UK telcos are warning that ripping out Huawei gear in a hurry could mean no signal on mobiles. CC-licensed photo by evan p. cordes 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. Not available on paper. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Coronavirus: The inside story of how UK’s ‘chaotic’ testing regime ‘broke all the rules’ • Sky News

Ed Conway and Rowland Manthorpe:

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As Britain sought to assemble its coronavirus testing programme, all the usual rules were broken.

In their effort to release rapid data to show the increase in testing capacity, officials from Public Health England (PHE) and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) “hand-cranked” the numbers to ensure a constant stream of rising test numbers were available for each day’s press conference, Sky News has been told.

An internal audit later confirmed that some of those figures simply didn’t add up.
According to multiple sources, the data collection was carried out in such a chaotic manner that we may never know for sure how many people have been tested for coronavirus.

“We completely buffed the system,” says a senior Whitehall figure. “We said: forget the conventions, we’re putting [this data] out.”

Sky News has learned that in the early days of mass COVID-19 testing, the statistical problems were so deep that one minister sat at their desk with Excel spreadsheets in front of them, calling round to try to collect data to use in each daily press conference.

Even as Health Secretary Matt Hancock struggled to get the number of tests carried out up to 100,000 a day by the end of April, the collection of those testing statistics was still so primitive that they were being compiled with pen and paper.

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“World-beating”, indeed.
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When a critic met Facebook: ‘what they’re doing is gaslighting’ • The New York Times

Charlie Warzel spoke to Rashad Robinson, who spoke to Facebook about its civil rights audit:

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Robinson: I believe we’re not going to win this fight through policies that Facebook puts in place. Yes, there are things Facebook could do tinkering on the margins. And, honestly, the only reason I’m at the table is because we don’t have the legislative and regulatory levers to pull right now. So I feel I need to be there. But the big fixes need those levers.

If there were not rules of the road for car companies around safety and seatbelts we wouldn’t get safety from the auto industry just because. They’d probably say things like Facebook says right now. “89% of seatbelts work!” [Facebook told Robinson that 89% of hate speech is caught before users report it.] And we’d say, ’that’s not good enough!’ And they’d say, well it’s a B-plus!’ The point is that there are regulations enforcing that accountability that Facebook does not have.

Q: You were instrumental in pushing Facebook for a public civil rights audit. What’s your reaction to the audit?
RR: The audit speaks to just how much Facebook’s incentive structure is broken. I keep thinking about the fact that the decisions around political speech and violations to rules goes through the team at the company that is the most political — who are in charge of dealing with lobbyists and Washington operators like Joel Kaplan [Facebook’s vice president of global public policy and a former Republican staffer and lobbyist].

And so then they consistently say things to me like, “Well, you just don’t like Republicans.” And I say, “I don’t think these issues should go through anyone who is primarily a political animal and operates inside D.C. politics.” I won’t pretend there are two equal sides of the issue. Joel Kaplan has political leanings that would make it harder for my grandfather to vote. And so if you put him in charge of voter suppression content, that’s an issue.

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Kaplan is going to become a bigger and bigger point of tension between Facebook and the outside world in the coming months.
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Conflict Culture is making social Unsocial • On my Om

Om Malik:

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The internet has removed the limitations of space on the print media. It might have started with the blogs, and later embraced by The Huffington Post. Today, the opinion pages of respected dailies, have also become expressive, and thus veering towards, not having a real impact, but as tools to keep the readership base close. Whether it is on the right or the left, everything has become infotainment. 

Just as daytime talk shows and cable news talk shows, the internet too has become the colosseum. The post-social internet is no different than daytime television and cable news. About a decade ago, I wrote about the future where we will all be starring in a movie called me. I was excited about the sources going direct. “In our 21st-century society, we all want to stand out and get attention,” I wrote, and that it was going to become the “defining the ethos for the new internet-connected age as we go along.”

Fast forward to today, that desire has mutated into a new dangerous form. The conflict culture has not only infected the social platforms but also started to consume the host body. Whether it is the president, or a maverick entrepreneur, a delusional rapper, self-important investor, a media personality – they are now hosts of their shows.

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Circular

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Draw a freehand circle, then click analyze to see how close you got to a perfect circle. Reset to start over

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This is damn difficult with a trackpad. (I got 12,000-plus points for something that looked like a scone.) Great way to lose some time, though.
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‘UK faces mobile blackouts if Huawei 5G ban imposed by 2023’ • BBC News

Leo Kelion:

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While it now seems likely the government will opt for a ban of some sort, the question is when it will come into effect. Some Tory backbenchers are urging a deadline to be set before the 2024 general election – and there has been speculation that it could be as soon as 2023.

But Vodafone and BT – which both use Huawei’s products in their networks – said this would be hugely disruptive. “To get to zero in a three-year period would literally mean blackouts for customers on 4G and 2G, as well as 5G, throughout the country,” said Howard Watson, BT’s chief technology and information officer.

He explained the logistics involved in bringing in cranes and shutting off streets to replace masts, base stations and other Huawei equipment meant that the only way to meet the timespan would be to switch over multiple sites in an area at the same time.

3G signals would not be affected as the EE network uses Nokia kit to provide that service.
Vodafone made a similar case – it uses Huawei’s kit in its 2G, 3G. 4G and 5G networks.

“[Customers] would lose their signal, sometimes for a couple of days, depending on how big or how intrusive the work to be carried out is,” said Andrea Dona, Vodafone UK’s head of networks.

“I would say a five-year transition time would be the minimum,” Mr Watson added: “A minimum of five years, ideally seven.”

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Apple promises to support Thunderbolt on its new ARM Macs • The Verge

Chaim Gartenberg:

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Apple has yet to offer Thunderbolt support on any products outside of Intel-powered Macs — Apple’s ARM-based iPad Pro, in particular, stands out as featuring a regular USB-C port, not a Thunderbolt 3 connector. Apple’s ARM-based Developer Transition Kit also only features standard USB-C ports.

The news comes as Intel detailed its upcoming Thunderbolt 4 standard, which will be based on the USB4 spec standard and which uses the same USB-C connector that Thunderbolt 3 already does today. Both Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 offer more guaranteed features (like the ability to power external monitors, or charge laptops) compared to the standard USB 3 and USB4 standards that they’re built off of, and offer a consistency that regular USB-C standards can often be sorely lacking in.

Thunderbolt 4, in particular, offers the same 40 Gbps speeds that Thunderbolt 3 had offered, but adds even stricter hardware requirements for manufacturers: devices will have to be able to support either two 4K displays or one 8K display, and allow for PCIe data transfer speeds of up to 32 Gbps — which should be a boon for external storage and external GPUs.

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Not surprising that the DTKs don’t have Thunderbolt 3, since they’re using iPad Pro chips. But including it (and Thunderbolt 4) in Apple Silicon Macs would be a way to distinguish them from iPads, apart from anything.

Also, 8K displays? I don’t think I’ve even got 8K eyes.
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EvilQuest Mac malware ‘is after your data, not your money’ • Macworld UK

Anders Lundberg:

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researchers at SentinelOne have examined the encrypted files and discovered that the files themselves contain their encryption keys, making it straightforward to decrypt them. The company has already released a small freeware program that restores all files encrypted by EvilQuest.

Malwarebytes has researched the program more deeply and reports that the whole extortion function can in fact be a distraction to divert attention from the real goal: stealing data.

The malware sometimes downloads a Python script that goes through the entire home folder and uploads a long line of files to the control server, completely unencrypted.

Patrick Wardle’s continued investigations into the malware show that it also appears to be the first genuine virus for Mac since Mac OS X was released nearly 20 years ago.

Once the program has installed itself on the Mac, it runs a process that looks up all executable files in the affected home folder and adds a new bit of malicious code to the beginning of the file which will then run every time that file is run.

«

That the files contain their own encryption keys makes this like the very, very, very first piece of ransomware, the AIDS Trojan, back in 1989, which did almost the same thing. As for the malware part – I thought Apple’s malware checker would spot this, but I guess not.
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Hong Kong downloads of Signal surge as residents fear crackdown • Ars Technica

Timothy Lee:

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The secure chat app Signal has become the most downloaded app in Hong Kong on both Apple’s and Google’s app stores, Bloomberg reports, citing data from App Annie. The surging interest in encrypted messaging comes days after the Chinese government in Beijing passed a new national security law that reduced Hong Kong’s autonomy and could undermine its traditionally strong protections for civil liberties.

The 1997 handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to China came with a promise that China would respect Hong Kong’s autonomy for 50 years following the handover. Under the terms of that deal, Hong Kong residents should have continued to enjoy greater freedom than people on the mainland until 2047. But recently, the mainland government has appeared to renege on that deal.

Civil liberties advocates see the national security law approved last week as a major blow to freedom in Hong Kong. The New York Times reports that “the four major offenses in the law—separatism, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign countries—are ambiguously worded and give the authorities extensive power to target activists who criticize the party, activists say.” Until now, Hong Kongers faced trial in the city’s separate, independent judiciary. The new law opens the door for dissidents to be tried in mainland courts with less respect for civil liberties or due process.

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The problem with Signal (as Ben Thompson and John Gruber discussed on their Dithering podcast) is that it’s completely tied to your phone, and your phone number. Lose your phone (or SIM) and you’re stuffed – and that SIM or phone might be the vector for your messages to be viewed.
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Google and Amazon are inadvertently funding Covid conspiracy sites to the tune of $25m • Forbes

Isabel Togoh:

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The research shows ads from organizations including Merck, Loreal, Canon and the British Medical Association, a trade union for U.K. doctors, appeared on pages featuring conspiracy theory content.

“Based on our findings, ads for big brands have been found funding stories that tout debunked and dangerous cures, undercut government lock-down measures, equate track-and-trace apps with state surveillance, and traffic in theories that the Chinese government and the global elite should be blamed for the virus’ spread,” the GDI said.

The figures exclude advertising on disinformation on social media and video platforms, the GDI said, meaning the real numbers could be far higher.

The study was based on the GDI’s analysis of 480 English language sites between January and June this year, whose content was dominated by coronavirus misinformation, and which also carried adverts. The GDI made conservative estimates, and warned that their figures are likely to be “the tip of the iceberg.” They also estimate that ad revenue may have been skewed by a spike in overall web traffic sparked by more people being at home and searching for news online, as well as a decline in ad spend due to the pandemic.

«

The research is by the Global Disinformation Index, and I found it at the Internet Archive – weirdly it wasn’t on the blog because Bloomberg was getting some sort of exclusive.

This story plays out again and again.
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Quibi reportedly lost 90% of early users after their free trials expired • The Verge

Nick Statt:

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Streaming service Quibi only managed to convert a little under 10% of its early wave of users into paying subscribers, says mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower. According to the firm’s new report on Quibi’s early growth, the short-form video platform signed up about 910,000 users in its first few days back in April. Of those users, only about 72,000 stuck around after the three-month free trial, indicating the app had about an 8% conversion rate.

That’s not too bad. But compare it to the streaming video industry’s most successful debut of the last few years, Disney Plus, and the resulting picture is a grim one for Quibi, which has struggled both to find a hit among its mobile-centric shows and gain traction with its desired younger, TikTok-loving demographic, despite the surge in screen time during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Sensor Tower, Disney managed to convert a comparable 11% of early free trials users, but that was of out of whopping 9.5 million people the firm estimates signed up for Disney Plus in its first three days of availability in the US and Canada. Since then, Disney has added tens of millions more subscribers and now enjoys more than 50 million paying users as of April thanks in part to its international expansion.

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I’m surprised that it’s as many as 72,000, though don’t ignore the likelihood that lots of them have completely forgotten ever signing up and will unsubscribe when they notice.
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Update on the upcoming Wink Subscription • Wink Blog

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We want to share updates about our Wink subscription – a vital change for Wink that will enable us to provide our customers with a strong and growing smart home experience. The change will bring about expanded support for new brand integrations and continue to bring enhancements through firmware and software updates.

Please know that we have adjusted our timelines since our initial announcement on May 6th to allow users more opportunity to make considerations. We were able to extend our service so that subscriptions will now begin on Monday, July 27th, 2020. All users who have not already subscribed will need to visit subscription.wink.com to sign up.

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Previously on Wink, which does a sort of smart home hub thing, but is running low on money. Was the delay was because they were trying to raise fresh funding, or because they wanted to get the news to spread a bit further? Either way, I doubt many more people will sign up. Maybe if they did a bundle with Quibi?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Rejoice! Gary Larson is drawing new cartoons on his website. CC-licensed photo by Robert Couse-Baker 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. Keeping my distance. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook’s own civil rights auditors said its policy decisions are a ‘tremendous setback’ • The Washington Post

Elizabeth Dwoskin and Cat Zakrzewski:

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The civil rights auditors Facebook hired to scrutinize its civil rights record on Wednesday delivered a long-awaited and scathing indictment of the social media giant’s decisions to prioritize free speech above other values, which they called a “tremendous setback” that opened the door for abuse by politicians.

The report criticized Facebook’s choice to leave several posts by President Trump untouched, including three in May that the auditors said “clearly violated” the company’s policies prohibiting voter suppression, hate speech and incitement of violence.

The conclusions by Facebook’s own auditors are likely to bolster criticism that the company has too much power and that it bends and stretches its rules for powerful people. Though Facebook frequently says it listens to experts when making judgment calls, the company’s decisions on recent posts by Trump and others suggest that is not always the case on critical matters of free expression.

“When you put free expression on top of every other consideration, I think civil rights considerations take more of a back seat,” said Laura Murphy, a civil rights lawyer and independent consultant who led the two-year audit.

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Same day as this came out, on the day Sheryl Sandberg said that the company “stands firmly against hate”, Buzzfeed News finds that for four days it’s been running a fearmongering ad from a white nationalist Facebook Page.
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New work by Gary Larson • TheFarSide.com

Yes, it’s Gary Larson:

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a few years ago—finally fed up with my once-loyal but now reliably traitorous [because it kept getting blocked] pen—I decided to try a digital tablet. I knew nothing about these devices but hoped it would just get me through my annual Christmas card ordeal. I got one, fired it up, and lo and behold, something totally unexpected happened: within moments, I was having fun drawing again. I was stunned at all the tools the thing offered, all the creative potential it contained. I simply had no idea how far these things had evolved. Perhaps fittingly, the first thing I drew was a caveman.

The “New Stuff” that you’ll see here is the result of my journey into the world of digital art. Believe me, this has been a bit of a learning curve for me. I hail from a world of pen and ink, and suddenly I was feeling like I was sitting at the controls of a 747. (True, I don’t get out much.) But as overwhelmed as I was, there was still something familiar there—a sense of adventure. That had always been at the core of what I enjoyed most when I was drawing The Far Side, that sense of exploring, reaching for something, taking some risks, sometimes hitting a home run and sometimes coming up with “Cow tools.” (Let’s not get into that.)

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His new stuff is just as good as ever.
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How the dumb design of a WWII plane led to the Macintosh • WIRED

Cliff Kuang:

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Fitts’ data showed that during one 22-month period of the war, the Air Force reported an astounding 457 crashes just like the one in which our imaginary pilot hit the runway thinking everything was fine. But the culprit was maddeningly obvious for anyone with the patience to look. Fitts’ colleague Alfonse Chapanis did the looking. When he started investigating the airplanes themselves, talking to people about them, sitting in the cockpits, he also didn’t see evidence of poor training. He saw, instead, the impossibility of flying these planes at all. Instead of “pilot error,” he saw what he called, for the first time, “designer error.”

The reason why all those pilots were crashing when their B-17s were easing into a landing was that the flaps and landing gear controls looked exactly the same. The pilots were simply reaching for the landing gear, thinking they were ready to land. And instead, they were pulling the wing flaps, slowing their descent, and driving their planes into the ground with the landing gear still tucked in. Chapanis came up with an ingenious solution: He created a system of distinctively shaped knobs and levers that made it easy to distinguish all the controls of the plane merely by feel, so that there’s no chance of confusion even if you’re flying in the dark.

By law, that ingenious bit of design—known as shape coding—still governs landing gear and wing flaps in every airplane today. And the underlying idea is all around you: It’s why the buttons on your videogame controller are differently shaped, with subtle texture differences so you can tell which is which. It’s why the dials and knobs in your car are all slightly different, depending on what they do. And it’s the reason your virtual buttons on your smartphone adhere to a pattern language.

But Chapanis and Fitts were proposing something deeper than a solution for airplane crashes.

