Facial recognition is in more and more places (like this airport gate). Maybe it’s the next big thing? CC-licensed photo by Delta News Hub 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. So let’s get started. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facial recognition creeps into everything at CES 2020 • CNET

Alfred Ng:

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Konami Gaming, a slot machine maker, wants to weave facial recognition into its one-armed bandits. During a visit to its Las Vegas headquarters to hear more about its plans, I quickly discovered what the world would be like if facial recognition is everywhere. 

“Hello, Alfred,” said a measured, robotic voice, startling me. It came from a kiosk called “Biometrics Welcome Console” positioned right next to the door of the conference room where my meeting was held. The kiosk knew who I was because Konami had set up a profile for me, using a public photo from my CNET bio without telling me. The facial recognition tagged me before I’d even said hello to the Konami team members in the room. 

I looked at the screen showing the photo the kiosk took of me when I walked in. The camera had caught just my eyes and nose. Still, the facial recognition software calculated it detected me with 60.5% accuracy.

“Any picture you use online can be used to identify you already,” Sina Miri, Konami’s vice president of innovation and strategic research and design, told me. Konami had also set up profiles of my colleagues at the visit, again without telling them.

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I think Ng is correct about what’s happening here: facial recognition is going to be in everything, and everywhere. Our homes and cars will recognise us, things in the street will recognise us. It will be the scene from Minority Report. The next big thing isn’t a positive thing like augmented reality spectacles that inform you about the world; it’s facial recognition everywhere, and we might not be in control of it as we are our smartphones. (Though even those leak data like mad.)
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Why does the IEA keep getting renewables wrong? • Unearthed

Lauri Myllyvirta:

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The IEA [International Energy Agency] argues that the New Policies Scenarios are not predictions or forecasts, simply assessments of ‘where today’s policy ambitions are likely to take the energy sector’. However, global policy ambition on solar did not increase ten-fold from 2005 to 2010, the ability of the technology to deliver did. Providing information on how much solar capacity current and expected policies are likely to deliver is exactly the job of these scenarios and, so far, they have been worse than useless in that job.

Forecasting the future is very hard, while picking faults in the work of an agency that puts out detailed scenarios every year is easy. However, the blatant underestimation of renewables goes well beyond normal shifts, surprises and misjudgments that are to be expected in any attempt to assess the future. If you keep making the exact same assessment for 15 years and are wildly wrong every time, you go back and assess the premises for your assessments. If something is happening in the real world that your models fail to capture, you improve your models. Anything else is not a good-faith effort to look at energy sector trends.

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This is from 2017. Guess what? The IEA (no relation to the right-wing shadily funded Institute of Economic Affairs) has continued getting it wrong. On its own that wouldn’t be a problem, but big banks and investment companies use the IEA’s forecasts to decide where to put their money. That keeps open the coal plants that should be shut down because they’ll be uneconomic, and prevents the investment in renewables that we need.
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State support helped fuel Huawei’s global rise • WSJ

Chuin-Wei Yap:

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Tax deductions and exemptions helped Huawei save up to $25 billion in income, value-added and other taxes in at least the past decade, the Journal estimated. Responding to the estimate, a Huawei spokesman said the company is globally tax-compliant.

In his remarks at the conference, Mr. Li said local officials began waiving or reducing levies on Huawei, including income and value-added taxes, in the early 1990s.

Financial support helped the company undercut rivals. In 2010, the European Commission found that Chinese modem exporters including Huawei had benefited from subsidies, according to a confidential report reviewed by the Journal. The commission cut short its probe after the complainant prompting it reached a “cooperation agreement” with the company. Huawei denied receiving such subsidies.

Besides subsidies, Huawei since 1998 has received an estimated $16 billion in loans, export credits, and other forms of financing from Chinese banks for itself or its customers, the Journal found.

China’s state-controlled banking system underpins cheap loans that lower costs for Huawei and its customers to buy its products on credit. State lending facilities for Huawei were among the largest in history.

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The WSJ puts the total subsidies at $75bn over its life. Not surprising that it has been able to undercut Nokia, Alcatel and the other network equipment companies in bids over the years; and that has a flywheel effect – you get more contracts, and your rivals aren’t getting them.

But is it really unfair, when China wanted to be able to control its destiny in the telecoms market?
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Researchers: Are we on the cusp of an ‘AI winter’? • BBC News

Sam Shead:

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Robot Wars judge Noel Sharkey, who is also a professor of AI and robotics at Sheffield University, told the BBC that he likes the term “AI autumn” – and several others agree.

…In 2014, Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, went one step further with his book Superintelligence. It predicts a world where machines are firmly in control. But those conversations were taken less and less seriously as the decade went on. At the end of 2019, the smartest computers could still only excel at a “narrow” selection of tasks.

Gary Marcus, an AI researcher at New York University, said: “By the end of the decade there was a growing realisation that current techniques can only carry us so far.”

He thinks the industry needs some “real innovation” to go further. “There is a general feeling of plateau,” said Verena Rieser, a professor in conversational AI at Edinburgh’s Herriot Watt University. One AI researcher who wishes to remain anonymous said we’re entering a period where we are especially sceptical about AGI.

“The public perception of AI is increasingly dark: the public believes AI is a sinister technology,” they said.

For its part, DeepMind has a more optimistic view of AI’s potential, suggesting that as yet “we’re only just scratching the surface of what might be possible”.

“As the community solves and discovers more, further challenging problems open up,” explained Koray Kavukcuoglu, its vice president of research. “This is why AI is a long-term scientific research journey.

“We believe AI will be one of the most powerful enabling technologies ever created – a single invention that could unlock solutions to thousands of problems. The next decade will see renewed efforts to generalise the capabilities of AI systems to help achieve that potential – both building on methods that have already been successful and researching how to build general-purpose AI that can tackle a wide range of tasks.”

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Two states. Eight textbooks. Two American stories • The New York Times

Dana Goldstein:

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The books The Times analyzed were published in 2016 or later and have been widely adopted for eighth and 11th graders, though publishers declined to share sales figures. Each text has editions for Texas and California, among other states, customized to satisfy policymakers with different priorities.

“At the end of the day, it’s a political process,” said Jesús F. de la Teja, an emeritus professor of history at Texas State University who has worked for the state of Texas and for publishers in reviewing standards and textbooks.

The differences between state editions can be traced back to several sources: state social studies standards; state laws; and feedback from panels of appointees that huddle, in Sacramento and Austin hotel conference rooms, to review drafts.

Requests from textbook review panels, submitted in painstaking detail to publishers, show the sometimes granular ways that ideology can influence the writing of history.

A California panel asked the publisher McGraw-Hill to avoid the use of the word “massacre” when describing 19th-century Native American attacks on white people. A Texas panel asked Pearson to point out the number of clergy who signed the Declaration of Independence, and to state that the nation’s founders were inspired by the Protestant Great Awakening.

All the members of the California panel were educators selected by the State Board of Education, whose members were appointed by former Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat. The Texas panel, appointed by the Republican-dominated State Board of Education, was made up of educators, parents, business representatives and a Christian pastor and politician.

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You might think: America’s a big place, it’s as big as Europe, there are going to be differences. But where you have divergent pictures of a history of a single nation, you’re going to create differences in how people view the country. That will then count when it comes to picking politicians and voting on laws.
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India’s top court says indefinite Kashmir internet shutdown is illegal • Reuters

Sankalp Phartiyal and Fayaz Bukhari:

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India’s Supreme Court said on Friday that an indefinite shutdown of the internet in Kashmir was illegal, rebuking the government for the communications lockdown imposed after it withdrew the Muslim majority region’s autonomy in August.

Internet suspensions can be imposed only for “temporary duration” and an indefinite suspension violated India’s telecoms rules, the court said in an order published on its website.

It also ordered authorities to review all such curbs in Kashmir immediately.

Authorities must consider immediately allowing the functioning of essential internet services such as for hospitals and limited e-banking in regions where internet cannot be restored right away, the court added.

“Freedom of Internet access is a fundamental right,” Supreme Court justice N. V. Ramana said.

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New fundamental right? The Indian government has been quietly turning into a very authoritarian one, though.
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LG aims to turn around mobile unit • Korea Times

Baek Byung-yeul:

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A senior LG Electronics executive said Thursday that the company’s long-time money-losing smartphone division will turn a profit by the end of 2021; however, he didn’t elaborate how.

“LG Electronics mobile business is going to be profitable by 2021. I can say we can make that happen as LG Electronics will expand our mobile lineup and steadily release new ones attached with some wow factors to woo consumers,” the company’s chief executive Kwon Bong-seok told reporters in a press conference on the sidelines of this year’s technology exhibition, here.

Regarding the specifics on how, the CEO didn’t delve into more but only reiterated LG Electronics’ plan to expand the phone lineup, which he believes is possibly a plus factor to improve LG’s competitiveness in the already saturated smartphone market.

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LG’s mobile division has lost money for more than three straight years now. So when the new CEO says it’s going to become profitable, I say

via GIPHY

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Facebook’s PR feels broken • The Margins

Ranjan Roy:

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to summarize, Andrew Bosworth, longtime Facebook exec, wrote a long, reflective internal post on Facebook’s role in the 2020 election:

So was Facebook responsible for Donald Trump getting elected? I think the answer is yes, but not for the reasons anyone thinks. He didn’t get elected because of Russia or misinformation or Cambridge Analytica. He got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period.

In a section that got a lot of attention, he continued:

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I find myself thinking of the Lord of the Rings at this moment. Specifically when Frodo offers the ring to Galadrial and she imagines using the power righteously, at first, but knows it will eventually corrupt her. As tempting as it is to use the tools available to us to change the outcome, I am confident we must never do that or we will become that which we fear.

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I’m not a big LOTR person, and will let Gizmodo cover the accuracy of his reference, but how does Facebook possibly let this enter the national conversation? One of their most longtime, loyal leaders is directly saying they have the power to sway national elections. It is their decision, and their decision alone, to resist the temptation to “change the outcome”!

This is the very definition of a need for regulation. By its own admission, the company is acknowledging its unnatural power. In the memo, Boz clarifies he’s liberal in his politics, but the issue is not Facebook and its purported ties to the right. The issue is simply its size. An individual, for-profit corporation should not get to decide whether democracy will work.

To continue on the communications breakdown, Boz posted an explanation on Facebook, where he advertises the post as an organizational, internal call-to-debate. But while it’s great to have a safe space for internal, organizational debates, it’s still hugely concerning when that internal debate is whether we should all have a free and fair election in the U.S.

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Roy and Manjan produce a consistently good newsletter (and it’s free). This dissects the whole Facebook debacle particularly well.
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A lazy fix 20 years ago means the Y2K bug is taking down computers now • New Scientist

Chris Stokel-Walker:

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Parking meters, cash registers and a professional wrestling video game have fallen foul of a computer glitch related to the Y2K bug.

The Y2020 bug, which has taken many payment and computer systems offline, is a long-lingering side effect of attempts to fix the Y2K, or millennium bug.

Both stem from the way computers store dates. Many older systems express years using two numbers – 98, for instance, for 1998 – in an effort to save memory. The Y2K bug was a fear that computers would treat 00 as 1900, rather than 2000.

Programmers wanting to avoid the Y2K bug had two broad options: entirely rewrite their code, or adopt a quick fix called “windowing”, which would treat all dates from 00 to 20, as from the 2000s, rather than the 1900s. An estimated 80% of computers fixed in 1999 used the quicker, cheaper option.

“Windowing, even during Y2K, was the worst of all possible solutions because it kicked the problem down the road,” says Dylan Mulvin at the London School of Economics.

Coders chose 1920 to 2020 as the standard window because of the significance of the midpoint, 1970. “Many programming languages and systems handle dates and times as seconds from 1970/01/01, also called Unix time,” says Tatsuhiko Miyagawa, an engineer at cloud platform provider Fastly.

Unix is a widely used operating system in a variety of industries, and this “epoch time” is seen as a standard.

The theory was that these windowed systems would be outmoded by the time 2020 arrived, but many are still hanging on and in some cases the issue had been forgotten.

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Bing loses out to DuckDuckGo in Google’s new Android search engine ballot • The Verge

James Vincent:

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EU citizens setting up Android devices from March 1 will be given a choice of four search engines to use as their default, including Google. Whichever provider they chose will become the default for searches made in Chrome and through Android’s home screen search box. A dedicated app for that provider will also be installed on their device.

The “choice screen” is being introduced by Google following an antitrust ruling from the European Union last March. Google was fined a record $5bn by EU regulators, who said the company had to stop “illegally tying” its search engine and browser to its mobile OS.

The search engines shown to new users will vary for each EU country, with the selection decided based on a “fourth-price” auction system. Each provider tells Google how much it’s willing to pay the company every time a user selects their product as the default. The three highest bidders are then shown to users, with the chosen provider paying Google the amount offered by the fourth-highest bid. This process is repeated every four months.

All this means that the choices Google will show to users don’t necessarily reflect a search engine’s popularity in that country. Rather, it shows how much the provider is willing to pay for users. This might explain why Microsoft’s Bing only appears as an option in the UK — a country where the revenue from search ads is likely to be higher than lower-GDP nations.

When Google announced the auction system last August, rival search providers were not happy. Eric Leandri, CEO of privacy-focused search engine Qwant, said it was a “total abuse of [Google’s] dominant position” to “ask for cash just for showing a proposal of alternatives.” Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo, said the auction system was a “pay-to-play auction” that meant “Google will profit at the expense of the competition.”

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As one of the commenters points out, the money from the auction shouldn’t go to Google – it ought to go to a charity. Or it could go to the EC, or to rival search providers. Whichever; it doesn’t make sense for Google to be rewarded for abusing its position, which the EC decision clearly says it was doing.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Venetian Resort hotel in Las Vegas: its owner disparaged Iran in 2013. Its hacking response cost him over $40m. CC-licensed photo by Ken Lund 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. Used the first week well? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook says it won’t back down from allowing lies in political ads • The New York Times

Mike Isaac and Cecilia Kang:

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The stance put Facebook, the most important digital platform for political ads, at odds with some of the other large tech companies, which have begun to put new limits on political ads.

Facebook’s decision, telegraphed in recent months by executives, is likely to harden criticism of the company heading into this year’s presidential election.

Political advertising cuts to the heart of Facebook’s outsize role in society, and the company has found itself squeezed between liberal critics, who want it to do a better job of policing its various social media platforms, and conservatives, who say their views are being unfairly muzzled.
The issue has raised important questions regarding how heavy a hand technology companies like Facebook — which also owns Instagram and the messaging app WhatsApp — and Google should exert when deciding what types of political content they will and will not permit.

By maintaining a status quo, Facebook executives are essentially saying they are doing the best they can without government guidance and see little benefit to the company or the public in changing.

In a blog post, a company official echoed Facebook’s earlier calls for lawmakers to set firm rules.

“In the absence of regulation, Facebook and other companies are left to design their own policies,” Rob Leathern, Facebook’s director of product management overseeing the advertising integrity division, said in the post.

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Facebook had a choice: leave things as they were and thus paint a big target on its back, or do something else and paint a big target on its back. The question, though, is which approach is the better one. Political ads just cause Facebook pain. Why not just ban them?
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Ring fired employees for watching customer videos • VICE

Joseph Cox:

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Amazon-owned home security camera company Ring has fired employees for improperly accessing Ring users’ video data, according to a letter the company wrote to Senators and obtained by Motherboard.

The news highlights a risk across many different tech companies: employees may abuse access granted as part of their jobs to look at customer data or information. In Ring’s case this data can be particularly sensitive though, as customers often put the cameras inside their home.

“We are aware of incidents discussed below where employees violated our policies,” the letter from Ring, dated January 6, reads. “Over the last four years, Ring has received four complaints or inquiries regarding a team member’s access to Ring video data,” it continues. Ring explains that although each of these people were authorized to view video data, their attempted access went beyond what they needed to access for their job.

“In each instance, once Ring was made aware of the alleged conduct, Ring promptly investigated the incident, and after determining that the individual violated company policy, terminated the individual,” the letter adds.

