Fortnite’s iOS stats could look a lot worse if Apple revokes its developer licences in, uh, a fortnight. CC-licensed photo by Veselin Rogelov on Flickr.

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

A selection of 12 links for you. Last one standing? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Epic Games asks court to stop Apple pulling its developer tools next week • Engadget

Nicole Lee:

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Epic Games has filed yet another lawsuit against Apple. The Fortnite developer is now suing the Cupertino-based company for allegedly retaliating against it for its other lawsuit last week. Apple has not only removed the game from the App Store but has told Epic that it will “terminate” all its developer accounts and “cut Epic off from iOS and Mac development tools” on August 28th.

According to the filing, Epic claims that Fortnite’s removal from the App Store in conjunction with the termination of the developer accounts will likely result in “irreparable harm” to Epic. The company adds that cutting off access to development tools also affects software like Unreal Engine Epic, which it offers to third-party developers and which Apple itself has never claimed to have violated any policy. Without them, the company states that it can’t develop future versions of Unreal Engine for iOS or macOS.

“Not content simply to remove Fortnite from the App Store, Apple is attacking Epic’s entire business in unrelated areas,” the lawsuit states. “Left unchecked, Apple’s actions will irreparably damage Epic’s reputation among Fortnite users and be catastrophic for the future of the separate Unreal Engine business.” The company says that the preliminary injunctive relief is necessary to prevent Epic’s business from being crushed before the case even goes to judgement.

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Apple’s response, in part: “Epic agreed to the App Store terms and guidelines freely”. And the Apple Developer Guidelines include the deathless phrase “Apple may terminate or suspend you as a registered Apple Developer at any time in Apple’s sole discretion. If Apple terminates you as a registered Apple Developer, Apple reserves the right to deny your reapplication at any time in Apple’s sole discretion.” Squeaky bum time for Epic.

While Epic might have gamed out that Apple would eject Fortnite from the App Store for offering its own payment system, it pretty clearly didn’t expect this nuclear response. Hard to see why a court would grant Epic an injunction for prima facie breaking Apple’s App Store guidelines. (Also: Apple’s kicking Fortnite’s devs out in a fortnight, so it’s the last one standing? Emblematic, at least.)
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Epic’s Fortnite standoff is putting Apple’s cash cow at risk • The Verge

Chaim Gartenberg:

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The 30% “Apple tax” is the beating heart for Apple’s services business, which it has emphasized as growth as the iPhone business starts to slow. That line of revenue has become a critical part of Apple’s business, the bright star executives have been able to point to on earnings reports in recent quarters.

Labeling the revenue line as “services” lets Apple obscure where the money is really coming from — and onstage, Apple executives tend to talk about the prestige products like Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, Apple News Plus, or Apple Arcade. But the money from those services is dwarfed by Apple’s cut of the money flowing through its App Store and its power to force major players like Adobe, Spotify, and even Epic to pay the toll. So when Apple squares off over Fortnite, it’s not just fighting over one app or one policy. It’s protecting one of the key sources of revenue in the years to come — a source it could lose permanently if Epic comes out on top.

The App Store may have started out small, but today, it makes Apple a staggering amount of money. In 2019 alone, Apple’s percentage taken on digital content sold through the App Store accounted for an estimated $18.3bn, or nearly 40% of Apple’s total service revenue. (To reach that number, Apple says that $61bn of digital content was sold through the App Store in 2019, of which it took an estimated $18.3bn cut, compared to the $46.3bn Apple reported in services revenue on its collected 2019 quarterly earnings.)

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Just so we know what’s at stake.
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Toxic trade-offs at Facebook • The New York Times

Shira Ovide:

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Beginning in 2017, Facebook started a revamp to emphasize personal posts and interactions and to steer us away from aimlessly scrolling past news articles and puppy videos in the news feed. Among the changes was pushing people to Facebook Groups, or online forums of like-minded people.

For many people, groups can be a wonderful resource and social outlet. But they also have become places for people to wallow in fake health treatments, plot violence or spread false theories like QAnon.

Groups that post frequently and have a lot of avid back-and-forth — and that often applies to discussions of fringe ideas — tend to get circulated more in the Facebook news feed, which funnels more people into those groups. [eg Holocaust denial or QAnon or domestic terror groups.]

…Facebook now wants to become a place for us to have more private and meaningful conversations — a continuing evolution from a global public message board to the more cloistered space that Zuckerberg started to emphasize in 2017. I worry that this may create Facebook’s next unintended consequence.

Part of this privacy plan is a march to encrypt, or scramble, all activity so that there are no digital trails of what we post or say. There are good reasons for this. Facebook wouldn’t be able to peer into our private messages, and authoritarian rulers couldn’t demand that Facebook identify the person behind an account critical of the government.

But the potential pitfalls terrify me. Encrypting Facebook apps including Instagram and Messenger will make it difficult or impossible for Facebook to help law enforcement figure out who is selling drugs on Instagram or calling for violence in its groups. It will be harder to trace a propaganda campaign to a foreign government. Facebook will be able to say, truthfully, that it can’t see behind its own curtain.

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Inside Facebook’s new power grab • WIRED UK

James Ball on Facebook’s latest push, into Africa:

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The scale of Facebook’s programmes, and their reach across dozens of countries, is for some, alarming. While it might seem odd to complain about free or cheap internet, concerns range from fears on misinformation, to worries that Facebook’s intervention could stifle potential local challengers, to suspicions about what the company might do with browsing data – something on which Facebook has hardly earned a glowing reputation.

“In my opinion, the ongoing expansion of the project has not received the scrutiny it deserves,” says Nothias. “Increasing connectivity, in general, benefits Facebook’s products. Facebook is pretty transparent about this.”

“Most importantly, for Free Basics users, Facebook becomes the homepage of the Internet. Free Basics builds brand loyalty among users. It contributes to Facebook’s dominant position in emerging markets with tremendous demographic growth.”

“Facebook is adamant that Free Basics is not a data extraction exercise – on the basis that information is aggregated or de-identified. But aggregated data is still valuable.”

Back in 2016, similar concerns were enough to trigger protests in India, and mobilise civil society groups around the world. So, what’s happened since for the outcry to be so muted? There’s several things going on, says Dr Anri van der Spuy, a senior associate at Research ICT Africa, a policy and regulation think-tank.

“In a lot of these contexts, people have to decide between buying a loaf of bread for their children or meal a day, and buying data,” she says. “Yes, [Facebook’s programme] is not perfect internet – [but] you can’t be highbrow about this. If people want to go on social media, they want to go on social media.”

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Here’s the reality: in countries that use Free Basics, levels of disinformation and misinformation and (for want of a better phrase) “fake news” are worse than in those which don’t. WhatsApp and Facebook become “the internet”, they don’t prevent the spread of lies and outrage, and the effects are malevolent.
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Google lobbies Australian users against plans to make it pay for news • The Verge

Jon Porter:

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Google has published an open letter about a newly proposed government regulation that would compel it to pay media outlets for news content. Australians visiting their local Google homepage are presented with an ominous pop-up which warns that “the way Aussies use Google is at risk” and “their search experience will be hurt by new regulation.” It’s a bold lobbying move that puts Google’s arguments against the change in front of millions of Australians.

Australia’s consumer watchdog pushed back, saying the letter “contains misinformation,” adding that “a healthy news media sector is essential to a well-functioning democracy.”

Australia’s proposed News Media Bargaining Code law, which is currently in draft and targets Facebook alongside Google, follows a 2019 inquiry in Australia that found the tech giant to be taking a disproportionately large share of online advertising revenue, even though much of their content came from media organizations.

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Google is really over-egging it by claiming peoples’ search experience will be hurt. The consumer watchdog letter says, in part,

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Google will not be required to charge Australians for the use of its free services such as Google Search and YouTube, unless it chooses to do so.

Google will not be required to share any additional user data with Australian news businesses unless it chooses to do so. The draft code will allow Australian news businesses to negotiate for fair payment for their journalists’ work that is included on Google services.

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Essentially, it’s the copyright fight that has been brewing ever since Google was first created on a PC at Stanford University by copying the whole web – a much simpler tasks then.

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U.S. tightening restrictions on Huawei access to technology, chips • Reuters

David Shepardson:

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The Trump administration announced on Monday it will further tighten restrictions on Huawei Technologies, aimed at cracking down on its access to commercially available chips.

The US Commerce Department actions will expand restrictions announced in May aimed at preventing the Chinese telecommunications giant from obtaining semiconductors without a special license – including chips made by foreign firms that have been developed or produced with US software or technology.

The administration will also add 38 Huawei affiliates in 21 countries to the US government’s economic blacklist, the sources said, raising the total to 152 affiliates since Huawei was first added in May 2019.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told Fox Business the restrictions on Huawei-designed chips imposed in May “led them to do some evasive measures. They were going through third parties,” Ross said. “The new rule makes it clear that any use of American software or American fabrication equipment is banned and requires a license.”

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That’s a noose tightening – although it will also push Huawei (and all of China) to develop chips in its own right.
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Secret Service bought phone location data from apps, contract confirms • Vice

Joseph Cox:

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The Secret Service paid for a product that gives the agency access to location data generated by ordinary apps installed on peoples’ smartphones, an internal Secret Service document confirms.

The sale highlights the issue of law enforcement agencies buying information, and in particular location data, that they would ordinarily need a warrant or court order to obtain. This contract relates to the sale of Locate X, a product from a company called Babel Street.

In March, tech publication Protocol reported that multiple government agencies signed millions of dollars worth of deals with Babel Street after the company launched its Locate X product. Multiple sources told the site that Locate X tracks the location of devices anonymously, using data harvested by popular apps installed on peoples’ phones.

Protocol found public records showed that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) purchased Locate X. One former Babel Street employee told the publication that the Secret Service used the technology. Now, the document obtained by Motherboard corroborates that finding.

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Lax protections lead to abuses. Or do European and British intelligence agencies just have carve-outs that let them grab this data without reference? (Thanks G for the link.)
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Covid-19 is creating a wave of heart disease • The New York Times

Dr Haider Warraich (who is a cardiologist):

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An intriguing new study from Germany offers a glimpse into how SARS-CoV-2 affects the heart. Researchers studied 100 individuals, with a median age of just 49, who had recovered from Covid-19. Most were asymptomatic or had mild symptoms.

An average of two months after they received the diagnosis, the researchers performed M.R.I. scans of their hearts and made some alarming discoveries: nearly 80% had persistent abnormalities and 60% had evidence of myocarditis. The degree of myocarditis was not explained by the severity of the initial illness.

Though the study has some flaws, and the generalizability and significance of its findings not fully known, it makes clear that in young patients who had seemingly overcome SARS-CoV-2 it’s fairly common for the heart to be affected. We may be seeing only the beginning of the damage.

Researchers are still figuring out how SARS-CoV-2 causes myocarditis — whether it’s through the virus directly injuring the heart or whether it’s from the virulent immune reaction that it stimulates. It’s possible that part of the success of immunosuppressant medications such as the steroid dexamethasone in treating sick Covid-19 patients comes from their preventing inflammatory damage to the heart. Such steroids are commonly used to treat cases of myocarditis. Despite treatment, more severe forms of Covid-19-associated myocarditis can lead to permanent damage of the heart — which, in turn, can lead to heart failure.

But myocarditis is not the only way Covid-19 can cause more people to die of heart disease.

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It’s all so jolly.

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Why did a small Pennsylvania town keep winning T-Mobile’s promotional contests? • CNBC

Megan Graham:

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Earlier this summer, players of a T-Mobile Tuesdays giveaway contest took to Reddit to discuss a strange discovery: the company in certain weeks gave away tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands of dollars in gift cards, prizes and cash to winners. In one of the contests, nearly a third of the publicly listed winners came from a Pennsylvania town with a population of less than 4,000.

Players wondered: What was in the water in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania? 

The theories began to blossom in threads as others posted publicly on social media asking T-Mobile for answers. Some surmised it could be the result of accidental coding. Maybe entries that were missing zip codes appeared to be from the town. Others suspected someone had figured out where, geographically speaking, someone could enter the contest to have a slight time advantage and set their server location as such. Some drew similarities to “McMillions,” an HBO series and podcast following a 2018 Daily Beast story titled “How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions.” 

The promotional app and contest, a ploy to foster goodwill with customers from a carrier known for such perks, offer occasional giveaways like tablets, Chromebooks, tickets to a “James Bond Fan Event,” a trip for two to Spanish-language awards show Premio lo Nuestro and more.

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If I tell you that you could enter via a web form, you’ll probably get there, but it’s an entertaining read nonetheless.
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Level of cryptocurrency scams ‘unprecedented in modern markets’ • Yahoo Finance

Oscar Williams-Grut:

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Researchers found 355 incidents of price manipulation across several cryptocurrency exchanges over a period of just seven months. $350m (£267m) of suspicious trading activity was linked to “pump and dump” scams that reaped an estimated profit of $6m for organisers.

While names like bitcoin and ethereum dominate coverage of the cryptocurrency space, price manipulation occurs with smaller coins. There are over 6,000 cryptocurrencies in circulation, according to CoinMarketCap.com, with huge variations in market capitalisation and liquidity.

“You have a large number of coins that you can essentially play trading games with,” Dhawan said.

15% of all the nearly 200 cryptocurrencies Dhawan and his co-author Tālis J. Putniņš looked at were manipulated at least once during the seven month period they observed.

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The researchers write: “Puzzlingly, people join in despite negative expected returns. In a simple framework, we demonstrate how overconfidence and gambling preferences can explain participation in these schemes, and find strong empirical support for both mechanisms. Pumps generate extreme price distortions of 65% on average, abnormal trading volumes in the millions of dollars, and large wealth transfers between participants. These manipulation schemes are likely to persist as long as regulators and exchanges turn a blind eye.”

Regulators? Exchanges? Zero chance that exchanges will lift a finger, and regulators might decide they have easier targets than people on crypto who can hide behind hard-to-trace accounts. All of which confirms to me that the crypto space is just a gaggle of greater fools.
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5G smartphones could crush your home Wi-Fi. So where’s the 5G? • WSJ

Joanna Stern went back, a year on, to see where 5G has got to. The answer hasn’t changed:

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When I asked executives at each of the big carriers where I’d really experience the 5G speed on a smartphone, they all said variations of the same thing: 5G will unlock the technology of the future, but for now…hefty downloads!

David Christopher, executive vice president and general manager of AT&T Mobility, talked about downloading the entire Harry Potter movie collection in 2 minutes. Verizon’s Ms. Hemmer mentioned downloading “Stranger Things” and HD video calling. And Karri Kuoppamaki, T-Mobile vice president of radio network technology and strategy? Video and game downloads!

Even so, how often do any of us even download movies anymore? Maybe before a flight? But…where are you flying these days?

I found 5G to be far faster than the nationwide average home-internet speed, 86 Mbps, reported by Ookla. As you’ll see in my video, I moved 15 of my home gadgets into an RV—laptops, tablets, a 32-inch TV, an Xbox One, a Ring doorbell, etc.—to see if the connections could handle it. The only real bottlenecks were the 5G phones themselves, which aren’t meant to serve as hotspots for so many devices at a time and don’t have the range of a wireless router.

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So basically it’s great for anyone living in an RV, as they’re called in the US (caravans, as they’re called more sensibly in the UK).
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What’s in a hedcut? Depends how it’s made • WSJ

Francesco Marconi, Carrie Reynolds and Emily Anderson:

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The hedcut is a drawing created largely out of dots and hatched lines. It stems from a centuries-old tradition that is also used around the world to illustrate currency. At the Journal, we typically use hedcuts to depict notable subjects in our stories and our journalists who write them. We also use this stippled style of drawing to illustrate our daily feature known as the A-Hed.

Hedcuts first appeared on the front page of the Journal in 1979. Their classical feel suited the paper’s formal, famously text-heavy style at the time. Even as the Journal embraced more visuals across all our platforms in the decades since, the hedcut has persisted—becoming something of a status symbol for politicians, celebrities and reporters alike.

“The hand-drawn hedcut portraits are highly coveted,” said the Journal’s chief art director John Nichols. “They are the mark that you’ve made it at the Journal.”

Mr. Nichols oversees a team of five artists who create these drawings each day, typically spending four to five hours per image.

Not far from some of the illustrators is the Journal’s 21-month-old R&D Lab. These data scientists and machine-learning experts aim to bring science into the art of storytelling. In the case of the Journal’s hedcuts, this meant figuring out the best technical methods to mimic the stippling (dots) and hatching (lines) that give hedcuts their classic feel.

One initial challenge was deciding whether to use artificial intelligence at all. A simple way to create automated hedcuts could have been to use the light-contrast technology available in Adobe Photoshop to mimic the dark and light parts of a photograph in a stipple style.

…Wall Street Journal artists will continue to create the hedcut drawings you see on our stories each day. But our new AI-driven tool offers WSJ members a chance to partake in the tradition by creating their own here.

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You have to have a WSJ account to get the portrait. Having tried it, I’d say it’s nice, but you’d need a certain sort of vanity to use it if you don’t work for the WSJ (but if you do, that’s totally appropriate).
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Facebook’s algorithm is suggesting Holocaust denial groups when people search on the term. CC-licensed photo by Daniel_Sadono 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. Reboot! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook algorithm found to ‘actively promote’ Holocaust denial • The Guardian

Mark Townsend:

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Facebook’s algorithm “actively promotes” Holocaust denial content according to an analysis that will increase pressure on the social media giant to remove antisemitic content relating to the Nazi genocide.

An investigation by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a UK-based counter-extremist organisation, found that typing “holocaust” in the Facebook search function brought up suggestions for denial pages, which in turn recommended links to publishers which sell revisionist and denial literature, as well as pages dedicated to the notorious British Holocaust denier David Irving.

The findings coincide with mounting international demands from Holocaust survivors to Facebook’s boss, Mark Zuckerberg, to remove such material from the site.