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The straight line element to the Mac, and other things, is remarkable, yet logical.
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Sanders-Biden climate task force calls for carbon-free power by 2035 • The Hill

Rachel Frazin:

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The task force’s broad plan includes a goal of eliminating carbon pollution from power plants by 2035, achieving net-zero emissions for all new buildings by 2030, and making energy-saving upgrades to as many as 4 million buildings and 2 million households within five years. 

Some of the recommendations released Wednesday set more specific targets than the former vice president’s current climate plan, which calls for a shift away from coal-fired electricity, halving the carbon footprint of buildings by 2035 and starting a national program aimed at affordable energy efficiency retrofits in homes.

The group is one of several “unity task forces” made up of supporters of Sanders and Biden that is making platform recommendations as Biden courts favor from the progressive faction of the party. 

…The climate panel is co-chaired by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a leading proponent of the Green New Deal, and 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.

“The Unity Task Force urges that we treat climate change like the emergency that it is and answer the crisis with an ambitious, unprecedented, economy-wide mobilization to decarbonize the economy and build a resilient, stronger foundation for the American people,” the document says.

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The power plants could be quite the challenge. The coal plants are effectively dead already, but there’s a lot of CCGT plants out there, or being planned – even though renewables will be cheaper by the time they’re ready.
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Health official: Trump rally ‘likely’ source of virus surge • Associated Press

Sean Murphy:

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President Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Tulsa that drew thousands of people in late June, along with large protests that accompanied it, “likely contributed” to a dramatic surge in new coronavirus cases, Tulsa City-County Health Department Director Dr. Bruce Dart said Wednesday.

Tulsa County reported 261 confirmed new cases on Monday, a one-day record high, and another 206 cases on Tuesday.

Although the health department’s policy is to not publicly identify individual settings where people may have contracted the virus, Dart said those large gatherings “more than likely” contributed to the spike.

“In the past few days, we’ve seen almost 500 new cases, and we had several large events just over two weeks ago, so I guess we just connect the dots,” Dart said.

A spokesman for the Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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What comment could they offer? “Sorry for ignoring all the advice on social distancing”?
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China’s superpower dreams are running out of money • Foreign Policy

Salvatore Babones:

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when Western media reported in December that China was pressuring a reluctant Pakistan to resume work on the stalled China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, they failed to mention that China is unwilling to finance the construction itself. Similarly, China wants to build a new port in Myanmar, but it is reluctant to pay for it. China signed a Transit and Transport Agreement with Nepal in 2015 but has yet to build a single mile of road or railway in the landlocked Himalayan country. It’s the same story in Africa and Eastern Europe: China continues to announce grand projects but has been unwilling to offer enough money to actually get them off the ground.

China’s financing problems are nowhere more apparent—and less acknowledged—than in its military budgets. Analyses from the Center for Strategic and International Studies suggest that Chinese defense spending may actually fall in real terms in 2020. Given China’s elevated pace of military operations on several borders, spending constraints must be putting serious pressure on acquisitions budgets. It is impossible for anyone outside China’s defence establishment to know what is really going on, but circumstantial evidence suggests that many of China’s big-ticket weapons programs have been put on go-slow.

For example, China is believed to have built only 50 or so J-20 fifth-generation stealth fighters. The J-20 program now seems to be experiencing serious development problems, limiting production for the foreseeable future. This compares to America’s stock of 195 F-22 and 134 F-35 fifth-generation fighters, with continuing annual production of more than 100 F-35s, even after coronavirus delays.

Similarly, China once planned to deploy six U.S.-style aircraft carrier strike groups by 2035. Aside from the Soviet-surplus training carrier Liaoning, China currently has only one conventionally powered ski-jump carrier, with a second under construction. Plans for four nuclear-powered carriers have been delayed indefinitely due to “technical challenges and high costs.”

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Being a superpower is also super-expensive.
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Why corporate America gave up on R&D • Marker on Medium

Kaushik Viswanath talks to the authors of a study which suggests that American companies are giving up on effective R&D:

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Sharon Belenzon (one of the authors): Companies are withdrawing from research, and I don’t think you can compensate for that with science created in universities and small firms. More importantly, leading economists have argued that what makes America unique is the strong link between technology and science generated by a diverse capitalist system. The diversity of institutions that engage in R&D are key. I am worried that we are losing such diversity in return for greater efficiency through specialization.

Q: What are the reasons behind that loss of diversity? Why do corporations no longer find it as desirable to engage in research?

Ashish Arora: There are two big factors. One is there are alternative sources of knowledge now, like the university system and startups, but the other big issue is that research is an unnatural activity inside a company. Companies are set up mostly to produce and deliver goods and services to the marketplace, not to have activities running that have no defined deliverables, with horizons of four to six years, not six to 18 months.

In the golden period of corporate research, the early successes like DuPont’s development of nylon generated a lot of goodwill. Because of those early successes, corporations agreed to keep funding them. But at some point, that goodwill runs out.

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Italian Alps’ pink snow is a cute sign of environmental disaster • Earther

Yessenia Funes:

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the dusty pink layer atop the Presena Glacier in the Italian Alps is more sinister than it looks. Algae has dyed the snow a bizarre color. The otherworldly look could end up speeding up the melt of snow and glaciers in the fragile mountain region.

Pink snow is usually a spring and summer phenomenon, requiring the right amount of light, warmth, and water to grow. Usually, the algae are inactive while under the snow and ice, but once melt season hits, the normally stark landscape bursts with color.

Biagio Di Mauro, a researcher at the Institute of Polar Sciences at Italy’s National Research Council, told Earther in an email that the bloom on Presena Glacier is an example of Chlamydomonas nivalis, a type of algae found in the Alps as well as polar regions from Greenland to the Antarctic. It’s more commonly referred to as watermelon snow, and it could be having an impact on snowmelt.

That’s because the whiter the snow, the more effective it is at bouncing the sun’s rays back into space, keeping things cool. Global warming is already doing enough harm to polar and mountain regions without algae coming and making it all the worse. A study published last year showed that up to half of the Alps’ glaciers could disappear this century as temperature rise.

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Our self-destruction will be heralded by more and more beautiful sunsets.
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Apple is planning to build its own GPUs, too, but playing quiet for now • ExtremeTech

Joel Hruska:

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Apple has already told us that it will finish its switch to Intel hardware in about two years, and the company has announced its initiative for that process. It has made no equivalent commitment to GPU hardware.

Yes, Apple has experience in building its own mobile GPUs, but scaling up a GPU design isn’t like scaling up a CPU design. Assuming Apple’s A12Z isn’t a huge departure from the A12X, we can expect a die size of 122mm2. Die size on a larger chip like the Core i9-10900K (comparing monolithic die to monolithic die) is 206.1mm2. Only modestly bigger.

122mm2 doesn’t even get the ball rolling, in terms of a high-end GPU. The RTX 2080 Ti has a die size of 775mm2. Even AMD’s Radeon VII, while much smaller, is a 331mm2 design. It’s also not an accident that Intel has taken years to bring a discrete GPU to market, despite the fact that Tiger Lake systems with Xe-class graphics are expected to ship in the very near future. Just as it takes time to scale up a CPU design, it takes time to scale up a GPU design, too.

What may happen is this: Apple may launch its own laptop / desktop ARM CPU, with its own Apple silicon, while simultaneously supporting AMD (most-likely) GPUs on higher-end Mac hardware. So long as we’re talking about an SoC, it makes obvious sense for Apple to field its own silicon. The question is, will Apple start building its own discrete add-in cards? It would have to, if it wants to supply top-end graphics performance.

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Watching people try to figure out what the hell Apple is going to do with Apple Silicon is a lot of fun. I’m filing this one away to come back to when Apple tips its hand – some time later this year.
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Your next Samsung phone may not come with a charger in the box • SamMobile

“Adrian F”:

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You can always count on your new smartphone to come with a charger in the box. However, it now seems that we’re moving towards a future where that might not be the case. According to a new report from South Korea, future Samsung phones may not ship with a charger.

Samsung ships hundreds of millions of smartphones every single year. Dropping the charger from even half of its lineup is going to result in major cost reductions for the company. It may also enable the company to price its affordable devices even more aggressively.

According to the report, Samsung is discussing plans to exclude the charger from the box components for some smartphones. If it decides to go ahead with this, we might see the first Samsung phones to ship without a charger starting next year.

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First reaction: I wonder where they got that idea? Second reaction: this isn’t going to be as easy for Samsung as for Apple, which has a single connector standard. Some older Samsung phones will be micro-USB. It’s not clear quite when they switched over to USB-C.

But as for “major cost reductions” – nope. As Neil Cybart pointed out in his newsletter, chargers cost a few dollars at most. Hundreds of millions of dollars can get eaten up in marketing or other costs; it’s a rounding error.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Might TikTok follow Huawei in being banned from the US by Trump? CC-licensed photo by ApolitikNow on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. There you go. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Right-wing media outlets duped by a Middle East propaganda campaign • Daily Beast

Adam Rawnsley:

»

If you want a hot take about the Middle East, Raphael Badani is your man.

As a Newsmax “Insider” columnist, he has thoughts about how Iraq needs to rid itself of Iranian influence to attract investment and why Dubai is an oasis of stability in a turbulent region. His career as a “geopolitical risk consultant and interactive simulation designer” and an “international relations senior analyst” for the Department of Labor have given him plenty of insights about the Middle East. He’s printed those insights at a range of conservative outlets like the Washington Examiner, RealClear Markets, American Thinker, and The National Interest.

Unfortunately for the outlets who published his articles and the readers who believed them, Raphael Badani does not exist. 

His profile photos are stolen from the blog of an unwitting San Diego startup founder. His LinkedIn profile, which described him as a graduate of George Washington and Georgetown, is equally fictitious (and was deleted following publication of this article).

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Twitter scrubbed a whole load of related accounts. But the best bit of this whole investigation is this:

»

The fake contributors also appear to have used AI-generated avatars for a handful of their personas. A high-resolution profile photo of the Joseph Labba persona, posted for an article at The Post Millennial, shows some of the telltale glitches commonly found in AI-generated faces. The left ear is oddly smooth without any ear lobe creases. Middlebury Institute of International Studies research associate Sam Meyer reviewed the photo of Labba using imagery analysis software and also noticed he appears to have three misfit teeth in his mouth where there should be four.

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With department stores disappearing, malls could be next • The New York Times

Sapna Maheshwari:

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The standard American mall — with its vast parking lots, escalators and air conditioning, and an atmosphere heavy on perfume samples and the scent of Mrs. Fields cookies — was built around department stores. But the pandemic has been devastating for the retail industry and many of those stores are disappearing at a rapid clip. Some chains are unable to pay rent and prominent department store chains including Neiman Marcus, as well as J.C. Penney, have filed for bankruptcy protection. As they close stores, it could cause other tenants to abandon malls at the same time as large specialty chains like Victoria’s Secret are shrinking.

Malls were already facing pressure from online shopping, but analysts now say that hundreds are at risk of closing in the next five years. That has the potential to reshape the suburbs, with many communities already debating whether abandoned malls can be turned into local markets or office space, even affordable housing.

“More companies have gone bankrupt than any of us have ever expected, and I do believe that will accelerate as we move through 2020, unfortunately,” said Deborah Weinswig, founder of Coresight Research, an advisory and research firm that specializes in retail and technology. “And then those who haven’t gone bankrupt are using this as an opportunity to clean up their real estate.”

Ms. Weinswig said the malls that are able to withstand the current turmoil will be healthier — better tenants, more inviting and occupied — but she anticipated that about 25% of the country’s nearly 1,200 malls were in danger.

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‘Parler feels like a Trump rally’ — and MAGA world says that’s a problem • POLITICO

Tina Nguyen:

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The MAGAfication problem [of Parler] is so bad that CEO and founder John Matze has openly begged progressive pundits to join the platform, offering a “progressive bounty” of $20,000 to any left-wing influencer with a following of 50,000 or more users on Twitter who makes an account. And with even establishment conservatives like Sens. Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney eschewing Parler for now, Trump supporters worry that Parler’s influencers will be preaching to a MAGA choir forever.

“The question is not pure engagement. The question is influence,” said Will Chamberlain, editor-in-chief of the populist magazine Human Events. “Twitter is interesting because there’s so many people, prominent people, that can be influenced. Parler is not that.”

Regardless, Parler is rapidly growing: In the past week alone, Parler’s user base has grown from 1 million to 1.5 million users, according to a CNBC interview with Matze. And given the number of conservative influencers on the site — as well as a robust presence of conservative outlets, which don’t have to worry about social media companies shutting off their traffic spigots — there is potential for the site to grow a decently sized conservative audience.

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You only have to *make* an account? Hey, am I influential or left-wing enough to get the payment? (Compared to lots of the people on Parler, the answer to the latter is probably “yes”.) But the existence of a right-wing talking shop is fabulously pointless.
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Technology to tackle online harms • University of Exeter Business School

»

David Lopez and his team are developing ‘LOLA’. She’s a sophisticated artificial intelligence, capable of picking up subtle nuances in language. This means she can detect emotional undertones, such as anger, fear, joy, love, optimism, pessimism or trust.

LOLA takes advantage of recent advances in natural language processing. Not only that, she also incorporates behavioural theory to infer stigma, giving her up to 98% accuracy. And she continues to learn and improve with each conversation she analyses.

Unlike human moderators, LOLA can analyse 25,000 texts per minute. This allows her to swiftly detect stigmatising behaviour. Thus, she highlights cyberbullying, hatred, Islamophobia and more.

In a recent use-case on fake news about Covid-19, LOLA found that this misinformation has strong components of fear and anger. This tells us that fear and anger are helping disseminate the fake news. Predictably, emotive language motivates people to pass on information, before giving it a second thought. For LOLA, it is straightforward to pinpoint the originators of the misinformation. In this way, we can reduce online harms.

In another use-case, LOLA could pinpoint the originators or cyberbullying against Greta Thurnberg. LOLA grades each tweet with a severity score, and sequences them: ‘most likely to cause harm’ to ‘least likely’. Those at the top are the tweets which score highest in toxicity, obscenity and insult.

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Lola named after “Charlie and Lola” from the Lauren Child children’s books, not the Kinks song.
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Pompeo says U.S. looking at banning Chinese social media apps, including TikTok • Reuters

Kanishka Singh and Shubham Kalia:

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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Monday that the United States is “certainly looking at” banning Chinese social media apps, including TikTok, suggesting it shared information with the Chinese government, a charge it denied.

“I don’t want to get out in front of the President (Donald Trump), but it’s something we’re looking at,” Pompeo said in an interview with Fox News.

U.S. lawmakers have raised national security concerns over TikTok’s handling of user data, saying they were worried about Chinese laws requiring domestic companies “to support and cooperate with intelligence work controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.”

Pompeo said Americans should be cautious in using the short-form video app owned by China-based ByteDance.

“Only if you want your private information in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party,” Pompeo remarked when asked if he would recommend people to download TikTok.

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Well that would wreck Trump’s chances with the youth vote– oh, never mind. Also, ByteDance insists that it’s a Cayman Islands-based company, at least when it suits it.

In sort-of related news: TikTok is withdrawing from Hong Kong. That actually makes it sound as though it might be passing data to China. Or else that it’s going to treat Hong Kong as Chinese territory, and make the Chinese version of the app available there.
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Are you dense? • DIGITS to DOLLARS

Jonathan Goldberg:

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Greatly oversimplifying, the average cellular base station today covers a range of about 1 mile. There are all sorts of caveats about this number – much longer ranges in open areas, much shorter in urban areas. By contrast, 3500 MHz travels less than half that, probably closer to 1,000 feet. And mmWaves travel a few hundred feet at best.

Looking at it another way. There are about 300,000 base stations in the US today across all the operators. A single network could probably cover the US with 100,000 sites. The mid-band spectrum probably needs 1 million sites and mmWave 10 million. To be clear, many of these will probably never be built, the point is that we need orders of magnitude more sites to provide a level of service that consumers care about or even notice.

This is not a problem of technology it is one of politics and zoning and organization. Getting sites is a business heavy on shoe leather – signing deals, getting approvals and laying cables. Who is going to do all that work?

For years, the US carriers have been slowly exiting the tower business. Today, a large share of cell sites are owned by 3rd party tower companies like Crown Castle and American Tower. This is an efficient way of doing things. The tower companies can specialize in local work (and have tax efficient corporate structures to boot), while the carriers can focus on what they do best, like running a network. Unfortunately, the tower companies do not have enough sites for 5G either. One tower company recently boasted they have 70,000 small sites in their portfolio. That sounds like a big number, and to their credit it is, but in the context of needing a million or two new sites, it is a drop in the bucket.

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In case you were planning to use 5G for our next entrant, below.
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Is anyone watching Quibi? • Vulture

Benjamin Wallace with a huge in-depth piece on how the 10-minutes-per-episode-only-on-mobile app/business got set up by Jeff Katzenberg, one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, and Meg Whitman, who retired from eBay:

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People have wondered why Katzenberg and Whitman, in their late and early 60s, respectively, and not very active on social media, would believe they have uniquely penetrating insight into the unacknowledged desires of young people. When I ask Whitman what TV shows she watches, she responds, “I’m not sure I’d classify myself as an entertainment enthusiast.” But any particular shows she likes? “Grant,” she offered. “On the History Channel. It’s about President Grant.”

Katzenberg is on his phone all the time, but he is also among the moguls of his generation who have their emails printed out (and vertically folded, for some reason) by an assistant. In enthusing about what a show could mean for Quibi, Katzenberg would repeatedly invoke the same handful of musty touchstones — America’s Funniest Home Videos, Siskel and Ebert, and Jane Fonda’s exercise tapes. When Gal Gadot came to the offices and delivered an impassioned speech about wanting to elevate the voices of girls and women, Katzenberg wondered aloud whether she might become the new Jane Fonda and do a workout series for Quibi. (“Apparently, her face fell,” says a person briefed on the meeting.)

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There are many other fabulous moments in the article, but this captures it beautifully.
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North Korea behind spate of Magecart attacks • Computer Weekly

Alex Scroxton:

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The North Korean state-sponsored Lazarus or Hidden Cobra advanced persistent threat (APT) group is almost certainly behind a spate of recent cyber attacks that saw the websites of multiple retailers, including Claire’s Accessories, compromised with the Magecart credit card skimmer, according to Sansec researcher Willem de Groot, who has been tracking the group.

North Korean APTs have previously tended to restrict their activity to financial services companies and South Korean cryptocurrency markets, but Sansec found that they have pivoted to targeting retail consumers in the US and Europe in a campaign that has been running for over 12 months.

De Groot told Computer Weekly it was likely that the activity was largely financially motivated – obtaining hard currency is suspected to be the prime motivation behind much of the threat activity originating from within the isolated, secretive and impoverished country.

De Groot said that with cards and CVV codes selling for between $5 and $30 on dark web forums, using Magecart could be a goldmine for the group.

This new discovery also marks something of a sea change for use of Magecart, which has traditionally been dominated by Russian and Indonesian hacking groups.

Sansec said Hidden Cobra probably managed to gain access to the store code of retailers through spearphishing attacks trying to obtain staff passwords. Once inside, they injected the malicious Magecart script into the store checkout page, from where the skimmer collected data input my customers, such as credit card numbers, and exfiltrated it to their server.

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Sounds like cryptocurrency isn’t paying off any more then. (Claire’s Accessories is a US-based company selling, well, accessories for women, whether named Claire or not.)
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How a Covid-19 vaccine could cost Americans dearly • The New York Times

Elisabeth Rosenthal:

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Manufacturers have traditionally claimed that only the lure of windfall profits would encourage them to take the necessary risks, since drug development is expensive and there’s no way of knowing whether they’re putting their money on a horse that will finish first, or scratch.

More recently they have justified high prices by comparing them to the costs they would prevent. Expensive hepatitis C drugs, they say, avoid the need for a $1m liver transplant. No matter that the comparison being made is to the highly inflated costs of treating disease in American hospitals.

Such logic would be disastrous if it were applied to a successful Covid vaccine. Covid-19 has shut down countless businesses, creating record-high unemployment. And the medical consequences of severe Covid-19 mean weeks of highly expensive intensive care.

“Maybe the economic value of the Covid vaccine is a trillion and even if the expense to the company was a billion. That’s 1,000 times return on investment,” said Dr. Schulman. “No economic theory would support that.”

…Medicare is not allowed to engage in price negotiations for medicines covered by its part D drug plan. The Food and Drug Administration, which will have to approve the manufacturer’s vaccine for use as ‘safe and effective,’ is not allowed to consider proposed cost. The panels that recommend approval of new drugs generally have no idea how they will be priced.

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A Covid-19 vaccine is going to be for the rich first, isn’t it. Not those who actually need it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Facebook and Twitter are suspending cooperation with data requests after Hong Kong introduced a new “security” law. CC-licensed photo by Jonathan van Smit 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. Again. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter suspend review of Hong Kong requests for user data • WSJ

Newley Purnell:

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Facebook and its WhatsApp messaging service, along with Twitter have suspended processing requests for user data from Hong Kong law-enforcement agencies following China’s imposition of a national-security law on the city.

WhatsApp is “pausing” such reviews “pending further assessment of the impact of the National Security Law, including formal human-rights due diligence and consultations with human-rights experts,” a WhatsApp spokeswoman said in response to a Wall Street Journal query Monday.

A spokeswoman for parent company Facebook said in a later statement that it was doing the same. “We believe freedom of expression is a fundamental human right and support the right of people to express themselves without fear for their safety or other repercussions,” the Facebook statement said.

Twitter later in a statement said it “paused” all data and information requests from Hong Kong authorities immediately when the law went into effect last week.

The moves have put U.S. technology titans on a potential collision course with Beijing, after China fast-tracked the national-security legislation that includes a provision mandating local authorities to take measures to supervise and regulate the city’s previously unfettered internet.

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Numbers:
• Twitter doesn’t seem ever to have handed over any data about Hong Kong;
• Facebook had 241 in the second half of 2019, of which it granted 46%. (That includes Instagram. WhatsApp doesn’t seem to have a separate transparency report, and I can’t figure out if Facebook includes it.)

Of course the small numbers don’t mean a lot. Things are going to change a lot with the new “security law”, which is basically a way to enforce Chinese law in Hong Kong – destroying the “one country, two systems” principle.
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Let juries review Facebook ads • The Atlantic

Jonathan Zittrain with a neat idea:

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while an independent oversight board might help with the interpretation of content policies, the job of fact-checking questionable ads is, naturally, fact-specific. The 2020 campaign could see the placement of hundreds of thousands of distinct ad campaigns—far more than Facebook’s oversight board could handle either directly or on some kind of appeal. And there won’t be easy consensus—outside of those obviously deceptive vote-next-Wednesday messages—around what’s “demonstrably false.” That’s not a reason not to vet the ads, especially when the ability to adapt and target them in so many configurations makes it difficult for an opposing candidate or fact-checking third party to catch up to them and rebut them. Instead, we should be thinking as boldly as we can about process.

That brings us back to juries. For all that people might disparage them, and try to avoid serving on them, that small group of citizens has been designed to play a vital role in the high-stakes administration of justice, not as much because 12 randos have special expertise, but because they stand in for the rest of us: I might not agree with what they did, but I wasn’t there, and they heard the evidence, and next time it could be me asked to play their role.

In that spirit, why shouldn’t public librarians be asked in small panels, real or virtually convened, to evaluate ads? Today only 33% of Americans have trust in the news media, but 78% trust libraries to help them find information that is “trustworthy and reliable.”

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There would be tons and tons and tons of ads, so I guess people would have to be instantly co-opted into juries to make decisions. Maybe that would be the CAPTCHA on logging into Facebook – “is this ad valid?” Though I’m not sure how much you could trust the decision. It could just be random, get-rid-of-it response.

(Via John Naughton.)
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Trump, Twitter, Facebook, and the future of online speech • The New Yorker

Anna Wiener on the American legislative debate around Section 230, which exempts online platforms from liability for content their users post:

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Ultimately, the problems that need solving may not be ones of content moderation. In the book “Platform Capitalism,” published in 2017, the economist Nick Srnicek explores the reliance of digital platforms on “network effects,” in which value increases for both users and advertisers as a service expands its pool of participants and suite of offerings.

Network effects, Srnicek writes, orient platforms toward monopolization; monopolization, in turn, makes it easier for a single tweet to be an extension of state power, or for a single thirty-six-year-old entrepreneur, such as Zuckerberg, to influence the speech norms of the global digital commons. Both outcomes might be less likely if there were other places to go. The business model common to many social-media platforms, meanwhile, is itself an influence over online speech. Advertisers are attracted by data about users; that data is created through the constant production and circulation of user-generated content; and so controversial content, which keeps users posting and sharing, is valuable. From this perspective, Donald Trump is an ideal user of Twitter. A different kind of business might encourage a different kind of user.

Nothing about the current arrangement should be treated as inevitable; the commercial Internet is relatively young.

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It’s Super Saturday, the pubs are open and it’s a privacy nightmare • WIRED UK

Matt Burgess:

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Underpinning all these changes is the extra burden placed on businesses which have to spend time and money on putting these systems in place. But there’s one government request to pubs that carries risks to customer’s privacy and poses a data-heavy bureaucratic problem for landlords. They’ve been asked to record customer details that can be used as part of the NHS Test and Trace scheme, which can be used to identify people in the result of an outbreak.

The idea is simple but the execution is tough. The government says pubs, restaurants and cafes – as well as hotels, museums, cinemas, zoos and hairdressers when they reopen – should collect information about every single person who has visited.

This includes names, contact numbers, date of the visit and arrival and departure times and in the cases of businesses where customers only interact with one staff member. A group can provide just one phone number instead of contact details for everyone. However, when combined this data can give a sense of who individuals interact with, where and for how long. The data should be stored for 21 days and provided to the NHS if it is required.

The scheme is voluntary: neither businesses nor customers are required to collect or provide this information by law. But there’s plenty of potential for things to go wrong.

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The cartoonist Matt, in the Daily Telegraph, depicted how this would go: the landlord saying “It’s going to be fun contacting Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Spartacus and Joris Bohnson if there’s a problem later.” (Thanks G for the link.)
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Nokia, hurt by costly 5G chip mistake, struggles to catch Huawei • WSJ

Stu Woo:

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Nokia selected the type of chip it thought would work best before an important technical debate had been settled, Mr. Uitto said. A telecom-industry consortium that included Nokia hadn’t finalized the standards for how cellular antennas should communicate with phones and other devices.

Nokia had two options. One is called a “system-on-chip,” or SoC. Advantage: It is power efficient and cheap to make. Disadvantage: Once the chip is made, it is difficult to reprogram. If Nokia ordered a supply of SoC chips and then 5G standards didn’t support them, the company would have a bunch of useless chips.

The other option was the so-called field-programmable gate array, or FPGA, chip. Its advantage was flexibility. An FPGA can be reprogrammed after it goes into an antenna. Nokia could start making antennas with the chips, and wireless carriers could reprogram them to suit whatever 5G standards would be adopted later.

Nokia focused on the more expensive FPGA. When the development of 5G accelerated, and standards crystallized sooner than expected, around 2018, Nokia realized it had too many FPGA chips and not enough of the cheaper ones [SoCs] that Huawei and Ericsson had bet on.

The FPGA was like “buying a car with a lot of features that you don’t use,” said Sandro Tavares, Nokia’s head of mobile marketing. The SoC, meanwhile, “has exactly what you need, so you’re not spending that much money there.”

One European telecom executive said the price tag for certain Nokia equipment was double that of products by Huawei and Ericsson using the SoC chips. Nokia executives say the price difference for high-volume products was typically between 5% to 15%. Nokia products using the FPGA chip also used more energy, a downside for wireless carriers trying to cut down power consumption.

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De-escalating social media • Nick Punt

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Social media has a conflict problem.

Spending even a few minutes on public social media can expose us to dozens of people we know little about, talking about things we know little about. In such a public place, any individual’s reputation, perspectives, and history are difficult to ascertain, and therefore their words must be taken at face value. Coupled with an almost complete lack of standards for participation in the community and a high degree of variance in knowledge among participants, and the environment naturally skews toward conflict and tribalism.

One particular effect of this environment is that small misunderstandings, mistakes, or disagreements can unexpectedly explode due to the public nature of discourse and assumptions of bad faith. Meanwhile, very few tools exist to moderate these effects.

This is why it’s my belief that as designed today, social media is out of balance. It is far easier to escalate than it is to de-escalate, and this is a major problem that companies like Twitter and Facebook need to address.

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He makes a lot of good points, though it’s hard to see many people climbing down from things – it’s not as if that happens now even given the chance. The option to say “I was wrong” and then turn off replies would be good – but verified users now can choose to turn off replies and effectively insist they’re right.

His mockups are for Twitter. The dynamics on Facebook are rather different, I think.
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Ex-MI6 chief: the UK should bar Huawei from its 5G network • Financial Times

John Sawers is a former head of MI6:

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The Trump administration’s motives for trying to destroy Huawei can be debated. But the latest US sanctions, at the end of June and last week, mean that reliable non-Chinese suppliers to Huawei can no longer work with the company. UK intelligence services can therefore no longer provide the needed assurances that Chinese-made equipment is still safe to use in the UK’s telecoms network.

There are now sound technical reasons for the UK to change January’s decision, which would have allowed Huawei to have an up to 35% stake in the UK’s 5G market, and exclude the company instead. The security assessment is now different because the facts have changed. It helps Boris Johnson that its conclusion points in the same direction as the political pressure from Conservative members of parliament. Reportedly, a fresh decision on Huawei is expected in the next two weeks. 

The interesting question is whether Mr Johnson’s decision to exclude Huawei from UK 5G will be justified purely on technical grounds, and leave Huawei itself to decide whether to go ahead with its planned £1bn Cambridgeshire facility. Or if Mr Johnson uses the moment to set out a comprehensive strategy that puts limits on Chinese investment in the UK.

I suspect the UK government — preoccupied by Covid-19, the deep economic recession and the Brexit negotiations — has no bandwidth to come up with a considered, new strategy. But its first response on Hong Kong, especially its open-door offer to almost 3m Hong Kong citizens, suggests there will be a sharper-edged approach. 

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The shift against China in the past couple of years has been quite something to watch. Question to consider: how would Hillary Clinton have handled what’s going on? I think the US would have ended up taking the same action against ZTE (and stuck to it) and then Huawei – that had been brewing for a long time. Hong Kong though is quite a wild card in all this.
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Six months of pandemic photography • Science Mag: Visuals

Emily Petersen:

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Back in early March, we had already spent 2 months covering the COVID-19 outbreak. The team gathered for the morning news meeting, many joining by video conference. “I’m surprised you’re all still in the office. I bet by the end of the week they’ll send everyone home,” Science’s infectious disease reporter declared ominously from the large video screen on the wall.

Science’s offices closed 3 days later. With the pandemic hitting the Washington, D.C., area our staff began working from home.

It’s been six months since the virus emerged. Over that time, as senior photo editor, I’ve pored through thousands of pictures documenting the effects of this historical crisis.

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They’re all remarkable photos in their way. I think the one I found most captured the surreal nature of the time was the one captioned “A teacher prepares a tablet showing a student’s image for a ‘cybergraduation’ ceremony at a high school in Manila, Philippines, as social distancing continued.” But you might find something else that grabs your attention – the gym users inside plastic shrouds, perhaps.

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Telegram to pay SEC fine of $18.5m and return $1.2bn to investors as it dissolves TON • TechCrunch

Jonathan Shieber:

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Pavel Durov’s grand cryptocurrency dreams for his Telegram messaging service are ending with an $18.5m civil settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and a pledge to return the more than $1.2bn that investors had put into its TON digital token.

The settlement ends a months long legal battle between the company and the regulator. In October 2019 the SEC filed a complaint against Telegram alleging the company had raised capital through the sale of 2.9 billion Grams to finance its business. The SEC sought to enjoin Telegram from delivering the Grams it sold, which the regulator alleged were securities. In March, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York agreed with the SEC and issued a preliminary injunction.

In May, Telegram announced that it was shutting down the TON initiative.

…[The SEC said:] “Our emergency action protected retail investors from Telegram’s attempt to flood the markets with securities sold in an unregistered offering without providing full disclosures concerning their project,” said Lara Shalov Mehraban, associate regional director of the New York Regional Office.

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Sure to be plenty more like this, aren’t there?
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Who is the mystery shopper leaving behind thousands of online shopping carts? • WSJ

Paul Ziobro:

»

Shawn Bercuson perks up at the mention of John Smith. The chief executive of FinnBin Inc. first spotted the shopper on his site, which sells Scandinavian-inspired boxes for newborns to sleep in, over a year ago.

At first, he thought it was a corporate client—the address was in the heart of Silicon Valley—ready to make a large order, a gift to new parents. But as more orders popped up from John Smith, he wondered whether a competitor was collecting pricing and other information from his site.

“Then it started getting out of hand,” Mr. Bercuson said. “The amount of abandoned carts we got were just insane.” In May, he said, John Smith started and walked away from 73 orders.

A part of the original team that founded Groupon Inc., Mr. Bercuson traffics in analytics to make business decisions from advertising to website design. John Smith fouled that up. When shoppers abandon carts, websites typically send an automated email prodding them to finish the purchase. The dozens of emails to John Smith distort the numbers, as does false shopping traffic.

“I want to know what is working and what’s not,” he said.

He turned to message boards for other online merchants to see if he was John Smith’s only target. He quickly found out he wasn’t, but nobody had answers.

Jeffrey Gornstein thinks of John Smith every day. His site, ComfortHouse.com, which sells home goods such as address plaques and other personalized gifts, has been warned by its email provider about sending emails to nonexistent accounts, due to all the follow-ups sent to John Smith, which bounce back as undeliverable. Every time he gets a readout of recent sales, he scans to see if his foe has visited. He then logs into his email platform to deactivate all the fictitious entries from John Smith.

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Turns out that John Smith is a Googlebot checking prices, to make sure the cart prices match the advertised ones. Smart, even if it does screw up sites’ statistics.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Seems we have these folks – the Neanderthals – to blame for some susceptibility to SARS-Cov-2. CC-licensed photo by Allan Henderson 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. Restart! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

239 experts with one big claim: the coronavirus is airborne • The New York Times

Apoorva Mandavilli:

»

The coronavirus is finding new victims worldwide, in bars and restaurants, offices, markets and casinos, giving rise to frightening clusters of infection that increasingly confirm what many scientists have been saying for months: The virus lingers in the air indoors, infecting those nearby.

If airborne transmission is a significant factor in the pandemic, especially in crowded spaces with poor ventilation, the consequences for containment will be significant. Masks may be needed indoors, even in socially-distant settings. Health care workers may need N95 masks that filter out even the smallest respiratory droplets as they care for coronavirus patients.

Ventilation systems in schools, nursing homes, residences and businesses may need to minimize recirculating air and add powerful new filters. Ultraviolet lights may be needed to kill viral particles floating in tiny droplets indoors.

The World Health Organization has long held that the coronavirus is spread primarily by large respiratory droplets that, once expelled by infected people in coughs and sneezes, fall quickly to the floor.

But in an open letter to the W.H.O., 239 scientists in 32 countries have outlined the evidence showing that smaller particles can infect people, and are calling for the agency to revise its recommendations. The researchers plan to publish their letter in a scientific journal next week.

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This surfaced over the weekend and has created a furore, science-wise. The implication is that if you’re not outdoors, you’re at risk (at least if people aren’t all using masks). Remember the restaurant that helped infect three different families? It’s essentially that.
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DNA linked to Covid-19 was inherited from Neanderthals, study finds • The New York Times

Carl Zimmer:

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“This interbreeding effect that happened 60,000 years ago is still having an impact today,” said Joshua Akey, a geneticist at Princeton University who was not involved in the new study.

This piece of the genome, which spans six genes on Chromosome 3, has had a puzzling journey through human history, the study found. The variant is now common in Bangladesh, where 63% of people carry at least one copy. Across all of South Asia, almost one-third of people have inherited the segment.

Elsewhere, however, the segment is far less common. Only 8% of Europeans carry it, and just 4% have it in East Asia. It is almost completely absent in Africa.

It’s not clear what evolutionary pattern produced this distribution over the past 60,000 years. “That’s the $10,000 question,” said Hugo Zeberg, a geneticist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden who was one of the authors of the new study.

One possibility is that the Neanderthal version is harmful and has been getting rarer over all. It’s also possible that the segment improved people’s health in South Asia, perhaps providing a strong immune response to viruses in the region.

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Un-peer-reviewed, it’s worth saying. Although the top line is that it makes you more vulnerable to severe illness, the much higher occurrence in Asia and lower in Europe argues the other way.

But if it is dangerous, then it’s the best example of revenge being a dish best served cold. Quite the move there, Neanderthals. (Thanks G for the link.)
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How Facebook has flattened human communication • OneZero

David Auerbach, writing in 2018:

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The conclusions and impact of data analyses more often flow from the classifications under which the data has been gathered than from the data itself. When Facebook groups people together in some category like “beer drinkers” or “fashion enthusiasts,” there isn’t some essential trait to what unifies the people in that group. Like Google’s secret recipe, Facebook’s classification has no actual secret to it. It is just an amalgam of all the individual factors that, when summed, happened to trip the category detector. Whatever it was that caused Facebook to decide I had an African-American “ethnic affinity” (was it my Sun Ra records?), it’s not anything that would clearly cause a human to decide that I have such an affinity.

What’s important, instead, is that such a category exists, because it dictates how I will be treated in the future. The name of the category — whether “African American,” “ethnic minority,” “African descent,” or “black” — is more important than the criteria for the category. Facebook’s learned criteria for these categories would significantly overlap, yet the ultimate classification possesses a distinctly different meaning in each case. But the distinction between criteria is obscured. We never see the criteria, and very frequently this criteria is arbitrary or flat-out wrong. The choice of classification is more important than how the classification is performed.

«

The way that we’re reduced to bits is easy to forget, but it’s part of why these systems distort our existences so much.
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Spies, lies, and stonewalling: what it’s like to report on Facebook • Columbia Journalism Review

Jacob Silverman:

»

In conversations with more than fifteen journalists and industry observers, I tried to understand what it is like to cover Facebook. What I found was troublesome: operating with the secrecy of an intelligence agency and the authority of a state government, Facebook has arrogated to itself vast powers while enjoying, until recently, limited journalistic scrutiny. (Some journalists, like The Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr, have done important work linking Facebook data to political corruption in the UK and elsewhere.) Media organizations have stepped up their game, but they suffer from a lack of access, among other power asymmetries.

Many journalists contacted for this story declined to talk out of fear of hurting relationships with Facebook’s communications shop. A number of journalists agreed to be interviewed, only to pass after speaking to their editors and PR reps. Some spoke to me off the record.

Nearly everyone I talked to acknowledged that the relationship between Facebook and journalists had dramatically deteriorated in recent years. It wasn’t long ago, after all, that Facebook and its comms shop was, for many journalists, a valued source.

«

I can’t think of a time when I thought of Facebook as a valued source. Certainly though in my experience it moved, exactly like Google, from being eager to talk up new products and give on-the-record briefings about those things, to being secretive and reactive. The shift wasn’t just about going public; there was also a size element (harder to coordinate things), and numerous scandals (for Google and Facebook) which subsequently made them wary of answering questions.

It’s a great piece, this.
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New Trump appointee puts global internet freedom at risk, critics say • The New York Times

Pranshu Verma and Edward Wong:

»

In less than a decade, the Open Technology Fund has quietly become integral to the world’s repressed communities. Over two billion people in 60 countries rely on tools developed and supported by the fund, like Signal and Tor, to connect to the internet securely and send encrypted messages in authoritarian societies.

After Mr. Pack was confirmed for his new post on June 4, following a personal campaign of support by President Trump, Mr. Pack fired the technology group’s top officials and bipartisan board, an action now being fought in the courts. A federal judge on Thursday ruled in Mr. Pack’s favor, a decision that plaintiffs will likely appeal.

On Friday, Mr. Pack appointed an interim chief executive, James M. Miles, to head the fund, according to a letter obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Miles is little known in the internet freedom community, and his appointment needs approval from the fund’s new board, which is stacked with Trump administration officials and chaired by Mr. Pack.

The move was a victory for a lobbying effort backed by religious freedom advocates displeased with the fund’s work and who are often allied with conservative political figures.

This battle revolves around software developed by Falun Gong, the secretive spiritual movement persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party.

«

At this point the story takes quite a weird turn, but the key point is that the OTF has always pushed open source software, because it’s easier to spread to countries, easier to verify. (Signal and Tor have been pushed by the OTF.) The bonkers group pushing at Pack wants him to boost a closed-source app. That creates all sorts of risks from fakes and man-in-the-middle attacks.

Every one of these political appointments makes the US that little bit worse.
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iOS 14: iCloud Keychain now alerts users about leaked passwords, more • 9to5Mac

Filipe Espósito:

»

If you’re not familiar with iCloud Keychain, it stores and syncs all your passwords from different websites and apps through iCloud. Users can access the iCloud Keychain with an iPhone or iPad by opening the Settings app and then tapping the Passwords menu.

With iOS 14, Apple offers a new “Security Recommendations” menu that shows only your passwords that could put your accounts at risk for some reason. This includes passwords that are easy to guess and even those that may have leaked on the web.

iCloud Keychain now clarifies what the problem is with the password for each specific account saved there, so users can learn more about creating stronger passwords. Some of these features were already present in iOS 13, but they weren’t as prominent as in iOS 14.

Here are some examples of security alerts provided by iCloud Keychain on iOS 14:
• Many people use this password, which makes it easy to guess.
• This password is easy to guess.
• This password uses a sequence, “123”. Using commom patterns makes passwords easy to guess.

There’s a new alert in particular that’s also one of the most important for users. According to Apple, iCloud Keychain now verifies if your passwords are involved in a data breach.

«

Though that last one will probably mean you’ll get an alert all the time if you’ve signed in many places. Data breaches are more than an everyday occurrence.
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Google-backed groups criticize Apple’s new warnings on user tracking • Reuters

Stephen Nellis and Paresh Dave:

»

Apple last week disclosed features in its forthcoming operating system for iPhones and iPads that will require apps to show a pop-up screen before they enable a form of tracking commonly needed to show personalized ads.

Sixteen marketing associations, some of which are backed by Facebook and Alphabet’s Google, faulted Apple for not adhering to an ad-industry system for seeking user consent under European privacy rules. Apps will now need to ask for permission twice, increasing the risk users will refuse, the associations argued.

Facebook and Google are the largest among thousands of companies that track online consumers to pick up on their habits and interests and serve them relevant ads.

Apple said the new feature was aimed at giving users greater transparency over how their information is being used. In training sessions at a developer conference last week, Apple showed that developers can present any number of additional screens beforehand to explain why permission is needed before triggering its pop-up.

«

Nobody’s going to say “yes, track me everywhere!” For the small adtech companies, it’s going to be a test of whether they really do need to do tracking to earn their money.
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NewsGuard: The internet trust tool

»

Get detailed ratings of more than 4,500 news websites that account for 95% of online engagement with news. See ratings displayed as icons next to links on all the major search engines, social media sites, and platforms.

See who’s behind each site and whether it has a record of publishing accurate information. Learn how each site fares on the nine journalistic standards NewsGuard uses to assess each site.

Get warnings on new trending misinformation sites as they are flagged and rated by NewsGuard’s 24/7 rapid response SWAT team.

[But] NewsGuard is exclusively for personal use, for use by journalists reporting on misinformation, or for use by our school and library partners. Any use of NewsGuard’s data by researchers, or any commercial use, including by moderators, coders and others at technology platforms, search providers or other companies, is strictly prohibited unless expressly permitted…

«

Interesting project. Browser extensions for Edge, Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Mobile apps for iOS and Android. It rates Gateway Pundit as “completely full of crap” (I paraphrase). Not free: it’s £2.95 per month.
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MIT apologizes, permanently pulls offline huge dataset that taught AI systems to use racist, misogynistic slurs • The Register

Katyanna Quach:

»

MIT has taken offline its highly cited dataset that trained AI systems to potentially describe people using racist, misogynistic, and other problematic terms.

The database was removed this week after The Register alerted the American super-college. MIT also urged researchers and developers to stop using the training library, and to delete any copies. “We sincerely apologize,” a professor told us.

The training set, built by the university, has been used to teach machine-learning models to automatically identify and list the people and objects depicted in still images. For example, if you show one of these systems a photo of a park, it might tell you about the children, adults, pets, picnic spreads, grass, and trees present in the snap. Thanks to MIT’s cavalier approach when assembling its training set, though, these systems may also label women as whores or bitches, and Black and Asian people with derogatory language. The database also contained close-up pictures of female genitalia labeled with the C-word.

Applications, websites, and other products relying on neural networks trained using MIT’s dataset may therefore end up using these terms when analyzing photographs and camera footage.

«

An old but much-used AI picture training database, dating back to the early 2000s, where nobody had actually bothered (we have to assume) to check quite how the content was labelled. Until these researchers did.
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Facebook admits Ben Shapiro is breaking its rules • Popular Information

Judd Legum:

»

Last week, Popular Information exposed how The Daily Wire has gained unprecedented distribution on Facebook through its relationship with Mad World News. Five large Facebook pages controlled by Mad World News expanded The Daily Wire’s audience by millions through the coordinated posting of dozens of links from The Daily Wire each day. 

Facebook previously said it had looked into the matter, found no evidence of a violation, and could not prove a financial relationship. The company now admits the two publishers are working together.

“After further investigation, we’ve found that these Pages violate our policies against undisclosed paid relationships between publishers. Our enforcement typically focuses on the Page distributing the cross-promoted content, which is why we are temporarily demoting Mad World News. We are also warning Daily Wire and will demote them if we see this behavior continue,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

«

Legum is chipping away, very gradually but thoroughly, at Shapiro’s little empire of paid-for Facebook echo chambers. (Facebook’s policy: “Facebook pages cannot ‘accept anything of value to post content that you did not create.'”) This is the first takedown, and more will surely follow.

Of course, far too difficult for Facebook, with its gigantic systems, to spot that someone’s posts always get echoed at precisely the same time across a whole ton of Pages. It needs one person asking difficult questions – and even then Facebook initially denied there was a problem.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Google’s $2.1bn acquisition of Fitbit is being held up by by regulators. Perhaps forever CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart 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. Another one down. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The rabbit outbreak • The New Yorker

Susan Orlean:

»

One of the lagoviruses of the family Caliciviridae causes a highly contagious illness called rabbit hemorrhagic disease. RHD is vexingly hard to diagnose. An infected rabbit might experience vague lethargy, or a high fever and difficulty breathing, or it might exhibit no symptoms at all. Regardless of the symptoms, though, the mortality rate for RHD can reach a gloomy hundred%. There is no treatment for it. The virus’s ability to survive and spread is uncanny. It can persist on dry cloth with no host for more than a hundred days; it can withstand freezing and thawing; it can thrive in a dead rabbit for months, and on rabbit pelts, and in the wool made from Angora-rabbit fur, and in the rare rabbit that gets infected but survives. It can travel on birds’ claws and flies’ feet and coyotes’ fur. Its spread has been so merciless and so devastating that some pet owners have begun referring to it as “rabbit Ebola.”

…In the universe of human-animal relations, rabbits occupy a liminal space. They are the only creatures we regularly keep as pets in our homes that we also, just as regularly, eat or wear. Fitting into both the companion-animal category and the livestock category means that rabbits are not entirely claimed by either. A number of animal statutes—particularly, felony-cruelty provisions—are specific to dogs and cats, but not to rabbits. Laws protecting livestock, such as the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, don’t apply to rabbits, either, even rabbits being raised for meat, because the U.S.D.A. does not officially recognize them as livestock. There is probably no other animal that is viewed as diversely, and valued as differently, by its various partisans. Simply being a rabbit person doesn’t mean that you look at rabbits the same way as another self-identified rabbit person. Any of the almost twenty thousand members of the American Rabbit Breeders Association are just as likely to be raising a prized Jersey Wooly that sleeps in their bed and is primped for rabbit shows as they are to have hundreds of caged rabbits that will end up as stew.

A few years ago, a lawyer named Natalie Reeves, who volunteers at a rabbit shelter and has lectured on rabbit law at the New York City Bar Association, was having trouble untangling the hair of her pet long-haired rabbit, Mopsy McGillicuddy. She found an Internet group for long-haired-rabbit owners, and posted about Mopsy’s hair troubles, expecting tips on conditioners and brushes. On the site, she noticed that a common response to similar problems was to kill the rabbit and start fresh with another.

«

This is an amazing tale. Give it your time.
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Facebook says the good it does outweighs the bad. But how many Likes make up for the hate? • The Guardian

Julia Carrie Wong, with a really powerful piece questioning the calculus of Likes:

»

I’m not saying that Facebook is solely responsible for the actions of every hate-addled individual who harassed me, let alone for the decisions made by [Heather] Heyer’s murderer [at the far-right rally in Charlottesville] or Myanmar’s military.

But I do think that Facebook played a role in creating the conditions necessary for those things to happen. I think that not because I am a bitter and cynical reporter who is chasing clicks with outrage, but because over and over and over again reporters, researchers and activists have documented the real and devastating costs of Facebook’s algorithmic negligence and record of accommodating hate.

So when I hear Facebook touting all the good it has supposedly done for the world, I want to know just how it’s making that accounting, because I’m not prepared to say that it’s enough.

Hate is an existential threat to the people it targets, but it’s no threat at all to Facebook. The only existential threat to a $650bn multinational corporation is a threat to its revenues. That’s where the real calculations are taking place right now at Facebook. When hate hurt people, Facebook did nothing. Now that it’s hurting Facebook, we’ll see what it really values.

«

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Facebook to shut down experimental apps Hobbi, Lasso • CNET

Alexandra Garrett:

»

Facebook is shutting down experimental apps Hobbi and Lasso. Users reportedly received notifications that each app will be closing up shop as of July 10.

Hobbi, developed by Facebook’s New Product Experimentation team, launched in February for iOS as a Pinterest-like app for organizing and saving photos of personal projects such as baking, ceramics, gardening, arts & crafts and more. From these photos, users could share videos of their projects with friends and family. 

Facebook confirmed that the NPE team will be shutting down its hobby focused app.

“Many of NPE’s products start small,” said a Facebook spokesperson on Wednesday. “We expect to have to shut down apps when they’re not catching on, but we also hope to learn from these experiments so that we can build better, more interesting apps in the future.”

Lasso was released over a year and a half ago, before the launch of the NPE team in 2019. The app lets users record 15-second long videos to share with friends. Lasso also includes video-editing tools to help users add music and text to their videos, similar to the social app TikTok. Facebook has since added a similar short-form video feature to Instagram, called Reels.

«

Quite a thing if Facebook has realised that it can’t compete with TikTok.
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Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg should change amid ad boycott pressure • Bloomberg

Tae Kim and Alex Webb:

»

antitrust is far more of an existential threat to Facebook than is regulation. That’s not simply because it could, in the most extreme circumstances, result in a breakup of the company. It’s because antitrust by definition seeks to tackle its business practices.

Just last week, Germany’s highest civil court ruled that Facebook must stop logging browsing activity outside of its platforms without users’ explicit permission, and that such permission couldn’t be a condition of using its other services. Crucially, though, the decision was based not on data protection but antitrust laws. It said Facebook was abusing its market power to force users to accept the terms because it is the dominant social network. And the ruling fundamentally attacked the company’s business model, which is built on using such data to target ads effectively. An effort by Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority is even less ambiguous: it’s carrying out a study into online platforms and digital advertising.

While the UK is no longer a member of the European Union, the bloc’s regulators are following the findings of the study closely. After years of tackling Google, Facebook is now high on the European agenda. The two firms’ dominance of digital advertising is fueled by their low incremental costs. Tackle their business models, and you might resolve the harmful content problem, runs the argument. The EU plans new rules by the end of the year on content regulation and platform liability, while Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s antitrust and tech chief, is seeking new powers to break companies up.

«

(Style note: Bloomberg calls the United Kingdom “U.K.” but the European Union “EU”. I removed the full stops. But why is the EU just EU to Bloomberg yet the UK is U.K.?)
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EU signals deeper investigation of Google Fitbit deal • Financial Times

Javier Espinoza:

»

EU regulators have sent two questionnaires, adding up to around 60 pages, asking Google and Fitbit’s rivals whether the deal will damage competition, disadvantage other fitness tracking apps in Google’s Play Store, or give Google more profiling data to improve its online search and advertising businesses.

The questionnaires also ask rivals to assess the impact of the deal on Google’s growing digital healthcare business.

Separately, 20 consumer groups, including Europe’s umbrella consumer organisation BEUC and the Consumer Federation of America, issued a warning about the deal on Thursday.

“Regulators must assume that Google will in practice utilise the entirety of Fitbit’s currently independent unique, highly sensitive data set in combination with its own, particularly as this could increase its profits, or they must impose strict and enforceable limitations on data use,” they said, in a joint statement.

The detail of the questions posed by the EU suggests that Brussels is gearing up for an extended investigation and may block the transaction, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

«

This acquisition is crawling along. It was announced in November 2019; still hasn’t happened. Australia’s competition commission is looking at this too. They’re concerned that it’s a one-way street for data, and that Google will get too much of it.
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UK regulators take aim at Apple’s search engine deal with Google • Reuters

Stephen Nellis:

»

The payments by Alphabet Inc’s Google to Apple Inc to be the default search engine on Apple’s Safari web browser create “a significant barrier to entry and expansion” for Google’s rivals in the search engine market, the UK markets regulator said in a report released on Wednesday.

Apple received the “substantial majority” of the £1.2bn ($1.5bn) that Google paid to be the default search engine on a variety of devices in the United Kingdom in 2019, according to the report.

The UK Competition and Markets Authority, in its final report investigating online platforms and digital advertising, said the arrangements between Apple and Google create “a significant barrier to entry and expansion” for Google’s rivals in the search engine market. Those rivals include Microsoft Corp’s Bing, Verizon Communications Inc-owned Yahoo and independent search engine DuckDuckGo, all of which also make payments to Apple in exchange for being search engine options on its devices, the report said.

«

The full report is really very interesting. Lots of data, plenty of graphs. Not short, though. Tantalising detail – such as how much Google’s search share would drop if it was forced to give up the iPhone default – are missing though.
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ThiefQuest Mac malware includes ransomware, data theft capabilities • SecurityWeek.Com

Eduard Kovacs:

»

at the time of writing it is detected by over a dozen engines.

Malwarebytes has seen the malware being distributed as trojanized installers for popular macOS applications, including the Little Snitch firewall, the Mixed In Key and Ableton DJ apps, and a Google software update.

Patrick Wardle, a researcher who specializes in the security of Apple products, pointed out that since these installers are not signed, macOS alerts users before opening them, but people who download pirated software are likely to ignore the warning and install the malware on their device.

Wardle has published a detailed analysis of how ThiefQuest is installed, how it achieves persistence and its capabilities. Once the malware has been deployed, it starts encrypting certain types of files found on the system, including archives, images, audio and video files, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, databases and web files.

It then drops a text file informing users that their files have been encrypted and instructs them to pay $50 in bitcoin to recover them. A summary of the ransom note is also displayed in a modal window and its content is read out using the speech feature in macOS.

«

Basically, people think they’re getting a pirated (free!) version of paid software, and get more than they expected. Life advice: don’t look into the egg when it opens for you.
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FakeSpy masquerades as postal service apps around the world • Cybereason

Ofir Almkias:

»

The Cybereason Nocturnus team is investigating a new campaign involving FakeSpy, an Android mobile malware that emerged around October 2017. FakeSpy is an information stealer used to steal SMS messages, send SMS messages, steal financial data, read account information and contact lists, steal application data, and do much more.

FakeSpy first targeted South Korean and Japanese speakers. However, it has begun to target users all around the world, especially users in countries like China, Taiwan, France, Switzerland, Germany, United Kingdom, United States, and others.

FakeSpy masquerades as legitimate postal service apps and transportation services in order to gain the users’ trust. Once installed, the application requests permissions so that it may control SMS messages and steal sensitive data on the device, as well as proliferate to other devices in the target device’s contact list.

Cybereason’s investigation shows that the threat actor behind the FakeSpy campaign is a Chinese-speaking group dubbed “Roaming Mantis”, a group that has led similar campaigns.

«

By “postal service”, they literally mean the services that deliver your post – this group has made fake apps pretending to be Royal Mail, Swiss Post, Deutsche Post, French La Poste, US Postal Service, and more. It’s kicked off by an SMS to your phone telling you there’s a package, and that you need to download an app – which it directs you to. The app is real, but fake, if you see what I mean. And then you have a real problem.

It asks for a million permissions, of course, but Android users have been inculcated into ignoring those and just saying yes, of course. (Thanks Jim for the link.)
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Uncovered: 1,000 phrases that incorrectly trigger Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

As Alexa, Google Home, Siri, and other voice assistants have become fixtures in millions of homes, privacy advocates have grown concerned that their near-constant listening to nearby conversations could pose more risk than benefit to users. New research suggests the privacy threat may be greater than previously thought.

The findings demonstrate how common it is for dialog in TV shows and other sources to produce false triggers that cause the devices to turn on, sometimes sending nearby sounds to Amazon, Apple, Google, or other manufacturers. In all, researchers uncovered more than 1,000 word sequences—including those from Game of Thrones, Modern Family, House of Cards, and news broadcasts—that incorrectly trigger the devices.

“The devices are intentionally programmed in a somewhat forgiving manner, because they are supposed to be able to understand their humans,” one of the researchers, Dorothea Kolossa, said. “Therefore, they are more likely to start up once too often rather than not at all.”

Examples of words or word sequences that provide false triggers include
• Alexa: “unacceptable,” “election,” and “a letter”
• Google Home: “OK, cool,” and “Okay, who is reading”
• Siri: “a city” and “hey jerry”
• Microsoft Cortana: “Montana”

«

So don’t watch Seinfeld with a Homepod or similar in the room. Got it. (Have never watched Seinfeld.)
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Google pushing scam ads on Americans searching for how to vote • Tech Transparency Project

»

Google is allowing scammers to prey on Americans seeking information about how to vote in the upcoming election, according to a Tech Transparency Project (TTP) analysis, undercutting the company’s claims that it’s helping people navigate the process of registering to vote, securing a mail-in ballot or finding their polling place.

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic is changing the way millions of Americans vote, and that makes access to accurate information about elections more important than ever. But citizens who turn to Google for answers could be discouraged or misled by scam ads that pop up as they search for how and where to vote in 2020.

TTP found that search terms like “register to vote,” “vote by mail,” and “where is my polling place” generated ads linking to websites that charge bogus fees for voter registration, harvest user data, or plant unwanted software on people’s browsers.

Such ads could have a suppressive effect on voters. Users searching for guidance about elections who instead find themselves on manipulative or confusing sites may eventually give up on finding the information they need. That’s a far cry from Google’s commitment to “protect our users from harm and abuse, especially during elections.” 

The ads identified by TTP appear to violate Google’s policies that prohibit misrepresentation, collecting user data for unclear purposes, and unwanted software. They may also run afoul of Federal Trade Commission regulations banning “unfair or deceptive advertising.”

«

OK, there are lots of ads to police, but you’d think if it’s important then Google would police it more closely.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Big advertisers are pulling ads from Facebook. Is that going to make any real difference, though? CC-licensed photo by Book Catalog 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. The Facebook edition. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

China’s software stalked Uighurs earlier and more widely, researchers learn • The New York Times

Paul Mozur and Nicole Perlroth:

»

The timeline [discovered by the security company Lookout] suggests the hacking campaign was an early cornerstone in China’s Uighur surveillance efforts that would later extend to collecting blood samples, voice prints, facial scans and other personal data to transform Xinjiang into a virtual police state. It also shows the lengths to which China’s minders were determined to follow Uighurs as they fled China for as many as 15 other countries.

The tools the hackers assembled hid in special keyboards used by Uighurs and disguised themselves as commonly used apps in third-party websites. Some could remotely turn on a phone’s microphone, record calls or export photos, phone locations and conversations on chat apps. Others were embedded in apps that hosted Uighur-language news, Uighur-targeted beauty tips, religious texts like the Quran and details of the latest Muslim cleric arrests.

“Wherever China’s Uighurs are going, however far they go, whether it was Turkey, Indonesia or Syria, the malware followed them there,” said Apurva Kumar, a threat intelligence engineer at Lookout who helped unravel the campaign. “It was like watching a predator stalk its prey throughout the world.”

«

The targeting goes back to 2013. Sometimes the police would physically take phones and install spyware. It’s shocking.
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Alexa, just shut up: We’ve been isolated for months, and now we hate our home assistants • The Washington Post

Travis Andrews:

»

Jennifer Wood-Thompson, an Indianapolis-based office manger, uses both Siri and Alexa for simple tasks such as creating shopping lists, checking the weather and playing music. She said, “My relationship with them has always been a little volatile, because sometimes they’re not cooperative. But being home for 2½ months definitely escalated it a little bit.” So, she added, “when you ask Alexa to turn on the light and she doesn’t do anything, I tend to just yell back her.”

For Zach Ratcheson, the breaking point came during a game of “Jeopardy!” he played on an Echo with his wife and two daughters, ages 10 and 13. They’re a pretty smart crew and kept offering the right answers, but Alexa couldn’t understand. Was it their Marietta, Ga., accents? Was she being purposely stubborn? Maybe the tech just isn’t where it needs to be? All he knows is that it’s infuriating.

“We were trying to make it a fun, non-TV activity for the whole family, but it kept telling us we were wrong, even though we weren’t,” Ratcheson said. “There was nothing more frustrating.”

That annoyance had been building for some time, particularly since he began working from home. Want to know what’s on Joe Scarborough’s Wikipedia page? Ratcheson probably knows it by heart, since Alexa often reads it to him when he wakes up early, puts coffee on, and asks “her” to play “Morning Joe.” Supposedly, Alexa can tell you when a package has reached the front door, but in reality, “the dog is better at it than that spinning yellow circle,” he said.

It feels like a broken pact. “You could hope it could evolve over time,” he said. The promise “of AI is that it’s supposed to get to know you and learn your habits over time, and it just never does.”

«

That thing about how it never learns is the real frustration. Even if a dog can’t turn the radio on, it does learn and it does show affection.
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Official COVID-19 count may underestimate deaths by 28% • UPI.com

Brian Dunleavy:

»

Official counts of COVID-19 cases in the United States may underestimate deaths by as much as 28%, according to an analysis published Wednesday by JAMA Internal Medicine.

From March 1 through May 30, an estimated 122,300 Americans died after being infected with the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, the researchers said. That’s higher than the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s tally of 95,235.

The difference is based on the researchers’ assessment of “excess deaths” across the country — the actual number of reported deaths compared to figures from the same period for the previous five years.”

There have been questions about whether the reported statistics overcount COVID-19 deaths, but our analyses suggest the opposite,” study co-author Daniel Weinberger, an associate professor of epidemiology at Yale University School of Medicine, told UPI.

«

Full paper here. But this is the nut.
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SoftBank seeks to end partnership with Wirecard • WSJ

Caitlin Ostroff and Margot Patrick:

»

SoftBank Group Corp. is looking to distance itself from Wirecard AG, after the Japanese tech conglomerate helped arrange a $1bn investment months before the German payments company went bust.

One of the world’s largest technology investors, SoftBank is seeking to terminate a five-year partnership its investment arm formed with Wirecard in April 2019, according to people familiar with the matter.

Wirecard declined to comment.

The partnership agreement called for SoftBank to introduce Wirecard as a digital payments provider to other companies in SoftBank’s sprawling portfolio of tech firms. SoftBank also agreed to help Wirecard expand in Japan and South Korea.

The partnership was struck in April 2019 at the same time that a SoftBank-run investment vehicle agreed to plow €900m ($1bn) into Wirecard through a convertible bond. It was an unusual deal in which SoftBank ended up not putting in any of its own money when it closed later that year.

«

Yet another bad decision by SoftBank. There were loads of warnings by then that this was a bad move. Though of course Credit Suisse, which jumped into this with both feet, bears some blame too.

I start to get a little itchy about ARM, which SoftBank bought some years ago.
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Want to stop hate? Fund facts, not Facebook • Snopes

The Snopes team:

»

Despite several years’ worth of public clamor for reform, Facebook — from our vantage point — has done little but begrudgingly undertake superficial changes to address the hate and misinformation proliferating on its platform. We have first-hand experience dealing with Facebook’s callous indifference to the real-world consequences of its business model.

We participated as a Facebook fact-checking “partner” for two years before we abandoned the role, sensing that the program effectively served as a public relations effort for Facebook, not as a genuine attempt to combat misinformation. When we pressed for changes, Facebook made it clear it was not interested in our suggestions.

Our investigative reporting has exposed vast networks of scammers and political schemers engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior on the platform. Facebook’s lack of cooperation and quiet deletion of the networks we’ve discovered plainly demonstrated it was unwilling to acknowledge the public harm enabled by its indifference.

We are relieved to see Facebook’s half measures and obfuscation tactics to address hate and misinformation are no longer being tolerated.

«

The Facebook fact-checking was pretty lucrative for Snopes: nearly half its revenue in 2018. But it dropped that in 2019 in favour of crowdfunding and reader contributions, which did better. The Facebook fact-checking was a terrible churn (I’ve been told by one who did it).
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Why Facebook is well placed to weather an advertising boycott • The Economist

»

Facebook’s share price has fallen by about 6% since the [Facebook advertising] boycott took off. If ad dollars go elsewhere, possible beneficiaries include smaller rivals like Snapchat, Pinterest and TikTok, as well as YouTube, owned by Google. Some advertisers may even go back to quaint things like newspapers and television, believes Andrew Lipsman of eMarketer, a research firm.

Yet the damage to Facebook is likely to be small. Its $70bn ad business is built on 8m advertisers, most of them tiny companies with marketing budgets in the hundreds or thousands of dollars and often reliant on Facebook as an essential digital storefront. The 100 largest advertisers on the site account for less than 20% of total revenue, compared with 71% for the 100 largest advertisers on American network television. And so far only three of Facebook’s top 50 ad-buyers have joined the boycott.

…On June 29th YouTube blocked various white-supremacist channels. Twitch, a video site, suspended President Donald Trump’s own channel for showing “hateful conduct”. Reddit deleted a forum, “The_Donald”, over hate speech.

This points to a pressure greater than advertising: politics. American tech firms have walked a fine line between Republicans, who accuse them of being too censorious, and Democrats, who want closer moderation. Now, as Mr Trump’s poll numbers swoon, Silicon Valley seem to be edging towards the Democratic view of things. Time, perhaps, to make new friends.

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Astute point about the politics. (Via John Naughton.)
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Facebook does not benefit from hate • About Facebook

Nick Clegg is Facebook’s vp of public affairs:

»

Facebook has come in for much criticism in recent weeks following its decision to allow controversial posts by President Trump to stay up, and misgivings on the part of many people, including companies that advertise on our platform, about our approach to tackling hate speech. I want to be unambiguous: Facebook does not profit from hate. Billions of people use Facebook and Instagram because they have good experiences — they don’t want to see hateful content, our advertisers don’t want to see it, and we don’t want to see it. There is no incentive for us to do anything but remove it.

More than 100 billion messages are sent on our services every day. That’s all of us, talking to each other, sharing our lives, our opinions, our hopes and our experiences. In all of those billions of interactions a tiny fraction are hateful. When we find hateful posts on Facebook and Instagram, we take a zero tolerance approach and remove them. When content falls short of being classified as hate speech — or of our other policies aimed at preventing harm or voter suppression — we err on the side of free expression because, ultimately, the best way to counter hurtful, divisive, offensive speech, is more speech.

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I disagree with Nick.
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Boogaloo ads have been making money for Facebook for months • Buzzfeed News

Ryan Mac and Caroline Haskins:

»

On Sunday, the @docscustomknives Instagram account placed an ad on the popular photo-sharing social network advocating that people “join the militia, fight the state.” As clips from action movies play, showing police officers being shot and killed, music blares with lyrics proclaiming, “We ain’t scared of no police / We got guns too.”

As of Tuesday afternoon, the ad was still online.

Several hashtags in the ad — including #Boogaloo, #BoogalooBois, and #BoogalooMemes — connect the ad to “Boogaloos,” a catchphrase for anti-government extremists who have called for violence against the police and state officials and advocated for another Civil War in the US.

A current ad on Instagram advocated that people “join the militia” and “fight the state,” while using hashtags associated with the extremist Boogaloo movement.

This ad is just one of several pieces of paid content related to the Boogaloo movement on Facebook and Instagram that were uncovered by BuzzFeed News; this is despite claims by Facebook that it was doing more to take action against the group.

The @docscustomknives may be the most recent, but it is far from the only Boogaloo ad that has run on Facebook or its photo-sharing site, Instagram. As right-wing extremists have used the company’s tools to organize, the world’s largest social network has also profited from ads pushing for white supremacy.

…Tech Transparency Project Director Katie Paul told BuzzFeed News that when Facebook accepted money from Boogaloo supporters and sympathizers, it amplified the movement.

“The company is not just failing to address the fact that its platform is really feeding this echo chamber of supporters, but also the fact that it’s profiting off that movement that is predicated on violence,” she said.

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Facebook says it doesn’t profit from hate speech. This gives the lie to that.
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Banning a violent network in the US • About Facebook

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Facebook designates non-state actors under our Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy after a rigorous process that takes into account both online and offline behavior. During this process, we work to identify an actor’s goals and whether they have a track record of offline violence. We know the initial elements of the boogaloo movement began as far back as 2012, and we have been closely following its developments since 2019. We understand that the term has been adopted by a range of anti-government activists who generally believe civil conflict in the US is inevitable.

…In order to make Facebook as inhospitable to this violent US-based anti-government network as possible, we conducted a strategic network disruption of their presence today removing 220 Facebook accounts, 95 Instagram accounts, 28 Pages and 106 groups that currently comprise the network. We have also removed over 400 additional groups and over 100 other Pages for violating our Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy as they hosted similar content as the violent network we disrupted but were maintained by accounts outside of it. As part of our designation process, we will now identify where we can strengthen how we enforce our policy against this banned network and spot attempts by the violent US anti-government network to return to our platform.

«

What Facebook doesn’t say in this is that the group is the “Boogaloo” movement, which is composed mainly of young white men, many of whom are white supremacists. The tracking was done by humans. Facebook’s recognising (finally) that it’s being used as a recruiting platform for these people.
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YouTube ​bans six big white nationalist channels • Right Wing Watch

Jared Holt:

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YouTube ​banned six accounts used by high-profile white nationalists on Monday. According to YouTube, the respective channels “repeatedly or egregiously violated our policies by alleging that members of protected groups were innately inferior to others, among other violations.”

The removed accounts include those ​owned by far-right political entertainer Stefan Molyneux, white nationalist outlets American Renaissance and Radix Journal, as well as longtime Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. YouTube also removed two associated channels: one belonging to alt-right poster boy Richard Spencer and another hosting American Renaissance podcasts.

“We have strict policies prohibiting hate speech on YouTube, and terminate any channel that repeatedly or egregiously violates those policies. After updating our guidelines to better address supremacist content, we saw a 5x spike in video removals and have terminated over 25,000 channels for violating our hate speech policies,” a YouTube spokesperson ​told Right Wing Watch in an email.

«

One has to ask: how come it took so long for YouTube to notice that Spencer is a notorious white nationalist? Or, jeepers, Duke?
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Experts predict more digital innovation by 2030 aimed at enhancing democracy • Pew Research Center

»

A large share of experts and analysts worry that people’s technology use will mostly weaken core aspects of democracy and democratic representation in the coming decade. Yet they also foresee significant social and civic innovation between now and 2030 to try to address emerging issues.

In this new report, technology experts who shared serious concerns for democracy in a recent Pew Research Center canvassing weigh in with their views about the likely changes and reforms that might occur in the coming years.

«

There are lots of the great and good predicting wonders and ponies for everyone (“some variant of social media will likely form the context for the rise of a global movement to stop the [climate denial] madness – which I call the Human Spring”). But also plenty of more rational people offering a more clear-eyed view of what’s more likely to happen over the next ten years.

I particularly liked this (part of one contributor’s input):

»

I’m not hopeful about ameliorating the social-media hate mobs. The driving causes there are too deeply linked to the incentives from outrage-mongering. I should note there’s a cottage industry in advice about social-media pitfalls and good conduct. But this is hardly better than the simplistic ‘If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.’ That’s not bad advice in itself, but it’s no substitute for something comparable to laws and regulations against fraud. Corporations that have their entire focus on selling advertising around outrage and surveillance are not stewards of news, democratic institutions, beneficial self-expression and so on. They are not ever going to become such stewards, as that is not what they do.

«

I’ll go with the latter view.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

She won’t look so happy when she discovers that her Galaxy Flip serves up ads, even in the phone app. CC-licensed photo by Kārlis Dambrāns 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. Your ad not here. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Examining the US response to the pandemic as if it were a plane crash • The Atlantic

James Fallows:

»

Consider a thought experiment: What if the NTSB [National Transportation Safety Board] were brought in to look at the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic? What would its investigation conclude? I’ll jump to the answer before laying out the background: This was a journey straight into a mountainside, with countless missed opportunities to turn away. A system was in place to save lives and contain disaster. The people in charge of the system could not be bothered to avoid the doomed course.

…On December 31, the open-source platform ProMED—the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases—carried a translated “Chinese media report about the outbreak.” According to all of the intelligence-community veterans I spoke with, signals like this would certainly have been enough to alert U.S. officials to a significant development. “From these early indications, a pattern would have been discernible, and we would have slewed the rest of the system to find out more about it,” one of these people said. “Particularly since we’d know what to look for. If Martians were invading, we wouldn’t know what that would look like. But we have been down this road before, with MERS and SARS and Ebola, and we know the indications that are visible and detectable.”

With cues like these, the intelligence apparatus directed more attention at the area around the city of Wuhan. “China is a very hard target,” a man who recently worked in an intelligence organization told me. “We have to be very deliberate about what we focus on”—which in normal times would be military developments or suspected espionage threats. “The bottom line is that for a place like Wuhan, you really are going to rely on open-source or informal leads.” During the Obama administration, the U.S. had negotiated to have its observers stationed in many cities across China, through a program called Predict. But the Trump administration did not fill those positions, including in Wuhan. This meant that no one was on site to learn about, for instance, the unexplained closure on January 1 of the city’s main downtown Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a so-called wet market where wild animals, live or already killed, were on sale along with fish and domesticated animals.

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The information would have been in the PDB – President’s Daily Briefing – by the start of January. But of course he doesn’t actually read that. They should send it to Fox News – then he’d get it.
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Facebook to boost news articles with original reporting in algorithm • Axios

Sara Fischer:

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The tech giant has long been criticized for not doing enough to elevate quality news over hyper-partisan noise. Now, it’s trying to get ahead of that narrative as the 2020 election inches closer.

Facebook says that in order to identify which original stories to promote, it will use artificial intelligence to analyze groups of articles on a particular story topic and identify the ones most often cited as the original source.

This won’t change the News Feed experience dramatically for most users, because Facebook will still only showcase stories from news outlets that they or their friends follow. But the tech giant will boost the more original story within that subset.

The company has been having active conversations with publishing executives, on both the business and editorial sides, to help define “original reporting” so that it can build signals into its algorithms to boost original stories, along with conducting user research.

The algorithm changes only apply to news stories. For now, the tech giant is focusing on stories in English. It hopes to expand to other languages in the future.

«

This is pretty difficult; it’s always been a big criticism of Google News that it gives more prominence to articles that have been updated in the past five minutes than those which broke the story. And will the tweaked algorithm be able to recognise the rehashed stories used by the company pushing Ben Shapiro’s content?
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Surprise: YouTube TV price goes way up, effective immediately • Android Authority

John Callaham:

»

Google’s YouTube TV first launched in February 2017 for the price of $34.99. Since then, the service has been adding more and more cable TV channels to its live TV streaming service. It has also seen a number of price increases. Today, Google announced the YouTube TV price has gone up by its largest amount since its launch.

In a blog post, Google revealed the YouTube TV price tag is going up by $15, from $49.99 to $64.99 a month. The price boost is going up immediately for new subscribers. Current users will see the price go up in their billing cycles or after July 30.

Along with the price increase, YouTube TV is also adding eight new cable TV channels from Viacom. They include BET, CMT, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount Network, TV Land, and VH1. More Viacom channels, including BET Her, MTV2, MTV Classic, Nick Jr., NickToons, and TeenNick will be added to the service sometime in the near future. It also recently added HBO Max and Cinemax as add-on channels. HBO Max costs $14.99 a month and Cinemax costs $9.99 a month.

«

Ah yes, the marketing strategy known as “boiling the frog”. Adding channels that the kids might like is a smart move. Hilariously, the explanation given for the rise in price is the cost of adding more content. Well, yes, that’s how it works. But there’s no getting away from it: YouTube TV is just another cable offering. And the price has gone up by 85% in three years.
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Ads are taking over Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones — and it needs to stop • Android Police

Max Weinbach:

»

Ads in Samsung phones never really bothered me, at least not until the past few months. It started with the Galaxy Z Flip. A tweet from Todd Haselton of CNBC, embedded below, is what really caught my eye. Samsung had put an ad from DirectTV in the stock dialer app. This is really something I never would have expected from any smartphone company, let alone Samsung.

It showed up in the “Places” tab in the dialer app, which is in partnership with Yelp and lets you search for different businesses directly from the dialer app so you don’t need to Google somewhere to find the address or phone number. I looked into it, to see if this was maybe a mistake on Yelp’s part, accidentally displaying an ad where it shouldn’t have, but nope. The ad was placed by Samsung, in an area where it could blend in so they could make money.

Similar ads exist throughout a bunch of Samsung apps. Samsung Music has ads that look like another track in your library. Samsung Health and Samsung Pay have banners for promotional ads. The stock weather app has ads that look like they could be news. There is also more often very blatant advertising in most of these apps as well.

Samsung Music will give you a popup ad for Sirius XM, even though Spotify is built into the Samsung Music app. You can hide the SiriusXM popup, but only for 7 days at a time. A week later, it will be right back there waiting for you. Samsung will also give you push notification ads for new products from Bixby, Samsung Pay, and Samsung Push Service.

«

Unbelievable. It’s not as if Samsung is short of the odd bob here or there. Weinbach calculates that given the number of ads, and the number of phones, this could be earning Samsung $500m just on the phones it sold in 2019. It shouldn’t, though.
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TikTok servers go down in India after government ban • Android Police

Rita El Khoury:

»

After a large, sweeping ban of 59 Chinese apps was issued by the Indian government yesterday, the biggest and hottest name on that list is now officially down in India: TikTok. The app’s servers are no longer active, and VPNs don’t seem to be working for everyone to circumvent the ban.

The clock has been (excuse the easy pun) tick-tocking on this since yesterday. Earlier today, TikTok’s official Twitter account in India issued a statement saying it was in the process of complying with the government’s decision and reiterated its stance on user privacy and Chinese government meddling.

It later voluntarily removed the app from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store in India, and now seems to have disabled access to its servers from any Indian IP address. If you already have the app installed or if you sideloaded it, you’ll see a blank slate with no posts or videos.

Looking at online mentions of this, it seems that using a VPN to circumvent the ban isn’t a surefire solution either. Some users are reporting success, but most are failing to connect with that too.

«

This is a novel form of warfare – which follows from a border clash between Indian and Chinese troops which left a number of Indian soldiers dead. TikTok is enormously popular in India, with hundreds of millions of downloads there. Unless the Modi government can persuade people that it’s their patriotic duty not to use it (which it quite possibly could) then there will be quite a backlash.
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Google has acquired North, the maker of Focals smart glasses • Engadget

Igor Bonifacic:

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According to The Globe and Mail, the search giant paid approximately $180m to buy the startup. Despite a $400 price cut at the start of 2019, North had reportedly sold very few of its Focals smart glasses to consumers, and the Globe says the company was running out of money before the deal came about. In April, North co-founder Stephen Lake teased that North was working on a second-generation model.

With Focals, North thought of a variety of clever solutions to some of the pain points that had come with earlier wearables like Google Glass. For instance, each pair of Focals came with a ring you would wear on your index finger. It featured a small joystick and D-pad to allow you to control the smart glasses without touching them and drawing attention to yourself.

No one could accuse you of being a “glasshole” because Focals were discrete in a way that Google Glass was not. The problem was that they were too expensive. Before North discounted them, a pair of Focals cost $1,000. You also had to get custom fitted for them at a physical retail store. All of those were significant issues for technology that did not feel indispensable.

«

It’s Google Glass, the reboot. The ring for the finger is a good idea, but persuading consumers why we need smart glasses at all remains a hell of a challenge.
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Twitch temporarily bans President Trump • The Verge

Jacob Kastrenakes:

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Twitch has temporarily banned President Donald Trump, in the latest surprise and high-profile suspension from the streaming service. Trump’s account was banned for “hateful conduct” that was aired on stream, and Twitch says the offending content has now been removed.

One of the streams in question was a rebroadcast of Trump’s infamous kickoff rally, where he said that Mexico was sending rapists to the United States. Twitch also flagged racist comments at Trump’s recent rally in Tulsa.

“Like anyone else, politicians on Twitch must adhere to our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines. We do not make exceptions for political or newsworthy content, and will take action on content reported to us that violates our rules,” a Twitch spokesperson told The Verge. The statement was originally issued last year when Trump’s channel was launched.

«

Your move, Facebo–oh, never mind.
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Trump’s phone calls alarm US officials, from pandering to Putin to abusing allies and ignoring his own advisers • CNNPolitics

Carl Bernstein (yes, of Woodward and Bernstein, Watergate fame) has an in-depth piece about how lousy Trump is on phone calls with state leaders. This struck me as the most telling element:

»

In one of the earliest calls between Putin and Trump, the President’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were in the room to listen — joining McMaster, Tillerson, Hill, and a State Department aide to Tillerson.

“The call was all over the place,” said an NSC deputy who read a detailed summary of the conversation – with Putin speaking substantively and at length, and Trump propping himself up in short autobiographical bursts of bragging, self-congratulation and flattery toward Putin. As described to CNN, Kushner and Ivanka Trump were immediately effusive in their praise of how Trump had handled the call – while Tillerson (who knew Putin well from his years in Russia as an oil executive), Hill and McMaster were skeptical.

Hill — author of a definitive biography of Putin – started to explain some of the nuances she perceived from the call, according to CNN’s sources, offering insight into Putin’s psychology, his typical “smooth-talking” and linear approach and what the Russian leader was trying to achieve in the call. Hill was cut off by Trump, and the President continued discussing the call with Jared and Ivanka, making clear he wanted to hear the congratulatory evaluation of his daughter and her husband, rather than how Hill, Tillerson or McMaster judged the conversation.

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Geekbench results for the Apple Silicon Developer Transition Kit surface online • Macworld

Jason Cross:

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For Mac apps that aren’t updated to be compatible Apple silicon, the new Macs will use an automatic emulation tool called Rosetta to translate apps made for Intel processors. And now that the DTKs are starting to ship to developers, we have an early look at what kind of performance that might give us.

The Geekbench results database currently shows eight benchmark results for the DTK. [It’s 28 at the time of editing, but probably going to go up by the time you read it.] Since Geekbench has not yet been made available as a new universal Apple/Intel Mac app, these results show what the DTK is capable of when running an app with the Rosetta translation.

The scores generally fall into the low 800s for single-core performance and around 2,800 or so for multi-core performance.

How does that stack up to other products? That same A12Z processor, running native code on an iPad Pro, scores about 1,100 for single-core and 4,700 for multi-core. The iPad Pro is roughly 25% higher on single-core performance and 40% higher on multi-core performance.

The latest MacBook Air, with its entry-level processor, scores around 1,100 for single-core and 2,200 for multi-core. And an entry-level Mac mini (which hasn’t been updated since 2018) delivers a score in the high 800s for single-core performance and around 2,500 for multi-core.

So the Mac Developer Transition Kit, running an Intel-based benchmark under Rosetta emulation/translation, takes a big hit compared to native performance. But Apple’s chips are so fast that it still runs roughly in the same ballpark as an entry-level Mac mini from 2018, or an entry-level MacBook Air from this year.

«

Apple told developers not to upload benchmarks. Of course people ignored that. These benchmarks don’t even begin to give you an idea of what an ARM-based Mac will be able to do. This is a two-year-old processor running emulation software. For ARM-native code on new processors, it’s going to fly.
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Is it safe to go to a restaurant? JP Morgan finds link between restaurant spending, COVID outbreaks • Fortune

Anne Sraders:

»

The firm analyzed spending by 30 million Chase credit and debit cardholders and coronavirus case data from Johns Hopkins University, and found that spending patterns from a few weeks ago “have some power in predicting where the virus has spread since then,” analyst Jesse Edgerton wrote Thursday. The study found that the “level of spending in restaurants three weeks ago was the strongest predictor of the rise in new virus cases over the subsequent three weeks,” in line with the firm’s recent studies using OpenTable data.

Notably, JPMorgan found that ‘card-present’ transactions in restaurants (meaning the person was dining in, not ordering online) were “particularly predictive” to a later spread of the virus.

And interestingly, the JPMorgan study also found that increased spending in supermarkets correlated to a slower spread of the virus. Analyst Edgerton wrote that the correlation hints that “high levels of supermarket spending are indicative of more careful social distancing in a state.” The firm pointed out that as of three weeks ago, supermarket spending in states like New York and New Jersey, which are now seeing a decrease in cases, was up 20% or more from a year ago, whereas states now seeing a surge like Texas and Arizona saw supermarket spending up less than 10%.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A couple of years ago this was Apple’s fastest chip; what’s coming in a couple of years in its laptops? CC-licensed photo by Paul Hudson 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. All in a row. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How Facebook wrote its rules to accommodate Trump • The Washington Post

Elizabeth Dwoskin, Craig Timberg and Tony Romm:

»

Outrage over the [December 2015 Trump campaign video calling for a ban on all Muslims entering the US] led to a companywide town hall, in which employees decried the video as hate speech, in violation of the company’s policies. And in meetings about the issue, senior leaders and policy experts overwhelmingly said they felt that the video was hate speech, according to three former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Zuckerberg expressed in meetings that he was personally disgusted by it and wanted it removed, the people said. Some of these details were previously reported.

At one of the meetings, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president for policy, drafted a document to address the video and shared it with leaders including Zuckerberg’s top deputy COO Sheryl Sandberg and Vice President of Global Policy Joel Kaplan, the company’s most prominent Republican.

The document, which is previously unreported and obtained by The Post, weighed four options. They included removing the post for hate speech violations, making a one-time exception for it, creating a broad exemption for political discourse and even weakening the company’s community guidelines for everyone, allowing comments such as “No blacks allowed” and “Get the gays out of San Francisco.”

Facebook spokesman Tucker Bounds said the latter option was never seriously considered.

The document also listed possible “PR Risks” for each. For example, lowering the standards overall would raise questions such as, “Would Facebook have provided a platform for Hitler?” Bickert wrote. A carveout for political speech across the board, on the other hand, risked opening the floodgates for even more hateful “copycat” comments.

Ultimately, Zuckerberg was talked out of his desire to remove the post in part by Kaplan, according to the people. Instead, the executives created an allowance that newsworthy political discourse would be taken into account when making decisions about whether posts violated community guidelines.

That allowance was not formally written into the policies, even though it informed ad hoc decision-making about political speech for the next several years, according to the people. When a formal newsworthiness policy was announced in October 2016, in a blog post by Kaplan, the company did not discuss Trump’s role in shaping it.

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Isn’t it amazing how every time something controversial involving a right-winger on Facebook comes up, Kaplan is there saying not to act on it? Every. Single. Time.
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Reddit shuts down r/The_Donald after years of problems with racism, anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories • The Washington Post

Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin:

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Reddit shut down its popular but controversial forum devoted to supporting President Trump on Monday, following years in which the social media company tried but often failed to control the racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, glorification of violence and conspiracy theories that flourished there.

The move against r/The_Donald, as the forum was known, came after its volunteer moderators and much of the community had left in recent months, moving to a website that mimics Reddit’s system of conversation and user voting on content but appears to have fewer rules. It is just one of several alternative social media sites, such as Gab and Parler, that have emerged in recent years, portraying themselves as freewheeling alternatives to more mainstream platforms.

The move by Reddit comes amid a broader crackdown by technology companies, including Twitter and Facebook, to try to rein in hateful, deceptive and other problematic content on their platforms, typically after high-profile scandals prompted action. Reddit also implemented its first policy banning hate speech on Monday and closed about 2,000 individual forums, what the company calls “subreddits.” The company already had a policy against “divisive language” in advertising.

Most of the closed subreddits already had become dormant while others, like r/The_Donald, had histories of policy violations. Reddit also closed the left-wing r/ChapoTrapHouse on Monday for violating platform rules.

«

Facebook’s “reining in” looks rather different from that of all the others, as already noted. Though this is really not much of a move, if it was already a ghost town. Though “2,000 others”? That’s a lot.
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Apple Silicon – first impressions • DIGITS to DOLLARS

Jonathan Goldberg:

»

Reading between the lines, they seem to be targeting desktop performance with highly improved power budgets. This is important because they could have done the inverse and built a very different product. This implies some incredibly powerful laptops, as opposed to ultra-long battery life on lighter devices. Which is interesting because that latter use case is an iPad, as most people use it today, which runs on a different branch of their chip family tree. Our interpretation of this is that they have built an incredibly flexible architecture that lets them assemble chip pieces like Lego bricks. This has big implications for the broader industry, which we will return to in tomorrow’s post.

«

I think this post is actually the more interesting one, since it makes a prediction about the forthcoming laptops. It’ll be comparatively easy to create laptops with the same external shape but more power: add more cores, clock the CPU a little faster. Apple has so much potential here.
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2020 iPhones won’t come with a power adapter or earbuds, says Kuo • The Verge

Sam Byford:

»

This year’s new iPhones might not have as much in the box as you’re used to. According to well-connected analyst Ming-chi Kuo, Apple is planning to stop including a power adapter and EarPods in the box with 2020 models, and will even remove the power adapter from the new iPhone SE’s packaging later this year. Kuo’s research note was reported on by AppleInsider, MacRumors, and 9to5Mac.

Apple is attempting to offset the cost increases that come with upgrading the iPhone range to 5G, according to Kuo. Smaller packaging would be more eco-friendly and also reduce shipping costs, since more phones could fit into a single shipment. (Encouraging more sales of AirPods can’t hurt, either.)

Right now Apple includes EarPods with all iPhones, a 5W USB-A adapter with the 11 and SE, and an 18W USB-C adapter with the 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max. Last year’s inclusion of the 18W charger came after years of widespread complaints regarding the slow 5W adapter, so it would be surprising to see it disappear so quickly. It’s not clear, however, whether that will be the case across the whole iPhone line.

«

I don’t think anyone would miss the adapter or the earbuds. If there’s a home that doesn’t have at least one spare set of each, I’d like to know about it. And when people upgrade, they… already have those things. Less electrical waste, too. Though this also tells us that, as expected, Apple isn’t going to get rid of the Lightning connector.
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Apple just crippled IDFA, sending an $80bn industry into upheaval • Forbes

John Koetsier:

»

Yesterday Apple killed the IDFA without killing the IDFA, by taking it out of the depths of the Settings app where almost no-one could find it — although increasingly people were finding it and turning it off — and making it explicitly opt-in for every single app. If an app wants to use the IDFA, iOS 14 will present mobile users with a big scary dialog [“This app would like permission to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies. Your data will be used to deliver personalised ads to you. Allow/Ask Not To Track”]

Would you say “yes” to allowing an app or brand permission to “track you across apps and websites owned by other companies?” Neither will 99% of consumers.

This is actually a genius move by Apple. Marketers can’t really get upset about losing the IDFA capability, because technically it’s still around. Apple gets to burnish its privacy credentials while not taking huge amounts of flack from brands and advertisers because, after all, who can argue with giving people more rights with their personal data?

And make no mistake: this is a great move for user privacy. But it’s also a huge problem for a massive industry.

«

The problem for the advertisers is that they won’t be able to track people, and measure the effects of their ads. Though that probably helps Facebook and Google, as ever.
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A Better World

“Fibretigre”:

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The dates you can change are in yellow.

The dates you just changed are in pink.

Click on one of them to change the past!

«

It’s a fun game. I managed to wipe out Europe with my first one. It’s like that SF short story, “A Sound of Thunder.” (That link’s probably not legit.) (Via Sophie Warnes.)
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This coronavirus mutation has taken over the world. Scientists are trying to understand why • The Washington Post

Sarah Kaplan and Joel Achenbach:

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When the first coronavirus cases in Chicago appeared in January, they bore the same genetic signatures as a germ that emerged in China weeks before.

But as Egon Ozer, an infectious-disease specialist at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, examined the genetic structure of virus samples from local patients, he noticed something different.

A change in the virus was appearing again and again. This mutation, associated with outbreaks in Europe and New York, eventually took over the city. By May, it was found in 95% of all the genomes Ozer sequenced.

At a glance, the mutation seemed trivial. About 1,300 amino acids serve as building blocks for a protein on the surface of the virus. In the mutant virus, the genetic instructions for just one of those amino acids — number 614 — switched in the new variant from a “D” (shorthand for aspartic acid) to a “G” (short for glycine).

But the location was significant, because the switch occurred in the part of the genome that codes for the all-important “spike protein” — the protruding structure that gives the coronavirus its crownlike profile and allows it to enter human cells the way a burglar picks a lock.

And its ubiquity is undeniable. Of the approximately 50,000 genomes of the new virus that researchers worldwide have uploaded to a shared database, about 70% carry the mutation, officially designated D614G but known more familiarly to scientists as “G.”

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Lab experiments suggest the mutation makes it more infectious. Or it might be an accident of sampling. (I’d go with infectivity. Evolution’s a hard taskmaster, and viruses evolve.)
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Coronavirus brings American decline out in the open • Bloomberg Opinion

Noah Smith:

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In addition to worrying about their jobs and livelihoods, Americans must now be subjected to months of images of Italians casually walking around on the streets while they cower in  their houses. It’s a painful and stark demonstration of national decline. Even more galling, the U.S.’s Covid failure means that its citizens can no longer travel freely around the world; even Europe plans to impose a travel ban on Americans.

But the consequences of U.S. decline will far outlast coronavirus. With its high housing costs, poor infrastructure and transit, endemic gun violence, police brutality and bitter political and racial divisions, the U.S. will be a less appealing place for high-skilled workers to live. That means companies will find other countries in Europe, Asia and elsewhere a more attractive destination for investment, robbing the U.S. of jobs, depressing wages and draining away the local spending that powers the service economy. That in turn will exacerbate some of the worst trends of U.S. decline – less tax money means even more urban decay as infrastructure, education and social-welfare programs are forced to make big cuts. Anti-immigration policies will throw away the country’s most important source of skilled labor and weaken a university system already under tremendous pressure from state budget cuts.

Almost every systematic economic advantage possessed by the U.S. is under threat. Unless there’s a huge push to turn things around – to bring back immigrants, sustain research universities, make housing cheaper, lower infrastructure costs, reform the police and restore competence to the civil service – the result could be decades of stagnating or even declining living standards.

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Or, you know, elect a competent president. That would be a start.
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The eye of the storm • The Critic Magazine

Marie Le Conte made a comment on Twitter which blew up. So now she’d become “the person everyone’s talking about on Twitter”, which is not who you ever want to be:

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By the time I was in the pub after work, my Twitter app had become unusable; by the time I met up with two colleagues for dinner, I’d deleted the tweet in a panic. As often happens with anxiety-inducing memories, I remember little from that evening. We were at Bocca Di Lupo and my two companions were trying to discuss the project we’d been working on, but I kept glancing in panic at my phone.

It’s hard to describe what it feels like, being the main character on Twitter. People tweet at you, at first to criticise what you said, then insulting you for what you said, then trying to find other things you said to criticise and insult you for, then moving on to discussing your appearance, what you may be like in bed, and anything else they can think of. They also tweet about you, which is more disconcerting if you aren’t a celebrity, which I am not. They are no longer talking to you but about you to each other; it’s a book club and you’re the book.

At least a book is self-contained; when you become the main character, people take the dots that they have, link them up, then add some new ones where they think they should be and at the end of it there is a person they can attack, but only a small part of that person is you. It was decided I was a frustrated and uptight straight woman; I am bisexual. It was decreed that I was a racist white woman; I am mixed-race.

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It’s a wonderful piece. “It’s a book club and you’re the book, and nobody wants to hear from the book.”
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Guy who reverse-engineered TikTok reveals the scary things he learned, advises people to stay away from it • Bored Panda

:

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2 months ago, Reddit user bangorlol made a comment in a discussion about TikTok. Bangorlol claimed to have successfully reverse-engineered it and shared what he learned about the Chinese video-sharing social networking service. Basically, he strongly recommended that people never use the app again, warning about its intrusive user tracking and other issues. Considering that TikTok was the 4th most popular free iPhone app download in 2019, this is quite alarming.

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It’s a long thread, because as he describes it “it’s a data-collection service thinly veiled as a social network”. Though isn’t what they all are? There’s some more disturbing stuff too.

This isn’t verified by anyone else, yet, but I wouldn’t expect that to take too long.
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A tech company spied on police brutality protesters • Buzzfeed News

Caroline Haskins:

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On the weekend of May 29, thousands of people marched, sang, grieved, and chanted, demanding an end to police brutality and the defunding of police departments in the aftermath of the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. They marched en masse in cities like Minneapolis, New York, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, empowered by their number and the assumed anonymity of the crowd. And they did so completely unaware that a tech company was using location data harvested from their cellphones to predict their race, age, and gender and where they lived.

Just over two weeks later, that company, Mobilewalla, released a report titled “George Floyd Protester Demographics: Insights Across 4 Major US Cities.” In 60 pie charts, the document details what percentage of protesters the company believes were male or female, young adult (18–34); middle-aged 35º54, or older (55+); and “African-American,” “Caucasian/Others,” “Hispanic,” or “Asian-American.”

“African American males made up the majority of protesters in the four observed cities vs. females,” Mobilewalla claimed. “Men vs. women in Atlanta (61% vs. 39%), in Los Angeles (65% vs. 35%), in Minneapolis (54% vs. 46%) and in New York (59% vs. 41%).” The company analyzed data from 16,902 devices at protests — including exactly 8,152 devices in New York, 4,527 in Los Angeles, 2,357 in Minneapolis, and 1,866 in Atlanta.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren told BuzzFeed News that Mobilewalla’s report was alarming, and an example of the consequences of the lack of regulation on data brokers in the US.

“This report shows that an enormous number of Americans – probably without even knowing it – are handing over their full location history to shady location data brokers with zero restrictions on what companies can do with it,” Warren said.

«

Half of me would love to know how this cross-matched with people who then developed Covid-19, and half of me knows this is already an incredible privacy invasion. (Separate data shows that protests haven’t increased Covid cases. But reopening close-contact areas such as restaurants and shops has.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Apple’s iOS 14 will tell you when apps grab data from the clipboard, and has already told on TikTok. CC-licensed photo by allispossible.org.uk 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. Know where you are? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

‘We’ve bought the wrong satellites’: UK tech gamble baffles experts • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

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The UK government’s plan to invest hundreds of millions of pounds in a satellite broadband company has been described as “nonsensical” by experts, who say the company doesn’t even make the right type of satellite the country needs after Brexit.

The investment in OneWeb, first reported on Thursday night, is intended to mitigate against the UK losing access to the EU’s Galileo satellite navigation system.

But OneWeb – in which the UK will own a 20% stake following the investment – currently operates a completely different type of satellite network from that typically used to run such navigation systems.

“The fundamental starting point is, yes, we’ve bought the wrong satellites,” said Dr Bleddyn Bowen, a space policy expert at the University of Leicester. “OneWeb is working on basically the same idea as Elon Musk’s Starlink: a mega-constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit, which are used to connect people on the ground to the internet.

“What’s happened is that the very talented lobbyists at OneWeb have convinced the government that we can completely redesign some of the satellites to piggyback a navigation payload on it. It’s bolting an unproven technology on to a mega-constellation that’s designed to do something else. It’s a tech and business gamble.”

Giles Thorne, a research analyst at Jeffries, agreed. “This situation is nonsensical to me,” he said. “This situation looks like nationalism trumping solid industrial policy.”

«

This satellite company agrees you’d need to upgrade the satellites to get a navigation capability. (But they’d be very resistant to jamming.) And of course there would be satellite broadband, their original purpose, which nobody sensible wants because the latency is terrible.

The problem with LEO (low earth orbit) for GPS is that they go out of visibility so quickly. If you can’t keep a fix on a satellite for long enough, you can’t get the time on its atomic clock, so you can’t figure out your position. The 24 US GPS satellites are in MEO (medium EO) at 20,200km; the OneWeb ones are at 1,200km, and presently in a pole-to-pole orbit, though that can be changed.

This has the potential to be a money pit. Don’t say we weren’t warned.
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The rise and fall of Hancock’s homegrown tracing app • Financial Times

Pilita Clark, Helen Warrell, Tim Bradshaw and Sarah Neville:

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The UK was one of the first western countries to start building a phone app. By mid-March, work was under way at NHSX, a body reporting to the health department. [Health secretary Matt] Hancock, a digital enthusiast, set it up last year to drag the notoriously analogue NHS into the 21st century.

Headed by a former diplomat, Matthew Gould, it soon discovered, as other nations would, that the task was far from simple. 

The app would have to rely on a Bluetooth system that was designed for pairing a smartphone with a wireless headset rather than trigger an alert that a stranger close to you was carrying a potentially fatal virus.

Figuring out how to repurpose this technology without draining a phone’s battery was just one of the early hurdles faced by developers around the world.

In the UK, however, there was another challenge. In other nations, the app was deployed as a back-up in established national systems where widespread testing helped teams of contact tracers track down those infected.

This was impossible in the UK, which was struggling to process more than [the unsatisfactorily low number of] 8,000 tests a day in March.

That meant the British app had to be shaped in a distinctive way, said several people involved in the early stages of its development.

Instead of triggering alerts about people who had tested positive for Covid-19, developers were initially told to build an app based on people reporting virus symptoms.

This had a ripple effect that ate up developers’ time, those familiar with the process said. First, an algorithm had to be built to try to ensure someone who claimed to have a cough or fever was telling the truth.

This, in turn, meant a database had to be built to hold and process huge amounts of confidential patient symptom data that would then have to be encrypted, anonymised and protected from hackers.

«

This is sure to figure heftily in the surely forthcoming public inquiry. There will be lots of “well it was impossible to know at that time”. Except that Apple and Google’s shift in early April offered the chance to get it right. But Hancock and the rest ploughed on. British exceptionalism: the wrong sort.
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TikTok App to stop accessing user clipboards after being caught in the act by iOS 14 • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

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In a statement to The Telegraph, TikTok said that it accessed the clipboard to identify spammy behaviour:

»

“Following the beta release of iOS 14 on June 22, users saw notifications while using a number of popular apps.

“For TikTok, this was triggered by a feature designed to identify repetitive, spammy behavior. We have already submitted an updated version of the app to the App Store removing the anti-spam feature to eliminate any potential confusion.

“TikTok is committed to protecting users’ privacy and being transparent about how our app works.”

«

An update to remove the feature has already been submitted to the App Store , and a download of the new update confirms that TikTok no longer appears to be accessing the clipboard.

TikTok did not say whether the feature would be removed from Android devices, nor whether clipboard data was ever stored or moved from user devices. Other apps have also been called out for reading the clipboard, including Starbucks, Overstock, AccuWeather, several news apps, and more.

«

That TikTok statement is baldly self-contradictory, and a lie. TikTok isn’t transparent about how the app works, because nobody outside TikTok knew it was grabbing the clipboard until this. The protection of users’ privacy – ditto. I bet there will be some crowdsourced examination of the destination of clipboard contents using an older version. And of the Android version.

Equally, I’m surprised that any app gets access to the iOS system clipboard without the user explicitly invoking it. If I copy something in one app, why should any other app be able to see it without me switching to that app and invoking “Paste”? After all, if I copy a password in an app, does that mean any random app running in the background can see it? (App developers tell me: yes. This blogpost from February pointed out the problem.)

It’s impressive that iOS 14 is only in its first week in beta and that it’s already highlighted this sort of behaviour, but the ability to behave like this at all is peculiar.
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Wrongfully accused by an algorithm • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill:

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The police drove Mr. Williams to a detention center. He had his mug shot, fingerprints and DNA taken, and was held overnight. Around noon on Friday, two detectives took him to an interrogation room and placed three pieces of paper on the table, face down.

“When’s the last time you went to a Shinola store?” one of the detectives asked, in Mr. Williams’s recollection. Shinola is an upscale boutique that sells watches, bicycles and leather goods in the trendy Midtown neighborhood of Detroit. Mr. Williams said he and his wife had checked it out when the store first opened in 2014.

The detective turned over the first piece of paper. It was a still image from a surveillance video, showing a heavyset man, dressed in black and wearing a red St. Louis Cardinals cap, standing in front of a watch display. Five timepieces, worth $3,800, were shoplifted.

“Is this you?” asked the detective.

The second piece of paper was a close-up. The photo was blurry, but it was clearly not Mr. Williams. He picked up the image and held it next to his face.

“No, this is not me,” Mr. Williams said. “You think all black men look alike?”

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The algorithm had decided it was him, though. Hill has done such great work on facial recognition – she was the one who revealed how ClearView had swept up as much data as it could, a hundred years ago. Well, in January.
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Depixellation? Or hallucination? • AI Weirdness

Janelle Shane on an AI system which claims it can reconstruct a face from a pixellated image, but which reconstructed Obama as a white guy:

»

Biased AIs are a well-documented phenomenon. When its task is to copy human behavior, AI will copy everything it sees, not knowing what parts it would be better not to copy. Or it can learn a skewed version of reality from its training data. Or its task might be set up in a way that rewards – or at the least doesn’t penalize – a biased outcome. Or the very existence of the task itself (like predicting “criminality”) might be the product of bias.

In this case, the AI might have been inadvertently rewarded for reconstructing white faces if its training data (Flickr-Faces-HQ) had a large enough skew toward white faces. Or, as the authors of the PULSE paper pointed out (in response to the conversation around bias), the standard benchmark that AI researchers use for comparing their accuracy at upscaling faces is based on the CelebA HQ dataset, which is 90% white. So even if an AI did a terrible job at upscaling other faces, but an excellent job at upscaling white faces, it could still technically qualify as state-of-the-art. This is definitely a problem.

A related problem is the huge lack of diversity in the field of artificial intelligence. Even an academic project with art as its main application should not have gone all the way to publication before someone noticed that it was hugely biased. Several factors are contributing to the lack of diversity in AI, including anti-Black bias. The repercussions of this striking example of bias, and of the conversations it has sparked, are still being strongly felt in a field that’s long overdue for a reckoning.

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Woke capitalism • The Bluestocking

Helen Lewis, in absolutely blistering form in her newsletter (of which this is a special Sunday version because I think this topic is bugging her mightily):

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Why is [Robin] DiAngelo’s book [“White Fragility”, about why white people are so.. fragile?, and which has gone to the top of the NYT bestseller lists] so popular? Again, look at economics. Every big company has recently poured money into “diversity training”. But it is often no more scientifically grounded than Myers-Briggs: the “implicit bias” test is controversial and the claim that it can predict real world behaviour (never mind reduce bias) is a shaky one. But it looks like something solid and quantitative – ooh! a test score! – and therefore metrics-obsessed modern companies (ie all of them) love it. People have been given the idea that confronting their own bias is the best way to address racism. (Also, let’s be honest, there are probably quite a lot of people who have bought White Fragility because they think of themselves as the kind of person who would read a book like that, without actually wanting to read a book like that. It’s a Social Justice Brief History of Time.)

Anyway, here’s Harvard Kennedy School professor of public policy Iris Bohnet:

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“About $8 billion a year is spent on diversity trainings in the United States alone. Now, I tried very hard to find any evidence I could. I looked not just in the United States but also in Rwanda and other post-conflict countries, where reconciliation is often built on the kind of diversity trainings that we do in our companies, to see how this is working. Sadly enough, I did not find a single study that found that diversity training in fact leads to more diversity.”

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Eight billion dollars a year! Imagine if you put that money into, say, paying all your junior staff a wage which allows them to live in the big city where your company is based, without needing help from their parents. You’d probably do more good at increasing your company’s diversity. Hell, get your staff to read White Fragility on their own time and give your office cleaners a pay rise.

«

“A Social Justice ‘Brief History Of Time'”. What a gut punch. (BHOT is famously the book everyone owned but nobody read.) But she’s absolutely right. Lewis ranges far and wide here: since it’s statue-toppling time, she’s noticed plenty of clay feet around the place. I love her comment: “the only question I want to ask big companies who chirrup on about ’empowering the female leaders of the future’ is this one: Do you have a creche?” Actions, not words. Don’t miss her analysis of why Stonewall is emphasising the “T” in “LGBT” either.
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Wirecard scandal puts spotlight on auditor Ernst & Young • WSJ

Patricia Kowsmann, Paul J. Davies and Juliet Chung:

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Ernst & Young, auditor to insolvent German fintech company Wirecard, had questions related to unorthodox arrangements under which the company’s cash was held in bank accounts it didn’t control as far back as 2016, according to emails seen by The Wall Street Journal.

The auditor subsequently signed off on three years of Wirecard’s financial results with those arrangements in place.

Now $2bn that was held in those accounts has disappeared. Wirecard says the money probably doesn’t exist. On Friday, a German shareholder association filed a criminal complaint to the prosecutors’ office in Munich, where Wirecard is based, accusing EY auditors of missing the alleged fraud.

“We feel Ernst & Young’s auditing work was a disaster,” said Marc Liebscher, whose Berlin-based law firm is representing the private Wirecard investors who filed the complaint. “Our clients are convinced, Ernst & Young should stand trial.”

EY said it had been duped along with everyone else. “There are clear indications that this was an elaborate and sophisticated fraud, involving multiple parties around the world in different institutions, with a deliberate aim of deception,” it said.

…Investors who bet Wirecard’s share price would fall have been sending detailed complaints to EY for years, flagging their concerns and media reports that raised questions about the company’s accounting and business practices, based on letters reviewed by the Journal.

“They’ve basically turned a blind eye toward the critics that raised very serious allegations,” said Fraser Perring, who with his former partner, Matthew Earl, published an early report critical of Wirecard in 2016.

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If it takes a whistleblower going to journalists for the fraud to unravel, then the auditors self-evidently haven’t been doing their job. The fraud was there to be found; as in so many cases (see also: Enron), it’s already visible in the books. But auditors hate to rock the boat: they’re the classic case of not understanding something if your job relies on not understanding it.
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Lest we forget the horrors: a catalog of Trump’s worst cruelties, collusions, corruptions, and crimes: the complete listing (so far): atrocities 1-759 • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Ben Parker, Stephanie Steinbrecher, Kelsey Ronan, John Mcmurtrie, Sophia Durose, Rachel Villa, and Amy Sumerton do what I had hoped someone would do. (If you close your eyes and wish hard enough, the internet will crowdsource whatever you want.) Their “atrocity key” includes these categories:
– Sexual Misconduct, Harassment, & Bullying
– White Supremacy, Racism, & Xenophobia
– Public Statements / Tweets
– Collusion with Russia & Obstruction of Justice
– Trump Staff & Administration
– Trump Family Business Dealings
– Policy
– Environment

I thought they’d missed one in the “White supremacy, racism & xenophobia” from their “before January 2017” category: his call, in a full-page advert, for the death sentence for the five black suspects who were arrested after the rape of a woman in Central Park on the basis that he thought they were guilty of sexual assault. (They were exonerated on DNA evidence and the real criminal’s confession.) But it turns out Trump reiterated that lie in October 2016.

Needless to say, it’s a long, long read, even though they don’t really get started until he’s in office.
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Microsoft to permanently close all of its retail stores • The Verge

Chris Welch:

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Microsoft is giving up on physical retail. Today the company announced plans to permanently close all Microsoft Store locations in the United States and around the world, except for four locations that will be “reimagined” as experience centers that no longer sell products.

Those locations are New York City (Fifth Ave), London (Oxford Circus), Sydney (Westfield Sydney), and the Redmond campus location. The London store only just opened about a year ago. All other Microsoft Store locations across the United States and globally will be closing, and the company will concentrate on digital retail moving forward. Microsoft says Microsoft.com and the Xbox and Windows storefronts reach “up to 1.2 billion monthly customers in 190 markets.”

The company tells The Verge that no layoffs will result from today’s decision. “Our commitment to growing and developing careers from this diverse talent pool is stronger than ever,” Microsoft Store VP David Porter said in a LinkedIn post on the move.

A source with knowledge of Microsoft’s retail operations told The Verge that this plan was originally in place for next year, but was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

«

So wonderful how Microsoft calls it “a new approach” to retail. Approach as in full speed retreat. The cost: $450m (“asset writeoffs and impairments”). Began in 2009, had 116 stores in 2018, but the number had fallen to 82 at the time of closure. Sorry, “new approach”.
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Radioactivity hike seen in Northern Europe; source unknown • The New York Times

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Nordic authorities say they detected slightly increased levels of radioactivity in northern Europe this month that Dutch officials said may be from a source in western Russia and may “indicate damage to a fuel element in a nuclear power plant.”

But Russian news agency TASS, citing a spokesman with the state nuclear power operator Rosenergoatom., reported that the two nuclear power plans in northwestern Russia haven’t reported any problems.

The Leningrad plant near St. Petersburg and the Kola plant near the northern city of Murmansk, “operate normally, with radiation levels being within the norm,” Tass said.

The Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish radiation and nuclear safety watchdogs said this week they’ve spotted small amounts of radioactive isotopes harmless to humans and the environment in parts of Finland, southern Scandinavia and the Arctic.

The Swedish Radiation Safety Authority said Tuesday that “it is not possible now to confirm what could be the source of the increased levels” of radioactivity or from where a cloud, or clouds, containing radioactive isotopes that has allegedly been blowing over the skies of northern Europe originated. Its Finnish and Norwegian counterparts also haven’t speculated about a potential source.

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It’ll be the Chernobyl Reenactment Group, won’t it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified