mac will use an A14X processor, which is codenamed “Tonga” and manufactured by TSMC, and the MacBook will have a battery life of between 15 and 20 hours, according to the Chinese-language newspaper The China Times:

»

According to Apple’s supply chain, Apple is expected to launch a Macbook with a 12-inch Retina Display at the end of this year, using its self-developed and designed A14X processor, with the development code of Tonga, supporting a USB Type-C interface and weighing less than 1 kilogram, because of the low-power advantage of the Arm-based processor. The Macbook battery lasts 15 to 20 hours. The A14X processor will also be used in the new generation iPad Pro tablet.

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Apple announced at its WWDC developer conference in June that its Macs will transition from Intel x86-based CPUs to its self-designed Arm-based Apple Silicon processors over the next two years. Bloomberg has said that Apple is currently developing at least three Mac processors that are based on the 5-nanometer A14 chip that will be used in the upcoming iPhone 12 models. According to the Chinese report’s sources, the first Apple-designed A14X processor has been finalized and will be mass produced using TSMC’s 5-nanometer process by the end of the year.

Apple’s first Mac processors will have 12 cores, including eight high-performance cores and at least four energy-efficient cores, according to Bloomberg. Apple is said to be exploring Mac processors with more than 12 cores for further in the future, with the company already designing a second generation of Mac processors based on the A15 chip.

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That Apple would revive the 12in MacBook has become the frontrunner in speculation about the first Apple Silicon devices; it would either be that or the 13in MacBook Pro getting a bump to 14in. The MacBook would thus become the new generation MacBook Air – built for lightness and battery life. In time, would it replace or subsume the Air?
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Lions are less likely to attack cattle with eyes painted on their backsides • The Conversation

Cameron Radford:

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While current approaches tend to focus on separating livestock from wild carnivores, for instance through fencing or lethal control, this is not always possible or desirable. Alternative and effective non-lethal tools that protect both large carnivores and livelihoods are urgently needed.

In a new study we describe how painting eyes on the backsides of livestock can protect them from attack.

Many big cats – including lions, leopards, and tigers – are ambush predators. This means that they rely on stalking their prey and retaining the element of surprise. In some cases, being seen by their prey can lead them to abandon the hunt. We tested whether we could hack into this response to reduce livestock losses to lions and leopards in Botswana’s Okavango delta region.

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The pictures are out of this world. It’s the same sort of thinking though as zebras: the stripes confuse flies. When you put (or paint) zebra-style stripes on horses, they aren’t troubled so much by flies.
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It’s been a year since I defriended Facebook • ZDNet

Ross Rubin:

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In the months since leaving and even in this extraordinary time that has impeded in-person connections, I have loved catching up with old friends through emails, direct messages, and phone calls. I’ve found these communications to strengthen real relationships as opposed to wading through the flotsam and forwarding that would fill the timeline. Leaving Facebook confirmed my sense that many of the “friendships” on Facebook are the relationship equivalent of junk food. They’re easy to obtain and quickly digested, but they’re not very nourishing.

For me, Facebook offered too low a signal-to-noise ratio, but there are occasionally some important signals. For that, I recommend having a Facebook-friendly friend or family member who is connected to many of the same folks you would be (or would want to be). Indeed, my deactivation was in part inspired by two college friends who never had Facebook accounts, but whose wives acted as conduits. Now, my wife, who enjoys being on Facebook more than I did, has graciously become my Facebook ambassador. When I organized a small group late last year, I turned to Band, which offers a Facebook Groups-like interface that people have found less imposing than Slack or Microsoft Teams.

One topic I’ve long considered is the chasm in public perception between Facebook and Google. The two internet giants have similar business models, but Google is largely beloved while Facebook is widely reviled.

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Zuckerberg denounces Apple’s monopolistic “stranglehold” on your iPhone • Buzzfeed News

Pranav Dixit and Ryan Mac:

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a swing at Apple on Thursday, calling the iPhone maker’s app store monopolistic and harmful to customers during a companywide meeting.

“[Apple has] this unique stranglehold as a gatekeeper on what gets on phones,” Zuckerberg said to more than 50,000 employees via webcast. He added that the Cupertino, California–based company’s app store “blocks innovation, blocks competition” and “allows Apple to charge monopoly rents.”

While the Facebook CEO was specifically answering a question about Apple blocking gaming-related apps, his comments came at a time where authorities are scrutinizing both Silicon Valley giants for antitrust behavior. Last month both Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook, as well as the heads of Amazon and Google, testified in a House of Representatives hearing examining potentially monopolistic practices at the United States’ largest technology firms.

Zuckerberg’s comments were another signal that there’s no love lost in the long-contentious relationship between the leader of the social network and the $2 trillion electronic device maker.

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OK, so Apple blocks Facebook from offering a game store, and from telling people that it takes the usual 30% cut of in-app purchases of tickets for online events. Not sure where the innovation is there.
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‘A totally different ballgame’: inside Uber and Lyft’s fight over gig worker status • CNET

Dara Kerr:

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[UCal employment law professor Veena] Dubal seems to have become a target in a complex campaign involving social media harassment, take-down articles on conservative websites and actions by at least two public relations firms hired by Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and Postmates. One of those PR firms, Sacramento-based MB Public Affairs, submitted a lengthy public records request on July 28 for Dubal’s email correspondence with 130 other labor activists, academics and union leaders. 

“It’s clearly a coordinated campaign,” says William Fitzgerald, who currently runs a strategic advocacy firm called The Worker Agency and previously worked for Google on both its public policy and communications teams. “What Uber is doing now with this is way further than anything I’ve seen. It’s a totally different ballgame.”

Public records obtained by CNET from the California Secretary of State show the five gig economy companies hired the PR firms to work on a ballot measure campaign that’s up for a vote in California’s November election. The ballot measure, Proposition 22, was jointly sponsored by the five companies and aims to specifically exempt them from [proposed anti-gig economy legislation] AB5.

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Really brutal and horrible behaviour. Proof, if it were needed, that “tech” companies aren’t any more enlightened or fairminded than all their “old economy” predecessors.
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China calls Trump’s bluff on TikTok, putting US deal at risk • Bloomberg

Tim Culpan on China’s announcement that it will have to approve any sale of ByteDance’s AI:

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Facebook, Snap and Alphabet (Google) are among those pouring billions of dollars into better predicting user behaviour. This is the bread and butter of search-engine results and timeline feeds, helping them sell more-targeted ads at higher prices. Notice that Google tends to return better results than Bing, despite having access to the same pool of data (the entire internet!), and you get a sense of why algorithms matter.

TikTok’s algos are gold. At least, that’s what bidders seem to think.

And it looks like Beijing agrees. Effectively, the Chinese government is saying, “You wanna buy TikTok? Go ahead, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get your hands on the secret sauce.” 

This development will surely send Microsoft, Oracle Corp. and everyone else back to their bankers, and lawyers, trying to figure out what TikTok would be worth without those algorithms. ByteDance, for its part, will need to work out what it can and cannot throw into the package it’s being forced to sell. That’s not easy.

At worst, this may require trawling through millions of lines of code to sort out whether content is allowable or forbidden. It’s not black and white. What one person considers AI may be viewed by another as mundane software technology. 

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If forced to play Monopoly, use this gameplan • Boing Boing

Mark Fraunfelder:

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Monopoly is just such a beautifully designed game. The orange and yellow cards with the iconic temporarily embarrassed millionaire. The cast metal player tokens, the green houses and red hotels. The attractively colored currency. What a shame the game is not very much fun to play. Has anyone created a set of rules that makes Monopoly fun? In any case, if you find yourself being forced to play a game of Monopoly, Reddit user FatherofGray has some advice for winning.

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Never buy purple, brown, utilities or railroads with the intent of completing the set – instead use them as trades with worae players that think they’re good. Railroads in particular are VERY in demand but awful unless you get all 4, at which point they’re still worse than the light blues.

The most valuable properties are the oranges and reds because that’s where most people land after getting out of jail – thr most common spot to be on in the game. Do pretty much anything you can to get a full set of orange or red. Yellow and light blue are also excellent choices.

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There’s more. If you have to play Monopoly, people will quail at your evil strategy.
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What if Facebook is the real ‘silent majority’? • The New York Times

Kevin Roose:

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what sticks out, when you dig in to the data, is just how dominant the Facebook right truly is. Pro-Trump political influencers have spent years building a well-oiled media machine that swarms around every major news story, creating a torrent of viral commentary that reliably drowns out both the mainstream media and the liberal opposition.

The result is a kind of parallel media universe that left-of-center Facebook users may never encounter, but that has been stunningly effective in shaping its own version of reality. Inside the right-wing Facebook bubble, President Trump’s response to Covid-19 has been strong and effective, Joe Biden is barely capable of forming sentences, and Black Lives Matter is a dangerous group of violent looters.

Mr. Trump and his supporters are betting that, despite being behind Mr. Biden in the polls, a “silent majority” will carry him to re-election. Donald Trump Jr., the president’s oldest and most online son, made that argument himself at the Republican National Convention this week. And while I’m not a political analyst, I know enough about the modern media landscape to know that looking at people’s revealed preferences — what they actually read, watch, and click on when nobody’s looking — is often a better indicator of how they’ll act than interviewing them at diners, or listening to what they’re willing to say out loud to a pollster.

Maybe Mr. Trump’s “silent majority,” in other words, only seems silent because we’re not looking at their Facebook feeds.

“We live in two different countries right now,” said Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist and digital director of Marco Rubio’s 2016 campaign. Facebook’s media ecosystem, he said, is “a huge blind spot for people who are up to speed on what’s on the front page of The New York Times and what’s leading the hour on CNN.”

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New Trump coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas pushes controversial ‘herd immunity’ strategy • The Washington Post

Yasmeen Abutaleb and Josh Dawsey:

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One of President Trump’s top medical advisers is urging the White House to embrace a controversial “herd immunity” strategy to combat the pandemic, which would entail allowing the coronavirus to spread through most of the population to quickly build resistance to the virus, while taking steps to protect those in nursing homes and other vulnerable populations, according to five people familiar with the discussions.

The administration has already begun to implement some policies along these lines, according to current and former officials as well as experts, particularly with regard to testing.

The approach’s chief proponent is Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist from Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution, who joined the White House earlier this month as a pandemic adviser. He has advocated that the United States adopt the model Sweden has used to respond to the virus outbreak, according to these officials, which relies on lifting restrictions so the healthy can build up immunity to the disease rather than limiting social and business interactions to prevent the virus from spreading.

…Atlas, who does not have a background in infectious diseases or epidemiology, has expanded his influence inside the White House by advocating policies that appeal to Trump’s desire to move past the pandemic and get the economy going, distressing health officials on the White House coronavirus task force and throughout the administration who worry that their advice is being followed less and less.

…Soumya Swaminathan, the World Health Organization’s chief scientist, said given the transmissibility of the novel coronavirus, it is likely that about 65 to 70% of the population would need to become infected for there to be herd immunity.

With a population of 328 million in the United States, it may require 2.13 million deaths to reach a 65% threshold of herd immunity, assuming the virus has a 1% fatality rate, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.

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But I thought they were all going to be saved by Covid plasma infusions? Or the rushed vaccine? It’s as if the people around Trump are just saying any old nonsense that they think will get his approval, and ignore how many people will die. Trump doesn’t care about anyone but himself, and nor do those around him. Under Trump, the US has now already passed from having a functioning government into federal authoritarianism; the question now is whether it can yank itself back after November.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What looks tasty? “Menu engineers” can steer you to dishes that make more money. CC-licensed photo by StreetsofWashington on Flickr

»You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email (arriving at about 0700GMT each weekday). You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.«

A selection of 11 links for you. No, you’re working on a holiday. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Meet the “menu engineers” helping restaurants retool in the pandemic • The Hustle

Michael Waters:

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You’d be hard-pressed to find many people who have thought more about restaurant menus than Michele Benesch.

In 1968, her grandfather, Walter Baker, started Menu Men, Inc., a creative consultancy that specializes in infusing menus with fanciful designs.

At the time, says Benesch, the art of the menu was largely neglected. Sensing some room for disruption, Baker convinced restaurateurs to invest in fully customized designs.

Benesch never expected to enter the family business. But she couldn’t fully escape it, either. When she went out to dinner as a kid in Miami, her father, who ran the company at the time, always pointed out little menu tricks. He’d ask her about the materials used (“Why did this client choose a parchment?”), the fonts, the placement of each item. 

“My whole life, I was being an apprentice for the job I never realized I wanted,” Benesch says. 

By the time Benesch took over the business in 2006, the menu engineering trade had begun to gain wider recognition, with a growing number of hospitality schools funding research into the psychology of menus. 

Consultants like Benesch realized they could use this research to get customers to spend more money.

Today, Benesch blends design, psychology research, and general food knowledge to build a more scientific menu. With a bit of tinkering, she can increase the odds of, say, a diner picking the highest-margin meal on the menu.

Considering how small restaurant profits are (typically 3% to 5%), the right menu can mean the difference between success and failure. 

When a Las Vegas restaurant recently hired Benesch to revamp its menu, she cut their 4-page layout down to a simple 2-page panel, upped the font size, did some dish repositioning, and cut loose some of the dishes that weren’t selling well.

The new menu led to a spending bump equivalent to $9 more per customer.

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Barbados introduces plan to allow visitors to stay for a year to “work from home” • Yahoo Money

»

Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley announced the “12-month Barbados Welcome Stamp” earlier this month that would allow “persons to come and work from here overseas, digitally so, so that persons don’t need to remain in the countries in which they are,” Mottley said in a press conference.

Mottley noted that working remotely doesn’t mean you have to physically work near your office, making the case that living elsewhere — or even abroad — is possible for some occupations that simply require a reliable internet connection to accomplish work.

She continued: “The government is committed to working with you on the promotion of new concepts like the 12-month Barbados Welcome Stamp, being able to open our borders to persons traveling and making it as hospitable as ever for all of us, and making it available for Barbadians from every walk of life to believe that for special occasions, or just for so, that they can come out and be a part of this wonderful exercise.”

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I think she meant “wonderful money-generating exercise”. Getting people from higher-income countries to come and spend their money in Barbados is a great way to help your tourist-dependent economy while there aren’t any tourists.
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Apple terminates Epic Games’ developer account • Mac Rumors

Juli Clover:

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Searching for Epic Games in the ‌App Store‌ brings up no apps and on the web, the Epic Games developer account is blank. Though the Epic Games developer account is no longer available, Fortnite continues to work.

Those who have downloaded Fortnite on an iPhone or iPad can continue to play the game, but there’s a catch – none of the new Marvel-themed Season 4 content is available because Fortnite is unable to be updated.

Fortnite has been in violation of the ‌App Store‌ rules since August 13, when it introduced a direct payment option that skirted Apple’s in-app purchase system by allowing payments directly to Epic Games. Shortly after Epic blatantly disregarded ‌App Store‌ policies, Apple pulled the app from the ‌App Store‌, leading to a lawsuit from Epic and a quickly escalating legal fight between the two companies.

Since Epic initiated the dispute with Apple, it has refused to back down from the direct purchase option added to Fortnite, and Apple has refused to allow the app in the ‌App Store‌ while the direct payment option remains. Apple told Epic that it was ready to “welcome Fortnite back onto iOS” if Epic removed the direct payment option and returned to the status quo while the legal battle plays out in court, but Epic has refused.

Last night, Epic sent out emails to Fortnite players blaming the unavailability of the new season on Apple and claming that Apple is “blocking Fortnite” in order to prevent Epic Games from “passing on the savings from direct payments to players.” Apple in turn has taken to featuring Fortnite competitor PUBG in its ‌App Store‌.

Apple originally wanted to terminate the developer accounts of both Epic Games and Epic International, a separate account linked to Epic’s Unreal Engine used by third-party app developers, but a judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing Apple from doing so. The judge declined to stop Apple from terminating the Epic Games account, however, telling Epic that it “created the situation” and made a “strategically and calculated move to breach” ‌App Store‌ terms.

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The judge’s reasoning was solid. Now we find out how much Epic needs the cash versus how much Apple needs Epic. I think both can survive without each other pretty well; this could turn into a long standoff.
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Tiktok assets can’t be sold without China’s approval • Bloomberg News

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ByteDance Ltd. will be required to seek Chinese government approval to sell the US operations of its short-video TikTok app under new restrictions Beijing imposed on the export of artificial intelligence technologies, according to a person familiar with the matter.

AI interface technologies such as speech and text recognition, and those that analyze data to make personalized content recommendations, were added to a revised list of export-control products published on the Ministry of Commerce’s website late Friday. Government permits will be required for overseas transfers to “safeguard national economic security,” it said.

The new restrictions cover technologies ByteDance uses in TikTok and will require the company to seek government approval for any deal, according to the person, asking not to be identified because the details aren’t public. The new rule is aimed at delaying the sale and is not an outright ban, the person said.

President Donald Trump’s administration has said ByteDance must sell the US operations of its popular video-sharing app because of alleged national security risks. Microsoft and Oracle have submitted rival bids to ByteDance to acquire TikTok’s US business, while Centricus Asset Management and Triller were said to have made a last-minute pitch on Friday to buy TikTok’s operations in several countries for $20bn.

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So it must be sold, but it can’t be sold. That’s going to be fun.
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Slack fixes ‘critical’ vulnerability that left desktop app users open to attack • Mashable

Jack Morse:

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the exploit allowed for something known as “remote code execution,” which is just as bad as it sounds. Before Slack fixed it, an attacker using the exploit could have done some pretty wild stuff, such as gaining “access to private files, private keys, passwords, secrets, internal network access etc.,” and “access to private conversations, files etc. within Slack.”

What’s more, according to the disclosure, maliciously inclined hackers could have made their attack “wormable.” In other words, if one person in your team got infected, their account would automatically re-share that dangerous payload to all their colleagues. 

It’s worth emphasizing that the security researcher who discovered this vulnerability — a process that takes untold hours of work and is a literal job — decided to do what many would consider the right thing and report it to Slack via HackerOne. For the security researcher, whose HackerOne handle is oskars, this resulted in a bug bounty payment of $1,750. 

Of course, had that person wanted, they could have likely gotten much, much more money by selling it to a third-party exploit broker.

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Slack might want to think about the amount it offers. Other hackers will have seen that and decided they could do better selling them. Suddenly, Slack looks like a security risk compared to, say, Microsoft Teams.
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A Kenosha militia facebook event asking attendees to bring weapons was reported 455 times. Moderators said it didn’t violate any rules • Buzzfeed News

Ryan Mac:

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During Facebook’s Thursday all-hands meeting, Zuckerberg said that the images from Wisconsin were “painful and really discouraging,” before acknowledging that the company had made a mistake in not taking the Kenosha Guard page and event down sooner. The page had violated Facebook’s new rules introduced last week that labeled militia and QAnon groups as “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” for their celebrations of violence.

The company did not catch the page despite user reports, Zuckerberg said, because the complaints had been sent to content moderation contractors who were not versed in “how certain militias” operate. “On second review, doing it more sensitively, the team that was responsible for dangerous organizations recognized that this violated the policies and we took it down.”

During the talk, Facebook employees hammered Zuckerberg for continuing to allow the spread of hatred on the platform.

“At what point do we take responsibility for enabling hate filled bile to spread across our services?” wrote one employee. “[A]nti semitism, conspiracy, and white supremacy reeks across our services.”

The internal report seen by BuzzFeed News sheds more light on Facebook’s failure.

“Organizers… advocated for attendees to bring weapons to an event in the event description,” the internal report reads. “There are multiple news articles about our delay in taking down the event.”

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At what point, one wonders, will Zuckerberg realise that his creation is utterly beyond his control – that Frankenstein has lost the ability to direct his monster?
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Facebook executive supported india’s Modi and disparaged opposition in internal messages • WSJ

Jeff Horwitz and Newley Purnell:

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A Facebook Inc. executive at the center of a political storm in India made internal postings over several years detailing her support for the now ruling Hindu nationalist party and disparaging its main rival, behavior some staff saw as conflicting with the company’s pledge to remain neutral in elections around the world.

In one of the messages, Ankhi Das, head of public policy in the country, posted the day before Narendra Modi swept to victory in India’s 2014 national elections: “We lit a fire to his social media campaign and the rest is of course history.”

“It’s taken thirty years of grassroots work to rid India of state socialism finally,” Ms. Das wrote in a separate post on the defeat of the Indian National Congress party, praising Mr. Modi as the “strongman” who had broken the former ruling party’s hold. Ms. Das called Facebook’s top global elections official, Katie Harbath, her “longest fellow traveler” in the company’s work with his campaign. In a photo, Ms. Das stood, smiling, between Mr. Modi and Ms. Harbath.

Ms. Das’s posts, which were viewed by The Wall Street Journal, haven’t been previously reported. Some Facebook employees said the sentiments and actions described by Ms. Das conflicted with the company’s longstanding neutrality pledge.

The posts cover the years 2012 to 2014 and were made to a Facebook group designed for employees in India, though it was open to anyone in the company globally who wanted to join.

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I’m guessing this was leaked by disgruntled Facebook employees. The scale of silent revolt inside Facebook is only going to grow. I can’t see how she can keep her job.
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Picking locks with audio technology • Communications of the ACM

Paul Marks on researchers who say they could recreate a copy of keys used for Yale or Schlage six-pin locks:

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Their first task was to work out how to surreptitiously acquire the audio from a key insertion, and the researchers suggest no less than five ways of going about it. First, in a walk-by attack, a spy simply walks behind somebody just as they unlock a door or locker, holding their phone out to furtively record the sound of the key going into the lock. So far, though, they have only done this with the phone an unrealistic 10cm (nearly four inches) from the lock. “We are still working on making this attack realizable,” says Ramesh.

Their second method takes another tack entirely: install malware on a victim’s smartphone (or smartwatch) so it records and transmits key insertion audio via an Internet or 4G backchannel. Such viruses are already known in the wild.

Third, they believe an attacker might hack a product like a domestic Internet of Things (IoT) device that contains a microphone, like a video doorbell, which is next to the lock, and acquire audio over the air. Again, this is a known attack vector.

The fourth trick might involve long-distance microphones, the NUS team suggest, while a fifth might involve installing hidden microphones in a corridor of a set of target offices; over time, they suggest, attackers could quietly harvest door key audio for multiple offices.

Once they have a key-insertion audio file, SpiKey’s inference software gets to work filtering the signal to reveal the strong, metallic clicks as key ridges hit the lock’s pins…

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I’ll go with “this is super-unlikely, but might make a neat subplot in a spy film.” (Thanks Steve for the link.)
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Everybody hates digital calendars, so everybody’s trying to build a better one • Protocol

David Pierce:

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ReclaimAI has the same long-term goal as that of Clockwise, Woven and others: to turn calendars from a block of hours into a more malleable, relentlessly optimizing thing. Programmers who need 15 hours of deep work each week shouldn’t have to schedule it in advance, these companies think; their calendar should make sure they have space for it. One-on-one meetings that need to happen once a week but not necessarily at a set time should shift to accommodate everyone’s schedule. Martin said Clockwise has 16 different categories of calendar entries, including everything from doctor’s appointments (personal, immovable) to general “catch up on email” holds (important, but easy to move around), each with its own unique characteristics. There are more categories to come. Over time, the more a calendar actually understands what’s on it, the better it can take care of a user’s time.

This kind of thinking has a second benefit: It turns corporate calendars into a powerful analytics tool. If you want to know what your company values, look at how people spend their time. Or, just as often, how their time gets wasted.

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The trouble with AI-organised and re-organised calendars is the potential for screwing up your life by surprising you with appointments you’re not prepared for but the machine has given you, surely? It’s a pain, but I wonder whether it’s trying to solve an insoluble problem – a sort of non-travelling salesman’s four-colour theorem.
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Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing • The Correspondent

Jesse Frederik:

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It seems that blockchain sounds best in a PowerPoint slide. Most blockchain projects don’t make it past a press release, an inventory by Bloomberg showed. The Honduran land registry was going to use blockchain. That plan has been shelved. The Nasdaq was also going to do something with blockchain. Not happening. The Dutch Central Bank then? Nope. Out of over 86,000 blockchain projects that had been launched, 92% had been abandoned by the end of 2017, according to consultancy firm Deloitte.

Why are they deciding to stop? Enlightened – and thus former – blockchain developer Mark van Cuijk explained: “You could also use a forklift to put a six-pack of beer on your kitchen counter. But it’s just not very efficient.” 

…[But] This is the market for magic, and that market is big.

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Blockchain is heading solidly towards the trough of despond in the Hype Cycle (if it wasn’t there already). Bitcoin chunters on as a speculative toy for people with more money than sense (or more sense than other people with money).
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Israeli phone hacking company faces court fight over sales to Hong Kong • MIT Technology Review

Patrick Howell O’Neill:

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Human rights advocates filed a new court petition against the Israeli phone hacking company Cellebrite, urging Israel’s ministry of defense to halt the firm’s exports to Hong Kong, where security forces have been using the technology in crackdowns against dissidents as China takes greater control.

Hong Kong police documents show the use of Cellebrite to hack and unlock phones of demonstrators. Former police officers have confirmed that Cellebrite has long been used by Hong Kong.

In July, police court filings revealed that Cellebrite’s phone hacking technology has been used to break into 4,000 phones of Hong Kong citizens, including prominent pro-democracy politician and activist Joshua Wong. He subsequently launched an online petition to end Cellebrite’s sales to Hong Kong, which gained 35,000 signatures.

“Defense Ministry officials must immediately stop the export of the Cellebrite system which is used for infringement on privacy, deprivation of liberty and freedom of expression, and political incrimination of Hong Kong citizens under the new National Security Law,” Wong wrote in a Facebook post urging Israel to stop Cellebrite’s exports to Hong Kong.

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I’ve looked in vain for any statement by the Israeli government on what it thinks about China’s effective legislative annexation of Hong Kong. That would tell us how its ministry of defence would respond to this lawsuit.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.