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“Once Ring was made aware” is suitably vague. Someone told on the staff? And there’s still the problem that it uses a simple email/password combination to log in to something intentionally accessible across the whole internet.
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Meghan and Harry’s story is quite the drama, but it’s no abdication crisis • The Guardian

Marina Hyde:

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this is not the abdication. Whatever the vicissitudes of Harry and Meghan’s new path, it’s probably going to be better than ending up in a Bois de Boulogne house, paying social calls on Adolf Hitler. On the downside, the jewellery collection is likely to be comparatively sparse.

So people may currently claim Harry and Meghan’s move is seismic. But, long-term, it will be most dangerous insofar as it feeds into what we might call the monarchy’s Charles III problem. The UK is in a time of huge national flux and turmoil, and the Queen, the last link with the postwar consensus, is 93. Waiting in the wings is a rather unloved and not especially admirable man. For all today’s sound and fury, the real looming crisis for the royal family is not the sixth in line to the throne – but the first.

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In the past three months Prince Andrew has “stepped back”, and now Harry and Meghan. That “postwar consensus” is looking very frayed; the succession will be a disjoint that might be on a par with Brexit for the discomfort it causes society.
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Amazon takes a swipe at Paypal’s $4bn acquisition • WIRED

Louise Matsakis:

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“[The browser extension] Honey tracks your private shopping behavior, collects data like your order history and items saved, and can read or change any of your data on any website you visit,” the message [on Amazon’s site] read. “To keep your data private and secure, uninstall this extension immediately.” It was followed by hyperlink where users could learn how to do so. Screenshots of the warning were posted to forums and social media by Honey users, like Ryan Hutchins, an editor at Politico.

Honey isn’t some obscure browser extension from an unknown developer. Founded in 2012, the Los Angeles-based startup now boasts over 17 million users. It finds discount codes to save shoppers money at tens of thousands of online retailers, including Amazon. In November, PayPal agreed to purchase Honey for an eye-popping $4 billion, its largest deal ever. The acquisition was completed this week.

Amazon’s warning, which began appearing on December 20, confused and angered many of Honey’s users, some of whom complained on its official social media channels. The browser extension has been compatible with Amazon since it was founded, and is a significant part of Honey’s appeal. Amazon is one of the most popular retailers in the world and the place where most Americans begin when looking for a product online.

Amazon declined to explain why it decided to label Honey a security risk so suddenly last month. “Our goal is to warn customers about browser extensions that collect personal shopping data without their knowledge or consent,” a spokesperson for the company said in a statement. They declined to answer follow-up questions about the basis for that claim.

When people install the Honey extension in their browser, they consent to the company’s Terms of Use and Privacy and Security Policy. While these kinds of agreements can be dense and difficult for the average person to interpret, Honey doesn’t appear to be collecting consumer information without asking, as Amazon implied to WIRED. Its privacy policy states that it doesn’t “track your search engine history, emails, or your browsing on any site that is not a retail website.”

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I’d guess that Amazon started doing this particularly over the Christmas period because that’s its biggest quarter, but also margins get squeezed.
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E-scooter startup Lime shuts in 12 markets, lays off around 100 • Axios

Kia Kokalitcheva:

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Scooter company Lime is laying off about 14% of its workforce (roughly 100 employees) and shuttering operations in 12 markets as it seeks to become profitable this year, the company tells Axios.

After two years of explosive growth, scooter companies have entered a new phase—survival of the fittest in a capital-intensive, money-losing industry.

Lime is not the first or only scooter company to make cuts.

Bird, Scoot, Lyft, and Skip have all held layoffs or retreated from certain markets over the past year. Lime too has made small cuts, as when it suspended operations and laid off workers in St. Louis in late 2018, though it emphasizes to Axios that it will continue to expand to new markets this year.

The companies have generated headlines for huge losses as they attempt to manage vehicle attrition, labor costs, and regulatory battles.

“We’re very confident that in 2020, Lime will be the first next-generation mobility company to be profitable,” Lime president Joe Kraus tells Axios.

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The odd thing is that 11 of the 12 cities have warm weather, and thus scooters could work year-round.
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U.S. funds free Android phones for the poor — but with permanent Chinese malware • Forbes

Thomas Brewster:

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It all sounds ideal for those who don’t have the money to splash on fancy Apple or Google phones. But according to security researchers, there’s a catch: the Android phones come with preinstalled Chinese malware, which effectively opens up a backdoor onto the device and endangers their private data. One of the malware types is impossible to remove, according to the researchers.

Researchers at cybersecurity company MalwareBytes said that they had tried to warn Assurance Wireless, a Virgin Mobile company, they had received no response. So the devices likely remain vulnerable today. Forbes was also unable to get a response from the company. The FCC, which runs Lifeline Assurance, also hadn’t responded to requests for comment.

Senator Ron Wyden is now asking the FCC why such phones are being shipped under the program. “It is outrageous that taxpayer money may be going to companies providing insecure, malware-ridden phones to low-income families. I’ll be asking the FCC to ensure Americans that depend on Lifeline Assistance aren’t paying the price with their privacy and security.”

The affected device is a UMX phone shipped by Assurance Wireless and one of the preinstalled malware, according to MalwareBytes senior analyst Nathan Collier, is the creation of a Chinese entity known as Adups. Though the tool looks and operates as a Wireless Update program, it’s capable of auto-installing apps without any user consent, which it starts doing immediately, according to a MalwareBytes analysis of a device, shared with Forbes ahead of publication. Adups hadn’t responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.

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Wyden is now asking the FCC to make sure the devices aren’t malware-riddled. Seems like a small request, doesn’t it?
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August 2008: Why Apple doesn’t do “concept products” « counternotions

“Counternotions”:

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Why would a commercial entity like Apple produce a concept product? Apple is likely generating more concept products and visions than any other technology company for internal use. When Apple wanted to get into retail stores, for example, Jobs had Ron Johson build a fully-functioning, real-size prototype and tore it down at the last minute to rebuild a new one. Why didn’t Apple release the “concept store” to the then-deeply-skeptical press in order to “demonstrate visionary leadership”? In a similar situation Microsoft likely would have.

Product design, above all, is a bet. Apple understands this better than any other company. In iPhone: The bet Steve Jobs didn’t decline, I explained just what a huge bet the iPhone project was to Apple in 2005. It was a bet-the-company kind of bet. One that Nokia, which has sold hundreds of millions of phones over many years, never took. Neither did Microsoft. They would just as well release annual concept products to the public in order not to go through the pain of taking a bet.

Apple bet the company to single handedly change the industrial design of mobile devices, how we interact with them, the balance between carriers and manufacturers, mobile application vending, etc. Indeed, it simply redefined what a mobile device is to become.

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This was linked from John Gruber’s meditation on the “Concept Electronics Show”, which is also worth reading, but this is a great piece in its own right.
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Guide to using reverse image search for investigations • bellingcat

Aric Toler:

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Yandex is by far the best reverse image search engine, with a scary-powerful ability to recognize faces, landscapes, and objects. This Russian site draws heavily upon user-generated content, such as tourist review sites (e.g. FourSquare and TripAdvisor) and social networks (e.g. dating sites), for remarkably accurate results with facial and landscape recognition queries.

Its strengths lie in photographs taken in a European or former-Soviet context. While photographs from North America, Africa, and other places may still return useful results on Yandex, you may find yourself frustrated by scrolling through results mostly from Russia, Ukraine, and eastern Europe rather than the country of your target images.

To use Yandex, go to images.yandex.com, then choose the camera icon on the right.

From there, you can either upload a saved image or type in the URL of one hosted online.

If you get stuck with the Russian user interface, look out for Выберите файл (Choose file), Введите адрес картинки (Enter image address), and Найти (Search). After searching, look out for Похожие картинки (Similar images), and Ещё похожие (More similar).

The facial recognition algorithms used by Yandex are shockingly good. Not only will Yandex look for photographs that look similar to the one that has a face in it, but it will also look for other photographs of the same person (determined through matching facial similarities) with completely different lighting, background colors, and positions. While Google and Bing may just look for other photographs showing a person with similar clothes and general facial features, Yandex will search for those matches, and also other photographs of a facial match.

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Useful primer (and probably a good one to bookmark for those times when you’re primed to repost/retweet something that looks remarkable, or you want to hunt down an FSB officer). There’s also a little “try this at home” series at the end.
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Iran’s cyberattack on billionaire Adelson provides lesson on strategy • Yahoo

Alyza Sebenius, Kartikay Mehrotra and William Turton:

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In October 2013, Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate and prominent supporter of conservative politicians and Israel, appeared on a panel in New York in which he suggested that the US could send a message to Iran, regarding its nuclear ambitions, by detonating an American warhead in the middle of the Iranian desert.

“You want to be wiped out? Go ahead and take a tough position,” said Adelson, who later became a major supporter of President Donald Trump. His comments infuriated Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who two weeks later said America “should slap these prating people in the mouth.”

Months later, in February 2014, hackers inserted malware into the computer networks of Adelson’s Las Vegas casino. The withering cyberattack laid waste to about three quarters of the company’s Las Vegas servers; the cost of recovering data and building new systems cost $40m or more.

A year after the attack, the top US intelligence official confirmed that Iran was behind it.

Now, as Iran vows revenge for the airstrike, the US faces an aggressive adversary in which digital warfare may be among its best options to strike directly at the American population. In the years since the Sands incident, Iranian hackers have continued their attacks, targeting a US presidential campaign, universities, journalists, and even a dam in suburban New York.

“I’m sure the Iranians are asking their hackers for a list of options,” said James Lewis, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, who oversees the policy research group’s cybersecurity program. “Cyberattacks can be tempting if they can find the right American target.”

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This time around, Adelson didn’t want to comment. Funny, that. And there will be plenty of American targets. Iran can take its time and select its targets to cause maximum disruption, or the minimum visibility with maximum effect. (The JCPOA – aka the Iran nuclear deal – was signed in July 2015. I wonder if Adelson might want it back in effect after all.)
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Grubhub considers strategic options including possible sale • WSJ

Maureen Farrell and Cara Lombardo:

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Grubhub, which went public nearly six years ago, has a market value of roughly $5bn. That is down from its peak of more than $13bn just over a year ago, before competition from other delivery startups heated up and eroded the company’s market-share lead and results.

Grubhub shares rose as much as 19% on Wednesday after The Wall Street Journal reported on the review. They closed at $54.75, up nearly 13%.

Competition in the nascent food-delivery industry, which ferries takeout orders from restaurants to homes and businesses, has intensified as newcomers try to lure customers and grab market share with discounts and promotions. At the same time, restaurants are pushing back against the fees delivery companies charge, squeezing Grubhub and its competitors. Investors and analysts have said the industry needs consolidation, with many seeing room for little more than two major players.

Grubhub on Oct. 28 cut its revenue and profit forecasts amid slowing customer growth, sending the shares down 43% the following day and helping prompt the review. Its third-quarter adjusted per-share earnings dropped 40% from the year-earlier period. The stock had gained back most of that ground after Wednesday’s rise.

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Proof if it were needed that just having a big tech backend doesn’t guarantee long-term success. Amazon had to work for it, and still does; people often forget that it saw off a lot of well-funded rivals.

Related: John Colley of Warwich Business School at The Conversation on Just Eat getting bought by Takeaway.com: “Take a closer look at the the business of online food delivery and it’s easy to wonder if anyone will ever make long-term significant returns.”
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Samsung has finally begun sharing figures about how many Galaxy Folds it has sold. CC-licensed photo by Aaron Yoo on Flickr.

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

Bluetooth will support hearing aids, sharing, and a better audio codec • The Verge

Dieter Bohn:

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Now that most smartphones don’t have headphone jacks, there’s no shortage of complaints about Bluetooth. This year at CES, the industry group in charge of defining the standard, the Bluetooth SIG, is introducing new features that should address some of them. Later this year, it will finalize new support for Bluetooth LE Audio, which is an umbrella term for a bunch of new features for Bluetooth devices.

The new features include higher-quality audio, hearing aid support, broadcasting to many people, and working better with wireless earbuds. Unfortunately, as is the way with all industry specs, it will take some time for these features to make their way into consumer products. The old joke that “Bluetooth will be better next year” still holds true.

The feature that will likely affect the most people is the new “Low Complexity Communication Codec,” or LC3. LC3 simultaneously reduces power consumption while increasing audio quality. Right now, the lowest common denominator for Bluetooth audio is the relatively old and relatively bad SBC codec, though many phones support Qualcomm’s proprietary codec, AptX.

In order to get SBC to sound good, you have to increase the bitrate, which increases power consumption. The Bluetooth SIG claims that, in its testing, users preferred the new LC3 codec, even at significantly lower bitrates.

The group is also finally beefing up official support for Bluetooth hearing aids. It has worked in conjunction with a European hearing instrument association to ensure broad support in the coming years, including working with TVs and other devices.

Hearing aid support is also possible because Bluetooth LE Audio includes a suite of other features that haven’t been possible before. For example, a new “broadcast” feature will theoretically allow an entire movie theater audience to use their Bluetooth headphones to tune in to the movie. I asked how, exactly, pairing would work in cases like these, and the answer seems to be “TBD.”

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It’s only taken 20 years, but it’s finally becoming properly useful.
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At CES, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are preaching privacy. Don’t believe the hype • The Washington Post

Geoffrey Fowler:

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It’s a big deal that techies are even talking about privacy; CES has long been the epicenter of cheerleading for connecting everything to the Internet. But this isn’t the solution we need. Call it privacy-washing: when tech companies market control and transparency over data but continue gobbling it up.

Apple may, in fact, be one of the lesser offenders. Facebook’s privacy chief Erin Egan was also on that CES panel and said, with a straight face, “I think privacy is protected today for people on Facebook.” A few months ago, the social networking giant agreed to pay a $5 billion fine to the Federal Trade Commission for privacy violations.

As part of its privacy-champion marketing, Facebook introduced in time for CES a new version of its “privacy checkup” page, which simplifies some of its many privacy knobs and controls but doesn’t give us new powers to stop the social network from surveilling us.

Elsewhere at CES, Google pitched its always-listening voice Assistant as designed for privacy because you can now tell it, “Hey, Google, that wasn’t for you,” when you notice it randomly recording your family’s intimate conversations. Cool, thanks.

And Amazon’s Ring video doorbell company introduced a privacy and security dashboard that also doesn’t change most of its (insufficient) default privacy and security settings. (Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, but I review all tech with the same critical eye.)

Fortunately, one other panelist at Tuesday’s CES privacy panel — FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter — was there for a reality check. Shortly after Facebook’s Egan made her pronouncement, Slaughter said: “I don’t want to talk about specific services or products, but as a general matter, no, I don’t think privacy is generally protected.” (Slaughter began her remarks by clarifying she was speaking only for herself and not the FTC.)

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Twitter will put options to limit replies directly on the compose screen • The Verge

Dieter Bohn:

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Speaking today at a CES event in Las Vegas, Twitter’s director of product management, Suzanne Xie, unveiled some new changes that are coming to the platform this year, focusing specifically on conversations.

Xie says Twitter is adding a new setting for “conversation participants” right on the compose screen. It has four options: “Global, Group, Panel, and Statement.” Global lets anybody reply, Group is for people you follow and mention, Panel is people you specifically mention in the tweet, and Statement simply allows you to post a tweet and receive no replies. (No word on whether Statement also automatically formats your tweet as a classic iPhone Notes app apology, but it should.)

Xie says that Twitter is “in the process of doing research on the feature” and that “the mock ups are going to be part of an experiment we’re going to run” in the first quarter. It will take learnings from that experiment and use them to launch the feature globally later this year.

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I wonder if that distinction will be rolled out (or enforced on) third-party apps. Presently, they can’t show polls (not much of a loss), but will Twitter’s API offer these? It ought to – but if it doesn’t show polls, will it show these correctly?
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Dating apps need women. Advertisers need diversity. AI companies offer a solution: fake people • The Washington Post

Drew Harwell:

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One firm is offering to sell diverse photos for marketing brochures and has already signed up clients, including a dating app that intends to use the images in a chatbot. Another company says it’s moving past AI-generated headshots and into the generation of full, fake human bodies as early as this month.

The AI software used to create such faces is freely available and improving rapidly, allowing small start-ups to easily create fakes that are so convincing they can fool the human eye. The systems train on massive databases of actual faces, then attempt to replicate their features in new designs.

But AI experts worry that the fakes will empower a new generation of scammers, bots and spies, who could use the photos to build imaginary online personas, mask bias in hiring and damage efforts to bring diversity to industries. The fact that such software now has a business model could also fuel a greater erosion of trust across an Internet already under assault by disinformation campaigns, “deepfake” videos and other deceptive techniques.

Elana Zeide, a fellow in artificial intelligence, law and policy at the University of California at Los Angeles’s law school, said the technology “showcases how little power and knowledge users have in terms of the reality of what they see online.”

“There’s no objective reality to compare these photos against,” she said. “We’re used to physical worlds with sensory input … but with this, we don’t have any instinctive or taught responses on how to detect what’s real and what isn’t. It’s exhausting.”

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Logical endpoint is that you get bots going on to the apps, and bots responding to them. Then you don’t need humans to take part, and they leave the bots talking to the bots and go and meet people in real life.
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(CES 2020) Samsung sold at least 400,000 Galaxy Fold smartphones in 2019: exec • Yonhap News Agency

Joo Kyung-don:

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Samsung Electronics Co., sold at least 400,000 Galaxy Fold smartphones last year, the company’s mobile business chief said Tuesday, denying earlier media reports that it sold one million foldable handsets.

“I think we’ve sold 400,000 to 500,000 Galaxy Fold smartphones,” Koh Dong-jin, President and CEO of Samsung’s IT & Mobile Communication division, told reporters at Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2020 in Las Vegas.

Koh’s comment confirms Samsung’s earlier answer refuting media reports that the company sold 1 million Galaxy Folds in 2019.

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The Galaxy Fold first went on sale on September 6 in South Korea, and then in the US later that month; then Europe, the Middle East, Japan, Russia, Brazil, Australia in October, followed by India, and China in mid-December; all told, markets totalling over 2 billion people.

The “1 million” number was the original sales target – though whether that was if the originally planned April launch had gone ahead isn’t clear.

I think it was the venerable analyst Michael Gartenberg who once said “any fool can sell 100,000 of anything. The talent comes in selling a million.” I think for Samsung you can replace his “100,000” with half a million. The question now is whether there’s a wider market prepared to stump up the extra for this.
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FBI seeks Apple’s help unlocking phones of suspected Pensacola naval station gunman • NBC News

Pete Williams:

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In a letter sent late Monday to Apple’s general counsel, the FBI said that although it has court permission to search the contents of the phones, both are password-protected. “Investigators are actively engaging in efforts to ‘guess’ the relevant passcodes but so far have been unsuccessful,” it said.

The letter, from FBI General Counsel Dana Boente, said officials have sought help from other federal agencies, as well as from experts in foreign countries and “familiar contacts in the third-party vendor community.” That may be a reference to the undisclosed vendor that helped the FBI open the locked phone of Syed Farook, the gunman who attacked a city meeting in San Bernardino, California, in 2015. The Justice Department took Apple to court in an effort to get the company to help the FBI open that phone.

“We have the greatest respect for law enforcement and have always worked cooperatively to help in their investigations,” Apple said in a statement. “When the FBI requested information from us relating to this case a month ago, we gave them all of the data in our possession and we will continue to support them with the data we have available.”

A law enforcement official said there’s an additional problem with one of the iPhones thought to belong to Alshamrani, who was killed by a deputy during the attack: he apparently fired a round into the phone, further complicating efforts to unlock it.

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That certainly is an “additional problem”. The FBI no doubt wants to get into the messaging apps on the phone (WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Viber..) which don’t get backed up to iCloud (from which Apple will have handed over the relevant data). The passcode doesn’t get backed up, of course, which leaves the FBI on its own again – unless it can find a “security” company with a hack. They’ll have put their prices up on hearing about this, for sure.
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Bitcoin’s threat to the global financial system is probably at an end • The Conversation

Gavin Brown and Richard Whittle:

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so-called bitcoin maximalists foresee a day when their currency of choice rises into the top league. They point to the bitcoin “halvening” expected in May – the moment every four years when the number of new coins being added to the network is halved – as the next event that will drive prices up.

Yet the long-term prospect for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is stasis on the peripheries of the financial system. The chances of a new bitcoin look increasingly slim: it’s several years since ethereum rose to become the prime challenger, before falling back to a fraction of the bitcoin price. [Bitcoin valuation in orange, ethereum in blue.]

More importantly, a much bigger threat to the current system is afoot – as evidenced by Facebook’s attempts to get its libra digital currency off the ground. JP Morgan has already launched a JPM coin for major institutional clients, while numerous other major banks are set to follow suit. Other tech giants like Amazon, Google and Apple are rumoured to be looking at launching rival currencies as well.

Their model is what are known as stablecoins – a sort of crypto hybrid that lives on blockchains but is pegged to mainstream currencies. But aside from this connection to the status quo, these multinationals would be challenging sovereign money. They want to opt out of the clunky system that they have been forced to operate in, with its transaction fees and international payment delays, to present customers with an alluring alternative instead.

The reason these companies are not throwing their weight behind bitcoin et al is because today’s cryptocurrencies have at least as many drawbacks as the mainstream system. Their prices are too volatile to act as a serious store of value, for instance, while their ability to process financial transactions is not yet particularly impressive.

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As was pointed out last year, bitcoin cannot become the prime cryptocoin, because it’s so easy to create infinitely many other ones; there will always be rivals. Bank- or company-backed “stablecoins” will always be a preferable alternative for anyone but crypto buffs. So it goes.
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Ditching coal in the US is saving lives, helping crops • Ars Technica

John Timmer:

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Working with data from the decade 2005-2016, Burney identified when [power] plants (almost entirely coal) shut down and when new ones (both coal and natural gas) came online. She then tracked changes to the measures of human and agricultural well-being from the surrounding area. While there are undoubtedly other factors that influenced these measures in each area, these should largely average out over the hundreds of plants that changed status over this period. It’s also not clear how widespread to expect the effects to be relative to the location of the plant. Burney did both a conservative measure, checking for impacts within 25km of the power plant, and a more expansive one that examined a 200km radius.

One of the interesting things she found was that the opening of new plants wasn’t correlated with any statistically significant changes. She suggests that this is likely the result of the fact that the newer plants adopt the latest pollution-control technology and therefore have a lower impact on the surrounding communities. This might indicate that, in the decades to come, we’ll see diminishing returns as coal plants close.

But for the plants that closed in the decade she examined, the results were dramatic. The decommissioning of coal plants was associated with drops in ozone and aerosols formed by sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide. For the latter two chemicals, the decrease faded as a simple matter of distance from the closed plant. (Ozone dynamics were a bit more complicated.)

Burney found that “these lower aerosol and ozone concentrations conferred near-immediate benefits to health and crop productivity.” All cause mortality in the counties closest to the closed plant dropped by 1%, with the elderly being the largest beneficiaries. All told, the data suggests that about 27,000 premature deaths were avoided between 2005 and 2016. The confidence intervals are wide, ranging from 2,700 to 50,000, but the numbers go up if a wider radius around the plant is used. The effects on crops were even more dramatic. Nearby corn and soybean yields went up by over 5%; wheat yields rose by 4%.

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As ever, bad choices often boil down to the difficulty of measuring negative externalities.
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How to lose a monopoly: Microsoft, IBM and anti-trust • Benedict Evans

Evans is pondering whether antitrust actions (against IBM, against Microsoft, against…?) work:

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The tech industry loves to talk about ‘moats’ around a business – some mechanic of the product or market that forms a fundamental structural barrier to competition, so that just having a better product isn‘t enough to break in. But there are several ways that a moat can stop working. Sometimes the King orders you to fill in the moat and knock down the walls. This is the deus ex machina of state intervention – of anti-trust investigations and trials. But sometimes the river changes course, or the harbour silts up, or someone opens a new pass over the mountains, or the trade routes move, and the castle is still there and still impregnable but slowly stops being important. This is what happened to IBM and Microsoft. The competition isn’t another mainframe company or another PC operating system – it’s something that solves the same underlying user needs in very different ways, or creates new ones that matter more. The web didn’t bridge Microsoft’s moat – it went around, and made it irrelevant. Of course, this isn’t limited to tech – railway and ocean liner companies didn’t make the jump into airlines either. But those companies had a run of a century – IBM and Microsoft each only got 20 years.

None of this is an argument against regulation per se of any specific issue in tech. If a company is abusing dominance today, it is not an argument against intervention to point out that it will lose that dominance in a decade or two – as Keynes says, ‘in the long term we’re all dead’. The same applies to regulation of issues that have little or nothing to do with market dominance, such as privacy (though people sometime fail to understand this distinction). Rather, the problem comes when people claim that somehow these companies are immortal – to say that is to reject all past evidence, and to claim that somehow there will never be another generational change in tech, which seems unwise.

On the other hand, it’s also worth asking whether or which of the mechanisms of anti-trust intervention are effective – to my metaphor, is it actually possible to fill in the moat and knock down the walls? If one suggests that that the anti-trust attention paid to Microsoft was mostly ineffective and that the company’s loss of dominance was mostly coincidental, that might just be an execution failure, but it might also suggest more general problems with applying traditional anti-trust thinking to software platforms.

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“Traditional” antitrust thinking was created early in the 20th century. It didn’t have to contend with network effects. A proper rethink is overdue; the obvious way to silt the moats and knock down the walls is to block the network effect when one network tries to acquire another.
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Inside the billion-dollar battle over .org • The New York Times

Steve Lohr:

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When ICANN renewed the 10-year contract with the Public Interest Registry last year, it removed a price cap that limited price increases to 10% a year at most. That move was part of a broader ICANN policy to ease price controls across all internet domains.

Ethos Capital [the private equity firm that wants to buy the .org registry] has pledged to adhere to the 10% cap, though it would have no contractual obligation to do so. In blog posts, the private equity firm said it planned to invest in new services and clamp down on spam, security attacks and other abuse launched from some illicit dot-org domains.

Some nonprofits worry that any cleanup effort could result in censorship, even if inadvertently. As the owner of the registry for dot-org, Ethos Capital would manage the acceptable business practices and conduct for dot-org domains. The same freedoms that open the door to extremist groups on some dot-org sites, nonprofit leaders say, also help protect free speech on public-interest dot-org sites in developing countries with authoritarian governments.

Ethos Capital said it would never facilitate censorship. It has also vowed to set up an independent “stewardship council” to monitor its management of the dot-org network.

Since the deal was announced, Mr. Brooks and top executives of the Internet Society and the Public Interest Registry have spoken with skeptics in person, in web sessions and on conference calls, seeking to reassure them that dot-org would be in safe hands. And on Tuesday, they submitted a detailed response to the questions raised by the four members of Congress [including Elizabeth Warren].

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There’s now a rival group looking to buy .org for much cheaper but offering clearer safeguards. Question is, can Ethos really guarantee that it will cut the spam and security attacks? The problem is in the structure of the deal: if ICANN can’t revert it for non-compliance on promises it makes, you can promise anything.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Monitor cutting out? These could be to blame. Honestly. CC-licensed photo by Daniel Foster on Flickr.

A selection of 11 links for you. Not still out of office? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Lord of the Rings, 2020 and stuffed Oreos: read the Andrew Bosworth memo • The New York Times

Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel and Mike Isaac got their hands on an internal Facebook memo written by Andrew Bosworth, effectively the alternative mind of Zuckerberg:

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The focus on filter bubbles causes people to miss the real disaster which is polarization. What happens when you see 26% more content from people you don’t agree with? Does it help you empathize with them as everyone has been suggesting? Nope. It makes you dislike them even more. This is also easy to prove with a thought experiment: whatever your political leaning, think of a publication from the other side that you despise. When you read an article from that outlet, perhaps shared by an uncle or nephew, does it make you rethink your values? Or does it make you retreat further into the conviction of your own correctness? If you answered the former, congratulations you are a better person than I am. Every time I read something from Breitbart I get 10% more liberal.

What does all of this say about the nature of the algorithmic rewards? Everyone points to top 0.1% content as being acutely polarized but how steep are the curves? What does the top 1% or 5% look like? And what is the real reach across those curves when compared to other content? I think the call for algorithmic transparency can sometimes be overblown but being more transparent about this type of data would likely be healthy.

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There’s lots to chew on here: he says that Cambridge Analytica was complete nonsense, and blames the media (somewhat) for getting Facebook’s intentions wrong, but then admits that’s not surprising given how little Facebook reveals.

The US presidential election is going to be uglier than ever, one feels.
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Twitter bots and trolls promote conspiracy theories about Australian bushfires • ZDNet

Stilgherrian :

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As Australia continues to battle bushfires of unprecedented size and ferocity, a social media disinformation campaign is pushing false conspiracy theories about their cause.

Tweets with the hashtag #ArsonEmergency are coming from a “much higher” proportion of bot-like or troll-like accounts than those with more general bushfire-related hashtags such as #BushfireAustralia or #AustraliaFire, according to initial analysis by Dr Timothy Graham from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

Graham came to look at #ArsonEmergency because it was being used by some of the more suspicious-looking individual Twitter accounts he’d been tracking.

“They were really focused in particular on climate denial, and The Greens being responsible for the bushfires, and arson attacks being responsible for the bushfires as well,” he told ZDNet on Tuesday.

Those last two are conspiracy theories, he said.

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As the journalist Jason Wilson observed, “When we say Australia now is a vision of the planetary future it means this, also: the use of disinformation to scapegoat and misdirect, and further delay action on climate change.”

(By the way, the bloke’s name really does appear to be “Stilgherrian”.)
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Display intermittently blanking, flickering or losing video signal • DisplayLink Support

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If you find one or more of the DisplayLink connected screens are going blank for about one second, then coming back on, and the windows on the DisplayLink display have not moved to another display, it is probably caused by the monitor losing sync with the video output from the DisplayLink video output. This can be caused by long, or poor quality video cables. Video cables are no different to any other cables in terms of quality. Poor quality cables can cause:
• Signal degradation
• Video flicker
• Video distortion

If you are seeing such an issue please check if swapping your video cable for another resolves the issue. 

Surprisingly, we have also seen this issue connected to gas lift office chairs. When people stand or sit on gas lift chairs, they can generate an EMI [electromagnetic interference] spike which is picked up on the video cables, causing a loss of sync.

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Don’t believe it? There’s a white paper dating from 1993 about it. And a Twitter video.
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Travelex being held to ransom by hackers • BBC News

Joe Tidy:

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Hackers are holding foreign exchange company Travelex to ransom after a cyber-attack forced the firm to turn off all computer systems and resort to using pen and paper.
On New Year’s Eve, hackers launched their attack on the Travelex network.

As a result, the company took down its websites across 30 countries to contain “the virus and protect data”.

A ransomware gang called Sodinokibi has told the BBC it is behind the hack and wants Travelex to pay $6m (£4.6m). The gang, also known as REvil, claims to have gained access to the company’s computer network six months ago and to have downloaded 5GB of sensitive customer data.

Dates of birth, credit card information and national insurance numbers are all in their possession, they say. The hackers said: “In the case of payment, we will delete and will not use that [data]base and restore them the entire network.

“The deadline for doubling the payment is two days. Then another seven days and the sale of the entire base.”

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There is a certain karma about this. Travelex’s extortionate exchange rates and its use of captive markets – it’s all over airports – mean it effectively holds travellers to ransom all the time.
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Sonos, squeezed by the tech giants, sues Google • The New York Times

Jack Nicas and Daisuke Wakabayashi:

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In 2013, Sonos scored a coup when Google agreed to design its music service to work easily with Sonos’s home speakers. For the project, Sonos handed over the effective blueprints to its speakers.

It felt like a harmless move, Sonos executives said. Google was an internet company and didn’t make speakers.

The executives now say they were naïve.

On Tuesday, Sonos sued Google in two federal court systems, seeking financial damages and a ban on the sale of Google’s speakers, smartphones and laptops in the United States. Sonos accused Google of infringing on five of its patents, including technology that lets wireless speakers connect and synchronize with one another.

Sonos’s complaints go beyond patents and Google. Its legal action is the culmination of years of growing dependence on both Google and Amazon, which then used their leverage to squeeze the smaller company, Sonos executives said.

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Google is “disappointed” that Sonos isn’t “continuing negotiations in good faith”. It disputes the claims. Sonos might sue Amazon next over the Echo line. New year, new lawsuits.
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How Trump’s trade war is making lobbyists rich and slamming small businesses • ProPublica

Lydia DePillis:

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Mike Elrod voted for Donald Trump in 2016, hoping for a break from tight government oversight that his business had endured for years, which he often found unreasonable.

“There was a time when every day I dreaded opening the mail,” said Elrod, who founded a small firm in South Carolina called Eccotemp that makes energy-efficient, tankless water heaters. “The Department of Energy would put in an arbitrary rule and then come back the next day and say, ‘You’re not in compliance.’ We had no input into what was changing and when the change was taking place.”

Elrod also thought that big businesses had long been able to buy their way out of problems, either by spending lots of money on compliance or on lobbyists to look for loopholes and apply political pressure. Trump, of course, had promised to address that — to “drain the swamp.”

Elrod is in his mid-60s, tall with a white beard and deliberative drawl. He trusted the president even as Trump started a trade war with China, where Elrod manufactures his heaters. The administration said US companies that could prove they had no other source for their imports and whose business would be gravely injured could be spared the punishing tariffs that Trump was imposing. They would simply have to file for an exemption.

“I had every reason to believe they were talking about us,” Elrod said. Eccotemp had spent 15 years developing different models of tankless heaters with manufacturers in China. Simply finding new factories in other countries seemed impossible.

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Guess what: Mike was totally wrong about the exemption. Now see if you can figure out whether he’s going to vote for Trump again.
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It’s 2020 and PCs are alive and kicking • TechSpot

Bob O’Donnell:

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It’s getting to be a familiar theme. Some of the most interesting announcements from CES 2020 in Las Vegas are focused around PCs. In fact, this year, there are probably more PC developments from a wider variety of vendors than we’ve seen in quite some time. From foldable displays, to 5G, to AI silicon, to sustainable manufacturing, the latest crop of PCs highlights that the category isn’t just far from dead, it’s actually at the cutting edge of everything that’s expected to be a hot topic for this new decade.

On top of that, some of the most important advancements in PC-focused CPUs in a long time have also been announced at the show, promising big leaps in bread-and-butter performance metrics for the coming year as well. In short, it’s a real PC renaissance.

Probably the flashiest new PC from CES is technically one that’s already been hinted at before, but whose final details were just released at the show: Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Fold. Leveraging a plastic OLED display from LG Display (similar in concept to what’s used on foldable phones like the Samsung Galaxy Fold and Motorola Razr), the X1 Fold shrinks a 13.3” screen down to a small leather-wrapped portfolio size when it’s folded in half. Unlike the phone displays, however, the X1 Fold supports pen input from the included active stylus.

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*Narrator’s voice* “There was no PC renaissance; in the following years they sold just as before.”

The Lenovo foldable looks horrible; is the idea that it’s a portable monitor that folds out? In which case you need a stand. As a laptop, it doesn’t make sense. Lenovo keeps throwing stuff against the wall, and it keeps sliding off. And even if this stuff did work, the sales would be tiny, and then you’d have the joy of no support when something went wrong.
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Bible lobbyist: we can’t print Bibles in America anymore • Substack

Matt Stoller, in his BIG newsletter:

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These publishers wanted to avoid bibles being subjected to tariffs [imposed by Trump’s administration on imports from China]. Here’s Jantz:

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Chinese printers have developed the technology and the artistry to produce the kinds of bibles people want which is why over 50% of the bibles published by ECPA members are printed in China. In fact, more bibles are printed in China than any other country on earth.

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This isn’t some high tech industry, it’s printing books. It is literally the oldest mass production industry in history, with bible printing dating from the 15th century. And yet, here’s more of what Jantz had to say:

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While there are some domestic printing options available, the U.S. printers, as has been remarked already, that are comparable to China on price and quality do not have the capacity to meet current demand….

The people who buy and read the bible would potentially have to pay a much higher price, perhaps higher than they could justify. Christians depend on the bible for their daily input of spiritual nourishment… Some publishers believe such a tariff would place a practical limitation on religious freedom.

A dramatic increase in the price of the bible, not to mention books that help people better understand the bible, would deter average Americans from getting the guidance and spiritual connectivity they depend on.

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Now of course, the Chinese government is cracking down on the 60 million Christians inside China, with party plans of “retranslating and annotating” the Bible to establish a “correct understanding” of the text. It’s not as well-known as the concentration camps set up for Muslim Uighurs, but it’s quite likely that Chinese Christians are not getting what Jantz calls their “daily input of spiritual nourishment.”

But the point here is not about religious freedom, but about whether we as a society value the ability to produce things. We certainly used to. We could make fantastic airplanes and invent a host of wonderful technologically sophisticated products to improve our lives. And yet today, our book distributors tell us we can’t even print books. There are a lot of reason for that, but the main one is that we have elevated the rights of financiers over the rights of workers, engineers, farmers, artists and businesspeople.

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The 100 worst ed-tech (education technology) debacles of the decade • Hack Education

Audrey Watters:

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For the past ten years, I have written a lengthy year-end series, documenting some of the dominant narratives and trends in education technology. I think it is worthwhile, as the decade draws to a close, to review those stories and to see how much (or how little) things have changed.

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There are ever so many (well, 100 actually..) so I thought I’d just pick one at random:

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93. 3D Printing
3D printing, The Economist pronounced in 2012, was poised to bring about the third industrial revolution. (I know, I know. It’s hard to tell if we’re on the third, the fourth, or the eighteenth industrial revolution at this stage.) And like so many products on this list, 3D printing was hailed as a revolution in education, and schools were encouraged to reorient libraries and shop classes towards “maker spaces” which would give students opportunities to print their plastic designs. In 2013, 3D printer manufacturer MakerBot launchedits MakerBot Academy with a goal “to put a MakerBot Desktop 3D Printer in every school in America.” But, as Wired noted just a few years later, 3D printing was already another revolution that wasn’t. Despite all sorts of wild promises, plastic gizmos failed to revolutionize either education or manufacturing (and they’re not necessarily so great for the environment either). Go figure.

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High performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, Michael Nielsen, Bret Victor, and ‘Seeing Rooms’

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Fields make huge progress when they move from stories (e.g Icarus)  and authority (e.g ‘witch doctor’) to evidence/experiment (e.g physics, wind tunnels) and quantitative models (e.g design of modern aircraft).

Political ‘debate’ and the processes of government are largely what they have always been — largely conflict over stories and authorities where almost nobody even tries to keep track of the facts/arguments/models they’re supposedly arguing about, or tries to learn from evidence, or tries to infer useful principles from examples of extreme success/failure. We can see much better than people could in the past how to shift towards processes of government being ‘partially rational discussion over facts and models and learning from the best examples of organisational success‘. But one of the most fundamental and striking aspects of government is that practically nobody involved in it has the faintest interest in or knowledge of how to create high performance teams to make decisions amid uncertainty and complexity.

This blindness is connected to another fundamental fact: critical institutions (including the senior civil service and the parties) are programmed to fight to stay dysfunctional, they fight to stay closed and avoid learning about high performance, they fight to exclude the most able people.

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I’ve intentionally left off the name of the person and their blog; I think this deserves to be considered on its face. I can’t see anything to disagree with in the whole post, but a lot of people have a reflexive reaction that it must be wrong because of who wrote it. (You’ll be able to figure it out.) Try reading it with an open mind.
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Front-end web development on iPad (2019) • Medium

Craig Morey returns to a question he examined in 2018 – can you do FEWD on an iPad, and why would you if there are Windows/Mac/Chromebooks around, or Surfaces:

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with all these alternative options already available, the question remains. Why bother trying to stretch the envelope of iOS to do web development when even Apple seem to be actively discouraging it?

It’s not an easy one to logically explain away. But I find it a pleasure to use an iPad. It’s genuinely light, connected and increasingly capable of most tasks, plus Windows and ChromeOS (and their app ecosystems) suck at being tablets. So if the iPad is my preferred device to grab and go – whether to the Coffee shop or Columbia – why would I want to also take another computer on the off-chance I need to fix a bug and re-deploy, or even build that project from scratch that I’ve been itching to try? My iPad is definitely powerful enough, so why not?

The truth is that most good ideas in tech were just fanboys playing around with what were considered “bad” ideas, until they reached a tipping point and suddenly everyone was doing it. So who’s to say we don’t discover a “new norm” here? God knows we could do with rethinking web-dev tooling and abstracting some of it away. That’s exactly what play.js has done.

This could still be an evolutionary dead-end – but we don’t know that until we push and see how far we get.

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Personally I’ll always pick up an iPad rather than my heavier MacBook Pro if I’m going somewhere. My workflows are duplicated, or mirrored; it’s lighter, and it’s just the screen is smaller.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

This isn’t quite what Carlos Ghosn would have looked like – if his flight case had been X-rayed. CC-licensed photo by keepps on Flickr.

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

YouTube officially rolls out changes to children’s content following FTC settlement • The Verge

Julia Alexander:

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YouTube still can’t describe what content is “made for kids” and what isn’t, because ultimately it’s up to the FTC to enforce the rules. The FTC defines the category as being intended for kids, taking into factor what the subject matter of a video is, including if it emphasizes kids’ characters, themes, toys, games, and more. Whether that includes Minecraft videos or other games content remains a major open question. YouTube has recommended creators team up with their own legal counsel outside of YouTube if they’re concerned.

“We also use machine learning to help us identify this content, and creators can update a designation made by our systems if they believe it is incorrect,” the blog post reads, noting that YouTube may label a video as made for kids if a creator doesn’t. “We will only override a creator designation if abuse or error is detected.”

YouTube’s lack of guidance over the changes has creators concerned. Toy channels, for example, have a large adult audience and are ostensibly targeted at collectors, not just kids who want to play with them. These creators have already discussed changing their channels, and preparing for major monetization problems, in the coming weeks and months.

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Of course YouTube isn’t going to help creators. It knows that if one lot vanishes, then another group will come along in their place.
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Lax security and moderation at Goodreads allows trolls to spoof people, harass authors • Patreon

Jason Sanford:

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The coordinated attacks on Tomlinson arose out of his work helping to shut down a controversial Reddit community (see interview with Tomlinson below for more details). Since being banned by Reddit the attackers now coordinate through a website in Russia. Messages on this new site show they are using Goodreads for their harassment campaign because of the book review site’s lax security and moderation policies.

“The only policy (Goodreads) might change, and I say might is email verification and even that is a stretch,” said one poster on this site. “Thst (sic) would slow the trolls down by maybe.”

 This poster was talking about the fact that Goodreads doesn’t currently use true email verification prior to users setting up a new account. While Goodreads requires new accounts to provide an email address and sends a “verification” email to that account, new users are immediately able to review books and have their reviews and ratings appear on the site without actually verifying the email Goodreads sends them.

Goodreads also allows multiple accounts to be set up under already existing member and user names, as happened with many of the authors mentioned here. And while Goodreads allows authors and users to flag suspicious reviews, the site has no way for users and authors to report or flag individual user accounts. This allows a fake user to repeatedly post fake reviews before their account is shut down.

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Will this be the decade – even the year – when sites which allow people to create accounts and leave reviews actually start doing this right? It’s comparatively simple to force email authorisation, and to limit which sites can be used to create accounts.
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Our neophobic, conservative AI overlords want everything to stay the same • Blog of the Los Angeles Review of Books

Cory Doctorow:

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of all these wonderful, smart, sharp analyses, none has left as enduring an impression as Molly Sauter’s odd and lyrical 2017 essay “Instant Recall,” published in the online magazine Real Life.

Sauter’s insight in that essay: machine learning is fundamentally conservative, and it hates change. If you start a text message to your partner with “Hey darling,” the next time you start typing a message to them, “Hey” will beget an autosuggestion of “darling” as the next word, even if this time you are announcing a break-up. If you type a word or phrase you’ve never typed before, autosuggest will prompt you with the statistically most common next phrase from all users (I made a small internet storm in July 2018 when I documented autocomplete’s suggestion in my message to the family babysitter, which paired “Can you sit” with “on my face and”).

This conservativeness permeates every system of algorithmic inference: search for a refrigerator or a pair of shoes and they will follow you around the web as machine learning systems “re-target” you while you move from place to place, even after you’ve bought the fridge or the shoes. Spend some time researching white nationalism or flat earth conspiracies and all your YouTube recommendations will try to reinforce your “interest.” Follow a person on Twitter and you will be inundated with similar people to follow. Machine learning can produce very good accounts of correlation (“this person has that person’s address in their address-book and most of the time that means these people are friends”) but not causation (which is why Facebook constantly suggests that survivors of stalking follow their tormentors who, naturally, have their targets’ addresses in their address books).

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In Carlos Ghosn’s escape, plotters exploited an airport security hole • WSJ

Nick Kostov, Mark Maremont and Rory Jones:

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About three months before former auto titan Carlos Ghosn’s escape last week from Japan to Lebanon, an operative helping plan his extraction visited Kansai International Airport in Osaka, Japan, and realized there was a huge security hole, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The terminal for private jets was quieter than those at most other airports and essentially empty, unless there was a flight coming in, this person said. What’s more, oversize luggage was too big to fit in the airport scanners.

The security hole proved crucial in Mr. Ghosn’s cinema-worthy escape from Japan, where he was out on bail facing charges of financial crimes. He has denied the charges and has previously said he would fight them in court.

The escape involved a 300-mile sprint across Japan, from Mr. Ghosn’s court-monitored home in Tokyo to the Osaka airport. He was then smuggled inside a large black box, generally used for concert equipment, with breathing holes drilled in the bottom, into a waiting private jet, as previously reported by The Wall Street Journal.

…work on a detailed plan to extract Mr. Ghosn started months beforehand, according to people familiar with the matter. The planning involved a team of between 10 and 15 people of different nationalities, one of these people said.

In all, the team took more than 20 trips to Japan and visited at least 10 Japanese airports before selecting the Osaka airport as a weak link, this person said.

A spokesman for the airport’s operator said its security is no different from other airports in Japan. He said all luggage too large for X-ray scanning is supposed to be opened by security staff, but an airport-security expert said they don’t necessarily do so for private-jet travelers as they are considered a lower terrorism risk.

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Surely going to be a great film.
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China tech start-ups go bust in 2019 ‘capital winter’ • Financial Times

Ryan McMorrow:

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Hundreds of Chinese tech start-ups — including several unicorns — failed in 2019, with many more limping into the new year, as companies burned through cash in the face of growing financial headwinds.

According to new data from business information provider ITjuzi, 336 start-ups in the country were forced to cease operations over the course of last year, having collectively raised Rmb17.4bn ($2.5bn) from investors. Among them were companies valued individually at more than $1bn.

Of the 20 costliest failures of “new economy” start-ups — those that have sprung up alongside the internet and private industry over the past two decades — about half occurred in 2019.

The closures come as tech companies in China face an advancing “capital winter”, a funding shortage that began last year as investors grappled with a slowing economy and the end of a venture capital boom. Meanwhile, tech start-ups’ penchant for employing expensive and risky strategies such as large subsidies intended to woo new customers has added to their problems. 

…Analysts say customer acquisition costs in the country are also some of the highest in the world, with William Bao Bean, a partner at SOSV Investments in Shanghai, estimating a single user app download cost $10 to $100.

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It seemed like a popular chat app. It’s secretly a spy tool • The New York Times

Mark Mazzetti, Nicole Perlroth and Ronen Bergman:

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It is billed as an easy and secure way to chat by video or text message with friends and family, even in a country that has restricted popular messaging services like WhatsApp and Skype.

But the service, ToTok, is actually a spying tool, according to American officials familiar with a classified intelligence assessment and a New York Times investigation into the app and its developers. It is used by the government of the United Arab Emirates to try to track every conversation, movement, relationship, appointment, sound and image of those who install it on their phones.

ToTok, introduced only months ago, was downloaded millions of times from the Apple and Google app stores by users throughout the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. While the majority of its users are in the Emirates, ToTok surged to become one of the most downloaded social apps in the United States last week, according to app rankings and App Annie, a research firm.

ToTok amounts to the latest escalation in a digital arms race among wealthy authoritarian governments, interviews with current and former American foreign officials and a forensic investigation showed. The governments are pursuing more effective and convenient methods to spy on foreign adversaries, criminal and terrorist networks, journalists and critics — efforts that have ensnared people all over the world in their surveillance nets.

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Apple and Google both banned ToTok from their app stores – and then Google reinstated it on Monday. ToTok meanwhile has been trying to encourage “influencers” to say nice things about it.
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Remembering the robotics companies we lost in 2019 • The Robot Report

Steve Crowe:

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There are many reasons robotics companies fail. From an ill-conceived idea to burn rate and poor execution, building and running a sustainable robotics company is challenging. Robotics development requires a combination of technology expertise, team building and business acumen. And managing customer expectations might be the toughest task of all.

If you think 2018 was a tough year for robotics companies, 2019 wasn’t any better. And that’s especially true for consumer robotics companies, which have the misfortune of dominating the following list. Here are robotics companies we’ll remember losing, and in one case potentially re-gaining, in 2019.

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This list implies that pretty much all the failures were in the consumer space – though I wonder if that’s just because they’re the ones we hear the most about. The “robots for consumers” space seems to be as cramped as the “drones for consumers” space – there’s only room for a couple of successful players (iRobot and maybe Dyson?).
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HP refreshes Spectre x360 15, announces Elite Dragonfly G2 at CES 2020 • Android Authority

Adamya Sharma:

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…HP calls out the new Elite Dragonfly G2 as the world’s first business convertible with 5G connectivity. It gets a Qualcomm X55 4G/5G modem to support the next-gen network technology. It also comes with smart signal technology to boost antenna performance.

HP has updated the specs on the laptop to feature up to a 10th Gen Intel Core i7 processor (up from 8th-gen last year). Other specs include a 13.3in display with 4K and Full-HD options, up to 16GB RAM, and up to 2TB PCIe Gen3 NVMe SSD storage.

The highlight of the Elite Dragonfly G2 is Tile support. It is the first laptop in the world to come with Tile’s built-in location tracking service. You’ll be able to tap into Tile’s network of connected trackers to, hopefully, locate your lost laptop.

«

The Tile tracker is a neat deal for Tile. Maybe you’re asking: why doesn’t Apple do it? Because it quietly introduced its own “find lost devices” system last year. But that relies on an ecosystem of Apple devices, especially handheld ones. HP once had aspirations there – but they died nearly a decade ago, and HP lost a lot of money on that. So while its PCs are widely used, there isn’t the ecosystem to help them find themselves.
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Samsung ships over 6.7 million Galaxy 5G devices in 2019 • Digitimes

Rodney Chan:

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Samsung Electronics has disclosed that in 2019 it shipped more than 6.7 million Galaxy 5G smartphones globally. As of November 2019, Samsung accounted for 53.9% of the global 5G smartphone market and offered five Galaxy 5G devices, according to the vendor.

…”5G smartphones contributed to 1% of global smartphone sales in 2019. However, 2020 will be the breakout year, with 5G smartphones poised to grow 1,687% with contribution rising to 18% of the total global smartphone sales volumes,” said, Neil Shah, VP of research at Counterpoint Research.

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That 6.7m (sorry, “over” 6.7m) doesn’t sound like a big number to me. Perhaps unsurprising, though, because what’s the use case? 5G isn’t really going to be transformative for a few years yet. This really is just like the 3G-4G transition.
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GoPro Karma drones grounded worldwide, apparently due to GPS glitch • The Verge

Sean O’Kane:

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Owners of the GoPro Karma have been unable to fly their drones since the new year began, according to dozens of forum posts and tweets. The problem is affecting owners all around the globe, and it seems to be related to the recent so-called clock “rollovers” in the GPS and GLONASS satellite systems. While most tech companies tried to avert problems with the rollovers by issuing software updates over the last few months, GoPro has not updated the Karma since September 2018, nine months after it discontinued the drone.

Multiple owners say their Karma controllers are flashing errors about not receiving a GPS signal, and that they can’t calibrate the compass. They’re not able to fly the drones at all, even after disabling GPS, though one claims to have sidestepped the issue by factory resetting the controller and turning GPS off. A GoPro spokesperson tells The Verge that the company’s engineering team is “actively troubleshooting” the issue, but didn’t offer any more information.

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They haven’t been on sale since January 2018, but some drones last. Quite the new year headache for GoPro’s support department: what’s the betting all their drone people departed some time ago?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

Put it in “Recycle” mode, and it’s good for nothing except, well, recycling. Is that really good? CC-licensed photo by BestAI Assistant 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. Yes, we’re back! And so are you! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google veterans: the company has become ‘unrecognizable’ • CNBC

Jennifer Elias:

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Nine-year veteran Colin McMillen told CNBC that he left Google early this year without another job because he felt couldn’t be a part of the organization anymore, citing Dragonfly, transparency and Google leadership’s “poor handling” of crises over the last year.

Employees last month staged a rally amid the suspension of employees who were later fired. That rally’s purpose was to “save Google’s open culture,” according to the event details. Protesters demanded transparency on policies that Google said led to their decision to fire four employees. In December, the National Labor Relations Board began investigating the company for the firings.

“Google is built on trust,” said Zora Tung, an engineer at Google who spoke at the rally. “If the company wants to succeed, it needs to regain that trust through transparency and accountability.”

Long-tenured Google employees also said the company culture changed as it scaled to more than 100,000 workers, many of whom are contractors instead of full-time employees.

Graham Neray is CEO of a New York start-up called Oso. He told CNBC that longtime Googlers who interviewed for roles at Oso said the company had become “too big” and bureaucratic to make a difference for workers. Major organizational changes and uncertainty in some divisions like the Google Cloud Platform were also mentioned by candidates, he said.

Bureaucracy was the reason for a former engineering director who left the company in August after seven years. This engineer, who asked to remain anonymous because he’s not authorized to talk about his time there, said upper management began placing extra emphasis on head count in recent years. Because of that, the company has become reluctant to eliminate weaker team members, which affected his and others’ organizations, he said.

Some employees said they were recruited on the notion they’d be able to change the world with a free and open-thinking channel to management and products. But over the last year, those ideals no longer seem tenable, workers said.

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It certainly feels like something has changed at Google over the past five years particularly. Page and Brin becoming disengaged but not handing over control; the tension, visible from outside, between Ruth Porat on finance and the spending of the “moonshot” groups. So over the next ten years, does it decline into sclerosis or somehow rediscover its vision?
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Chrome OS has stalled out • Android Police

David Ruddock:

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Getting Android apps to run on Chrome OS was simultaneously one of the Chrome team’s greatest achievements and one of its worst mistakes. In 2019, two things are more obvious than ever about the Android app situation on Chrome. The first is that the “build it and they will come” mantra never panned out. Developers never created an appreciable number of Android app experiences designed for Chrome (just as they never did for Android tablets). The second is that, quite frankly, Android apps are very bad on Chrome OS. Performance is highly variable, and interface bugs are basically unending because most of those apps were never designed for a point-and-click operating system. Sure, they crash less often than they did in the early days, but anyone saying that Android apps on Chrome OS are a good experience is delusional.

Those apps are also a crutch that Chrome leans on to this day. Chrome OS doesn’t have a robust photo editor? Don’t worry, you can download an [Android] app! Chrome doesn’t have native integration with cloud file services like Box, Dropbox, or OneDrive? Just download the [Android] app! Chrome doesn’t have Microsoft Office? App! But this “solution” has basically become an insult to Chrome’s users, forcing them to live inside a half-baked Android environment using apps that were almost exclusively designed for 6″ touchscreens, and which exist in a containerized state that effectively firewalls them from much of the Chrome operating system.

As a result, file handling is a nightmare, with only a very limited number of folders accessible to those applications, and the task of finding them from inside those apps a labyrinthine exercise no one should have to endure in 2019. This isn’t a tenable state of affairs—it’s computing barbarism as far as I’m concerned.

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I always thought the point of ChromeOS was to be a low-end disruptor – cheaper and simpler than Windows/macOS, so it could do simpler tasks (in call centres?) that could run through a browser.
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It’s 2020 and you’re in the future • Wait But Why

Tim Urban:

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We’re now in charge of making this a cool decade so when people 100 years from now are thinking about how incredibly old-timey the 2020s were, it’s old-timey in a cool appealing way and not a boring shitty way.

It’s also weird that to us, the 2020s sounds like such a rad futuristic decade—and that’s how the 1920s seemed to people 100 years ago today. They were all used to the 19-teens, and suddenly they were like, “whoa cool we’re in the twenties!” Then they got upset thinking about how much farther along in life their 1910 self thought they’d be by 1920.

In any case, it’s a perfect time for one of those “shit we’re old” posts.

So here are some New Years 2020 time facts:

When World War 2 started, the Civil War felt as far away to Americans as WW2 feels to us now.

Speaking of World War 2, the world wars were pretty close together. If World War 2 were starting today, World War 1 would feel about as far back to us as 9/11.

The Soviet Union break up is now as distant a memory as JFK’s assassination was when the Soviet Union broke up.

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The post is a few days old, so that “If World War 2 were starting today” comment has more bite now than it did when written.
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Sonos in bricked speaker ‘recycling’ row • BBC News

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Sonos is facing a backlash for encouraging customers to get rid of their old speakers when there may be nothing wrong with them.

The US speaker giant offers customers a 30% discount on new products if they follow steps to recycle their old ones. Following these puts the device in Recycle Mode, which means it will then be permanently deactivated.

Sonos said it wanted to encourage responsible disposal of electrical equipment. But many took to Twitter saying it would be far better to allow people to resell them.

“Sonos’s ‘recycle mode’ intentionally bricks good devices so they can’t be reused,” wrote Twitter user AtomicThumbs. He posted photos of five Sonos speakers which had been recycled through his company, Renew Computers. “Someone recycled five of these Sonos Play:5 speakers. They’re worth $250 each, used, and these are in good condition. They could easily be reused.”

A Sonos spokeswoman told the BBC: “To participate in the Trade Up program and receive the 30% discount, a customer has to tell us in the app that they plan to recycle their old device.

Customers can then redeem their discount at sonos.com or at a participating dealer. Once they have their new device, the customer will then be able to wipe their old device and deactivate it. Then it’s up to them either to recycle it locally, or they can return it to Sonos and we’ll recycle it.

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It’s a really bad scheme: if the speakers could be reused, that could potentially increase the number of Sonos users. Sure, some people might resell them and take advantage of the 30% discount and in effect get a speaker for free. But Sonos would have a new user – which it needs, badly.
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TikTok and the coming of infinite media • ROUGH TYPE

Nick Carr:

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Infinite media sucks in all media, from news to entertainment to communication. Witness what’s going on in pop. Each TikTok has a soundtrack, a looping clip spinning on a wee turntable in the corner of the screen. The music business, seeing TikTok’s ability to turn songs into memes, has already developed a craving for the app’s yee yee juice. As Jia Tolentini explains in the New Yorker:

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Certain musical elements serve as TikTok catnip: bass-heavy transitions that can be used as punch lines; rap songs that are easy to lip-synch or include a narrative-friendly call and response. A twenty-six-year-old Australian producer named Adam Friedman, half of the duo Cookie Cutters, told me that he was now concentrating on lyrics that you could act out with your hands. “I write hooks, and I try it in the mirror—how many hand movements can I fit into fifteen seconds?” he said. “You know, goodbye, call me back, peace out, F you.”

«

The aural hooks amplify the visual hooks, and vice versa, to saturate the sensorium. When it comes to the infinite, more is always better.

Boomers may struggle to make sense of TikTok, but they’ll appreciate its most obvious antecedent: the Ed Sullivan Show. Squeeze old Ed through a wormhole and give him a spin in a Vitamix, and you get TikTok. There’s Liza Minnelli singing “MacArthur Park,” then there’s a guy spinning plates on the ends of sticks, then there’s Señor Wences ventriloquizing through a hand puppet. Except it’s all us. We’re Liza, we’re the plate-spinning guy, we’re Señor Wences, we’re the puppet. We’re even Ed, flicking acts on and off the stage with the capriciousness of a pagan god.

Every Sunday night during the sixties the nation found itself glued to the set, engrossed in a variety show. It was an omen.

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It’s great that Carr is blogging regularly again. (Implies to me he’s between book projects.) Impressed that he managed to resist “in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 seconds”. I couldn’t. Speaking of TikTok…
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Hype House and the Los Angeles TikTok mansion gold rush • The New York Times

Taylor Lorenz:

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Alex, Thomas, Daisy Keech, 20, and Kouvr Annon, 19, live at the house full time. As the oldest, Thomas acts as a default den mother. Though Chase helped put money down for the house, Thomas manages schedules, handles the house issues and resolves the inevitable conflicts. Unlike Team 10 and other groups, Hype House doesn’t take a cut of anyone’s revenue.

The house does have strict rules, however. Creators can have friends over, but it is not a party house. If you break something, you have 15 days to replace it. And if you want to be a part of the group, you need to churn out content daily.

“If someone slips up constantly, they’ll not be a part of this team anymore,” Thomas said. “You can’t come and stay with us for a week and not make any videos, it’s not going to work. This whole house is designed for productivity. If you want to party, there’s hundreds of houses that throw parties in L.A. every weekend. We don’t want to be that. It’s not in line with anyone in this house’s brand. This house is about creating something big, and you can’t do that if you’re going out on the weekends.”

In order to make a splash on the internet, you need the right people and so Chase acts as Hype House’s unofficial talent scout and a behind-the-scenes operator. He has a knack for spotting influencers early and knows what qualities it takes to get big online.

You have to be young, you have to “have a lot of energy and personality and honestly a little weird. The weird people get the furthest on the internet,” Chase said. “You either have to be talented at something, or a weird funny mix, or extremely good looking.”

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Cities struggle to boost ridership with ‘Uber for transit’ schemes • WIRED

Flavie Halais:

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According to the tech companies pushing this solution, making on-demand busing work is a matter of crunching vast amounts of transit data, now made available by location tracking, and using algorithms to create custom shared routes. Data will help agencies reroute buses in real time based on factors like user demand and congestion, says Amos Haggiag, CEO of Optibus, whose software helps cities plan and manage bus routes, both on-demand and fixed. “I do see mass transit, even the large buses, as much more dynamic.” Many of those companies, including Uber, think all buses, not just those in low-ridership areas, should run on demand.

Reality, though, adds complications. Not everyone who needs to get around has access to an app. Smartphone ownership remains vastly unequal among countries, and between income and age groups. The cost of data is still cited as a major barrier to smartphone use around the world. And even those who do have phones may not want to rely on them to get to work. When I point out that my smartphone shuts down when the weather gets too cold in winter, Haggiag says my situation is “extreme.” I live in Montreal, along with 1.75 million other people.

Tech companies and planners often make decisions without considering the needs of people who are not like them. A pilot project in St. Petersburg, Florida, that let residents use Uber to connect to bus stops faced low adoption rates. The local transit authority realized residents, many of whom were low-income, didn’t know how to use Uber. They needed help on how to use the app, a planner told WIRED in 2017.

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Fixing things that don’t need fixing; what’s really needed is just regular buses, which can be funded by a mix of fares and tax incentives.
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Trade war dents China’s attendance at world’s biggest electronics show • WSJ

Raffaele Huang and Stu Woo:

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The expanding U.S.-China rivalry in the world of technology is set to be put on full display this week, with a smaller Chinese presence expected in Las Vegas for CES, the world’s biggest consumer-electronics exhibition.

Chinese exhibit space at the annual show is projected to be down 5% to 6% compared with last year, event organizers said. The event on Jan. 7 to Jan. 10 could also see a downtick in overall Chinese exhibitors, since 1,120 attended last year, but only 1,097 Chinese companies were listed on the 2020 directory as of Saturday.

One of those companies listed on the directory said it wouldn’t show up. A spokesman for Suning, a major Chinese electronics and appliance retailer akin to Best Buy Co. , said neither its Chinese nor its U.S. team would attend, even if it had already booked the space. Suning last year had a big booth that showcased shopping technology. The spokesman declined to elaborate on why the company is skipping the event.

The drop-off in Chinese participation at CES is a reversal from years past. In 2018, the exhibition had 15,383 attendees from China, the country’s highest reported attendance ever. At the time, some attendees jokingly referred to CES, formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, as the “Chinese Electronics Show.” But attendance from China dropped to 12,839 in 2019, according to the official show audit.

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Analyst, analyze yourself • Asymco

Horace Dediu points out that we can – and so we should – examine sell-side analyst (ie share price forecaster) predictions, especially about the present from the past:

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The green line in the graph represents the closing share price at weekly intervals (from about October 2016 until last week.) The blue dots represent various estimates. Note that they are 12 months since their issuance and that since estimates can come at any time the are not easily clustered.

That is except last year and the “big reset” when the estimates all were issued on the same day. I highlighted the range with a vertical line. Note that the closing price last week was well above the highest estimate and that the lowest estimate ($140 is less than 50% of the current price).

This is quite a big fail. Errors of 50 for a 12 month time frame are egregious.

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The graph is a little hard to read, but essentially it says: they’re often wrong. For completeness I guess you’d want a random walk generator to compare them against for the same period.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Carol singers? It’s 2019 – now you can have a line from every carol, done by computer. Don’t expect to like it though. CC-licensed photo by byronv2 on Flickr.

Thank you for reading The Overspill during 2019!

It will be back in 2020 with issue 1,215.

If you need to fill the time while it’s not arriving in your inbox, you could make a charitable donation to the Internet Archive or Wikipedia; or to your local homeless charity. They’ll all appreciate it.

Though they won’t arrive until next year, 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Twelve million phones, one dataset, zero privacy • The New York Times

Stuart Thompson and Charlie Warzel:

»

Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. It holds more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Each piece of information in this file represents the precise location of a single smartphone over a period of several months in 2016 and 2017. The data was provided to Times Opinion by sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to share it and could face severe penalties for doing so. The sources of the information said they had grown alarmed about how it might be abused and urgently wanted to inform the public and lawmakers.

After spending months sifting through the data, tracking the movements of people across the country and speaking with dozens of data companies, technologists, lawyers and academics who study this field, we feel the same sense of alarm. In the cities that the data file covers, it tracks people from nearly every neighborhood and block, whether they live in mobile homes in Alexandria, Va., or luxury towers in Manhattan.

…or giant tech company, nor did it come from a governmental surveillance operation. It originated from a location data company, one of dozens quietly collecting precise movements using software slipped onto mobile phone apps. You’ve probably never heard of most of the companies — and yet to anyone who has access to this data, your life is an open book.

… Our privacy is only as secure as the least secure app on our device.

«

Which isn’t very. Is America ever going to discover privacy?
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Endless Jingling • Josh Millard

»

Endless Jingling was written and recorded by Josh Millard. It selects a handful of Christmas songs at random from a collection of three dozen recordings, then jumps around randomly between them forever and ever and ever or until you reload for a new combination of songs.

«

They’re all tuned to the key of C, so no fretting about the key changes. Put it on in the background at your Christmas party and see how long it takes before someone kills you. No, you’re welcome.
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To control its destiny, Facebook bets big on hardware • The Information

Alex Heath:

»

Earlier this year, it held talks to acquire Cirrus Logic, a semiconductor company founded in 1981 that supplies chips to Apple and others, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions (no deal transpired). Facebook even has a team building its own operating system from scratch, led by a former star Microsoft engineer, which could help it wean its products off Android, the free operating system its rival Google makes. Large portions of Facebook’s hardware group will begin to move into the new campus when it opens late next year.   

The person overseeing the company’s far-ranging hardware efforts is Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook veteran who met the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 at Harvard University, when Bosworth was a teaching assistant in an AI class Zuckerberg was taking. 

The Information recently spoke to Bosworth at Facebook’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters, as part of a series of interviews with key hardware leaders at the company. Bosworth—known as “Boz” to people who work with him—said the company is building so many of the underlying technologies for its future hardware products because it doesn’t want to rely on outsiders. 

«

The prospect of Facebook doing all this stuff is quite concerning, really. Though there’s no hope of it succeeding with an OS: the ecosystem won’t be there.
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Hundreds of ‘pink slime’ local news outlets are distributing algorithmic stories and conservative talking points • Columbia Journalism Review

Priyanjana Bengani:

»

An increasingly popular tactic challenges conventional wisdom on the spread of electoral disinformation: the creation of partisan outlets masquerading as local news organizations. An investigation by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School has discovered at least 450 websites in a network of local and business news organizations, each distributing thousands of algorithmically generated articles and a smaller number of reported stories. Of the 450 sites we discovered, at least 189 were set up as local news networks across ten states within the last twelve months by an organization called Metric Media.

Titles like the East Michigan News, Hickory Sun, and Grand Canyon Times have appeared on the web ahead of the 2020 election. These networks of sites can be used in a variety of ways: as ‘stage setting’ for events, focusing attention on issues such as voter fraud and energy pricing, providing the appearance of neutrality for partisan issues, or to gather data from users that can then be used for political targeting.

On October 20, the Lansing State Journal first broke the story of the network’s existence. About three dozen local news sites, owned by Metric Media, had appeared in Michigan. Further reporting by the Michigan Daily, the Guardian and the New York Times identified yet more sites. Ultimately, previous reporting has identified around 200 of these sites. Our analysis suggests that there are at least twice that number of publications across a number of related networks, of which Metric Media is just one component.

«

“Pink slime” is quite the phrase for this stuff.
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Sale of second-hand e-books infringes copyright, rules CJEU • World IP Review

Rory O’Neill:

»

When a book is sold in physical form, the copyright for the work is said to have been ‘exhausted’, in other words, the purchaser is free to sell it on without violating the author or publisher’s IP.

Tom Kabinet argued that the exact same principle should hold for digital copies.

The CJEU, following the AG’s opinion, ruled that rights exhaustion in the case of e-books would damage rights owners much more than in the case of physical copies.

This is because e-books do not deteriorate with use and are therefore a perfect substitute for new physical copies of the work.

The Dutch copyright groups argued that Tom Kabinet’s resale of the e-books constituted an unauthorised “communication to the public” of the copyright-protected material under Directive 2001/29/EC (commonly known as the InfoSoc Directive).

Under EU law, exhaustion of copyright only applies to the right of distribution. In today’s judgment, the CJEU found that downloading an e-book is not covered by the right of distribution, but rather the right of communication to the public, which cannot be exhausted.

The court referred to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) Copyright Treaty, which underpins the InfoSoc Directive. According to the court, that treaty holds that rights exhaustion should be “reserved for the distribution of tangible objects,” such as physical books.

«

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Prime power: how Amazon squeezes the businesses behind its store • The New York Times

Karen Weise:

»

Amazon has pushed to keep prices low since the day it opened. That has become trickier as more sales came from outside sellers. According to antitrust law, each seller of goods should determine what to charge on its own. To avoid problems, an in-house lawyer is typically present when internal Amazon teams discuss pricing, according to two former employees.

In 2017, Amazon began reducing prices to match competitors; if the new price was lower than the one requested by the sellers, Amazon paid the difference. The company also alerted companies if their products were cheaper elsewhere.

Still concerned about news reports that prices on Amazon weren’t always the lowest, the company tried another approach, the one that hit VitaCup: removing the Buy Now and Add to Cart buttons when its software detected lower prices. When those buttons disappear, sales tumble as much as 75 percent, sellers say.
Executives at Amazon intended this as a tool to lower prices. The company has told Congress that the buttons amount to an endorsement, saying it only displays them on “offers that it is confident will present a great experience for its customers.”

But many brands raise their prices elsewhere to avoid losing the buttons. Or they decide to list their product only on Amazon. That is what happened to a health care supply company that worked with Jason Boyce, who advises online sellers.

“My client cut off Walmart — Walmart! — because it was hurting their Amazon business,” Mr. Boyce said. “If that’s not monopoly power, I don’t know what is.”

«

A long read, but worth it – though as with many of these portmanteau pieces, you’re left reeling at the many ways in which Amazon’s power is imposed.
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A data leak exposed the personal information of over 3,000 Ring users • Buzzfeed News

Caroline Haskins:

»

The log-in credentials for 3,672 Ring camera owners were compromised this week, exposing log-in emails, passwords, time zones, and the names people give to specific Ring cameras, which are often the same as camera locations, such as “bedroom” or “front door.”

Using the log-in email and password, an intruder could access a Ring customer’s home address, telephone number, and payment information, including the kind of card they have, and its last four digits and security code. An intruder could also access live camera footage from all active Ring cameras associated with an account, as well as a 30- to 60-day video history, depending on the user’s cloud storage plan.

We don’t know how this tranche of customer information was leaked. Ring denies any claims that the data was compromised as a part of a breach of Ring’s systems. A Ring spokesperson declined to tell BuzzFeed News when it became aware of the leak or whether it affected a third party that Ring uses to provide its services.

“Ring has not had a data breach. Our security team has investigated these incidents and we have no evidence of an unauthorized intrusion or compromise of Ring’s systems or network,” the spokesperson said. “It is not uncommon for bad actors to harvest data from other companies’ data breaches and create lists like this so that other bad actors can attempt to gain access to other services.”

It is not clear what “other companies’ data breaches” the spokesperson was referring to.

«

Come on, there are tons of them – and if you use the same password as on Ring (lots of people do; password overload is everywhere) then you’re vulnerable. Side note: Wirecutter, which recommends stuff, has suspended its recommendation of Ring.
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Can the internet survive climate change? • The New Republic

Kevin Lozano:

»

How the internet adapts to the pressures of the climate crisis will change daily life as we know it, from high-speed trading to shit-posting, from email to aircraft control. It’s an open question whether the internet of the future will be as reliable as it is today. In fact, it’s likely that internet access will be among the many scarce resources that future generations will fight over, and that this unequal distribution could create two different internets: one for the poor and another for the rich. 

Everything is going to change, and quickly. Sites like Low-Tech offer one possible future, but generally speaking, the internet is likely to face changes to its basic infrastructure that will be both sweeping and hard to predict. In the last few months, I’ve talked to dozens of people—web designers and futurists, computer scientists and activists—who are all increasingly concerned about the internet’s own climate impact and its operational vulnerability in a fast-warming planet. What follows, pieced together from their observations, is a provisional picture of the internet’s future in the age of global warming.

The internet is inextricably tied to the coming horrors of the climate crisis. It is both a major force behind that crisis and one of its likely casualties.

It is the largest coal-fired machine on the entire planet, accounting for 10% of global electricity demand. And the internet’s climate impact is only going to get worse: Around half of the world has yet to log on—a presently disconnected population of more than three billion people eager to begin streaming videos and updating Facebook accounts. The internet’s cut of the world’s electricity demand will likely rise to 20% or more by 2030, at which point it will produce more carbon than any country except China, India, and the United States.

«

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Giant solar park in the desert jump starts Egypt’s renewables push • Reuters

Aidan Lewis:

»

Near the southern Egyptian city of Aswan, a swathe of photovoltaic solar panels spreads over an area of desert so large it is clearly visible from space.

They are part of the Benban plant, one of the world’s largest solar parks following completion last month of a second phase of the estimated $2.1bn project.

Designed to anchor a renewable energy sector by attracting foreign and domestic private-sector developers and financial backers, the plant now provides nearly 1.5GW to Egypt’s national grid and has brought down the price of solar energy at a time when the government is phasing out electricity subsidies.

In 2013, Egypt was suffering rolling blackouts due to power shortages at aging power stations. Three gigantic gas-powered stations with a capacity of 14.4GW procured from Siemens in 2015 turned the deficit into a surplus.

National installed electricity capacity is now around 50GW and Egypt aims to increase the share of electricity provided by renewables from a fraction currently to 20% by 2022 and 42% by 2035.

…Last year a report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) suggested Egypt could be more ambitious in its green energy goals and aim to supply 53% of its electricity from renewables by 2030.

«

So: good, but could be better.
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India’s internet curbs are part of growing global trend • The Guardian

Michael Safi:

»

On Thursday, internet shutdowns came to the capital city of the world’s largest democracy.

The suspension of data services, phone calls and texting to curb protests in parts of Delhi was an inauspicious milestone for a tactic that is becoming an increasingly common tool for authoritarian governments – but practised most often by India.

As internet penetration has surged this past decade, especially in the developing world, so have attempts to switch off the flow of information. The internet-freedom group Access Now recorded 75 internet outages around the world in 2016; the figure more than doubled to 196 last year.

With protest movements convulsing dozens of countries this year, the figure is likely to be “much, much higher”, said Berhan Taye, a senior policy analyst at Access Now.

Iraq has periodically curbed the internet as violent protests have spread throughout the country. In Ethiopia, enforced outages have become so frequent that they are damaging the economy, costing an estimated US$4.5m a day, according to figures from a digital rights group. Reports of outages from Venezuela are so frequent that they can barely be counted, Taye said. “It’s like a child is at the switch, turning it on and off whenever they fear something is happening,” she said.

«

We saw it at the beginning of the decade – it was a common tactic during the Arab Spring – and now it has come back into vogue.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Tory MPs are switching away from Signal to WhatsApp – claiming it’s because there are too many of them for a single group. CC-licensed photo by Tim Reckmann 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. Nearly there. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

First, the smartphone changed. Then, over a decade, it changed us • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

»

The modern-day smartphone in all its rectangular touch screen beauty wasn’t invented in 2010. (The iPhone arrived in 2007.) But it was the year that so many of us began to ditch those aforementioned gadgets, and trade our phones—made for calls and the occasional text or email—for that single computer now in our pocket. It was also the year the biggest apps currently lining our homescreens began to arrive.

What we got was a device that changed what it means to be human. A gadget that as it gained functionality, fundamentally altered the way we navigate the world, our relationships, ourselves. But it also began to navigate us—in ways we sometimes didn’t even realize and probably shouldn’t have welcomed.

To see just how much the smartphone has changed the way we function in the world, I challenged myself to go on a trip to the past for 24 hours—using just 2010 technology, including my old BlackBerry. (Watch my video to see how well I survived my day in Hell, Michigan.)

At times I felt totally and completely lost—probably because, with a malfunctioning GPS, I actually was. I missed not being able to do so many things I now take for granted. And yet it was also strangely exhilarating. I felt more in control, more present and, maybe, more like myself.

«

Stern always has such fantastic setups for her pieces; choosing to do it in Hell is just the icing on the cake.
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We tested Ring’s security. It’s awful • VICE

Joseph Cox:

»

It’s not so much being watched. It’s that I don’t really know if I’m being watched or not.

From across the other side of the world, a colleague has just accessed my Ring account, and in turn, a live-feed of a Ring camera in my apartment. He sent a screenshot of me stretching, getting ready for work. Then a second colleague accessed the camera from another country, and started talking to me through the Ring device.

“Joe can you tell I’m watching you type,” they added in a Slack message. The blue light which signals someone is watching the camera feed faded away. But I still couldn’t shake the feeling of someone may be tuning in. I went into another room.

My colleagues were only able to access my Ring camera because they had the relevant email address and password, but Amazon-owned home security company Ring is not doing enough to stop hackers breaking into customer accounts, and in turn, their cameras, according to multiple cybersecurity experts, people who write tools to break into accounts, and Motherboard’s own analysis with a Ring camera it bought to test the company’s security protections.

…Ring is not offering basic security precautions, such as double-checking whether someone logging in from an unknown IP address is the legitimate user, or providing a way to see how many users are currently logged in—entirely common security measures across a wealth of online services.

«

Email addresses and cracked passwords for various services are available all over the net; Amazon isn’t taking this seriously enough.
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Chartbeat: 2019’s top stories

Chartbeat:

»

How we compiled the 2019 list.

We evaluated more than 54 million pieces of content, totalling 294 billion minutes of Engaged Time, which is the total amount of time visitors spent actively reading pages across our network. Stories are tagged by topics, reflecting the variety of coverage and ultimately favouring original narratives.

«

The top story turns out to be one that I didn’t link to, so you might need to go and visit to find out. Though as to Chartbeat’s claim that it’s “ultimately favouring original content”, there are a couple of rewrites of other articles in the list in there. And the Yahoo Japan content, in Japanese: who knows?
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Exclusive: Facebook adding part-time fact-checkers to root out misinformation • Axios

Sara Fischer:

»

The reviewers are meant to be representative of everyday Facebook users, so they don’t have any sort of particular expertise in fact-checking.

This is done intentionally by Facebook because it wants the sources that they pass over to third-party fact-checkers to be unbiased, and akin to what an average Facebook user would find if they searched for news articles to assess the validity of a piece of information they found on Facebook.

Facebook wouldn’t say how many part-time contractors are being hired, but it says the number will vary as the pilot is evaluated and that Appen will be responsible for making staffing adjustments based on scaling needs.

As an additional safeguard, Facebook says it’s partnering with YouGov, a global public opinion and data company, to ensure that the pool of community reviewers represent the diversity of people on Facebook.

Facebook says that ahead of the pilot’s launch, YouGov has determined that the requirements Appen has used to select community reviewers will lead to a pool of people that is representative of the Facebook community in the U.S., and that it should reflect the diverse viewpoints on Facebook, including political ideology.

«

This has so much potential to go so, so wrong. Part-time non-expert fact-checkers. Like part-time non-expert airline pilots, maybe: responsible for a lot of people’s direction.
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Tories switch to messaging app Signal after WhatsApp leaks • The Guardian

Jim Waterson:

»

The Conservative party has started using the secure messaging service Signal for its internal communications with Tory MPs, following years of leaks from WhatsApp groups.

Signal, which is an alternative to Facebook-owned WhatsApp, prides itself on its ultra-secure privacy features and has an option to make messages automatically disappear after a set period of time, making it harder to retrospectively leak conversations.

The nonprofit open source service, which is endorsed by the likes of Edward Snowden, promises highly encrypted ad-free communications and pledges to ensure no one can read user messages or see their calls. Earlier this year the co-founder of WhatsApp gave $50m (£38m) to Signal to help improve the service.

Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group, which campaigns on internet freedoms, suggested the Tories’ switch to using Signal for party communications is ironic given the party’s longstanding campaign to introduce a backdoor on such messaging services for the benefit of the authorities.

…A Conservative spokesperson said the real justification for their MPs to use Signal was operational, rather than for security reasons. With so many Tory MPs elected at the last election, it had become impossible to fit them all in a single WhatsApp group, because they are currently capped at 256 members.

…[Killock said:] “I guess Priti Patel must be quite confused and alarmed as her party votes with its feet for secure messaging platforms, while she’s campaigning to stop them from protecting these very same users.”

«

Yes, but for Priti Patel to have to worry about cognitive dissonance, she’d need to be able to hold two thoughts in her head. Also, there were more than 256 Tory MPs in the last Parliament; so that’s another lie.
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Apple, Google, Amazon, Zigbee partner on smart home • CNBC

Todd Haselton:

»

Today, you might walk into a store and buy a smart lock for your home. But you’d have to figure out if you need to buy a lock that works with Amazon Echo (which uses various standards including Zigbee), Google Home or Apple HomeKit.

This same headache extends to the companies that build smart devices. They need to decide from the outset if they want to support various connectivity methods used by Amazon, Apple or Google and, if they do, they need to continue updating the device throughout its life so it’s secure across all platforms.

The new standard aims to fix those problems.

It’s called “Project Connected Home over IP” and it will work to create a new standard for the smart home so that people can buy products knowing that they’ll work with the systems they have at home, and that they’re secure. A logo on gadget boxes will let customers know if it’s built and supported by Project Connected Home over IP or not.

“The project is built around a shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to use,” the companies said in a press release.

«

Alliances are nice, but tend to achieve little because the temptation to break away is so great for whoever is the market leader, no matter what stage the market is at.
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InLink Limited limited: firm that puts up UK’s ad-supported phone booths enters administration • The Register

Matthew Hughes:

»

Phonebooth sprawl wasn’t the only problem. Many local authorities refused permission for the InLink booths due to their association with criminality — specifically the drug trade.

InLink kiosks allowed users to place phone calls to UK landline and mobile numbers. Because they did not require any prior registration, they were ideally suited for those wishing to make drug deals, for example.

According to a Metropolitan Police report from 2018, five InLink kiosks facilitated 20,000 drug-related calls over a 15-week period. This forced BT to disable calls on certain kiosks, including those located in deprived areas of London’s Whitechapel, Bethnal Green, and Commercial Road.

Across the sprawling borough of Tower Hamlets, which has a population of over 300,000, InLink briefly suspended calls to mobile numbers, while allowing calls to landlines.

Separately, InLinkUK started work earlier this year rolling out on an algorithm that would identify and block drug-related calls (PDF). This used a combination of police intelligence, alongside a consideration of the frequency of attempted and connected calls, as well as their length.

Despite these efforts, InLink Kiosks developed a bad name. This reputation stymied the rollout of InLink kiosks around the UK.

«

Kudos to Adrian Short, a privacy activist who demonstrated early on what a blight these things – essentially big advertising hoardings – would be. So much for the smart city ideas too. Google/Alphabet is somewhere back there in the ownership, too.
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PlusToken scammers didn’t just steal $2+ billion worth of cryptocurrency. They may also be driving down the price of bitcoin • Chainalysis Blog

»

Scams are all too common in the cryptocurrency world, with our internal research suggesting bad actors bilked billions of dollars’ worth of funds from millions of victims in 2019. In addition to the monetary losses sustained by affected individuals, scams paint a negative picture of the industry and may scare off potential participants.

But in the case of one notable 2019 scam, the consequences may go beyond the direct victims. We believe that the criminals behind the PlusToken Ponzi scheme could be driving down the price of Bitcoin when they liquidate their stolen funds via OTC brokers.

Based in China, PlusToken presented itself as a cryptocurrency wallet that would reward users with high rates of return if they purchased the wallet’s associated PLUS cryptocurrency tokens with Bitcoin or Ethereum. The scammers claimed those returns would be generated by “exchange profit, mining income, and referral benefits.” PlusToken would go on to be listed on several Chinese exchanges and hit a peak price of $350 USD, raking in “investments” from millions of people. 

Chinese media reports that the scam attracted over $3 billion worth of cryptocurrency. We tracked a total of 180,000 BTC, 6,400,000 ETH, 111,000 USDT, and 53 OMG (OmiseGo) that went from scam victims to PlusToken wallets, equating to roughly $2bn. Either figure would make PlusToken one of the largest Ponzi schemes ever. 

«

And now they’re trying to cash out, in amounts so large it’s pushing down the price. But look again at that opening sentence: “Scams are all too common in the cryptocurrency world”. Mm. Avoid.
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What do women want? Some crypto flavoured mansplaining, apparently • FT Alphaville

Jemima Kelly:

»

we were just thrilled to come across an article published on crypto news site Coindesk on Monday night under the headline “What Do Women Want? More Educational Materials Before Investing in Bitcoin”. Our attention was drawn to it via the medium of Twitter — specifically this truly eye-catching tweet:

(Just look at those poor, helpless, beautiful women! All they want is some educational materials to help them join the cause!)

The article, it turns out, was based on a survey of 1,100 people carried out earlier this year, some unknown proportion of whom were women. And that survey, it turns out, was carried out by Grayscale, a crypto and blockchain asset management firm owned by Digital Currency Group which, it turns out, owns… Coindesk. 

Coindesk mansplains explains (emphasis ours):

»

The survey found women were just as likely as men to see bitcoin’s high growth potential (56.2% of women, compared to 56.4% of men). They also understood bitcoin’s finite supply could drive future price increases (49.8% of women, 49.9% of men).

«

You see women aren’t silly. They understand something that is totally not grounded in any fact or evidence. They understand that even though we all know exactly how many bitcoins there will ever be in circulation (21 million, if you’re talking about the original bitcoin AKA BTC), that limit will nonetheless “drive future price increases”. Crypto markets — they’re so rational! And women, it turns out, can be the same kind of rational! 

«

Kelly wields the flamethrower of murder-that-crap just as you would expect her to, especially on the followup offering an “unbiased introduction” from “crypto enthusiasts”.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

DeepMind’s AlphaZero has found that changing a single rule in chess can make games more interesting – and reduce draws. CC-licensed photo by Megan Wong 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. Well-decorated. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Kramnik and AlphaZero: how to rethink chess • Chess.com

Vladimir Kramnik is a former world chess champion who asked DeepMind to get AlphaZero to test new variations – because it can run through millennia of games in a few days:

»

My aim was to find a chess variant that would not only have the potential to bring the excitement and decisive victories back to chess, but is also aesthetically pleasing. The goal was to reignite interest and introduce players and audiences to the immense complexity and creativity of the original game of chess.

To begin, we tasked AlphaZero with exploring a variant that prevented either side from castling, trying different opening moves from both sides. The outcome was beyond our expectations!

We let AlphaZero learn how to play “no-castling chess” from scratch, allowing the program to incrementally learn how to master the game through a process of trial and error, similar to how it taught itself to play classical chess. After playing millions of games, AlphaZero became a no-castling expert, allowing us to analyze how it plays and assess the overall game balance.

The win/loss percentages for both White and Black are similar to classical chess, suggesting that the no-castling variant should be quite playable without favoring a particular player. Preventing the king from retreating to a safe distance means that all of the pieces have to engage in the melee, making the play more dynamic and entertaining, with a number of original patterns.

«

Certainly much simpler, and easy to test. (He considered, and rejected, FischerRandom – where you place the back row pieces randomly but mirror-image before the game. Too difficult for amateurs, and too variable.)
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Finland is winning the war on fake news. Other nations want the blueprint

Eliza Mackintosh:

»

Finland has faced down Kremlin-backed propaganda campaigns ever since it declared independence from Russia 101 years ago. But in 2014, after Moscow annexed Crimea and backed rebels in eastern Ukraine, it became obvious that the battlefield had shifted: information warfare was moving online.

Toivanen, the chief communications specialist for the prime minister’s office, said it is difficult to pinpoint the exact number of misinformation operations to have targeted the country in recent years, but most play on issues like immigration, the European Union, or whether Finland should become a full member of NATO (Russia is not a fan).

As the trolling ramped up in 2015, President Sauli Niinisto called on every Finn to take responsibility for the fight against false information. A year later, Finland brought in American experts to advise officials on how to recognize fake news, understand why it goes viral and develop strategies to fight it. The education system was also reformed to emphasize critical thinking.

Although it’s difficult to measure the results in real-time, the approach appears to be working, and now other countries are looking to Finland as an example of how to win the war on misinformation.

“It’s not just a government problem, the whole society has been targeted. We are doing our part, but it’s everyone’s task to protect the Finnish democracy,” Toivanen said, before adding: “The first line of defense is the kindergarten teacher.”

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Government-funded, which seems wise.
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Exclusive: Facebook funding Reuters deepfakes course for newsrooms • Axios

Sara Fischer:

»

The free e-learning course, called “Identifying and Tackling Manipulated Media,” seeks to help journalists globally learn how to identify photos or videos that have been altered to present inaccurate information.

It’s available online only, and takes about 45 minutes to complete. Reuters and Facebook will do events and panels in 2020 together around the course.

Much of the course isn’t focused on deepfakes specifically, but rather on the way manipulated media can be used to distort the facts. Deepfakes involve the use of artificial intelligence to create media that is doctored to look real; they are a subset of the much broader category of manipulated media, which is any media altered to change the factual record.

What they’re saying: Hazel Baker, Reuters’ head of user-generated content news-gathering, who created the course, says that the goal was to help newsrooms understand what they should be looking for.

“Ninety per cent of manipulated media we see online is real video taken out of context used to feed a different narrative,” says Baker, whose unit of 13 at Reuters specializes in verifying visual media. “Sometimes it’s edited, but often it’s not. I think that’s quite an important starting point.”

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So is Facebook going to take down content like this? *Hilarious laughter* Ok then.
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Facebook’s unhealthy obsession with growth persists after years of scandal • Buzzfeed News

Alex Kantrowitz:

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Facebook’s growth at any cost mentality has birthed innumerable scandals over the past decade — election meddling, political discord, privacy invasion. Yet today, after repeated apologies and promises to do better, that mentality remains largely unchanged. BuzzFeed News has learned the company continues to evaluate and compensate product managers based mostly on their ability to grow its products, with little regard to the impact of those products on the world. In fact, for Facebook, the very word “impact” is often defined by internal growth rather than external consequences and it uses growth metrics as a key criteria for evaluating performance and determining compensation changes.

This emphasis on growth, particularly as it’s tied to performance evaluation, encourages Facebook’s employees to focus on growth above all else, sources close to the company told BuzzFeed News.

“Working at Facebook made me aware of how you can reprogram humans,” one ex–product manager who recently left the company said. “It’s hard to believe that you could get humans to override all of their values that they came in with. But with a system like this, you can. I found that a bit terrifying.”

“When you’re building something at this scale, solutions take a good amount of time” 
The system this product manager described — a source of concern among others who have worked for the company — has two main components: Facebook’s data science team and its performance evaluation system. The company’s data science team has years of data at its disposal, which it uses to pinpoint how much a team should grow a product it’s working on. Facebook’s product teams use that information to set goals every six months as part of a “roadmap planning” process. The criterion is typically growth, though there are sometimes other goals as well, like reducing harmful behavior on its service.

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A microcosm of ourselves.
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Introducing MusicBot: the all-in-one Apple Music assistant, powered by Shortcuts • MacStories

Federico Viticci:

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For the past several months, I’ve been working on a shortcut designed to be the ultimate assistant for Apple Music. Called MusicBot, the shortcut encompasses dozens of different features and aims to be an all-in-one assistant that helps you listen to music more quickly, generate intelligent mixes based on your tastes, rediscover music from your library, control playback on AirPlay 2 speakers, and much more. I poured hundreds of hours of work into MusicBot, which has gained a permanent spot on my Home screen. Best of all, MusicBot is available to everyone for free.

I’m a happy Apple Music subscriber, and I love the direction Apple has taken with the service: fewer exclusive deals, more human curation, artist spotlights, and playlists updated daily. However, I believe the Music app for iPhone and iPad leaves much to be desired in terms of navigation and fast access to your favorite music. While Music gets the job done as a gateway to a streaming catalog, I find its interactions somewhat slow when it comes to playing my favorite playlists on shuffle or getting to albums I frequently listen to. Some of Music’s most interesting mixes are only available by asking Siri; additionally, getting to certain sections of the app or tweaking specific settings often takes far too many taps for my taste.

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That it’s written in Shortcuts is, in its own right, incredible: the interface for working in Shortcuts is terrible, and this has more than 750 Shortcut actions in it. Proof, of a sort, that you can program on an iPad. But unless Viticci was able to use a second screen (which he might have, with an iPad), this was the sort of masochism that would have left the Marquis De Sade raising his eyebrows and asking if that wasn’t a bit much.
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Walt Mossberg: Tim Cook’s Apple had a great decade but no new blockbusters • The Verge

Mossberg came out of retirement to write about Apple’s decade:

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Cook does bear the responsibility for a series of actions that screwed up the Macintosh for years. The beloved mainstream MacBook Air was ignored for five years. At the other end of the scale, the Mac Pro, the mainstay of professional audio, graphics, and video producers, was first neglected then reissued in 2013 in a way that put form so far ahead of function that it enraged its customer base.

Some insiders think Cook allowed Ive’s design team far too much power and that the balance Jobs was able to strike between the designers and the engineers was gone, at least until Ive left the company earlier this year.

The design-first culture that took root under Cook struck again with the MacBook Pro, yielding new laptops so thin their keyboards were awful and featuring USB-C ports that required sleek Macs to be used with ugly dongles. Apple has only recently retreated back to decent keyboards on the latest MacBook Pro, and it issued a much more promising Mac Pro. But dongles are still a part of the Apple experience across its product lines.

Cook’s other success this decade was to nurture the iPhone along as smartphone sales first plateaued and then began to decline. The biggest change he made came in 2014, before the dip, when Apple introduced two new iPhone 6 models, which belatedly adopted big screens that Android phones had pioneered. Sales took off like a rocket, and there’s been a big iPhone option every year since.

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I’d definitely agree with the “some insiders”. USB-C perhaps could have waited a year or two, or three, but dongles are hardly the end of the world. The keyboards, though, and the overemphasis on “thin” and “featureless” over functional, are points that maybe were impossible to hear above the noise of everything else happening inside the company – particularly with the shift to services and TV.
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Google brass set 2023 as deadline to beat Amazon, Microsoft in cloud • The Information

Nick Bastone, Kevin McLaughlin and Amir Efrati:

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The clock is ticking for Google Cloud.

The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding. While the company has invested heavily in the business since last year, Google wants its cloud group to outrank those of one or both of its two main rivals by 2023, said people with knowledge of the matter.

That timeline was devised early last year, after an intense monthslong debate among senior leaders at Google and its parent company Alphabet over the future of the cloud business, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told The Information. The group, which included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Alphabet chief financial officer Ruth Porat and then-CEO of Alphabet Larry Page, discussed whether Google could “win” in the business, who would be best to lead the effort and the difficulties of competing on things other than technology, such as sales and marketing. The group even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely, this person said.

…Becoming No. 1 or 2 in the cloud market will be a stretch for Google. In the third quarter, Amazon Web Services accounted for almost 33% of global cloud spending, while Microsoft had nearly 17% and Google had just under 7%, according to research firm Canalys.

At the same time, there are some signs of progress. On Alphabet’s fiscal second quarter earnings call in July, Pichai revealed that Google Cloud generated $2bn in revenue during the quarter, giving it an $8bn annualized sales rate—double the $1bn a quarter in cloud revenue it disclosed for the last quarter of 2017

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But Google’s ad business is about 20 times bigger. Business Insider also mentioned 2023. This is the sort of revelation that won’t help Google’s Cloud business at all.

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Match the classic book to its not-so-classic sequel • Mental Floss

Personally I didn’t even know there was a sequel to Forrest Gump. Or quite a few of the others. Difficult!
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List of best-selling mobile phones • Wikipedia

Everyone on the internet:

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With over 4 decades on the market, mobile phones have become the most used electronic device in the world. Below is a list of best-selling mobile phones, released between 1992 and 2018. The best-selling mobile devices are the Nokia 1100 and 1110, two bar phones released in 2003 and 2005, respectively. Both have sold over 250 million units.

The best-selling touchscreen phones are the Apple iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, both released in 2014. Together, they have sold over 220 million units. The best-selling flip phone is the Motorola RAZR V3, released in 2004. It sold over 130 million units. The best-selling slider phone is the Samsung E250, released in 2006. It has sold over 30 million units.

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Some amazing stats in here, and surprises too. Apple leads on the individual best-selling phones because its portfolio was, for so long, so small: rather than releasing a different phone every day of the week (as Samsung sometimes seems to), its focus until recently on one or two helps bump it up.

Even so, the numbers for this year may surprise you. (Thanks stormyparis for the link.)
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Guess what, Marissa Mayer’s back – and she wants to save you some time. CC-licensed photo by TechCrunch 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. Never garbage in, only out. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google and YouTube moderators speak out on the work that’s giving them PTSD • The Verge

Casey Newton:

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Peter is one of hundreds of moderators at the Austin site. YouTube sorts the work for him and his colleagues into various queues, which the company says allows moderators to build expertise around its policies. There’s a copyright queue, a hate and harassment queue, and an “adult” queue for porn.

Peter works what is known internally as the “VE queue,” which stands for violent extremism. It is some of the grimmest work to be done at Alphabet. And like all content moderation jobs that involve daily exposure to violence and abuse, it has had serious and long-lasting consequences for the people doing the work.

In the past year, Peter has seen one of his co-workers collapse at work in distress, so burdened by the videos he had seen that he took two months of unpaid leave from work. Another co-worker, wracked with anxiety and depression caused by the job, neglected his diet so badly that he had to be hospitalized for an acute vitamin deficiency.

Peter, who has done this job for nearly two years, worries about the toll that the job is taking on his mental health. His family has repeatedly urged him to quit. But he worries that he will not be able to find another job that pays as well as this one does: $18.50 an hour, or about $37,000 a year.

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People paying the price of all the other people.
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Marissa Mayer is launching a new project: Lumi Labs • Fast Company

Harry McCracken:

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Mayer remains cryptic about the specific types of apps Lumi has under development, and the time frame for their launch. But she will say that Lumi stands to benefit from the kinds of AI breakthroughs that Silicon Valley researchers are making in areas such as teaching cars to drive themselves. This kind of work, she says, is immediately useful for the tools Lumi is devising to automate activities “so mundane and so time-consuming that a lot of people [choose not to] do them.” For instance, the company is applying machine learning to certain photo-related tasks such as figuring out whether a particular image “is blurry, whether it’s well lit, whether it’s one that someone is likely to want to share based on the history of photos they shared in the past.”

If Lumi’s apps take off, it won’t be through the company’s use of AI alone. “We want our products to be thoughtful, to feel nice when they’re used,” explains Mayer, who was once famous for zealously guarding Google’s search engine against complication and clutter. She admits that she misses the days when the products she launched reached hundreds of millions of people. But with Lumi, “the hope is to be able to have that kind of impact and scale at some point,” she says. “That’s certainly what we will be building for.”

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Whether my photo is too blurry. Really. Too blurry. From the woman who once oversaw Google Mail.

Let’s check back in two years.
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How AI will eat UI

Artyom Avanesov:

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When AR wearables hit the market, our apps will start tracking both our conscious and subconscious behavior. By measuring our heart rate, respiration, pupil size, and eye movement, our AI’s will be able to map our psychology in high resolution. And armed with this information, our interfaces will morph and adapt to our mood as we go about our day.

Future interfaces will not be curated, but tailored to fulfill our subconscious needs. Maybe the best way to navigate a digital ecosystem isn’t through buttons and sliders. Maybe the solution is something more organic and abstract.

Autodesk is developing a system that uses Generative Design to create 3D models. You enter your requirements, and the system spits out a solution. The method has already produced drones, airplane parts, and hot rods. So it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing AI-generated interfaces.

This may all sounds far out, but the future tends to arrive sooner than we expect. One day, in a brave new world, we will look at contemporary interfaces the same way we look at an old typewriter; gawking at its crudeness and appreciating how far we’ve come.

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Now that’s something to think about. What if the UI is different for each of us because the AI picks up different things? Nobody’s phone would look the same, nobody’s phone would act the same. You wouldn’t be able to make sense of your best friend’s device. And yet it might happen.
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Google Turkey suspends services for upcoming phones over fine • Daily Sabah

:

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Tech giant Google has suspended its services for new Android smartphones in Turkey unless the country backtracks from its decision to fine the company for violating competition law, the company announced Sunday.

The decision will not affect current users or current phone models already existing on the market. The move will only suspend Google services for Android devices yet to be released.

Turkey’s Competition Authority last September announced it had fined Google some TL 93 million for violating competition laws with its mobile software sales. The watchdog said in March this year that it was launching a broader investigation into Google based on preliminary findings.

Google told Turkish business partners, phone manufacturers and telecom carriers selling smartphones that it would not grant licenses to Android phones set to be launched on the Turkish market for the use of its services, including Google Play Store, Gmail, YouTube and other Google applications. Accordingly, Google said it would also suspend operating system updates.

…The initial probe aimed to determine whether Google’s contracts with equipment producers – in addition to its mobile communications systems, applications and provision of services – found the tech giant had violated the law.

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That’s quite the reaction, Google. Most of the 10m smartphones sold in Turkey annually run Android. Wonder how this is going to pan out if neither side backs down.
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Introducing DeepText: Facebook’s text understanding engine • Facebook Engineering

Ahmad Abdulkader, Aparna Lakshmiratan, and Joy Zhang:

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DeepText is already being tested on some Facebook experiences. In the case of Messenger, for example, DeepText is used by the AML Conversation Understanding team to get a better understanding of when someone might want to go somewhere. It’s used for intent detection, which helps realize that a person is not looking for a taxi when he or she says something like, “I just came out of the taxi,” as opposed to “I need a ride.”

We’re also beginning to use high-accuracy, multi-language DeepText models to help people find the right tools for their purpose. For example, someone could write a post that says, “I would like to sell my old bike for $200, anyone interested?” DeepText would be able to detect that the post is about selling something, extract the meaningful information such as the object being sold and its price, and prompt the seller to use existing tools that make these transactions easier through Facebook.

DeepText has the potential to further improve Facebook experiences by understanding posts better to extract intent, sentiment, and entities (e.g., people, places, events), using mixed content signals like text and images, and automating the removal of objectionable content like spam. Many celebrities and public figures use Facebook to start conversations with the public. These conversations often draw hundreds or even thousands of comments. Finding the most relevant comments in multiple languages while maintaining comment quality is currently a challenge. One additional challenge that DeepText may be able to address is surfacing the most relevant or high-quality comments.

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But fake news? Perish the thought.
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September 2015: Last house on the Left: following Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign trail • The Quietus

Taylor Parkes, back in September 2015, when it looked as though Corbyn was going to be elected leader of the Labour Party:

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The fact is, unless a lot of things change deeply and most unexpectedly over the next four years, Jeremy Corbyn is not going to win a general election. This is not to suggest that there’s some kind of objective, immovable “centre ground”, nor that if there were, it would be occupied by the Labour Right – still less the modern Conservative Party. In truth, Corbyn’s domestic policies are not very extreme, and would in many cases prove quite popular. Yes, they’re “radical” in the sense that there’s a chasmal distance out to there from where we are today, but really, Corbynism is just about hauling Britain back towards the social-democratic Centre. There will be no pogroms, no fifteen-hour queues for stale bread. This is not the problem.

I think we all know what the problems are. For instance, I’m not what you’d call a hawk, but please: out there in grainy, hard-bollocked reality, Corbyn’s foreign policy would not just leave Britain naked in the conference chamber, but fastened into a gimp mask with a horse-tail dangling out of its arse. Whether we like it or not, there is at least one confrontation coming; you can be sure of that. There are some nasty people in the world, you know. Some of them – get this! – are even nastier than Tony Blair. And even if you leave them all alone, they will not stop. Not for all the tea in Islington North.

What’s more, there are certain… issues with Corbyn and the company he keeps. He doesn’t just have skeletons in his closet, he hangs up his shirts in an ossuary. This is not a trivial matter. Those who underestimate the problems this will cause are fooling themselves (and in some cases, losing sight of their own moral compass).

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It’s amazing: Parkes gets every single thing correct about Corbyn, about his outriders, and his past, about how he would fare against Boris Johnson. Four. Years. Ago.

It’s a fantastic piece; I highly recommend all of it.
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Post Office coughs £57.75m to settle wonky Horizon IT system case • The Register

John Oates:

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The UK’s Post Office has finally agreed to settle a long-running case brought by postmasters the company accused of theft based on evidence from the Horizon IT system.

Claimants (and their lawyers, of course) will split £57.75m in order to settle Bates and others v the Post Office.

The biz said in a statement: “The Post Office would like to express its gratitude to claimants, and particularly those who attended the mediation in person to share their experiences with us, for holding us to account in circumstances where, in the past, we have fallen short and we apologise to those affected.”

It said the new chief executive was committed to learning lessons and that the company would be “undertaking an ambitious and sustained programme of changes to the Post Office’s relationship with postmasters”.

Freelance journalist Nick Wallis, who has been reporting on the case since 2010, pointed out that litigants would have spent about £22m, assuming their legal bills were similar to the Post Office’s. Wallis noted the case was backed by litigation funder Therium and by his rough maths on what they would expect to be paid, he estimated payments for each of the 550 litigants would be between £47,000 and £78,000.

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Astonishing that something like this has to go on for so long, and yet the consequences for those who behaved wrongly will, one fears, be minimal.
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FixMyStreet for TfL — now live • mySociety

Myfanwy Nixon:

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Back in November, we announced our new partnership with Transport for London. We’re now pleased to say that the new Street Care service is live.

If you’re a seasoned user of FixMyStreet, there’s no learning curve required: you can proceed exactly as normal. If you prefer, you can carry on making reports through the national website at FixMyStreet.com or via the FixMyStreet app.

The only difference is that now, if the issue is the responsibility of TfL, that’s where your report will be routed, and that’s where updates will come from to let you know when the fix is in progress or completed.

The new service covers potholes, roadworks, bus shelters and traffic lights on the capital’s busiest roads — the ‘red routes’, which make up only 5% of the city’s highways, but account for a whopping 30% of traffic. Users can also report graffiti and flyposting, problems with hoardings, scaffolding and mobile cranes, street lights and damaged trees.

As ever, the underlying FixMyStreet platform means that you don’t need to think about who is responsible for your issue. If a problem is reported and it’s nothing to do with TfL, it’ll be automatically routed to the relevant borough or authority.

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Amazingly, FixMyStreet dates back to 2007 – it’s one of the earliest web projects built for the community in the UK. Only slightly concerning that it has taken 12 years for the capital’s transport authority to integrate it.
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Netflix’s Napster moment • Tech-Thoughts

Sameer Singh:

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All of a sudden, Netflix finds itself in a world where must-watch content is fragmented across streaming services with individual subscriptions. Not that different from the pre-cord cutting world. The content economics are largely similar and all that has changed is that it is now delivered over the internet. In this world, does Netflix have the freedom to cut down on original content investments? The subscribers they have acquired have their own niche tastes. If they no longer get new content  they are interested in, they have enough options available from competitors.

Even if Netflix continues to invest in content, is that enough to keep subscribers around in this world? Users are unlikely to sign up AND stick to every streaming service that has a “must watch” show. A fan of Stranger Things, His Dark Materials and The Mandalorian is unlikely to pay for Netflix, HBO Max and Disney+ every month. A more likely outcome is that users “hop” between streaming subscriptions based on what they want to watch. There is already evidence of this, as HBO NOW subscriptions in the past few years experienced a dramatic peak during every new season of Game of Thrones. Subscriptions then dropped back down as soon as the season was complete. This pattern will dramatically increase user churn and, consequently, customer acquisition costs. Of course, the other eventuality is an increase in piracy, which will also hurt economics.

…The upside is that Netflix isn’t the only company facing these challenges. The entire video streaming industry is on an unsustainable path. High content costs, subscriber churn and piracy will affect everyone in the industry. This, in turn, is likely to create the conditions necessary for a new industry structure. Take yourself back to the music industry in the early 2000s. Revenue losses caused by piracy, and Napster in particular, forced industry players to co-operate and created the conditions necessary for Apple to unbundle music albums via iTunes. Video streaming is on a very similar path (a combination of unbundling and re-aggregation onto a single platform).

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Singh is always worth listening to – though I think it’s no secret that this splurge on video content can’t last.
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Prime leverage: how Amazon wields power in the technology world • The New York Times

Daisuke Wakabayashi:

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The A.W.S. [Amazon Web Services] database service, an instant hit with customers, did not run software that Amazon created. Instead, the company plucked from a freely shared option known as open source.

…open source is a tried and true model nurtured by the software industry to get technology to customers quickly. A community of enthusiasts often springs up around the shareable technology, contributing improvements and spreading the word about its benefits. Traditionally, open-source companies later earn money for customer support or from paid add-ons.

Technologists initially paid little attention to what Amazon had done with database software. Then in 2015, Amazon repeated the maneuver by copying Elasticsearch and offering its competing service.

This time, heads turned.

“There was a company that built a business around an open-source product that people like using and, suddenly, they have a competitor using their own stuff against them,” said Todd Persen, who started a non-open-source software company this year so there was “zero chance” that Amazon could lift his creations. His previous start-up, InfluxDB, was open source.

Again and again, the open-source software industry became a well that Amazon turned to. When it copied and integrated that software into A.W.S., it didn’t need permission or have to pay the start-ups for their work, creating a deterrent for people to innovate.

That left little recourse for many of these companies, which could not suddenly start charging money for what was free software. Some instead changed the rules around how their wares could be used, restricting Amazon and others who want to turn what they have created into a paid service.

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This piece begins promisingly – OMG Amazon totes ripped off Elasticsearch! – but you gradually realise that the complaints are nothingburgers. Open source companies are whining because Amazon is using the combination of its size and software that is provided as open source to produce big services they can’t compete with because they’re small.

Clue for you, people: don’t make it open source. Do it the hard way: closed source, and find customers. It worked for Microsoft and for Amazon and a gazillion companies up and down the chain. (Thanks Nic for the link.)
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