Last Wednesday Facebook announced it was banning conspiracy theories about Jewish people “controlling the world”. However, it has been unwilling to categorise Holocaust denial as a form of hate speech, a stance that ISD describe as a “conceptual blind spot”.

The ISD also discovered at least 36 Facebook groups with a combined 366,068 followers which are specifically dedicated to Holocaust denial or which host such content. Researchers found that when they followed public Facebook pages containing Holocaust denial content, Facebook recommended further similar content.

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Recommending “similar” content has led to people literally being recruited to terrorist groups. No surprise that this would happen with Holocaust denial. That’s the content about which Mark Zuckerberg said in 2018 “I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong.”
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Facebook’s hate-speech rules collide with Indian politics • WSJ

Newley Purnell and Jeff Horwitz:

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In Facebook posts and public appearances, Indian politician T. Raja Singh has said Rohingya Muslim immigrants should be shot, called Muslims traitors and threatened to raze mosques.

Facebook Inc. employees charged with policing the platform were watching. By March of this year, they concluded Mr. Singh not only had violated the company’s hate-speech rules but qualified as dangerous, a designation that takes into account a person’s off-platform activities, according to current and former Facebook employees familiar with the matter.

Given India’s history of communal violence and recent religious tensions, they argued, his rhetoric could lead to real-world violence, and he should be permanently banned from the company’s platforms world-wide, according to the current and former employees, a punishment that in the U.S. has been doled out to radio host Alex Jones, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and numerous white supremacist organizations.

Yet Mr. Singh, a member of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party, is still active on Facebook and Instagram, where he has hundreds of thousands of followers. The company’s top public-policy executive in the country, Ankhi Das, opposed applying the hate-speech rules to Mr. Singh and at least three other Hindu nationalist individuals and groups flagged internally for promoting or participating in violence, said the current and former employees.

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Yes, Facebook put its thumb on the scale because of politics. Literally scores of people have died in India due to content posted on Facebook’s apps (including WhatsApp). And then it does nothing when it knows someone is rabble-rousing?
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Mozilla signs fresh Google search deal worth mega-millions as 25% staff cut hits Servo, MDN, security teams • The Register

Katyanna Quach:

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Mozilla has renewed its lucrative nine-figure deal with Google to ensure its search engine is the default in Firefox in the US and other parts of the world.

Within hours of the browser maker laying off a quarter of its staff this week, a well-placed source told The Register Moz had signed a three-year agreement with Google. On Thursday, a spokesperson for Mozilla confirmed the partnership had been renewed though declined to go into specific detail on the contract duration and sums of money involved.

However, our source told us Moz will likely pocket $400m to $450m a year between now and 2023 from the arrangement, citing internal discussions held earlier this year.

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Saved by the bell. Even so, that’s three more years of charity during which it needs to figure out what it’s for. Google is surely overpaying for this, relative to Firefox’s absolute share (combined desktop and mobile). Though it might have some use in warding off antitrust complaints as Chrome becomes more and more dominant. (That’s the argument here, which I discovered after this.)
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A college kid created a fake, AI-generated blog. It reached #1 on Hacker News • MIT Technology Review

Karen Hao:

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At the start of the week, Liam Porr had only heard of GPT-3. By the end, the college student had used the AI model to produce an entirely fake blog under a fake name.

It was meant as a fun experiment. But then one of his posts reached the number-one spot on Hacker News. Few people noticed that his blog was completely AI-generated. Some even hit “Subscribe.”

While many have speculated about how GPT-3, the most powerful language-generating AI tool to date, could affect content production, this is one of the only known cases to illustrate the potential. What stood out most about the experience, says Porr, who studies computer science at the University of California, Berkeley: “It was super easy, actually, which was the scary part.”

GPT-3 is OpenAI’s latest and largest language AI model, which the San Francisco–based research lab  began drip-feeding out in mid-July. In February of last year, OpenAI made headlines with GPT-2, an earlier version of the algorithm, which it announced it would withhold for fear it would be abused. The decision immediately sparked a backlash, as researchers accused the lab of pulling a stunt. By November, the lab had reversed position and released the model, saying it had detected “no strong evidence of misuse so far.”

…The trick to generating content without the need for much editing was understanding GPT-3’s strengths and weaknesses. “It’s quite good at making pretty language, and it’s not very good at being logical and rational,” says Porr. So he picked a popular blog category that doesn’t require rigorous logic: productivity and self-help.

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Says as much about Hacker News (and the productivity and self-help category) as it does GPT-3.
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Sources: Google plans to eventually replace Duo with Meet • 9to5Google

Abner Li:

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With classic Hangouts on the way out, Google today has two video calling apps. However, that is one too many for the company, and sources familiar with the matter tell us that Google Duo will eventually be replaced by Meet.

This decision is the result of Google placing its consumer communication services — Duo, Messages, and Android’s Phone app — under the leadership of G Suite head Javier Soltero. After the unified team was made public in May, Soltero announced to employees that it does not make sense for Duo and Meet to coexist. 

Following the rise of work from home and remote learning, Google has moved aggressively to make Meet a Zoom competitor. Like Duo, it’s now “free for everyone” to use and going after the same market.

With all the focus on Meet, the new messaging chief opted to have the service become Google’s one video calling service for both regular and enterprise customers. Internally, this is being described as a merger of the two services that is codenamed “Duet” — a portmanteau of Duo and Meet.

We’re told by sources that this new direction and the reduced interest in building a dedicated consumer service came as a surprise to the Duo team.

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Oh man. Nothing should come as a surprise to people working on any of Google’s messaging apps. Any time there are more than two (video and text) there’s a risk of one getting wiped out.
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UK firm’s solar power breakthrough could make world’s most efficient panels by 2021 • The Guardian

Jillian Ambrose:

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An Oxford-based solar technology firm hopes by the end of the year to begin manufacturing the world’s most efficient solar panels, and become the first to sell them to the public within the next year.

Oxford PV claims that the next-generation solar panels will be able to generate almost a third more electricity than traditional silicon-based solar panels by coating the panels with a thin layer of a crystal material called perovskite.

The breakthrough would offer the first major step-change in solar power generation since the technology emerged in the 1950s, and could play a major role in helping to tackle the climate crisis by increasing clean energy.

By coating a traditional solar power cell with perovskite a solar panel can increase its power generation, and lower the overall costs of the clean electricity, because the crystal is able to absorb different parts of the solar spectrum than traditional silicon.

Typically a silicon solar cell is able to convert up to about 22% of the available solar energy into electricity. But in June 2018, Oxford PV’s perovskite-on-silicon solar cell surpassed the best performing silicon-only solar cell by reaching a new world record of 27.3%.

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That’s a 24% improvement. Substantial. And usually these things are “five years from now…” This is a lot quicker than that. Although there do seem to be questions about the longevity of the perovskite layer.

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We won’t remember much of what we did in the pandemic • Financial Times

Tim Harford (with a non-paywalled article):

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Instead of storing each frame separately, video compression algorithms will start with the first frame of a scene and then store a series of “diffs” — changes from one frame to the next. A slow, contemplative movie with long scenes and fixed cameras can be compressed more than a fast-moving action flick.

Similarly, a week full of new experiences will seem longer in retrospect. A month of repeating the same routine might seem endless, but will be barely a blip in the memory: the “diffs” are not significant enough for the brain to bother with.

After months of working from home, I now realise that there was something incomplete about this account. New experiences are indeed important for planting a rich crop of memories. But, by itself, that is not enough. A new physical space seems to be important if our brains are to pay attention.

The Covid-19 lockdown, after all, was full of new experiences. Some were grim: I lost a friend to the disease; I smashed my face up in an accident; we had to wear masks and avoid physical contact and worry about where the next roll of toilet paper was coming from. Some were more positive: the discovery of new pleasures, the honing of new skills, the overcoming of new challenges.

But I doubt I am alone in finding that my memory of the lockdown months is rather thin. No matter how many new people or old friends you talk to on Zoom or Skype, they all start to smear together because the physical context is monotonous: the conversations take place while one sits in the same chair, in the same room, staring at the same computer screen.

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‘Canary in the coal mine’: Greenland ice has shrunk beyond return, study finds • Reuters

Cassandra Garrison:

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Greenland’s ice sheet may have shrunk past the point of return, with the ice likely to melt away no matter how quickly the world reduces climate-warming emissions, new research suggests.

Scientists studied data on 234 glaciers across the Arctic territory spanning 34 years through 2018 and found that annual snowfall was no longer enough to replenish glaciers of the snow and ice being lost to summertime melting.

That melting is already causing global seas to rise about a millimeter on average per year. If all of Greenland’s ice goes, the water released would push sea levels up by an average of 6 meters — enough to swamp many coastal cities around the world. This process, however, would take decades.

“Greenland is going to be the canary in the coal mine, and the canary is already pretty much dead at this point,” said glaciologist Ian Howat at Ohio State University. He and his colleagues published the study Thursday in the Nature Communications Earth & Environment journal.

The Arctic has been warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the world for the last 30 years, an observation referred to as Arctic amplification. The polar sea ice hit its lowest extent for July in 40 years.

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How suffering farmers may determine Trump’s fate • The New Yorker

Dan Kaufman:

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In June, as Trump’s poll numbers dropped nationwide, the Washington Post reported that his campaign advisers were losing hope for Michigan and Pennsylvania, and would focus on holding Wisconsin. “It’s baked into the cake that Trump will lose the state’s large metro areas in a landslide, while the suburbs have been fleeing him,” Ben Wikler, the head of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, told me. “Trump can’t win a second term unless he racks up enormous margins in rural Wisconsin.”

For [dairy farmer and 2016 Trump voter, after two terms voting for Obama] Volenec, Trump’s appeal vanished almost immediately. “If I had known the things I know about him now, I wouldn’t have voted for him,” he said, when I visited him at his farm in February. As Trump’s trade wars escalated, Volenec’s problems worsened. In March, 2018, Canada effectively cut off all dairy imports from the United States, and milk from Michigan that had previously been exported began flooding into Wisconsin’s processing plants.

The co-op where Volenec sent his milk for processing was now competing with cheap out-of-state milk, and put a cap on the amount that it would take from him. That week, Volenec heard about a meeting of the Wisconsin Farmers Union, a family-farm advocacy group, in nearby Dodgeville, to promote a version of supply management, a system used in Canada that sets a quota on the production of dairy, eggs, and poultry.

Designed, like the New Deal policies, to prevent overproduction and to guarantee farmers a stable income, the system relies on higher prices for Canadian consumers. Trump’s trade war with Canada is aimed at dismantling supply management, which has long been deplored by Republican politicians. John Boehner, the former Speaker of the House, called it “Soviet-style” agriculture. For Volenec, it was a revelation. “This was my first glimpse into a world where the dairy farmer is not subservient to The Market,” he wrote in an essay called “Groomed for Apocalypse.”

«

That essay isn’t linked in the piece, but it seems to be here. This is a lovely, elegaic article by Kaufman; elegies, of course, being a lament for the dead.
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Epic’s battle for “open platforms” ignores consoles’ massive closed market • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

»

when Fortnite was predictably removed from both [Apple’s and Google’s mobile] platforms, Epic filed lawsuits against both companies, alleging “anti-competitive restraints and monopolistic practices” in the mobile app marketplace. That move came alongside a heavy-handed PR blitz, including a video asking players to “join the fight to stop 2020 from becoming ‘1984.’”

But through this entire public fight for “open mobile platforms,” as Epic puts it, there is one major set of closed platforms that the company seems happy to continue doing business with. We’re speaking, of course, about video game consoles.

Most if not all of the complaints Epic makes against Apple and Google seem to apply to Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo in the console space as well. All three console makers also take a 30% cut of all microtransaction sales on their platforms, for example.

This DLC fee represents a big chunk of those console makers’ revenues, too. “Add-on content” was a full 41% of Sony’s Game and Network revenue in the latest completed fiscal quarter. Microsoft saw a 39-percent increase in gaming revenue the quarter after Fortnite was released, too, coyly attributing the bump to “third-party title strength.” And the Switch saw similar post-Fortnite digital revenue increases after Nintendo announced that fully half of all Switch owners had downloaded Fortnite.

On mobile platforms, Epic is calling the same kind of 30% fee “exorbitant” and says it wants to offer a more direct payment solution so it can “pass along the savings to players.” On consoles, though, Epic happily introduced a permanent 20% discount on all microtransaction purchases, despite there being no sign that the console makers have changed their fee structure.

The major console makers also all exercise full control over what games and apps can appear in their own walled gardens. When it comes to iOS, Epic says that “by blocking consumer choice in software installation, Apple has created a problem so they can profit from the solution.” When it comes to consoles, Epic is silent about the same state of affairs.

«

Epic is being terribly hypocritical here, though as Orland points out, it’s a bit odd how it’s silent when the companies have investments in it. Epic’s CEO says that the 30% is permissible on games consoles because they’re sold below cost and there are “tremendous marketing campaigns”. Hmm.
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Research report on coronavirus fake news gets misreported by media • Mark Pak

Mark was suspicious about the BBC report last week on thousands of people dying from social media dis/misinformation about Covid-19:

»

Here is the relevant part of that article:

»

A popular myth that consumption of highly concentrated alcohol could disinfect the body and kill the virus was circulating in different parts of the world. Following this misinformation, approximately 800 people have died, whereas 5,876 have been hospitalized and 60 have developed complete blindness after drinking methanol as a cure of coronavirus.

«

That 5,876 figure is the origin of the 5,800 figure in the news reports. But note, it’s only the death toll from the one very specific piece of fake news: drinking methanol as a cure of coronavirus. Nor is it a figure about social media specifically. It’s a hospitalisation total for that myth, however it spread. Social media almost certainly played a big part in it spreading, but there’s no attempt to isolate its impact from other sources of spreading.

What’s more, go to the footnotes for this figure and they are all sources that refer to Iran. It looks like the figure is specifically for the one country, not a global one. For example, one of the cited sources is this Al Jazeera story: “Iran: Over 700 dead after drinking alcohol to cure coronavirus”.

So we have a figure for hospitalisations due to one myth in one country that has ended up being reported as a global figure for myths on social media specifically.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Higher than Everest’s North Base Camp, this was the world’s highest ski resort. Then climate change hit. CC-licensed photo by Elias Rovielo on Flickr.

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

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Apple bans Fortnite from its App Store • The New York Times

Kellen Browning, Jack Nicas and Erin Griffith:

»

Apple’s spat with app developers over its cut of their revenues exploded into a high-stakes clash on Thursday when Apple kicked the wildly popular game Fortnite off iPhones and Fortnite’s maker hit back with a lawsuit.

The fight began on Thursday morning with a clear provocation. Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, started encouraging users of the Fortnite iPhone app to pay it directly, rather than through Apple. The iPhone maker requires that it handle all such app payments, so it can collect a 30% commission, a policy that has been at the center of antitrust complaints against the company.

Hours later, Apple responded, removing the Fortnite app from its App Store.

“Epic enabled a feature in its app which was not reviewed or approved by Apple, and they did so with the express intent of violating the App Store guidelines,” Apple said in a statement. “We will make every effort to work with Epic to resolve these violations so they can return Fortnite to the App Store.”

Epic followed with its own response: It said it was suing Apple.

“Apple’s removal of Fortnite is yet another example of Apple flexing its enormous power in order to impose unreasonable restraints and unlawfully maintain its 100% monopoly over the” market for in-app payments on iPhones, Epic said in a 62-page lawsuit unveiled just moments after Apple removed the Fortnite app.

«

The Epic lawsuit is pretty desperate stuff. As Ben Thompson has pointed out at Stratechery, just because an action is anti-competitive doesn’t mean it’s unlawful. Apple doesn’t have a monopoly of any relevant market. Sure, as Epic says, it has a monopoly of the iOS market. That’s as redundant as saying it has a monopoly of the iPhone. Epic wants to introduce a games app store on iOS. Apple won’t be forced to make that happen unless the law changes.

Meanwhile, people who already have Fortnite will still have it. The app just won’t be updated.
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The age of the office is over – the future lies in Britain’s commuter towns • The Guardian

Simon Jenkins:

»

In his classic biography of the Cambridgeshire village of Foxton, The Common Stream, Rowland Parker described its many traumas. They included invading Saxons, the Black Death and, most recently, the arrival of combine harvesters in the 1920s. The machines slashed the need for farm labour. The village emptied. Rural vitality was devastated.

Since then Foxton has recovered as a dormitory suburb for office workers in Cambridge and even London. But does it now face another change, that of home-working? Across Britain there must be many people wondering if they really want to fight their way to a city office block when their home can be their office. Morgan Stanley reports a mere 18% of European office workers wanting to return to an office five days a week. Fulltime home working is estimated to raise productivity by more than 16 days over a full year.

The media is awash in studies declaring that offices are good for us after all. They promote social diversity and informal contacts, offering relief from relationship claustrophobia in “getting out of the house”. Management ideology has long identified “the company” with its headquarters, its physical presence and hierarchy. The New Scientist reports the boss of Microsoft worrying that unmonitored home working will eat into the “social capital” built up in an office environment. Zoom cannot replace the gossip of “those two minutes before and after” a meeting. We know that from TV’s The Office.

None the less, office workers seem certain to vote with their feet.

«

This, more than anything, feels like an inevitable aftereffect of the coronavirus. Even once we can all “go back to work” (ie go back to offices), will we need to? Will we want to? It becomes “why do I need to?” rather than “what reason is there not to?” The cost of commuting, both in money and time, is going to weigh very heavily the longer this goes on – at least for those whose jobs offer that flexibility.
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Microsoft’s dual-screen Duo is here. The timing’s not great • WIRED

Lauren Goode:

»

When the Duo was first revealed to WIRED last October, [chief product officer Panos] Panay insisted that it helps him stay “in the flow”—his productivity zone—so many times that I wondered if an internal quota had been set for the phrase. The Duo, like the foldable phones from Samsung and Motorola, was pitched as a product for people on the go. You wouldn’t need to carry a phone and a tablet with you on the train or plane; with a foldable, you have both. And the dual-screened OS? No prob: You could run Outlook and PowerPoint, side by side, because work work work work work.

Now Microsoft is trying to sell an ultraportable two-in-one at a time when many of us are going exactly nowhere. For the digital employee, work has officially been redefined as WFH, and our days are structured by whatever screen we have to use at any given hour. The move from a 6-inch screen to a 13-inch one, and later in the evening to a 50-inch screen or 10-inch one, is the delineator between work and leisure. Now, Microsoft wants to wedge its way into your living room and onto your couch, instead of your train ride and your office.

“The context of these kinds of devices has changed,” says Ben Arnold, consumer technology analyst at the NPD Group, which tracks US sales of electronics. “It’s not the one-handed emailer on the subway anymore. It’s the uber-productive work-from-home worker, and there are some different dimensions to that.”

«

That’s the problem right there. The context has completely changed. Foldables might once have seemed like a worthwhile idea. That’s questionable now.
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US seized cryptocurrency from three terrorist groups • Bloomberg via MSN

Chris Strohm:

»

The U.S. seized about $2m and more than 300 cryptocurrency accounts used by al-Qaeda, the al-Qassam Brigades – Hamas’s military wing – and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – widely known as ISIS – in what the Justice Department said was “the government’s largest-ever seizure of cryptocurrency in the terrorism context.”

The action indicates the government can identify and infiltrate terrorist or criminal groups that think they’re cloaked by the anonymity offered by Bitcoin and other digital currencies.

“This case is really historic and unprecedented for several reasons,” Michael Sherwin, acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, told reporters on a press call. “We’re looking at three different entities that were targeted by the government to prevent financing going to these very dangerous terrorist organizations.”

The operations tied to Islamic State sought to exploit the coronavirus pandemic by offering to sell millions of dollars in what was actually fake personal protective gear to U.S. hospitals, nursing homes and first responders, according to the Justice Department.

«

Disgraceful! They should leave that sort of thing to Jared’s friends, who have never worked in PPE manufacture either. The DOJ press release actually has a lot more useful information; and it’s proof that bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous.
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Intel says new transistor technology could boost chip performance 20% • Reuters

Stephen Nellis:

»

Intel sought to buck the notion that the single-number names given to each generation of chip process node tell the entire story by disclosing improvements on its existing 10-nanonmeter process node. It announced a new way of making what it now calls “SuperFin” transistors, which, along with a new material being used to improve the capacitors on chips, is expected to boost the performance of Intel’s forthcoming processors, despite their still being made on 10-nanonmeter manufacturing lines.

“It is 20%, the largest intra-node jump ever in our history,” Raja Koduri, Intel’s chief architect, said of the performance gain in an interview with Reuters. “It’s actually same as what you would get with one full Moore’s Law node of performance.”

It will not be possible to test those claims in the real world until Intel’s new chips come out, but its “Tiger Lake” laptop chips slated for release this fall will use the chips.

«

Convenient announcement to tempt any OEMs that were thinking of defecting. As the story says, no way to confirm it until the chips are actually in peoples’ hands.
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‘Hundreds dead’ because of Covid-19 misinformation • BBC News

Alistair Coleman:

»

At least 800 people may have died around the world because of coronavirus-related misinformation in the first three months of this year, researchers say.

A study published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene also estimates that about 5,800 people were admitted to hospital as a result of false information on social media.

Many died from drinking methanol or alcohol-based cleaning products.

They wrongly believed the products to be a cure for the virus.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has previously said that the “infodemic” surrounding Covid-19 spread just as quickly as the virus itself, with conspiracy theories, rumours and cultural stigma all contributing to deaths and injuries.

Many of the victims had followed advice resembling credible medical information – such as eating large amounts of garlic or ingesting large quantities of vitamins – as a way of preventing infection, the study’s authors say. Others drank substances such as cow urine. These actions all had “potentially serious implications” on their health, the researchers say.

«

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Corporate America worries WeChat ban could be bad for business • WSJ

John D. McKinnon and Lingling Wei:

»

U.S. companies whose fortunes are linked to China are pushing back against the Trump administration’s plans to restrict business transactions involving the WeChat app from Tencent Holdings, saying it could undermine their competitiveness in the world’s second-biggest economy.

More than a dozen major U.S. multinational companies raised concerns in a call with White House officials Tuesday about the potentially broad scope and impact of Mr. Trump’s executive order targeting WeChat, set to take effect late next month.

Apple, Ford Motor Co., Walmart and Walt Disney were among those participating in the call, according to people familiar with the situation.

“For those who don’t live in China, they don’t understand how vast the implications are if American companies aren’t allowed to use it,” said Craig Allen, president of the U.S.-China Business Council. “They are going to be held at a severe disadvantage to every competitor,” he added.

Other participants in the call Tuesday included Procter & Gamble Co., Intel Corp., MetLife Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, United Parcel Service Inc., Merck & Co. Inc. and Cargill Inc., according to the people.

…One aim of the call was to seek clarity on the precise meaning of the executive order signed by Mr. Trump last week, according to the people familiar with the matter. That order barred “any transaction that is related to WeChat” by Americans but left details of what is actually banned to the Commerce Department to be worked out.

Companies are hoping the administration will narrow the order as it is implemented over the coming weeks, according to the people familiar.

«

The WeChat ban is wild, poorly defined and potentially ruinous. Who knows which dolts at the State Department thought it was clever. As usual, they’re wrong.
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The ski resort that lost its glacier • Atlas Obscura

Tony Dunnell:

»

The Chacaltaya ski resort WAS once the only ski resort in Bolivia. The popular resort also had the honor of being both the highest ski resort in the world and home to the world’s highest restaurant. But when the mountain’s glacier melted, it was all but abandoned.

The ski resort was opened in the late-1930s, and soon middle- and upper-class residents of nearby La Paz were flocking to its slopes. For seven or eight months of the year, people came to ski and go sledding down the Chacaltaya Glacier, at least until the cold and extreme altitude made them return to lower ground.

At 17,519 feet above sea level, the Chacaltaya Ski Resort was higher than the North Base Camp of Mount Everest. For decades it held the record as the world’s highest ski resort, and the resort’s restaurant is still recognized by Guinness as the highest restaurant in the world.

But in the 1990s, scientists at the Mount Chacaltaya Laboratory began to make some stark predictions. By 2015, they warned, the Chacaltaya Glacier would be gone. As it turned out, they were being optimistic. By 2009, the 18,000-year-old glacier was completely gone.

With the ice and snow melted, the skiers naturally stopped coming. The resort was soon shut down and abandoned, and its ski lifts shut down. Since then, the resort has sat like a freezing ghost town on the bare rocky slopes of Chacaltaya.

«

AO seems to be a sort of tourist community. The “Been Here?” tag has 45 people, and the “Want To Visit” has 275. That’s quite an altitude, though. Altitude sickness must be a risk.
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We tested Instagram Reels, the TikTok clone. What a dud • The New York Times

Brian Chen and Taylor Lorenz:

»

I invited Taylor Lorenz, our internet culture writer and resident TikTok expert, to share her thoughts about how Facebook’s clone worked versus the real thing. With her experience and my novice knowledge, we could assess how both the never-TikTokers and the TikTok die-hards might feel about Reels.

The verdict? For her, it was: Not good. For me, it was: Confused.

Let’s start with what was copied. Both TikTok, a stand-alone app, and Reels, a feature inside Instagram, are free to use. With Reels, Instagram mimicked TikTok’s signature ability to create short video montages, which are overlaid with copyrighted music and embellished with effects like emojis and sped-up motion.

The similarities pretty much ended there — and not in a positive way for Instagram.

On Instagram, the videos are published to a feed known as the Explore tab, a mishmash of photos, sponsored posts and long-form videos. On TikTok, videos are surfaced through For You, a feed algorithmically tailored to show clips that suit your interests. Reels also lacks TikTok’s editing features, like song recommendations and automatic clip trimming, that use artificial intelligence to speed up the process of video creation.

Taylor and I each tested Reels for five days and then talked about what we had found. We didn’t hold back.

TAYLOR: I can definitively say Reels is the worst feature I’ve ever used.

«

And it goes downhill from there. What TikTok has, Facebook can’t necessarily copy: it’s algorithms, it’s huge amounts of content, it’s people dedicated to making the algorithm better and better every minute. Not a stuck-on feature on a different product. Watch the two super-short just-throw-in-and-see-what-it-makes videos comparing them.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

New Zealand is investigating the possibility that coronavirus was transmitted via imported frozen food packaging. CC-licensed photo by Victor Wong on Flickr.

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The Boogaloo Bois are all over Facebook • Vice

Tess Owen:

»

The anti-government Boogaloo movement is thriving on Facebook under an array of code names, where followers are circulating links to Google Drives containing manuals on bomb making, how to be a getaway driver, and how to murder people with your bare hands, an investigation by the Tech Transparency Project found.

The group, which tracks extremist movements on social media, identified 110 Boogaloo groups that were created since Facebook designated it a “dangerous organization” and banned it from the platform on June 30. At least 18 of them were created on a single day.

Some of those groups have already amassed thousands of members, and are distributing documents including “Al Qaeda kidnapping manual” and the “Army Sniper Manual,” as well as reports on bombings such as the 2005 attack on London’s transport system, which left 56 dead.

…In some cases, the presence of the Boogaloo movement may be even more troubling than it was before. The distribution of entire folders containing instructions for violent acts is an escalation even compared to just a few months ago, when members were just pasting recipes for Molotov cocktails directly into Facebook groups.

“The biggest concern is the ability to reach such a large number of people,” said Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project. “That increases the number of people who may be unstable. One person could take these manuals, find them useful, and carry out a lone-wolf attack.”

«

Just the other day Faebook was congratulating itself for the amount of terrorist content it had taken down. Does this count?
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Marjorie Taylor Greene, candidate who supports QAnon, wins Republican primary runoff in Georgia • The Washington Post

Isaac Stanley-Becker and Rachael Bade:

»

Greene, who owns a construction company jointly with her husband, defeated John Cowan, a neurosurgeon. She will face Democrat Kevin Van Ausdal, an IT specialist, in November. [She’s likely to win unless Van Ausdal can overturn a double-digit poll difference generally in Georgia.]

GOP leaders, whose standard-bearer rose to political prominence on the basis of a conspiracy theory about Barack Obama’s birthplace, have watched her ascent with some unease. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the House Republican whip, endorsed her primary opponent. Republican members of Georgia’s delegation privately urged the party’s House leader, Kevin McCarthy of California, to do more to intervene in the race, according to multiple GOP aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the conversations.

“There are a lot of members livid at McCarthy for sitting back and doing nothing to stop this woman from being elected while the entire Georgia delegation, Scalise and some moderates tried” to help her opponent, said one House Republican aide closely monitoring the race.

«

Also: Max Boot (formerly very Republican, post-Trump very much not) on how the Republican party is being dragged to the right by these loons, while the Democratic party has its left wing (AOC, Ilhan Omar etc) under control.
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A Bible burning, a Russian news agency and a story too good to check • The New York Times

Matthew Rosenberg and Julian E. Barnes:

»

The story was a near-perfect fit for a central Trump campaign talking point — that with liberals and Democrats comes godless disorder — and it went viral among Republicans within hours of appearing earlier this month. The New York Post wrote about it, as did The Federalist, saying that the protesters had shown “their true colors.” Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, said of the protesters, “This is who they are.” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, tweeted that antifa had moved to “the book burning phase.”

The truth was far more mundane. A few protesters among the many thousands appear to have burned a single Bible — and possibly a second — for kindling to start a bigger fire. None of the other protesters seemed to notice or care.

Yet in the rush to paint all the protesters as Bible-burning zealots, few of the politicians or commentators who weighed in on the incident took the time to look into the story’s veracity, or to figure out that it had originated with a Kremlin-backed video news agency. And now, days later, the Portland Bible burnings appear to be one of the first viral Russian disinformation hits of the 2020 presidential campaign.

With Election Day drawing closer, the Russian efforts to influence the vote appear to be well underway.

«

Nicest line: “the tweet [pushing the nonsense] was picked up by a Malaysian named Ian Miles Cheong who has amassed a large Twitter following by playing a right-wing American raconteur on social media.”
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Retail chains abandon Manhattan: ‘it’s unsustainable’ • The New York Times

Matthew Haag and Patrick McGeehan:

»

In the heart of Manhattan, national chains including J.C. Penney, Kate Spade, Subway and Le Pain Quotidien have shuttered branches for good. Many other large brands, like Victoria’s Secret and the Gap, have kept their high-profile locations closed in Manhattan, while reopening in other states.

Michael Weinstein, the chief executive of Ark Restaurants, who owns Bryant Park Grill & Cafe and 19 other restaurants, said he will never open another restaurant in New York.

Of Ark Restaurants’ five Manhattan restaurants, only two have reopened, while its properties in Florida — where the virus is far worse — have expanded outdoor seating with tents and tables into their parking lots, serving almost as many guests as they had indoors.

“There’s no reason to do business in New York,” Mr. Weinstein said. “I can do the same volume in Florida in the same square feet as I would have in New York, with my expenses being much less. The idea was that branding and locations were important, but the expense of being in this city has overtaken the marketing group that says you have to be there.”

Even as the city has contained the virus and slowly reopens, there are ominous signs that some national brands are starting to abandon New York. The city is home to many flagship stores, chains and high-profile restaurants that tolerated astronomical rents and other costs because of New York’s global cachet and the reliable onslaught of tourists and commuters.

But New York today looks nothing like it did just a few months ago.

In Manhattan’s major retail corridors, from SoHo to Fifth Avenue to Madison Avenue, once packed sidewalks are now nearly empty. A fraction of the usual army of office workers goes into work every day, and many wealthy residents have left the city for second homes.

«

The latter group will come back, but the former might well not.
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New Zealand considers freight as possible source of new coronavirus cluster • Reuters

Praveen Menon:

»

New Zealand officials are investigating the possibility that its first COVID-19 cases in more than three months were imported by freight, as the country’s biggest city plunged back into lockdown on Wednesday.

The discovery of four infected family members in Auckland led Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to swiftly reimpose tight restrictions in the city and social distancing measures across the entire country.

The source of the outbreak has baffled health officials, who said they were confident there was no local transmission of the virus in New Zealand for 102 days.

“We are working hard to put together pieces of the puzzle on how this family got infected,” said Director General of Health Ashley Bloomfield.

Investigations were zeroing in on the potential the virus was imported by freight. Bloomfield said surface testing was underway at an Auckland cool store where a man from the infected family worked.

“We know the virus can survive within refrigerated environments for quite some time,” Bloomfield said during a televised media conference.

…China has reported several instances of the coronavirus being detected on the packaging of imported frozen seafood in recent weeks.

«

WHO says 🤷. That’s a pretty remarkable vector for transmission, though.
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Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products • ZDNet

Catalin Cimpanu:

»

Going forward, [Mozilla CEO Mitchell] Baker said Mozilla will also be re-thinking its core business model and put more focus on financially viable products.

“Recognizing that the old model where everything was free has consequences, means we must explore a range of different business opportunities and alternate value exchanges,” Baker said.

“We must learn and expand different ways to support ourselves and build a business that isn’t what we see today.”

This most likely includes a bigger focus on Mozilla’s VPN offering, which Mozilla formally launched last month. Virtual Private Network (VPN) apps are one of today’s biggest money-makers in tech, and Mozilla, despite arriving late to the party, is set to become one of the biggest players on the market, primarily due to its reputation as a privacy-first organization and civil and privacy rights advocate.

Furthermore, Mozilla’s contract with Google to include Google as the default search provider inside Firefox is set to expire later this year, and the contract has not been renewed. The Google deal has historically accounted for around 90% of all of Mozilla’s revenue, and without it experts see a dim future for Mozilla past 2021.

«

Well spotted, “experts”. Not mentioned in this is that Mozilla laid off 70 people back in January. Its 2018 financial statement showed $133m in the bank at the start of 2019, so that’s a number to watch for whenever the financials drop – which on past form seems to be roughly 12 months after the relevant year-end.

Baker burbled that the “pre-COVID plan is no longer workable”, but I don’t think it was workable before either. Mozilla needs a significant revenue source that isn’t Google, and VPNs could be it. Or paid-for dev tools. The expertise is there. The era of free seems, as she says, to be over.
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The cult of the free must die • QuirksBlog

Peter Paul Koch:

»

Isn’t it time Mozilla distances itself from the cult of the free? I know it’s deep in their DNA, but that hasn’t prevented it from hitting a very rough spot. Maybe the model is not as viable as we all thought.

So allow me to make a modest proposal: build in a donations function in Firefox itself — for instance by adding a simple “Please support us” message to the update page you get to see whenever you update the browser, and by adding a Donations item to the main menu.

Oh, and don’t bother with perks for paying members. It’s not about perks, it’s about supporting the software you’re using. The software is the perk.

I’m not saying Mozilla should erect a paywall around Firefox. That would far worse than the problem it’s supposed to solve. (The fact that it would be such a terribly bad move is part of the problem, though. If people had just learned to pay for the good stuff …)

I’m also not saying this will solve Mozilla’s financial problems — in fact, I’m quite certain that it won’t. Still, it would be one step in the direction of a better web where consumers slowly get used to the idea of paying. Also, it might help Mozilla itself veer away from the cult of the free towards a more sustainable model, mostly by putting psychological pressure on the organisation as a whole.

«

Strange how Koch, who in 2016 (the link above) wrote that “offering stuff for free is the web’s original sin” can’t see that the strategy of “offering stuff for pay” is its solution. There is then the problem of how you reach those who can’t afford, which brings in advertising, which then means stuff is offered for free, but then the ads can’t support it… and so the cycle continues.
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Google adds AR chemistry models to Search • Android Police

Manuel Vonau:

»

Last year during Google I/O (it feels so long ago), Google introduced AR animal models you can put into your home, available right through Google Search without requiring extra software. Over the following year, the company has added many more 3D models to its library, including skeletons, planets and other celestial bodies, NASA equipment, anatomic models, cell structures, and many more. Now Google has expanded the list of supported 3D models with chemistry terms.

To view the new chemistry models, make sure your phone is on the list of supported models and search the Google app or Chrome for the terms you want to see.

«

Neat (and probably useful for GCSE or A-level students in particular). Here’s the full Google blogpost.
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Google beats song lyric scraping lawsuit • Hollywood Reporter

Eriq Gardner:

»

Genius Media Group was pretty clever when it used digital watermarks to show that Google had been using its huge collection of song lyrics. One of those watermarks spelled “redhanded” in Morse code. That Google was caught with another site’s song lyric transcriptions made international news — and even merited a mention during Congress’ Big Tech hearing late last month. But was there anything unlawful about Google’s alleged scraping (direct or indirect)? On Monday, a New York federal judge dismissed claims by Genius.

Genius doesn’t own copyrights to the song lyrics. Those rights belong to publishers and songwriters. Genius does have a license to the song lyrics in question. Additionally, Genius spends a lot of time and millions of dollars facilitating collaborative lyric transcription. Can’t it protect its sweat? Genius believed so.

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I honestly can’t understand this judgment: I don’t get why Google isn’t an accessory to copyright infringement.
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China hires over 100 TSMC engineers in push for chip leadership • Nikkei Asian Review

Cheng Ting-Fang:

»

Two Chinese government-backed chip projects have together hired more than 100 veteran engineers and managers from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s leading chipmaker, since last year, multiple sources have told the Nikkei Asian Review.

The hirings are aimed at helping Beijing achieve its goal of fostering a domestic chip industry in order to cut China’s reliance on foreign suppliers, the sources said.

Quanxin Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Jinan), better known as QXIC, and Wuhan Hongxin Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., or HSMC, along with their various associate and affiliate companies, are little-known outside the industry. But in addition to employing more than 50 former TSMC employees each, both are also led by ex-TSMC executives with established reputations in the chip world. The two projects are aiming to develop 14-nanometer and 12-nanometer chip process technologies, which are two to three generations behind TSMC but still the most cutting-edge in China.

Hongxin and QXIC, founded in 2017 and 2019, respectively, are part of a recent boom in China’s semiconductor industry as Beijing prioritizes self-sufficiency in key tech areas impacted by tensions with Washington.

«

And is America’s government doing the same, given its determination to ramp up tensions with China? (Although this will be a question for the next administration, given the time it takes to create a new fab.)
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Microsoft’s Surface Duo arrives on September 10th for $1,399 • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

MicrosoftMicrosoft is launching its Surface Duo dual-screen Android phone on September 10th, priced from $1,399. After months of Microsoft executives teasing the device on Twitter, the company is now allowing anyone to preorder the Surface Duo today in the US. Preorders will be available at AT&T, Microsoft’s online store, and Best Buy.

While Microsoft had revealed the design of the Surface Duo back in October, the company has kept the specs relatively secret. The device includes two separate 5.6-inch OLED displays (1800 x 1350) with a 4:3 aspect ratio that connect together to form a 8.1-inch overall workspace (2700 x 1800) with a 3:2 aspect ratio. Unlike foldables like Samsung’s Galaxy Fold, the Surface Duo is using real Gorilla Glass, and the displays are designed to work in a similar way to multiple monitors on a Windows PC.

«

Nothing on the outside – no screen. So if you get a phone call (it does happen), how will you know who it’s from? If there’s a message ping, you’ll have to take it out of your pocket or wherever, and open it – this isn’t a “glance” device.

Sure to be more robust than the Galaxy Fold, pretty sure to sell fewer once people discover its limitations.
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‘A shady move’: Apple News+ Safari change automatically redirecting traffic to itself infuriates publishers • Digiday

Max Willens and Lucinda Southern:

»

The operating system changes arrive [CA: will arrive; this is in the public beta, due September or so] at a rare moment when publishers were seeing good signs emanating from Apple News+. Sources at four different publishers said reader revenue from Apple News+ has been up over the spring (due to a lag in reporting time, publishers do not yet know how much money they made from Apple News+ in June or July).

It is unclear whether that spike is the result of Apple adding subscribers or subscribers consuming more content; Apple distributes 50% of Apple News+’s subscriber revenue to publishers based on subscribers’ dwell time on content within the app, and keeps the remaining 50% for itself. It also does not tell publishers how many subscribers it has.

Data from Apple News’ ad-supported side suggests more consumption may be responsible. Several sources said they were seeing record views from Apple News this spring, much like the record-breaking traffic their own sites got at the start of the coronavirus crisis.

But that increased consumption did little to improve Apple News’s long-standing issues with monetization. Two sources said that the effective CPMs on Apple News ads have fallen close to 20% since the fourth quarter of 2019, and the fill rates — which have been described as “atrocious” in the past — have never climbed above 50% at any point this year, one source said.

Two sources said they believe the CPM drops are more the result of this spring’s broader economic turbulence than any specific change Apple or NBCUniversal, which handles ad sales for Apple News, made.

«

From the noise people are trying to drum up, you’d think publishers didn’t have any option but to be in the paid-for News+. Actually, they aren’t obliged to be there. If it’s so bad, why not just pull out?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Quake! But Android users will get an early warning. CC-licensed photo by Ant %26 Carrie Coleman 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. Unshaken, unstirred. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Android is now the world’s largest earthquake detection network • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

Back in 2016, Ars reported on an interesting use for the bundle of sensors we carry around every day in our smartphones—earthquake detection. The accelerometers in your phone make a passable-enough seismometer, and together with location data and enough users, you could detect earthquakes and warn users as the shocks roll across the landscape. The University of California-Berkeley, along with funding from the state of California, built an app called “MyShake” and a cheap, effective earthquake detection network was born, at least, it was born for people who installed the app.

What if you didn’t need to install the app? What if earthquake detection was just built in to the operating system? That’s the question Google is going to answer, with today’s announcement of the “Android Earthquake Alerts System.” Google is going to build what it calls “the world’s largest earthquake detection network” by rolling earthquake detection out to nearly every Google Play Android phone. Here’s the meat of the announcement:

»

All smartphones come with tiny accelerometers that can sense earthquakes. They’re even sensitive enough to detect the P-wave, which is the first wave that comes out of an earthquake and is typically much less damaging than the S-wave which comes afterward. If the phone detects something that it thinks may be an earthquake, it sends a signal to our earthquake detection server, along with a coarse location of where the shaking occurred. The server then combines information from many phones to figure out if an earthquake is happening. We’re essentially racing the speed of light (which is roughly the speed at which signals from a phone travel) against the speed of an earthquake. And lucky for us, the speed of light is much faster!

«

That “race” often works out to only a minute or so of warning, but that’s usually enough to duck and cover if you catch the notification.

«

This is very much in line with what I recall Marissa Mayer describing wayyy back when I interviewed her in July 2009:

»

Q: Things like the sensors in the phones that say “here we are” and buildings that can say “this is my temperature” – how do you think it will start integrating into search?

Mayer: I think that some of the smartphones of today are doing a lot of the work for us: by having cameras, they already have eyes; by having GPS, they know where they are; by having things like accelerometers, they know how you’re holding them.

«

This is a (very big, potentially lifesaving) extension of that idea.
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TikTok tracked user data using tactic banned by Google • WSJ

Kevin Poulsen and Robert McMillan:

»

TikTok skirted a privacy safeguard in Google’s Android operating system to collect unique identifiers from millions of mobile devices, data that allows the app to track users online without allowing them to opt out, a Wall Street Journal analysis has found.

The tactic, which experts in mobile-phone security said was concealed through an unusual added layer of encryption, appears to have violated Google policies limiting how apps track people and wasn’t disclosed to TikTok users. TikTok ended the practice in November, the Journal’s testing showed.

The findings come at a time when TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance Ltd., is under pressure from the White House over concerns that data collected by the app could be used to help the Chinese government track U.S. government employees or contractors. TikTok has said it doesn’t share data with the Chinese government and wouldn’t do so if asked.

The identifiers collected by TikTok, called MAC addresses, are most commonly used for advertising purposes. The White House has said it is worried that users’ data could be obtained by the Chinese government and used to build detailed dossiers on individuals for blackmail or espionage.

…The security hole is widely known, if seldom used, [cofounder of AppCensus, Joel] Reardon said. He filed a formal bug report about the issue with Google last June after discovering the latest version of Android still didn’t close the loophole. “I was shocked that it was still exploitable,” he said.

Mr. Reardon’s report was about the loophole in general, not specific to TikTok. He said that when he filed his bug report, the company told him it already had a similar report on file. Google declined to comment.

TikTok collected MAC addresses for at least 15 months, ending with an update released Nov. 18 of last year, as ByteDance was falling under intense scrutiny in Washington, the Journal’s testing showed.

«

Blackmail? Via data on TikTok? Whaaaat?
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Trump advisers Mnuchin and Navarro fought over the fate of TikTok inside the Oval Office • The Washington Post

Ellen Nakashima, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Jeff Stein and Jay Greene:

»

Last week, as leaders in Silicon Valley, China and Washington raced to seal the fate of one of the world’s fastest-growing social media companies, a shouting match broke out in the Oval Office between two of President Trump’s top advisers.

In front of Trump, trade adviser Peter Navarro and other aides late last week, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin began arguing that the Chinese-owned video-sharing service TikTok should be sold to a U.S. company. Mnuchin had talked several times to Microsoft’s senior leaders and was confident that he had rallied support within the administration for a sale to the tech giant on national security grounds.

Navarro pushed back, demanding an outright ban of TikTok, while accusing Mnuchin of being soft on China, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private discussions freely. The treasury secretary appeared taken aback, they said.

The ensuing argument — which was described by one of the people as a “knockdown, drag-out” brawl — was preceded by months of backroom dealings among investors, lobbyists and executives. Many of these stakeholders long understood the critical nature of establishing close connections with key figures in the Trump administration.

But over the past few weeks, they also were reminded of the unpredictable and precarious nature of business dealings under a Trump-led government — and how the winner of a heated debate in front of the president could help decide the fate of a multibillion-dollar deal that may reshape the technology business landscape for years to come.

«

I doubt the Oval Office hasn’t heard some knock-down dragged-out rows before. The article is a long read (which could do with a lot of cutting down) but boils down to: Navarro, who has been wrong on pretty much everything, wanted TikTok banned; Mnuchin wanted it sold. Trump didn’t know. He just watched.
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Bosses started spying on remote workers. Now they’re fighting back • WIRED UK

Alex Christian:

»

As working from home has flourished, so too has employee monitoring software. Programs such as Time Doctor, ActivTrak, Teramind and the dystopian-sounding StaffCop have all seen huge upticks in demand. Remote teams are now watched through their webcams via always-on video services like Sneek. In the office-free world, bosses can now clandestinely scan screenshots, login times and keystrokes at will to ensure their workforce is keeping its focus and productivity.

But some remote workers are fighting back against the tide of company scrutiny. “My employer sent me a laptop running with all their corporate spyware on it,” says one Florida-based programmer. “Right next to it is my own computer for all my personal stuff. Can they detect when I haven’t touched the laptop for an hour? Possibly. But I’m not being paid by the hour.”

Methods of avoiding employers’ prying eyes range from the sublime to the ridiculous. With surveillance software hard to evade (employers will likely notice if it’s been switched off), the tech-minded are downloading virtual machines. That means they can ring-fence offending programs – and their work – from the rest of their computer. “If you have a hefty enough PC, you can work in one window and game in another without them ever knowing,” explains the programmer.

Anti-surveillance software is experiencing a boom, too: Presence Scheduler, which can set your Slack status as permanently active, doubled in sales and traffic in the first two months of lockdown – until Slack clamped down and closed the coding loophole. “I believe my site caused the policy changes,” says developer Wesley Henshall. “But there was a further spike in interest once I emailed users that we’d adapted to the changes.”

«

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QAnon groups have millions of members on Facebook, documents show • NBC News

Ari Sen and Brandy Zadrozny:

»

An internal investigation by Facebook has uncovered thousands of groups and pages, with millions of members and followers, that support the QAnon conspiracy theory, according to internal company documents reviewed by NBC News.

The investigation’s preliminary results, which were provided to NBC News by a Facebook employee, shed new light on the scope of activity and content from the QAnon community on Facebook, a scale previously undisclosed by Facebook and unreported by the news media, because most of the groups are private.

The top 10 groups identified in the investigation collectively contain more than 1 million members, with totals from more top groups and pages pushing the number of members and followers past 3 million. It is not clear how much overlap there is among the groups.

The investigation will likely inform what, if any, action Facebook decides to take against its QAnon community, according to the documents and two current Facebook employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. The company is considering an option similar to its handling of anti-vaccination content, which is to reject advertising and exclude QAnon groups and pages from search results and recommendations, an action that would reduce the community’s visibility.

«

Given the support by a number of wingnut Republicans for this particular strain of idiocy, how long before we get a report about Joel Kaplan interfering in any move to restrain this bunch?

Also:

»

There are tens of millions of active groups, a Facebook spokesperson told NBC News in 2019, a number that has probably grown since the company began serving up group posts in users’ main feeds.

«

Facebook’s News Feed: one of the most effective recruiting mechanisms that extremist groups of all sorts have ever discovered.
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News+ privacy on Big Sur • Lapcat Software

Jeff Johnson looked into claims that Apple’s paid-for News Plus subscription service is somehow calling Apple when you click on a link in Safari (or some other apps) to see whether to open it in Safari, or News Plus (terrible name):

»

From a privacy perspective, it would be very disturbing if Apple’s operating system were “phoning home” to Cupertino when you opened a URL to a non-Apple web site. Fortunately, this is not the case, at least on macOS Big Sur. (I haven’t installed or tested the iOS 14 beta, but I would assume it behaves the same as Big Sur in this respect.) This is easy to test yourself, if you think about it. Today I signed up for a free 1 month trial of Apple News+ (note to self: cancel in 4 weeks). Then I got the URL of an article from The Wall Street Journal, a publisher who participates in News+. I disconnected my internet by turning off my MacBook Pro’s Wi-Fi. Finally, I opened the Terminal app and entered the following command:

open "https://www.wsj.com/articles/commercial-properties-ability-to-repay-mortgages-was-overstated-study-finds-11597152211"

Sure enough, it opened the News app. Of course the article failed to open in News, since my internet was off, and then as a fallback the News app opened Safari, which failed to load the article for the same reason. As a further test, I also tried a fake, nonexistent article URL:

open "https://www.wsj.com/articles/blahblah"

Same result, opens the News app! So I think we can say with confidence that Big Sur is checking an offline list of URL domains rather than checking online with Apple. Your privacy is still protected here.

For those who are interested in more technical details, it’s the LaunchServices framework, located on disk at /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework, which determines which app should open any given URL.

«

Once again for those at the back: this only happens if you choose to sign up with News Plus AND you click on a link to something in that service in Apple’s NOT yet released OSs.
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New conversation settings, coming to a Tweet near you • Twitter blog

»

Here’s how it works. Before you Tweet, choose who can reply with three options: 1) everyone (standard Twitter, and the default setting), 2) only people you follow, or 3) only people you mention. Tweets with the latter two settings will be labeled and the reply icon will be grayed out for people who can’t reply. People who can’t reply will still be able to view, Retweet, Retweet with Comment, share, and like these Tweets.

Since we started testing this in May, people have used it to host interviews and panels, share what’s on their mind, and make announcements. We’ve learned a lot from usage, feedback interviews, and surveys. These settings help some people feel safer and could lead to more meaningful conversations, while still allowing people to see different points of view. Here’s more on what people shared with us. ⬇️
These settings help some people feel safer.

People tell us they feel more comfortable Tweeting and more protected from spam and abuse.

Problematic repliers aren’t finding another way – these settings prevented an average of three potentially abusive replies while only adding one potentially abusive Retweet with Comment. And, we didn’t see any uptick in unwanted Direct Messages.

People who face abuse find these settings helpful – those who have submitted abuse reports are 3x more likely to use these settings.

It’s a new method to block out noise – 60% of people who used this during the test didn’t use Mute or Block.

The change could lead to more meaningful conversations on Twitter.

«

Although it’s also a bit more mental load. Usually companies don’t try to increase the cognitive load associated with using their products.
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Sea life around Mauritius dying as Japanese ship oil spill spreads • Reuters

Duncan Miriri:

»

Mauritian volunteers fished dead eels from oily waters on Tuesday as they tried to clean up damage to the Indian Ocean island’s most pristine beaches after a Japanese bulk carrier leaked an estimated 1,000 tonnes of oil.

The ship, MV Wakashio, owned by Nagashiki Shipping and operated by Mitsui OSK Lines Ltd, struck a coral reef on Mauritius’ southeast coast on July 25 and began leaking oil last week, raising fears of a major ecological crisis.

Activists told Reuters that dead eels were floating in the water and dead starfish were marked by the sticky black liquid. Crabs and seabirds are also dying.

“We don’t know what may happen further with the boat, it may crack more,” said clean up volunteer Yvan Luckhun.

The MV Wakashio is still holding some 2,000 tonnes of oil and it is expected to eventually break up, Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth said late on Monday, warning that the country must brace for the worst.

Tourism is a leading part of the Mauritius economy. The government, which declared an emergency on Friday due to the spill, is working with former colonial ruler France to try to remove the oil.

«

But the shipowners are liable, right? They have to pay some gigantic whack of a penalty, surely? Mauritius is such a beautiful place; this sort of damage can be repaired but there must be reparation.
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Qualcomm lobbies US to sell chips for Huawei 5G phones • WSJ

Asa Fitch and Kate O’Keeffe:

»

The American chip company Qualcomm is lobbying the Trump administration to roll back restrictions on the sale of advanced components to the Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies, wading into the intensifying technology battle between the US and China.

Qualcomm is telling US policy makers their export ban won’t stop Huawei from obtaining necessary components and just risks handing billions of dollars of Huawei sales to the US firm’s overseas competitors, according to a presentation reviewed by The Wall Street Journal that the San Diego-based company has been circulating around Washington.

Qualcomm is lobbying to sell chips to Huawei that the Chinese company would include in its 5G phones, which use the new standard for superfast telecommunications. US chip makers need a license from the Commerce Department to ship many such components to Huawei after the federal government placed the company on an export blacklist and imposed other limits.

With those restrictions, the US has handed Qualcomm’s foreign competitors a market worth as much as $8bn annually, the company said in the presentation.

«

Those competitors mostly being Samsung and MediaTek of Taiwan.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Would breaking up “big tech” be as easy as this – and as unpredictable? CC-licensed photo by khalid KHALIL 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. Foofarah. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Would breaking up ‘big tech’ work? What would? • Benedict Evans

»

the UK’s competition authority, the CMA, analyses Google and Facebook’s dominant positions, and doesn’t focus on breaking them up. Instead, it proposes a long list of highly specific internal, mechanical interventions. For example:

• “The power to require Google to provide click and query data to third-party search engines to allow them to improve their search algorithms”

• “The power to restrict Google’s ability to secure default positions, to restrict the monetisation of default positions on devices [i.e. Apple selling the default search engine slot to Google] and to introduce choice screens”

• “ Facebook should offer a defined find contacts service to users of a third-party platform, but rival platforms should not be required to reciprocate”

There’s lots to argue about in specific proposals like this (including how much of it will be enacted), but that’s not really the point – rather, one should ask which problems you can resolve by splitting the company apart, or by fining people, and which by getting right inside the operations and writing rules. As I pointed out [in a previous post], we didn’t make cars safer by breaking up GM or Ford, but by writing rules about how you can make a car.

«

The problem of lawmaking moving too slowly to deal with the speed at which technology changes is well known. The examples all date back decades.
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When a vaccine arrives, people will ignore the anti-vaxxers • The Atlantic

Yascha Mounk:

»

the risks posed by the coronavirus are very much on the mind of most Americans. Far from being a virtually extinct disease whose dangers are only chronicled in medical textbooks, COVID-19 has seriously sickened or killed hundreds of thousands of Americans in the past few months.

All these reasons help explain why the experts I consulted are optimistic that most Americans will ultimately choose to immunize themselves. As Beyrer, the Desmond M. Tutu Professor of Public Health and Human Rights at Johns Hopkins University, told me, “The whole country, and the whole world, is invested in getting a vaccine.”

Polio, rather than measles, may be the best historical precedent for predicting what will happen once a vaccine for COVID-19 becomes available. “Older Americans still have a memory” of polio, Beyrer said. “The vaccine allowed them to go back to having a childhood, and not having to be afraid of mixing with other children.” In that sense, the immense suffering of the past few months may offer a bitterly ironic silver lining, he said: “This disease has touched almost everyone. Tragically, that is a reason why there will be a very different take-up to this vaccine.”

But will enough people get it? What happens if, as the CBS poll suggests, one in five Americans refuses to cooperate?

«

I really think that poll isn’t going to reflect what people will do. And measles vaccination rates are actually very high (via CDC data), even if they dip low in a very few, very localised areas.
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How pro-Trump forces work the refs in Silicon Valley • The New York Times

Ben Smith:

»

One of the oddest moments during last month’s tech hearings on Capitol Hill came when a Florida congressman darkly hinted that Google was making it difficult for him to find a website he was looking for, The Gateway Pundit.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, wearing a dark suit and the forced solemnity of an undertaker, promised the congressman he’d look into the issue.

Mr. Pichai could have said something else: that Google doesn’t showcase links to Gateway Pundit because the site is notorious for regularly crossing the line from wild hyperpartisan spin into outright falsehoods, from a phony sexual assault allegation against Robert Mueller to a recent report amplifying false claims that Anthony Fauci is “due to make millions” on a coronavirus vaccine. Mr. Pichai could have said that he wouldn’t let nitwits lobby him to pollute Google with lies.

But while it was a quintessentially 2020 exchange, the gripe voiced by Representative Greg Steube was also a classic example of a politician “working the refs” — that is, complaining vocally about a referee’s decision in the hopes of getting a better call next time. It’s a tactic the Trump movement has revived and deftly employed against the powerful, befuddled new referees of public debate, Google, Facebook and Twitter.

I’ve been thinking about conservatives’ long and persistent campaign to influence the referees since the historian Rick Perlstein emailed me recently to offer me a scoop, if a somewhat dusty one.

«

Ah, Gateway Pundit, home of Jim Hoft, aka “the stupidest man on the internet”. The trouble is, this purposeful disinformation distorts politics calamitously.
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Blackstone to acquire Ancestry.com for $4.7bn • Reuters

Chibuike Oguh:

»

Blackstone Group said on Wednesday it agreed to acquire genealogy provider Ancestry.com Inc from private equity rivals for $4.7bn, including debt, placing a big bet on family-tree chasing as well as personalized medicine.

Ancestry.com is the world’s largest provider of DNA services, allowing customers to trace their genealogy and identify genetic health risks with tests sent to their home.

Blackstone is hoping that more consumers staying at home amid the COVID-19 pandemic will turn to Ancestry.com for its services.

“We believe Ancestry has significant runway for further growth as people of all ages and backgrounds become increasingly interested in learning more about their family histories and themselves,” David Kestnbaum, a Blackstone senior managing director, said in a statement.

…Ancestry.com has more than 3 million paying customers in about 30 countries, and earns more than $1bn in annual revenue. Launched in 1996 as a family history website, it harnessed advances in DNA testing and mobile phone apps in the following two decades to expand its offerings.

«

Not sure how happy I’d feel if my DNA (or my relatives’) were on there.
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China is now blocking all encrypted HTTPS traffic that uses TLS 1.3 and ESNI • ZDNet

Catalin Cimpanu:

»

The Chinese government has deployed an update to its national censorship tool, known as the Great Firewall (GFW), to block encrypted HTTPS connections that are being set up using modern, interception-proof protocols and technologies.

The ban has been in place for at least a week, since the end of July, according to a joint report published this week by three organizations tracking Chinese censorship – iYouPort, the University of Maryland, and the Great Firewall Report.

Through the new GFW update, Chinese officials are only targeting HTTPS traffic that is being set up with new technologies like TLS 1.3 and ESNI (Encrypted Server Name Indication).

Other HTTPS traffic is still allowed through the Great Firewall, if it uses older versions of the same protocols – such as TLS 1.1 or 1.2, or SNI (Server Name Indication).

For HTTPS connections set up via these older protocols, Chinese censors can infer to what domain a user is trying to connect. This is done by looking at the (plaintext) SNI field in the early stages of an HTTPS connections.

…ZDNet also confirmed the report’s findings with two additional sources – namely members of a US telecommunications provider and an internet exchange point (IXP) – using instructions provided in this mailing list.

«

Wonder whether those who are trying to connect from China know that this is now in place, and when they can be traced.
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Facebook hackers use ISIS propaganda to target ABC host Julia Baird • News Australia

Jack Gramenz:

»

Over the weekend, ABC host and Nine newspaper columnist Julia Baird had her Facebook account compromised, which the hackers then edited to feature the flag of the Islamic State terrorist group as its profile picture and background.

This is apparently not the first time this has happened.

Melbourne pilot Jake Barden told Nine News last month the same thing had happened to him. “It was quite creepy. I was starting to get worried but I thought it has to be a hack, someone is hacking in to my account,” he said after noticing his profile had also been changed to the ISIS flag.

His Facebook account and his linked Instagram account then disappeared after the hackers violated the social media platform’s community standards. Similar to Ms Baird’s case, the hackers soon turned their attention to the aviation business where Mr Barden worked, using his compromised account to delete all the other administrators before purchasing a few hundred dollars worth of Facebook ads for an Asian clothing company.

In October last year Nine also reported a Gold Coast woman who conducted her business using the Instagram platform Facebook owns lost access in a similar attack, which netted the hackers a similarly paltry sum of a little over $400. Mr Stewart said he had a client in a similar boat. “Someone has hacked their personal Facebook and uploaded the ISIS flag to their profile photo and background, which has then triggered Facebook to deactivate the account,” he said.

“That seems to be the M.O. of the hackers, I have no idea what the ultimate goal is but the consequences are really real.”

«

Simple MO: find a linked personal account able to run ads, get in, get it disabled for “terror”, hoik over to the corporate site, bin the other admins, buy ads. Ultimate goal: get Facebook ads for free.
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Weeknotes 039 • Dan Catt

The Reverend notes:

»

I have a theory that the engineers in Silicon Valley are ageing at the same rate as me (no surprise there) and in a life-stage staggered a few years behind my own, as features get put into products roughly 4-5 years after I need them. The theory is that they are discovering the same need I had—case in point…

With things like Kindle or Spotify it started with; here is your account, buy books listen to music. But at some point, I wanted to purchase books for the kids so they could read them, and let them discover music for themselves. So we all logged into the same account, which was a pain in the ass.

Sometime later, we started to get family sharing features. And I’m assuming that’s because the engineers had begun having their own kids and were running into the same problems I was having.

The problem I now have is how to migrate family members as they grow up, my eldest Modesty turned 18 earlier this year. At some point we’ll need to remove her from the “family” because she’ll a) want to do her own thing, and b) may well start her own family.

Things are generally orientated around, “you’re kids are starting to read, and you don’t want your library clogged up with YA novels” or some such, and adding young kids to the family account.

I’m going to have to wait another five years for those Valley engineers to get to the point where their kids are growing up and leaving home to get workable, what I’m calling “flying the nest migration”, systems, removing old kids from the family account.

«

I worked with Dan at The Guardian, on and off. Always a source of wisdom and humour. And he’s absolutely right – how does one handle the problem of children growing up beyond the Family account so they can retain their apps yet have their independence?
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How Covid-19 signals the end of the American era • Rolling Stone

Wade Davis in excoriating form:

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For many years, those on the conservative right in the United States have invoked a nostalgia for the 1950s, and an America that never was, but has to be presumed to have existed to rationalize their sense of loss and abandonment, their fear of change, their bitter resentments and lingering contempt for the social movements of the 1960s, a time of new aspirations for women, gays, and people of color. In truth, at least in economic terms, the country of the 1950s resembled Denmark as much as the America of today. Marginal tax rates for the wealthy were 90 percent. The salaries of CEOs were, on average, just 20 times that of their mid-management employees.

Today, the base pay of those at the top is commonly 400 times that of their salaried staff, with many earning orders of magnitude more in stock options and perks. The elite one% of Americans control $30 trillion of assets, while the bottom half have more debt than assets. The three richest Americans have more money than the poorest 160 million of their countrymen. Fully a fifth of American households have zero or negative net worth, a figure that rises to 37% for black families. The median wealth of black households is a tenth that of whites. The vast majority of Americans — white, black, and brown — are two paychecks removed from bankruptcy. Though living in a nation that celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most Americans live on a high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall.

With the COVID crisis, 40 million Americans lost their jobs, and 3.3 million businesses shut down, including 41% of all black-owned enterprises. Black Americans, who significantly outnumber whites in federal prisons despite being but 13% of the population, are suffering shockingly high rates of morbidity and mortality, dying at nearly three times the rate of white Americans. The cardinal rule of American social policy — don’t let any ethnic group get below the blacks, or allow anyone to suffer more indignities — rang true even in a pandemic, as if the virus was taking its cues from American history.

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New Genoa bridge inauguration is bittersweet • The New York Times

Gaia Pianigiani:

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Since the dramatic and deadly collapse of the Morandi bridge over the Italian port of Genoa two years ago, builders have worked around the clock, through a judicial investigation and the coronavirus pandemic, so a new bridge could open on time.

Designed by a native son of the city, the architect Renzo Piano, and built in a record 15 months, the new Genoa San Giorgio bridge, whose inauguration is Monday, has become a matter of pride for Genoa and all of Italy, a symbol of their can-do spirit.

Yet residents and business owners say the accomplishment will hardly cure the pains of the city, which was shrinking — economically, demographically and culturally — even before the collapse, which killed 43 people on Aug. 14, 2018.

The loss of one of the city’s main arteries and its fastest east-west connection compounded all those problems, devastating businesses and paralyzing life. Today many in Genoa are still suffering and lament that the new bridge will not be enough to overcome the absence of a broad, long-term vision to revive their city.
Though the government and the company that manages the bridge, Autostrade per l’Italia, or Highways for Italy, gave aid to dozens of businesses in the area to help them stay afloat, many had to relocate or remained cut off from the rest of Genoa.

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The bridge is a kilometre long, and all of the original was demolished. Although the reason that it had to be built is hardly good – the collapse came after signs of serious deterioration were overlooked – the fact that the whole thing was built at such speed gives the lie to any griping about Italian productivity. (And through the pandemic, too.) Puts Trump’s never-fulfilled trillion-dollar infrastructure plan (promised on his campaign in 2016, in 2017, again in 2018, and 2019, and just for luck once more in 2020) into perspective.
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No, China didn’t ban time travel movies • Uproxx

Caleb Reading:

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Recently a story circulated including a rough translation of a ruling by China’s General Bureau of Radio, Film and Television saying that movies and TV programs based on time travel or on the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature should not “be encouraged anymore”. The part about time travel was mistranslated, however. China hasn’t banned time travel movies. In fairness, they’re just getting the Ashton Kutcher magnum opus Butterfly Effect over there, so even if this were a correct translation we would understand.

The true purpose of the ruling seems to be to discourage the misrepresentation of historical figures in films and TV shows, including in time travel movies. As for limiting the adaptation of the Four Great Classical Novels, that may be out of respect (no crappy adaptations of revered source material) or, more likely, it’s about controlling dissent: adaptations of the Novels are often used to subversively criticize those in power. Hopefully this won’t affect Neil Gaiman’s adaptation of Journey To The West.

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Turns out that the article yesterday, and this one, are from 2011. (I missed that.) But what if they were put there by time-travellers? Meanwhile, Journey To The West seems to have vanished into one of Hollywood’s black holes. (Thanks Seth for pointing it out.)
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dorking, or “how to find anything on the Internet” – FYI

Alec Barrett-Wilsdon:

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Software engineers have long joked about how much of their job is simply Googling things.

Now you can do the same, but for free.

Below, I’ll cover dorking, the use of search engines to find very specific data:

For each example, you can paste it directly into Google to see the result.

table of contents:

• webpages
• emails
• files
• SEO
• coupons!
• secrets
• operator review

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These are all useful and the page is definitely worth bookmarking. They work on non-Google search engines too, because those use the same operators.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: see the item on China and time travel.

The hokey 1960s TV series “Time Tunnel” probably wouldn’t pass muster in China – because of its time-travel theme CC-licensed photo by James Vaughan on Flickr.

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A selection of 13 links for you. Well-baked. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

U.S. government contractor embedded software in apps to track phones • WSJ

Byron Tau:

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A small U.S. company with ties to the U.S. defense and intelligence communities has embedded its software in numerous mobile apps, allowing it to track the movements of hundreds of millions of mobile phones world-wide, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Anomaly Six LLC a Virginia-based company founded by two U.S. military veterans with a background in intelligence, said in marketing material it is able to draw location data from more than 500 mobile applications, in part through its own software development kit, or SDK, that is embedded directly in some of the apps. An SDK allows the company to obtain the phone’s location if consumers have allowed the app containing the software to access the phone’s GPS coordinates.

App publishers often allow third-party companies, for a fee, to insert SDKs into their apps. The SDK maker then sells the consumer data harvested from the app, and the app publisher gets a chunk of revenue. But consumers have no way to know whether SDKs are embedded in apps; most privacy policies don’t disclose that information. Anomaly Six says it embeds its own SDK in some apps, and in other cases gets location data from other partners.

…The company told The Wall Street Journal it restricts the sale of U.S. mobile phone movement data only to nongovernmental, private-sector clients.

Numerous agencies of the U.S. government have concluded that mobile data acquired by federal agencies from advertising is lawful.

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I’m sure that the security around it is absolutely rock solid and not at all at risk from Chinese state and other hackers.
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China bans time travel films and shows, citing disrespect of history • Hollywood Reporter

Jonathan Landreth:

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China’s media authorities have stopped the clock on time travel in film and television, saying the sci-fi notion “disrespects history.”

This would be odd for a country whose big and small screens have long been filled with historically porous period epics about scandalized courts of bygone eras, but not so when one considers that 2011 marks the 90th anniversary of China’s ruling political party.
 
“The rationale [for the time travel ban] is that whatever isn’t possible in the real world belongs to superstition,” said film critic and journalist Raymond Zhou Liming, who notes that time travel is untouched by censors in Chinese literature and theater.
 
In the electronic mass media, however, which in China reaches the world’s largest TV audience and the globe’s fastest growing movie market, the idea of time travel presents a clear and present danger.
 
In time-travel dramas such as Myth (Shen Hua), currently popular on Chinese TV, audiences seem to like the story of a modern man going back to ancient China where, after some adjustment, he finds love and happiness.
 
“Most time travel content that I’ve seen (in literature and theater, that is) is actually not heavy on science, but an excuse to comment on current affairs,” Zhou told The Hollywood Reporter.
 
Apparently unhappy with film and TV presenting even the fictional notion that China’s ability to provide happiness is a thing of the past for the average man, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television posted its guidance about time travel.

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The reason why this is in the Hollywood Reporter is that China is often a big source of funds, and viewers, for films. Or at least, it was. Speaking as someone who loves time travel films, I find this Chinese proscription a bit bonkers – but it makes sense in the context of an authority that doesn’t want to admit the possibility of the present being any different from how it is.
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How Tim Cook made Apple his own • WSJ

Tripp Mickle:

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Mr. Cook’s command of detail causes underlings to enter meetings with trepidation. He leads through interrogation, with a precision that has reshaped how Apple staff work and think.

“The first question is: ‘Joe, how many units did we produce today?’ ‘It was 10,000.’ ‘What was the yield?’ ‘98%.’ You can answer those and then he’d say, ‘Ok, so 98%, explain how the 2% failed?’ You’d think, ‘F—, I don’t know.’ It drives a level of detail so everyone becomes Cook-like,” said Joe O’Sullivan, a former Apple operations executive. He said Mr. Cook’s first meeting with staff the day he arrived in 1998 lasted 11 hours.

Middle managers today screen staff before meetings with Mr. Cook to make sure they’re knowledgeable. First-timers are advised not to speak. “It’s about protecting your team and protecting him. You don’t waste his time,” said a longtime lieutenant. If he senses someone is insufficiently prepared, he loses patience and says, “Next,” as he flips a page of the meeting agenda, this person said, adding, “people have left crying.”

In late 2012, Mr. Cook was absent when Apple’s senior leadership gathered at the St. Regis hotel in San Francisco to review an early prototype of the Apple Watch, its first new product after Mr. Jobs, according to people in attendance.

Such an absence from a new product discussion would have been unthinkable for Mr. Jobs, associates say. But as Apple continued to rake in record profits, Mr. Cook began to turn his focus toward investors who wanted to know what he would do with an ever-growing pile of cash.

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Lots of little details about what he does that’s different: hardly ever goes to the design shop, gets annoyed at little errors, isn’t one for the “how might the world look like in five or ten years?” questions (which is part of why the HomePod, for example, was late to market even though Apple had it internally for years).

Anyway, puts the 2014 book “Haunted Empire” by former WSJ reporter Yukari Iwatani Kane, which argued that Apple post-Jobs was doooooooomed, into perspective. (She’s now an adviser to San Quentin News, “the country’s only prisoner-run newspaper”.
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Snapdragon chip flaws put more than 1 billion Android phones at risk of data theft • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

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A billion or more Android devices are vulnerable to hacks that can turn them into spying tools by exploiting more than 400 vulnerabilities in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chip, researchers reported this week.

The vulnerabilities can be exploited when a target downloads a video or other content that’s rendered by the chip. Targets can also be attacked by installing malicious apps that require no permissions at all.

From there, attackers can monitor locations and listen to nearby audio in real time and exfiltrate photos and videos. Exploits also make it possible to render the phone completely unresponsive. Infections can be hidden from the operating system in a way that makes disinfecting difficult.

Snapdragon is what’s known as a system on a chip that provides a host of components, such as a CPU and a graphics processor. One of the functions, known as digital signal processing, or DSP, tackles a variety of tasks, including charging abilities and video, audio, augmented reality, and other multimedia functions. Phone makers can also use DSPs to run dedicated apps that enable custom features.

“While DSP chips provide a relatively economical solution that allows mobile phones to provide end users with more functionality and enable innovative features—they do come with a cost,” researchers from security firm Check Point wrote in a brief report of the vulnerabilities they discovered.

…Check Point is withholding technical details about the vulnerabilities and how they can be exploited until fixes make their way into end-user devices.

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That sounds easy enough to exploit. And could be a while before it’s sorted. (Thanks G for the link.)
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New ‘unpatchable’ exploit allegedly found on Apple’s Secure Enclave chip; here’s what it could mean • 9to5Mac

Filipe Esposito:

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Chinese hackers from the Pangu Team have reportedly found an “unpatchable” exploit on Apple’s Secure Enclave chip that could lead to breaking the encryption of private security keys. An unpatchable exploit means that the vulnerability was found in the hardware and not the software, so there’s probably nothing Apple can do to fix it on devices that have already been shipped.

We still don’t have further details on what exactly hackers can do with this specific vulnerability, but having full access to the Security Enclave could also mean having access to passwords, credit cards, and much more. The only thing we know so far is that this vulnerability in Secure Enclave affects all Apple chips between the A7 and A11 Bionic, similar to the checkm8 exploit that allows jailbreak for almost all iOS devices up to iPhone X.

Even though Apple has already fixed this security breach with the A12 and A13 Bionic chips, there are still millions of Apple devices running with the A11 Bionic or older chips that could be affected by this exploit. The impacts that this vulnerability found in the Security Enclave will have on users will likely be known in the coming months.

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New cars can stay in their lane—but might not stop for parked cars • Ars Technica

Timothy Lee:

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In recent years, a number of car companies have—like Tesla—begun offering driver assistance systems that offer lane-keeping as well as adaptive cruise control. This might seem like a big step toward a “self-driving car,” since a system like this can travel down the freeway for miles without human intervention. But a new report from AAA underscores the limitations of these systems.

Its most dramatic finding: the advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) on the latest cars still struggle to avoid collisions with parked vehicles. They tested cars from BMW, Kia, and Subaru; none consistently avoided running into a fake car partially blocking the travel lane.

The researchers also examined the ADAS in the Cadillac CT6 and the Ford Edge, but these cars’ systems weren’t included in the parked-vehicle test because their driver assistance systems wouldn’t engage on AAA’s closed course. They were included in other tests conducted on public highways.

“All test drivers reached a general consensus that combining adaptive cruise and lane-keeping functionalities in a single system did not consistently enhance the driving experience,” the report said. The vehicles made mistakes often enough that drivers often found the experience nerve-wracking rather than relaxing.

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Soooo you won’t really feel comfortable engaging them.
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Bill Gates on Covid: most US tests are ‘completely garbage’ • WIRED

Steven Levy speaks to billg:

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Q: As someone who has built your life on science and logic, I’m curious what you think when you see so many people signing onto this anti-science view of the world.

Gates: Well, strangely, I’m involved in almost everything that anti-science is fighting. I’m involved with climate change, GMOs, and vaccines. The irony is that it’s digital social media that allows this kind of titillating, oversimplistic explanation of, “OK, there’s just an evil person, and that explains all of this.” And when you have [posts] encrypted, there is no way to know what it is. I personally believe government should not allow those types of lies or fraud or child pornography [to be hidden with encryption like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger].

Well, you’re friends with Mark Zuckerberg. Have you talked to him about this?

After I said this publicly, he sent me mail. I like Mark, I think he’s got very good values, but he and I do disagree on the trade-offs involved there. The lies are so titillating you have to be able to see them and at least slow them down. Like that video where, what do they call her, the demon sperm woman? That got over 10 million views! [Note: It was more than 20 million.] Well how good are these guys at blocking things, where once something got the 10 million views and everybody was talking about it, they didn’t delete the link or the searchability? So it was meaningless. They claim, “Oh, now we don’t have it.” What effect did that have? Anybody can go watch that thing! So I am a little bit at odds with the way that these conspiracy theories spread, many of which are anti-vaccine things. We give literally tens of billions for vaccines to save lives, then people turn around saying, “No, we’re trying to make money and we’re trying to end lives.” That’s kind of a wild inversion of what our values are and what our track record is.

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“He and I do disagree” is the gentlest possible phrase. Gates was famous, at Microsoft, for going ballistic at people who screwed up. Yet he respects Zuckerberg’s intelligence and instincts. The whole interview is excellent – though note that Gates is now very clever at saying his strong opinions in coded ways.
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Twitter, TikTok have held preliminary talks about possible combination • WSJ

Georgia Wells and Cara Lombardo:

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Twitter has had preliminary talks about a potential combination with TikTok, the popular video-sharing app that the Trump administration has declared a national-security threat due to its Chinese ownership, according to people familiar with the matter.

It is unclear whether Twitter will pursue a deal with TikTok, which would face significant challenges. A deal would involve TikTok’s U.S. operations, the people said.

Microsoft has been negotiating for weeks with TikTok’s owner, Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd., and is considered the front-runner for any possible deal, according to the people. Twitter is seen as a long-shot bidder, given that it is much smaller than Microsoft and would have a harder time paying for the deal—and the software giant is further advanced in negotiations.

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Here’s what it could look like right here, right now. Twitter TikTok. Fabulous.
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Facebook slams Apple’s App Store policies, launches Facebook Gaming on iOS without games • The Verge

Tom Warren:

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Facebook is joining Microsoft in condemning Apple’s App Store policies today. The social media company is launching its Facebook Gaming app for iOS — primarily an app used to watch streamers play video games — but has had to remove the app’s mini games feature to pass Apple’s strict App Store approval process. Facebook isn’t happy about the compromise.

“Unfortunately, we had to remove gameplay functionality entirely in order to get Apple’s approval on the standalone Facebook Gaming app — meaning iOS users have an inferior experience to those using Android,” said Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer in a press statement given to The Verge. “We’re staying focused on building communities for the more than 380 million people who play games on Facebook every month — whether Apple allows it in a standalone app or not.”

Facebook says it has had the Facebook Gaming app rejected multiple times by Apple in recent months. The company says Apple has cited App Store guideline 4.7 to justify the rejections, claiming the primary purpose of the Facebook Gaming app is to play games. Facebook says it shared usage data from its Android Facebook Gaming app that showed 95% of activity is watching streams, but this didn’t change Apple’s stance.

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“We’re only completely breaking your rules 5% of the time” isn’t the sort of excuse that washes with any sort of rulemaker, to be honest.
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To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo • The Markup

Adrianne Jeffries:

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In one of the documents, which appear to be written by the legal team, employees are advised to choose their words carefully and use only third-party data when referencing Google’s “position in search” in sales pitches. They are further cautioned never to print or hand out their slides.

“We use the term ‘User Preference for Google Search’ and never the term market share,” that document says.

Google Search is the company’s most profitable product and, as such, a large target for antitrust regulation. It’s estimated that nine in 10 web searches in the U.S. are completed on Google.

To take action against a company, antitrust regulators must establish that it has a dominant share in a market. The more broadly a market is defined, the easier it is for the company to argue that it has real competition. In the slides, employees are cautioned that defining a market is hard and best avoided.

“These are completely standard competition law compliance trainings that most large companies provide to their employees,” Google spokesperson Julie Tarallo McAlister said in an email. “We instruct employees to compete fairly and build great products, rather than focus or opine on competitors. We’ve had these trainings in place for well over a decade.”

One part of the presentation, subtitled “Communicating Safely,” advises employees on which terms are “Bad” and “Good.” Instead of “market,” employees may say “industry,” “space,” “area,” or simply cite the region, according to the presentation. Instead of “network effects,” the presentation suggests “valuable to users.” And instead of “barriers to entry,” substitute “challenges.”

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They learned from Microsoft. In place for a decade? It was 2009 when the first antitrust complaint was filed against Google – in Europe, by Foundem. Not surprising these are longstanding systems.
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The US declared war on TikTok because it can’t handle the truth • The Verge

Sarah Jeong:

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When it comes down to it, the thorniest privacy dispute of 2020 isn’t about privacy or technology at all — it’s about China. The question “Is Facebook better, worse, or the same as TikTok?” is more or less the same as “Is the United States better, worse, or the same as China?”

And in 2020, this is becoming a genuinely difficult question to answer. China is detaining over a million Uighurs in internment camps, citing national security issues. The United States detains migrants in its own internment camps, even going as far as to place children in cages. China is not a democracy; the American president has proposed to unconstitutionally delay this year’s election. China brutally represses its political dissidents; in America, law enforcement in military camouflage have grabbed protesters off the streets and shoved them into unmarked vans.

Earlier this summer, the American president decided to tweet “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” in response to mass protests — only a few days before the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. I am writing this column from Portland, Oregon, with my gas mask hanging next to my desk. When I go to tie my shoes, my laces emit faint puffs of residual tear gas.

The protests in my city are the same protests happening elsewhere in the country — protests against police violence and racial discrimination. As these protests were raging, Secretary Pompeo gave a speech at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia where he attacked The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which originated as a special issue of The New York Times Magazine containing articles examining slavery and its lasting legacy in everything from mass incarceration to pop music.

“They want you to believe that Marxist ideology that America is only the oppressors and the oppressed,” said Pompeo. “The Chinese Communist Party must be gleeful when they see the New York Times spout this ideology.”

…I call this ideology information-nationalism. Here’s how I would describe its assumptions:

1. When your country acknowledges human rights abuses, you are made weak
2. You can weaken rival nation-states by exposing their human rights abuses

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TikTok and the Sorting Hat • Remains of the Day

Eugene Wei on the surprising success of TikTok, which managed to do what almost no other Chinese app managed – to break through the cultural barrier and resonate in the west:

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They say you learn the most from failure, and in the same way I learn the most about my mental models from the exceptions. How did an app designed by two guys in Shanghai managed to run circles around U.S. video apps from YouTube to Facebook to Instagram to Snapchat, becoming the most fertile source for meme origination, mutation, and dissemination in a culture so different from the one in which it was built?

The answer, I believe, has significant implications for the future of cross-border tech competition, as well as for understanding how product developers achieve product-market-fit. The rise of TikTok updated my thinking. It turns out that in some categories, a machine learning algorithm significantly responsive and accurate can pierce the veil of cultural ignorance. Today, sometimes culture can be abstracted.

…Bytedance has an absurd proportion of their software engineers focused on their algorithms, more than half at last check. It is known as the algorithm company, first for its breakout algorithmic “news” app Toutiao, then for its Musical.ly clone Douyin, and now for TikTok.

Prior to TikTok, I would’ve said YouTube had the strongest exploit algorithm in video, but in comparison to TikTok, YouTube’s algorithm feels primitive (the top creators on YouTube have long ago figured out how to game YouTube’s algorithm’s heavy dependence on click-through rates and watch time, one reason so many YouTube videos are lengthening over time, much to my dismay).

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Toshiba formally and finally exits laptop business • The Register

Simon Sharwood:

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As the PC market contracted and Lenovo, Dell and HP came to dominate PC sales in the 2010s, Toshiba just became a less likely brand to put on a laptop shopping list.

By 2018 the company saw the writing on the wall and sold its PC business unit to Sharp for a pittance – just $36m changed hands – but retained a 19.9% share of the company with an option in Sharp’s favour to buy that stock.

Sharp quickly renamed the business to “Dynabook”, a product name Toshiba had used in Japan, and set about releasing new models and reviving the brand. And it’s done rather well, as shown in our recent review of the new Portégé X30L-G.

Which brings us to June 30th, 2020, when Sharp exercised its option to acquire the 19.9% of Dynabook shares it did not already own. On Tuesday, Toshiba transferred those shares and announced the transaction on Thursday.

And thus ends Toshiba’s time as a PC vendor.

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35 years. Not bad. Though it’s rather like politics: all PC vendors end in failure.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You won’t believe how (in)efficient wireless charging is! CC-licensed photo by Aaron Yoo on Flickr.

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

Facebook employees wonder what would happen if Trump used their platform to dispute election results • Buzzfeed News

Craig Silverman and Ryan Mac:

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Last Friday, at another all-hands meeting, employees asked Zuckerberg how right-wing publication Breitbart News could remain a Facebook News partner after sharing a video that promoted unproven treatments and said masks were unnecessary to combat the novel coronavirus. The video racked up 14 million views in six hours before it was removed from Breitbart’s page, though other accounts continued to share it.

Zuckerberg danced around the question but did note that Breitbart could be removed from the company’s news tab if it were to receive two strikes for publishing misinformation within 90 days of each other. (Facebook News partners, which include dozens of publications such as BuzzFeed News and the Washington Post, receive compensation and placement in a special news tab on the social network.)

“This was certainly one strike against them for misinformation, but they don’t have others in the last 90 days,” Zuckerberg said. “So by the policies that we have, which by the way I think are generally pretty reasonable on this, it doesn’t make sense to remove them.”

But some of Facebook’s own employees gathered evidence they say shows Breitbart — along with other right-wing outlets and figures including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Trump supporters Diamond and Silk, and conservative video production nonprofit Prager University — has received special treatment that helped it avoid running afoul of company policy. They see it as part of a pattern of preferential treatment for right-wing publishers and pages, many of which have alleged that the social network is biased against conservatives.

…On July 22, a Facebook employee posted a message to the company’s internal misinformation policy group noting that some misinformation strikes against Breitbart had been cleared by someone at Facebook seemingly acting on the publication’s behalf.

“A Breitbart escalation marked ‘urgent: end of day’ was resolved on the same day, with all misinformation strikes against Breitbart’s page and against their domain cleared without explanation,” the employee wrote.

The same employee said a partly false rating applied to an Instagram post from Charlie Kirk was flagged for “priority” escalation by Joel Kaplan, the company’s vice president of global public policy. Kaplan once served in George W. Bush’s administration and drew criticism for publicly supporting Brett Kavanaugh’s controversial nomination to the Supreme Court.

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Kaplan’s influence is creating a disinformation climate that is toxic to the rule of law. Increasingly, the question is whether Facebook can be saved in time for the US to save itself.
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The White House’s plan to purge Chinese tech from the internet is just bluster — for now • The Verge

James Vincent:

»

It’s an expansion of the White House’s 5G Clean Path initiative, which was announced earlier this year with the aim of keeping Chinese hardware companies like Huawei and ZTE out of America’s 5G infrastructure. The Clean Network program takes that anti-Chinese impulse and applies it not only to 5G but also telecoms carriers, cloud services, undersea cables, apps, and app stores. It would mean no Chinese apps in US app stores, no US data stored on the Chinese cloud, and no US apps on Chinese smartphones.

Announcing the plan yesterday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said a major aim of the program was to keep American citizens safe from Chinese spies and censorship. In what would be a serious escalation of the administration’s current war against TikTok, Pompeo said that under the Clean Program, the US government would remove all “untrusted” Chinese apps like TikTok and WeChat from American app stores.

“With parent companies based in China, apps like TikTok and WeChat and others, are significant threats to personal data of American citizens, not to mention tools for Chinese Communist Party content censorship,” said Pompeo in the press briefing, reports CNBC.

But while the Clean Network program is grand in scope, it’s not clear how or if it can be enforced, especially with the Trump administration distracted by an election challenge in a few months’ time.

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As usual, it’s something vaguely resembling a good idea, done in entirely the wrong way. The US needs rules about how all data is used, not rules about “Chinese” apps. It’s also the usual tipping of the hand of the Trump admin’s authoritarian instincts: other countries that do this sort of blunt-tool approach are Turkey, India, Russia and China. This won’t stop scams and won’t protect American data, because if Chinese state hackers want it, they’ll just grab it from data brokers or the zillions of unsound web servers out there. Including the US government’s.
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Snapchat adds in-app voter registration targeted at young people • Axios

Sara Fischer:

»

Snapchat successfully registered 450,000 people through its app during the 2018 midterms. Data released in May shows that 50% of those registered actually went out and cast ballots.

What’s next: The new tools will roll out in September, but Snapchat is announcing the tools Thursday on the 55th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. Snapchat says it will also release new content within its content arm, Discover, that will help inform users about how to register to vote and turn out.

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For context: Snapchat reaches 80 million users who are over 18 in the US.

Wonder if Facebook will copy this feature?
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Twitter will label government officials and state-affiliated media accounts • The Verge

Adi Robertson:

»

The state-affiliated media category includes outlets where a government “exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.” (The labels will also appear on senior staff members’ accounts.) It doesn’t include outlets that receive government funding but maintain editorial independence.

Twitter already banned state-affiliated media from buying Twitter ads, and it’s now going to avoid amplifying these outlets, “including on the home timeline, notifications, and search.” The full extent of this isn’t clear: searching for Russia-affiliated RT, for example, still brings up the account’s name with its new label. A Twitter spokesperson also tells The Verge that “there won’t be a change to the account’s visibility if someone follows them” — so if you follow an account like RT, you’ll still see its tweets in the algorithmically organized “top tweets” timeline.

Twitter is following a similar move by Facebook, which added labels to state-owned media in June, and YouTube, which announced a labeling policy in 2018. However, Twitter is apparently the first major platform to explicitly lock these accounts out of its recommendation algorithms.

«

A lot of fun to be had looking at which Chinese media accounts do and don’t get these.
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Wireless charging is a disaster waiting to happen • OneZero

Eric Ravenscraft:

»

I tested a Pixel 4 using multiple wireless chargers, as well as the standard charging cable that comes with the phone. I used a high-precision power meter that sits between the charging block and the power outlet to measure power consumption.
In my tests, I found that wireless charging used, on average, around 47% more power than a cable.

Charging the phone from completely dead to 100% using a cable took an average of 14.26 watt-hours (Wh). Using a wireless charger took, on average, 21.01 Wh. That comes out to slightly more than 47% more energy for the convenience of not plugging in a cable. In other words, the phone had to work harder, generate more heat, and suck up more energy when wirelessly charging to fill the same size battery.

How the phone was positioned on the charger significantly affected charging efficiency. The flat Yootech charger I tested was difficult to line up properly. Initially I intended to measure power consumption with the coils aligned as well as possible, then intentionally misalign them to detect the difference.

Instead, during one test, I noticed that the phone wasn’t charging. It looked like it was aligned properly, but while trying to fiddle with it, the difference between positions that charged properly and those that didn’t charge at all could be measured in millimetres.

«

Personally, I long ago gave up wireless charging on a phone: it’s too easy to get the position wrong (hence zero charging), and too slow. It’s hard to see phone companies retreating from it, though, because it has the lustre of convenience.
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Scientists rename genes because Microsoft Excel reads them as dates • Engadget

Jon Fingas:

»

Microsoft Excel’s automatic formatting is normally helpful for finishing spreadsheets quickly, but it’s proving to be an agent of chaos for geneticists. The Verge has learned that the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee has issued guidelines for naming human genes to prevent Excel’s automatic date formatting from altering data. MARCH1 (Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1), for example, should now be labeled MARCHF1 to stop Excel from changing it to 1-Mar.

The names of 27 genes have been changed in the past year to avoid Excel-related errors, HGNC coordinator Elspeth Bruford said. This isn’t a rare error, either, as Excel had affected about a fifth of genetics-related papers examined in a 2016 study.

There will still be a library of discarded names and symbols to help reduce confusion going forward.

The scientific community has changed gene names before, but usually to minimize false positives in search results or to be sensitive to the concerns of patients. Now, it’s directly in response to software design — technology is getting in the way of research rather than speeding it up.

«

Ah yes – noted this problem back in February 2018, and that paper notes that the problem has been ongoing since 2004. That’s 16 years of errors which may have been overlooked. Terrific screenplay plot device.
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April 2019: Secrecy, self-dealing, and greed at the N.R.A. • The New Yorker

Mike Spies, just over a year ago:

»

The National Rifle Association (N.R.A.) and Ackerman [McQueen, a PR company] have become so intertwined that it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. Top officials and staff move freely between the two organizations; Oliver North, the former Iran-Contra operative, who now serves as the N.R.A.’s president, is paid roughly a million dollars a year through Ackerman, according to two N.R.A. sources.

But this relationship, which in many ways has built the contemporary N.R.A., seems also to be largely responsible for the N.R.A.’s dire financial state. According to interviews and to documents that I obtained—federal tax forms, charity records, contracts, corporate filings, and internal communications—a small group of N.R.A. executives, contractors, and venders has extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from the nonprofit’s budget, through gratuitous payments, sweetheart deals, and opaque financial arrangements.

Memos created by a senior N.R.A. employee describe a workplace distinguished by secrecy, self-dealing, and greed, whose leaders have encouraged disastrous business ventures and questionable partnerships, and have marginalized those who object. “Management has subordinated its judgment to the vendors,” the documents allege. “Trust in the top has eroded.”

«

The New York attorney-general filed on Thursday to have the NRA dissolved on the basis that there’s fraud and self-dealing going on. The article by Spies either triggered the investigation, or was informed by it. A political move, to be sure, but in a sense so was going after Al Capone for non-payment of taxes.
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Hello! You’ve been referred here because you’re wrong about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act • Techdirt

Mike Masnick:

»

Hello! Someone has referred you to this post because you’ve said something quite wrong about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
I apologize if it feels a bit cold and rude to respond in such an impersonal way, but I’ve been wasting a ton of time lately responding individually to different people saying the same wrong things over and over again, and I was starting to feel like this guy [from the “Someone is wrong on the internet” XKCD cartoon].

And… I could probably use more sleep, and my blood pressure could probably use a little less time spent responding to random wrong people. And, so, for my own good you get this. Also for you own good. Because you don’t want to be wrong on the internet, do you?

Also I’ve totally copied the idea for this from Ken “Popehat” White, who wrote Hello! You’ve Been Referred Here Because You’re Wrong About The First Amendment a few years ago, and it’s great. You should read it too. Yes, you. Because if you’re wrong about 230, there’s a damn good chance you’re wrong about the 1st Amendment too.

«

One to read – because everywhere I look there are folks who don’t understand S230 – and to keep in the bookmarks so you too can refer people to it.
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Samsung Galaxy Note 20: this pandemic sure changed smartphone marketing • WSJ

»

Samsung’s Galaxy Note smartphones have always been known for on-the-go productivity, but now we’re not going anywhere. WSJ’s Joanna Stern looks at how Samsung’s changed the phone—and its promotional messages—due to Covid-19.

«

Stern’s are the only videos worth watching about smartphones. And this all rings so, so true. As a comment elsewhere said, “These days, we’re not working from home – we’re living at work.”
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The Beirut explosion and the dangers of ammonium nitrate • Arc Digital

Joel Looper:

»

Not long before this ammonium nitrate was seized by Lebanese port authorities — and it’s not yet clear why it was seized — a similar explosion happened on the other side of the world in the central Texas town of West, with a population under 3,000. The blast on April 17, 2013 killed fifteen, injured more than 160, and destroyed or damaged more than 150 buildings. Windows were blown out seven miles away in Abbott, Texas, the smoke could be seen twenty miles away in Waco, and the resulting 2.1-magnitude earthquake could be felt as far away as the Dallas-Fort Worth area. 240 tons of ammonium nitrate were involved in that blast. (Watch the West, Texas explosion here.)

Both videos show how violent ammonium nitrate explosions can be. The chemical is an oxidizer. All it needs is contact with an open flame for a chemical reaction to take place, and once it begins, the process is rapid and frighteningly powerful. While ammonium nitrate is cheap and easy to manufacture, useful in fertilizer production — and, yes, bomb-making — under the wrong conditions the compound can become extraordinarily lethal.

That became obvious to U.S. officials after the West explosion. After a three year investigation into conditions at the West Fertilizer Company, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) implemented several measures to prevent such a disaster from happening again. These included guidelines to help first responders navigate situations like the one that happened in West, and a requirement that companies make their hazard planning documents available.

«

Now, guess which administration reversed these requirements in November 2019, increasing the possibility of such an explosion happening again? (Thanks G for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Will airports still look like this after the pandemic? CC-licensed photo by Jonathan Cutrer 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. Unticketed. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Can killing cookies save journalism? • WIRED

Gilad Edelman:

»

A study performed by Google last year, for example, concluded that disabling cookies reduced publisher revenue by more than 50%. (Research by an independent team of economists, however, pegged the cookie premium at only 4%. Needless to say, there were methodological differences.)

If the Google study was right, then [Dutch broadcaster] NPO [which essentially let everyone opt out of targeted advertising] should have been heading for financial disaster. The opposite turned out to be true. Instead, the company found that ads served to users who opted out of cookies were bringing in as much or more money as ads served to users who opted in. The results were so strong that as of January 2020, NPO simply got rid of advertising cookies altogether. And rather than decline, its digital revenue is dramatically up, even after the economic shock of the coronavirus pandemic.

This makes NPO a particularly powerful entrant into a long-running debate over the value of targeted advertising. Ad tech companies, a category dominated by Google and Facebook but which teems with other players, argue that microtargeting is better for everyone: users like “relevant” ads, advertisers like being able to reach potential customers more precisely, and publishers get paid more for ads with a higher click rate.

A growing body of evidence, however, calls each of these premises into question. The significance of the debate goes far beyond internet privacy, implicating the viability of journalism and, by extension, the health of democracy.

«

Not giving money to middlemen turns out to be a great way to keep more money for yourself. I’ve never seen the point in targeted advertising.
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A “bug” in Instagram’s hashtags has been favouring Donald Trump • Buzzfeed News

Ryan Mac:

»

For at least the last two months, a key Instagram feature, which algorithmically pushes users toward supposedly related content, has been treating hashtags associated with President Donald Trump and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in very different ways. Searches for Biden also return a variety of pro-Trump messages, while searches for Trump-related topics only returned the specific hashtags, like #MAGA or #Trump — which means searches for Biden-related hashtags also return counter-messaging, while those for Trump do not.

Earlier this week, a search on Instagram for #JoeBiden would have surfaced nearly 390,000 posts tagged with the former vice president’s name along with related hashtags selected by the platform’s algorithm. Users searching Instagram for #JoeBiden might also see results for #joebiden2020, as well as pro-Trump hashtags like #trump2020landslide and #democratsdestroyamerica.

A similar search for #DonaldTrump on the platform, however, provided a totally different experience. Besides showing 7 million posts tagged with the president’s name, Instagram did not present any related hashtags that would have pushed users toward different content or promoted alternative viewpoints.

The difference between these two results, which an Instagram spokesperson told BuzzFeed News was a “bug,” prevented hashtags including #Trump and #MAGA from being associated with potentially negative content. Meanwhile, Instagram hashtags associated with the Democratic presidential candidate — #JoeBiden and #Biden, for example — were presented alongside content that included overtly pro-Trump content and attacks on the former vice president.

«

Instagram then whined, after this was published, that Buzzfeed News had “cherry-picked” from tens of thousands of hashtags that were affected. To which Mac responded that “if Instagram considers comparing the leading hashtags of the top two presidential candidates as ‘cherry-picking,’ I am worried for your platform. How about you guys focus on fixing your platform so reporters don’t have to be your product managers?”

Amen to that last.
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Trump ads on Facebook about Biden and police are false, fact-checkers find • The Washington Post

Craig Timberg and Andrew Ba Tran:

»

Fact-checkers were unanimous in their assessments when President Trump began claiming in June that Democrat Joe Biden wanted to “defund” police forces. PolitiFact called the allegations “false,” as did CheckYourFact. The Associated Press detailed “distortions” in Trump’s claims. FactCheck.org called an ad airing them “deceptive.” Another site, the Dispatch, said there is “nothing currently to support” Trump’s claims.

But these judgments, made by five fact-checking organizations that are part of Facebook’s independent network for policing falsehoods on the platform, were not shared with Facebook’s users. That is because the company specifically exempts politicians from its rules against deception. Ads containing the falsehoods continue to run freely on the platform, without any kind of warning or label.

Enabled by Facebook’s rules, Trump’s reelection campaign has shown versions of the false claim on Facebook at least 22.5 million times, in more than 1,400 ads costing between $350,000 and $553,000, a Washington Post analysis found based on data from Facebook’s Ad Library.

«

Facebook is awful. Awful.
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Facebook must better police online hate, state attorneys general say • The New York Times

Davey Alba:

»

Twenty state attorneys general on Wednesday called on Facebook to better prevent messages of hate, bias and disinformation from spreading, and said the company needed to provide more help to users facing online abuse.

In a letter to the social media giant, the officials said they regularly encountered people facing online intimidation and harassment on Facebook. They outlined seven steps the company should take, including allowing third-party audits of hate content and offering real-time assistance to users.

“We hope to work with you to ensure that fewer individuals suffer online harassment and discrimination, and that it is quickly and effectively addressed when they do,” said the letter, which was addressed to Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and its chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. The officials who signed the letter, all of them Democrats, represent states including New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California, as well as the District of Columbia.

The letter adds to the rising pressure facing Mr. Zuckerberg and his company to stop disinformation and harassment on Facebook.

«

He’ll ignore it.
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What travel will look like after coronavirus • WSJ

Scott McCartney:

»

When will we be traveling again in large numbers? And what will travel be like in the future?

The first question depends on a medical solution to the coronavirus pandemic. The second is best answered with experience.

I asked eight travel pioneers for predictions on what the future of travel will be—current and former chairmen and chief executives of travel companies and a former secretary of transportation. All have experience from past crises and recoveries.

Most foresee a lasting decline in business travel, but think leisure travel will bounce back robustly. That means airlines and hotels will have to change their business plans, being unable to rely as much on rich revenue from corporate travelers. Expect higher ticket prices and room rates for vacationers to cover the costs with fewer high-dollar customers to subsidize bargain-seekers.

“The airline industry is going to have to examine its business plan,” says Robert Crandall, former chief executive of American Airlines. “You are never going to see the volume of business travel that you’ve seen in the past.”

He estimates one-third to one-half of business travel will go away. More meetings will take place electronically. Trips once thought necessary will be seen as superfluous. “Everybody who depends on business travel is going to have to rethink their game plan,” Mr. Crandall says.

«

I seem to recall predictions of business travel “going away” after 9/11. That didn’t happen. Perhaps this time it will.
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The truth is paywalled but the lies are free • Current Affairs

Nathan Robinson, pointing out that reliable news sites almost always have paywalls, but junk ones definitely don’t:

»

people can find their ways around paywalls. SciHub is a completely illegal but extremely convenient means of obtaining academic research for free. (I am purely describing it, not advocating it.) You can find a free version of the article debunking race and IQ myths on ResearchGate, a site that has engaged in mass copyright infringement in order to make research accessible.

Often, because journal publishers tightly control access to their copyrighted work in order to charge those exorbitant fees for PDFs, the versions of articles that you can get for free are drafts that have not yet gone through peer review, and have thus been subjected to less scrutiny. This means that the more reliable an article is, the less accessible it is. On the other hand, pseudo-scholarhip is easy to find.

Right-wing think tanks like the Cato Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, the Hoover Institution, the Mackinac Center, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation pump out slickly-produced policy documents on every subject under the sun. They are utterly untrustworthy—the conclusion is always going to be “let the free market handle the problem,” no matter what the problem or what the facts of the case. But it is often dressed up to look sober-minded and non-ideological. 

«

The essay gets into the much bigger question of why we can’t repay creators based on how much their work is read. (Have you seen Medium, Nathan?) And he does acknowledge the existence of The Guardian, though he says “but it’s owned by a trust!” as though that was the answer to everything. It isn’t.
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Wear OS will lose Google Play Music months before a YouTube Music app exists • Android Police

Jules Wang:

»

Google Play Music is being phased out in favor of YouTube Music starting next month. That change already exacerbates the need for the latter to achieve a desirable feature parity with its predecessor, but it also now presents a challenging chasm for Wear OS users who will lose access to Play Music without a robust YouTube Music experience.

A new Wear OS help page tells users that they won’t be able to download or even use Google Play Music “in the next couple of weeks.” And until a proper YouTube Music experience appears “in the coming months,” that means they’ll have to resort to other apps in order to download and play local files.

People are understandably upset about the lack of commitment Google has to its own wearables platform. It’s been a struggle since day one, after all, and it will continue to be for some time. For the time being, as with almost any media source, Wear OS users will be able to control YouTube Music playback on their phone from their watches.

«

I haven’t been able to keep up with Google’s naming on its music services for ages. Seems like it can’t keep up with keeping them organised across its hardware lines either, which is a terrible indictment of the coordination between the software and hardware sides. And Google doesn’t even offer a smartwatch – this is a mismatch between software for one sort of hardware and software for another sort of hardware. John Gruber argues that Google has just lost interest in Android and WearOS, and it’s hard to make the contrary case.
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Microsoft integrates Android apps into Windows 10 with new Your Phone update • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Microsoft is now allowing Windows 10 users to run Android apps side by side with Windows applications on a PC. It’s part of a new feature in Your Phone, and it builds upon the mirroring that Microsoft’s Your Phone app already provides. You can now access a list of Android apps in Microsoft’s Your Phone app and launch these mobile apps accordingly. These will run in a separate window outside of the Your Phone app, mirrored from your phone.

This new Android app support also allows Windows 10 users to multitask with other Windows apps with alt+tab support, and you’ll even be able to pin these Android apps to the Windows 10 taskbar or Start menu. The ability to launch apps directly from Your Phone means you no longer have to search around on a mirrored experience of your phone, you can simply pin your favorite Android apps to the taskbar and run them as if they’re regular Windows apps.

«

Pretty good! Beat Apple in getting to–

»

Not all Android apps will work seamlessly with this new Your Phone feature, though. Microsoft warns that some may block the ability to cast to other screens, producing a black screen instead. Some apps and games will also not respond to a keyboard or mouse, and others may play audio from your phone.

«

Oh well. But certainly cements the two dominant ecosystems for mobile and phone. A far wiser move by Microsoft than the quixotic pursuit of Windows Phone.
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Levandowski gets 18 months in prison for stealing Google files • Reuters

Paresh Dave:

»

A U.S. judge on Tuesday sentenced former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski to 18 months in prison for stealing a trade secret from Google related to self-driving cars months before becoming the head of Uber Technologies Inc’s rival unit.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco said Levandowski, who was convicted on Tuesday following a March plea agreement, said Levandowski could enter custody once the COVID-19 pandemic has subsided.

Alsup said a sentence short of imprisonment would have given “a green light to every future brilliant engineer to steal trade secrets,” comparing what Levandowski took to a “competitor’s game plan.”

The 75-year-old judge, who has been involved in Silicon Valley litigation for nearly five decades, described Levandowski’s conviction as the “biggest trade secret crime I have ever seen.”

“Billions [of dollars] in the future were at play, and when those kind of financial incentives are there good people will do terrible things, and that’s what happened here,” Alsup said.

Prosecutors sought a 27-month prison sentence. Levandowski requested one-year confinement at his Marin County home, contending that bouts with pneumonia in recent years would make him susceptible to death from the novel coronavirus while in prison. His attorneys asked the judge to consider that investigators found no evidence that “Levandowski used any of Google’s trade secrets after leaving Google’s employment.”

Levandowski transferred more than 14,000 Google files including development schedules and product designs to his personal laptop before leaving the company and while negotiating a deal with Uber, where he briefly led its self-driving car unit.

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Files by Google adds PIN protection for your most sensitive files on Android • The Verge

Jon Porter:

»

The Files by Google app, which primarily gives Android users an easy way to manage files and free up space on their phone, is getting a new PIN-protected “Safe Folder” feature. After setting up a four-digit PIN, you can store any of your sensitive files in this encrypted folder. The folder is locked the moment you switch away to another app, and its contents are only accessible through Files by Google.

According to Google, the feature is mainly designed to help people who share Android devices, which it says is common for women in many parts of the world. Safe Folders keep important files like identity documents safe and secure from accidental deletion or sharing by kids, for example. And yes, it could also help anyone who wants to keep any “sensitive photos” private.

«

If my own experience with files you can PIN-lock is any guide, the world will soon be full of people who have either used their cashcard PIN or birthday to lock these folders, or who cannot remember the PIN to unlock the folder one day after they lock it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The UK Home Office is to stop using an algorithm deemed ‘racist’ for processing visa applications. CC-licensed photo by Jon Evans 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 stranded (yet). I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Missing sailors stranded on Pacific island saved by giant SOS in the sand • The Guardian

Ben Doherty:

»

Three Micronesian sailors stranded on a remote Pacific island have been found alive and well after a rescue team spotted their giant SOS message written into the sand on a beach.

Australian and US military aircraft found the three men on tiny Pikelot Island, nearly 200km west of where they’d set off. Rescuers said they were “in good condition” with no significant injuries.

The men had been missing for three days after their seven-metre skiff ran out of fuel and strayed off course.

Authorities in the US territory of Guam raised the alarm on Saturday after the men failed to complete a 42km trip from Poluwat to Pulap atolls.

Australia’s HMAS Canberra was sailing between Australia and Hawaii when it received the call for help.

On Sunday, a helicopter from the Canberra spotted the giant SOS, close to a small makeshift shelter on the beach, and it landed on the tiny island to check the men’s condition and give them food and water.

«

I find this really heartening. I’d only ever seen it in Tintin-style cartoons, but it’s great to know that it really works in practice. Next time, lads, please also set fire to things inside the letters so it shows at night.
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We won! Home Office to stop using racist visa algorithm • Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants

»

We are delighted to announce that the Home Office has agreed to scrap its ‘visa streaming’ algorithm, in response to legal action we launched with tech-justice group Foxglove.

From Friday, 7 August, Home Secretary Priti Patel will suspend the “visa streaming” algorithm “pending a redesign of the process,” which will consider “issues around unconscious bias and the use of nationality” in automated visa applications.

»

“The Home Office’s own independent review of the Windrush scandal, found that it was oblivious to the racist assumptions and systems it operates. This streaming tool took decades of institutionally racist practices, such as targeting particular nationalities for immigration raids, and turned them into software. The immigration system needs to be rebuilt from the ground up to monitor for such bias and to root it out.”

«

–Chai Patel, Legal Policy Director of JCWI

Today’s win represents the UK’s first successful court challenge to an algorithmic decision system. We had asked the Court to declare the streaming algorithm unlawful, and to order a halt to its use to assess visa applications, pending a review. The Home Office’s decision effectively concedes the claim.

«

Small – and not-so-small – victories. Important to challenge this, but you have to know that these systems are being used in order to mount the challenge. That’s the real problem. Because you know that once you dig into them, they’ll be rotten with assumptions.
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UK coal use to fall to lowest level since industrial revolution • Carbon Brief

Simon Evans:

»

UK coal use is likely to soon fall back to levels last seen during the industrial revolution, Carbon Brief analysis of official figures suggests.

The UK used 49 million tonnes of coal in 2014 according to Carbon Brief estimates. That’s more than a 20% reduction compared to the previous year, and the joint lowest coal use in  records going back to the 1850s. Only 2009, when the country was in the depths of the financial crisis, had equally low coal consumption.

There are several reasons to expect coal use to continue falling this year, suggesting a clear historic low is in store for 2015.

Getting out of coal as quickly as possible is necessary in developed countries, to prevent dangerous global warming. To assess UK progress we’ve looked back at its changing relationship with coal, and what that means for the climate.

«

A longer-term view shows that we’re now using as little (or as much) coal as when Stephenson got his patent for the Rocket steam engine. I guess there was a lot being used to heat houses.
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Greg Joswiak replaces Phil Schiller as head of Apple marketing • The Verge

Jacob Kastrenakes:

»

Apple’s longtime marketing chief, Phil Schiller, is stepping into a somewhat smaller role after decades with the company. Schiller is dropping his role as senior vice president of worldwide marketing, but he’ll remain in charge of the App Store and Apple Events. Greg Joswiak, previously the head of product marketing, will take over Schiller’s former position as Apple’s overall marketing leader.

Marketing is a huge role inside of Apple that goes beyond simply advertising products, so this marks a significant change within the company. As Apple puts it, the marketing division is “responsible for Apple’s product management and product marketing, developer relations, market research, business management, as well as education, enterprise, and international marketing.” Joswiak has been in Apple leadership roles for more than two decades, and he’s led Apple’s worldwide product marketing for the last four years.

Schiller has been with Apple since 1997, helping to steer the company from one of its lowest points to the technology juggernaut that it is today. While he’s been in charge of marketing, Schiller is also known for his involvement in Apple’s hardware, often presenting new products — like the previous Mac Pro — onstage at events.

«

Schiller has been a crucial member of Apple. Incredible to think that he joined at the age of 27, and this year turned 60. More than three decades, from just after its darkest hour to its biggest. And he’s been involved in crucial decisions: he was one of the people who lobbied Steve Jobs to allow third-party developers to create the App Store in 2007. Jobs was Apple, but Schiller in many ways is even more the embodiment of Apple: outwardly calm, amiable, and prepared, but behind his eyes always working the angles and looking to the future. I interviewed him many times on and off the record and never felt I was being shortchanged.
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Last hurrah? 27-inch iMac get Intel processor upgrade, all-SSD storage, T2 chip – Six Colors

Jason Snell:

»

At Apple’s developer conference in June, Tim Cook said that the company still had Macs with Intel processors in its pipeline. It must be rapidly filling with Macs with Apple silicon, but on Tuesday that pipeline disgorged a new Intel-based 27-inch iMac with a bunch of technical improvements, while retaining the prices of previous models.

For those expecting a redesign to the exterior of the iMac, which has been largely unchanged for many years now, it’s clear that any major rethinking of Apple’s venerable all-in-one is going to have to wait for the Apple silicon era. Apple’s not doing what it did with the iMac back during the last processor transition and redesigning the exterior just before swapping chips, and future Mac historians will be thankful for that.

…As for the future, is this the last Intel Mac we’ll see? There’s no way to tell, though reading between the lines, it wouldn’t be surprising if there were some more Intel-based Mac releases as Apple progresses through its two-year-long processor transition. But I’d wager good money that the next time we see an iMac update, there won’t be an Intel processor at its heart. And perhaps it will look appreciably different, too.

«

My guess for the order of Apple Silicon (ARM) updates is: MacBook, MacBook Pro 13in, Mac mini, MacBook Pro 16in, iMacs, MacBook Air, Mac Pro.

The Air as the last laptop to join because it’s insanely profitable once they’ve locked down the design, and they only updated it recently. They’ll want 18 months of that lovely profit first – and people don’t mind about the speed; it’s the name and the shape.

Also, I bet Schiller will want to introduce at least one of these machines.
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Science Twitter got catfished by a fake professor who ‘died from Covid’ • Gizmodo

Ed Cara:

»

A bizarre saga of events played out on social media over the weekend, embroiling much of the close-knit world of scientists, academics, and researchers on Twitter. It started with accusations that Arizona State University’s actions had exposed one of their faculty members, an Indigenous woman and anthropologist, to an ultimately fatal case of covid-19. But it ended with allegations that the death was a hoax, carried out by someone who also faked the supposed professor’s entire existence.

Given that many colleges and schools are debating if and how it’s possible to reopen physically this fall in the midst of the pandemic, the accusations of negligence on the part of Arizona State University carry a heavy weight. But many members of the science Twitter community now suspect that the academic who was the first to report the woman’s death, Tennessee-based neuroscientist BethAnn McLaughlin, has pulled off a catfishing scam for years, citing inconsistencies in the woman’s accounts of events in her now-gone tweets.

“Unfortunately, this appears to be a hoax. We have been looking into this since this weekend and cannot verify any connection with the university,” an ASU representative said in an email. If this was indeed a catfishing scheme, the faux death would not only make a mockery of the concerns people have about covid-19, but also the challenges that women of color continue to face in science. 

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A fabulous example of people wanting to believe, and ignoring a fair amount of evidence to the contrary. But equally, when you have someone who’s determined to catfish you hard, you need a very suspicious mind to detect it, which most people don’t come with. (Or read the NYTimes version of the story.)
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Theoretical physicists say 90% chance of societal collapse within several decades • Vice

Nafeez Ahmed:

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Two theoretical physicists specializing in complex systems conclude that global deforestation due to human activities is on track to trigger the “irreversible collapse” of human civilization within the next two to four decades. 

If we continue destroying and degrading the world’s forests, Earth will no longer be able to sustain a large human population, according to a peer-reviewed paper published this May in Nature Scientific Reports. They say that if the rate of deforestation continues, “all the forests would disappear approximately in 100–200 years.”

“Clearly it is unrealistic to imagine that the human society would start to be affected by the deforestation only when the last tree would be cut down,” they write.  

This trajectory would make the collapse of human civilization take place much earlier due to the escalating impacts of deforestation on the planetary life-support systems necessary for human survival—including carbon storage, oxygen production, soil conservation, water cycle regulation, support for natural and human food systems, and homes for countless species.  

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You wanted good news? Sorry.
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Google’s secret home security superpower: your smart speaker with its always-on mics •

Janko Roettgers:

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Last week, Reddit user Brazedowl received a curious notification on his phone: Google was telling him that a smoke detector in his home had gone off. Brazedowl, a teacher from North Carolina who goes by Drew in real life, knew about the smoke alarm — he was at home himself and had just fried some sausages in his kitchen. But up until that moment, he had no idea that his smart speaker was able to detect such events. “Google just made my dumb smoke detectors smart,” he wrote on Reddit. “Pretty rad.”

A Google spokesperson told Protocol that the feature was accidentally enabled for some users through a recent software update and has since been rolled back. But in light of Monday’s news that Google invested $450 million — acquiring a 6.6% stake — in home security provider ADT, it may be a sign of things to come for Google, as it hints at the company’s secret home security superpower: millions of smart speakers already in people’s homes.

Once the deal closes, ADT’s more than 20,000 installers will also sell Google-made smart displays, security cameras and other hardware, and ADT will more closely integrate Google technology into its own home security offerings. “The goal is to give customers fewer false alarms, more ways to receive alarm events, and better detection of potential incidents inside and around the home,” Google Nest VP and GM Rishi Chandra said in a blog post.

Brazedowl wasn’t the only Google smart speaker user receiving a possible preview of this kind of incident detection in recent days. Other Reddit users reported getting security alerts after breaking glassware, as well as some false alarms triggered by sounds like popped bubble wrap and high-frequency noises that could be confused with a smoke alarm.

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Google announced this in May for paying subscribers of its Nest Aware service. But it must be feasible for any Google Home to do this. Always listening, all the time.
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Mergers: proposed acquisition of Fitbit by Google • EU Competition Commissioner

Margrethe Vestager:

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Following its first phase investigation, the Commission has concerns about the impact of the transaction on the supply of online search and display advertising services (the sale of advertising space on, respectively, the result page of an internet search engine or other internet pages), as well as on the supply of ”ad tech” services (analytics and digital tools used to facilitate the programmatic sale and purchase of digital advertising). By acquiring Fitbit, Google would acquire (i) the database maintained by Fitbit about its users’ health and fitness; and (ii) the technology to develop a database similar to Fitbit’s one.

The data collected via wrist-worn wearable devices appears, at this stage of the Commission’s review of the transaction, to be an important advantage in the online advertising markets. By increasing the data advantage of Google in the personalisation of the ads it serves via its search engine and displays on other internet pages, it would be more difficult for rivals to match Google’s online advertising services. Thus, the transaction would raise barriers to entry and expansion for Google’s competitors for these services, to the ultimate detriment of advertisers and publishers that would face higher prices and have less choice.

…the Commission will also further examine:

• the effects of the combination of Fitbit’s and Google’s databases and capabilities in the digital healthcare sector, which is still at a nascent stage in Europe; and
• whether Google would have the ability and incentive to degrade the interoperability of rivals’ wearables with Google’s Android operating system for smartphones once it owns Fitbit.

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Could take until December. Again, I wonder how Fitbit stays afloat during this.
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First cruises to set sail post COVID-19 abruptly canceled due to outbreak • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

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At least 36 crew members and five passengers of the Norwegian cruise ship, MS Roald Amundsen, have tested positive for COVID-19.

Four of the infected crew members have been hospitalized and hundreds of passengers are in quarantine, awaiting test results.

MS Roald Amundsen is run by the Norwegian firm Hurtigruten, which in mid-June became the first cruise ship operator in the world to resume voyages amid the coronavirus pandemic. Hurtigruten assured travelers that it followed national public health guidelines and touted safety precautions for passengers on board, including social distancing, increased hygiene and sanitation protocols, and a vow to sail at no more than 50% capacity.

“At Hurtigruten, safety always has been, and always will be, our number one priority,” the company says on a COVID-19 safety page on its website. “With over 127 years of experience, we have established strict procedures for protection against infectious [sic] on board our ships.”

In the wake of the outbreak, the company has suspended all cruises. Norway’s government has also banned cruise ships carrying more than 100 people from disembarking passengers at its ports for 14 days.

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I cannot imagine what in the world would tempt anyone to take a cruise at the moment, unless they’re affiliated with Dignitas.
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Coronavirus future in USA will be whack-a-mole: Q&A with epidemiologist • USA Today

USA Today interviewed Larry Brilliant, the epidemiologist who helped eradicate smallpox:

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Q: What do you predict is going to happen when schools open in person?

A. I think a lot of schools will be able to open just fine. But the models all say that the single most important factor in the safety of an internal area that you’re trying to make safe — whether it’s a convention or a company or movie production or a theater — is the ambient viral burden. How bad are the incidence and the prevalence and the death rates in hospitals right outside that school? There will be schools that are located in fortunate places that have, at this point, very low incidence. But this virus hopscotches around.

Q. Even if relatively few kids get seriously ill, don’t they spread the disease? 

A. The school season has been, historically, the place that sets off the fall set of respiratory diseases. We talk about it as the spark that begins the American portion of influenza season. Respiratory viruses begin with the kids going to school and sharing viruses and then taking them home. And then a few weeks later, I’m sure you’ve had this experience: Your kids go to kindergarten and two weeks later, you’re getting a cold. So, I think it will help the virus to continue its growth, and it will spread it everywhere around the country that doesn’t already have it.

Q: Are we on the verge of the perfect storm?

A. Well, it can get really bad. If the epidemic isn’t stopped, it’ll just keep going. Right now maybe 10% of (the 330 million) Americans have had the disease. That means you got 300 million more customers for this disease who have not bought it yet.

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I’d be surprised if it’s even 10% that have had it. There’s a long way to go. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified