Hi there! It looks like I might be coming to the Mac through the power of Github. CC-licensed photo by 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. If you need help… I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook giving massive distribution to dangerous misinformation about diabetes • Popular Info

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Facebook is giving a page featuring incendiary right-wing memes and dangerous misinformation about diabetes massive distribution — reach that exceeds some of the nation’s largest news outlets. 

The Rowdy Republican page, which has over 780,000 followers, is run by an affiliate marketer with a history of legal problems and deceptive practices. He is seeking to drive people to a site about “The Big Diabetes Lie,” which tries to convince people to purchase a $55 paperback book. According to the website, if you have diabetes and don’t purchase this book, you will soon die…

One of the leading medical experts in treating diabetes, Dr. David Goldstein, an endocrinologist affiliated with the University of Missouri, reviewed the website and told Popular Information that the information was “ridiculous” and contained “dangerous misinformation.” 

The Daily Caller, a member of Facebook’s official fact-checking program, reviewed a post by Rowdy Republican that included a link to “The Big Diabetes Lie” and rated it “true.”

The runaway success of the Rowdy Republican page is a sign that Facebook’s efforts to reduce the spread of misinformation is failing. As a result, its users are being put in danger. 

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Yeah, having the Daily Caller – noted for its Pluto-like relationship with the truth – as a fact-checker is an evident error there.
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Conversations about mass shootings at an NRA expo in Texas • The New Yorker

Charles Bethea went to the NRA :

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Around the corner, a former park ranger in her forties, who now works as an accountant in oil and gas, introduced herself as Corey. She’d just concluded a seminar called Methods of Concealed Carry for Women. Corey was game to talk at length about the problem of mass shootings in America.

“I’m a Christian, and I just think there are evil people in the world and it’s gonna happen,” she told me. “If they didn’t have guns, it would be something else.” She mentioned “people in cars mowing people down in the streets,” and the Oklahoma City bombing, in 1995. “He didn’t use a gun,” she said, of Timothy McVeigh. “He used fertilizer.”

I mentioned that it’s generally harder to obtain a driver’s license than a gun. “I don’t think so,” she replied.

I noted that you don’t need a background check to buy a gun from a stranger. The man who carried out the mass shooting in West Texas, in August, used what’s been described as an “AR-type” gun. He purchased the murder weapon in a person-to-person sale that did not require a background check—which he would have failed, because he was federally barred from purchasing a firearm.

Corey said that she’d never bought a gun from a stranger. “There are loopholes for everything, right?” she went on. “Drugs are illegal, but you can still buy them.”

Why did she think there were so many mass shootings in this country, compared to other countries? Does it have to do with the fact that we have so many guns?

“No,” Corey said.

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There’s such fun to be had in going around asking people to lay out their cognitive dissonances for you.
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Microsoft Clippy assistant comes to MacOS via GitHub • CNBC

Jordan Novet:

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Clippy, Microsoft’s love-it-or-hate-it virtual assistant that debuted in the 1990s, has come back to life as a free application for Apple’s MacOS.

The resuscitation capitalizes on people’s memories of bygone software from Microsoft, which last year recaptured the title of world’s most valuable public company as it becomes more centered on subscriptions and cloud services.

Devran “Cosmo” Ünal, senior product engineer at optics company Zeiss Group, released the software on the Microsoft-owned GitHub code-storage website last week, and it has drawn attention quickly.

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Hard pass.
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US charges Chinese professor in latest shot at Huawei • Reuters

Karen Freifeld:

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Bo Mao was arrested in Texas on Aug. 14 and released six days later on $100,000 bond after he consented to proceed with the case in New York, according to court documents.

He pleaded not guilty in US district court in Brooklyn on Aug. 28 to a charge of conspiring to commit wire fraud.

According to the criminal complaint, Mao entered into an agreement with the unnamed California tech company to obtain its circuit board, claiming it was for academic research.

The complaint, however, accuses an unidentified Chinese telecommunications conglomerate, which sources say is Huawei, of trying to steal the technology, and alleges Mao played a role in its alleged scheme. A court document also indicates the case is related to Huawei.

Mao, an associate professor at Xiamen University in China, became a visiting professor at a Texas university last fall. He first gained attention as part of a Texas civil case between Huawei and Silicon Valley startup CNEX Labs Inc.

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Huawei really has been given the role of evil supervillain lately. It’s still accused of stealing robot tech from T-Mobile.
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11 myths about USB Type-C • Electronic Design

Julie Stultz is a technical marketing manager for On Semiconductor, and offers the full 11, but let’s pick these two out:

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Myth 3. All Type-C ports have identical functionality.

Reality: Despite a common connector, the actual feature set of a USB-C port can vary significantly. Ports on travel adapters only charge devices. Ports on wearable devices typically only receive charge. Ports on dual-role devices such as laptops can still see variation in port features. Power levels for standard Type-C ports are limited to 15 W while ports that implement PD can negotiate power up to 100 W. In addition, some ports are capable of data communication up to USB SS Gen 2 speeds of 10 Gb/s. Other features may include DisplayPort or Thunderbolt support.

4. All Type-C cables are identical.

Reality: While all USB-C cables have identical paddles and can fit any USB-C port (Fig. 1), it doesn’t necessarily mean that their electrical characteristics and features are the same. Standard cables are rated for 3 A and length of ≤4 m. Cables that are ≤2 m or required to support between 3 to 5 A need an electrical marker IC known as an e-marker.

The USB-C form factor is much smaller than HDMI and USB 3. While the size is comparable to Lightning, USB-C will be universal, and it has the same connector on both ends.

Cables can also be “full featured” and, for example, support up to 4K high-definition video. As mentioned earlier, full-featured cables could actually have more wires to enable the additional bandwidth. The Type-C spec allows designers to utilize only what features they need on their ports, reducing complexity and cost. As the market has matured, more and more solutions have been optimized to meet demands.

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Commerce chief threatened firings at NOAA after Trump’s Dorian tweets, sources say • The New York Times

Christopher Flavelle, Lisa Friedman and Peter Baker:

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The Secretary of Commerce threatened to fire top employees at NOAA on Friday after the agency’s Birmingham office contradicted President Trump’s claim that Hurricane Dorian might hit Alabama, according to three people familiar with the discussion.

That threat led to an unusual, unsigned statement later that Friday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration disavowing the office’s own position that Alabama was not at risk. The reversal caused widespread anger within the agency and drew criticism from the scientific community that NOAA, a division of the Commerce Department, had been bent to political purposes.

Officials at the White House and the Commerce Department declined to comment on administration involvement in the NOAA statement.

The actions by the Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur L. Ross Jr., are the latest developments in a political imbroglio that began more than a week ago, when Dorian was bearing down on the Bahamas and Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter that Alabama would be hit “harder than anticipated.”

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Trump was wrong, and has had a tantrum for a week that he was shown to be wrong. But Ross is meant to be an adult. This presidency is going to leave so, so many with their reputations shredded.

And also: the Washington Post says the director of the National Weather Service (part of the NOAA) is backing the Alabama forecasters. Who had “Trump’s presidency is upended by a weather forecast”?
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How Apple’s apps topped rivals in the App Store it controls • The New York Times

Jack Nicas and Keith Collins:

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Top spots in App Store search results are some of the most fought over real estate in the online economy. The store generated more than $50bn in sales last year, and the company said two-thirds of app downloads started with a search.

But as Apple has become one of the largest competitors on a platform that it controls, suspicions that the company has been tipping the scales in its own favor are at the heart of antitrust complaints in the United States, Europe and Russia.

Apple’s apps have ranked first recently for at least 700 search terms in the store, according to a New York Times analysis of six years of search results compiled by Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm. Some searches produced as many as 14 Apple apps before showing results from rivals, the analysis showed. (Though competitors could pay Apple to place ads above the Apple results.)

Presented with the results of the analysis, two senior Apple executives acknowledged in a recent interview that, for more than a year, the top results of many common searches in the iPhone App Store were packed with the company’s own apps. That was the case even when the Apple apps were less relevant and less popular than ones from its competitors. The executives said the company had since adjusted the algorithm so that fewer of its own apps appeared at the top of search results…

…Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president who oversees the App Store, and Eddy Cue, the senior vice president who oversees many of the Apple apps that benefited from the results, said there was nothing underhanded about the algorithm the company had built to display search results in the store.

The executives said the company did not manually alter search results to benefit itself. Instead, they said, Apple apps generally rank higher than competitors because of their popularity and because their generic names are often a close match to broad search terms.

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The scrolling presentation at the top of this piece is terrific. And Google? Rand Fishkin, an SEO expert, says that “Apple ranked first for an estimated 1.2% of all App Store searches. I can virtually guarantee Google ranks Alphabet-owned properties No.1 for more than that (in a clickstream analysis I did w/ @jumpshotinc in June, they got ~6% of all search clicks).”
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Apple, Foxconn broke a Chinese labour law for IPhone production • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

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Apple Inc. and manufacturing partner Foxconn violated a Chinese labor rule by using too many temporary staff in the world’s largest iPhone factory, the companies confirmed following a report that also alleged harsh working conditions.

The claims came from China Labor Watch, which issued the report ahead of an Apple event on Tuesday to announce new iPhones. The non-profit advocacy group investigates conditions in Chinese factories, and says it has uncovered other alleged labor rights violations by Apple partners in the past.

For its latest report, CLW said undercover investigators worked in Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant in China, including one who was employed there for four years. One of the main findings: temporary staff, known as dispatch workers, made up about 50% the workforce in August. Chinese labor law stipulates a maximum of 10%, CLW noted.

Apple said that, after conducting an investigation, it found the “percentage of dispatch workers exceeded our standards” and that it is “working closely with Foxconn to resolve this issue.”

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Ooh, now this is interesting. My hypothesis about Apple’s split beta is that it hurried to get as many iPhones built as it could, fearing that Trump would impose tariffs on Chinese-built electronics. Those tariffs were delayed, but Apple was committed to the hurried build.

And look, there’s Apple and Foxconn hurrying to get as many phones built as they could. Later today we’ll know which version of iOS 13 the new iPhones are running. My guess is it’s beta 8, near enough, of iOS 13.0.
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Billie Eilish In Oculus Venues was good social VR, but not a great event • UploadVR

Harry Baker:

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Upon viewing an Oculus Venues experience, you have two options: social or solo mode. Solo will put you in a seat by yourself, just watching alone, whereas social will place you in a virtual arena, laid out like stadium seating, where you can talk and interact with other Venues users around you.

I picked social from the get go, and felt no desire to go back and try solo mode. Sitting in the stadium-style seats, you’re presented with a 180-degree dome view in front of you showing the concert. While the seating arrangement makes it look like you’re up in the nosebleed section, the video feed in front of you doesn’t always display an image that matches that position. At times it did, with a view looking down on the stage and the mosh pit-goers in Madrid, but it would switch to a close-up feed of the stage frequently as well. Although this allowed you to see Billie up close, it also meant that the scale was completely off when up close. Instead of appearing human-sized, the gigantic screen meant that with certain close camera angles, Billie would appear literally larger than life.

The stream itself was of varying quality. The resolution was adequate, but not excellent, however it frustratingly featured heaps of mini stutters, pauses and moments where I could tell the feed was a few seconds out of sync from what everyone around me was watching. It wasn’t perfect and it wasn’t horrendous. There’s definitely work to be done from Oculus on the backend for a smoother experience, but it serves for now.

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I was wondering how it would be for artists performing with more virtual viewers than are present, but of course that’s what happens with pretty much any event covered by TV. All that’s different here is you’re wearing a not-completely-functional goldfish bowl.
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Ring has given ‘active camera’ maps of its customers to police • VICE

Caroline Haskins:

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Ring, Amazon’s home surveillance company, has consistently told Motherboard and other reporters that it does not share maps showing the exact locations of camera-owners with police.

However, a map published by The Guardian last week reveals that Ring gave Georgia’s Gwinnett County Police Department, located just northeast of Atlanta, an “active camera” map that shows hundreds of dots representing the locations of Ring owners in the region.

Now, emails and documents obtained from the police department by Motherboard provide additional context. The emails reveal that the image was one of two maps showing active Ring cameras in Gwinnett County. (One of the maps is slightly more zoomed-in than the other.)

The maps were provided several months before Ring donated 80 video doorbells to the county worth a total of $15,920, according to documents reviewed by Motherboard. The emails reviewed by Motherboard show the maps were shared with Gwinnett County in order to show that a Ring partnership would give them possible access to a large amount of data.

“Gwinnett County has an incredible amount of Ring devices and neighbors using the Ring app,” a Ring representative told Gwinnett County police. “At no cost, the portal can be an incredible asset to your agency Please let me know what you think.”

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I think it’s the consumer-surveillance complex.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Not broken or melted; it’s the Huawei Mate X, now getting some brief hands-on testing. CC-licensed photo by Kārlis Dambrāns on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. We begin again. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook, Google face off against a formidable new foe: state attorneys general • The Washington Post

Tony Romm:

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The nation’s state attorneys general have tangled with mortgage lenders, tobacco giants and the makers of addictive drugs. Now, they’re setting their sights on another target: Big Tech.

Following years of federal inaction, the state watchdogs are initiating sweeping antitrust investigations against Silicon Valley’s largest companies, probing whether they undermine rivals and harm consumers. Their latest salvo arrives Monday, when more than 40 attorneys general are expected to announce their plan to investigate Google, delivering a rare rebuke of the search-and-advertising giant — and its efforts to maintain that dominance — from the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The states seek to probe allegations that the tech industry stifles start-ups, delivers pricier or worse service for Web users and siphons too much personal information, enriching their record-breaking revenue at the cost of consumer privacy.

“The growth of these [tech] companies has outpaced our ability to regulate them in a way that enhances competition,” said Keith Ellison, a Democratic attorney general from Minnesota who is signing on to the effort to probe Google.

“They need to be regulated,” he continued, “and my view is, it’s the state AGs job to do it, particularly when the federal government is not necessarily a reliable partner in the area.”

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Going to be fun seeing how they do it, though. How do you split up Google? Which bits do you break off, which do you allow to remain together? Easier to regular individual pieces (such as Google Shopping) than the whole, but even then you run into problems around what is corporate “speech” and thus, in effect, protected.
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The Epstein scandal at MIT shows the moral bankruptcy of techno-elites • The Guardian

Evgeny Morozov:

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There was no better original exponent of the “third culture” than Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the MIT Media Lab and a new kind of applied intellectual, full of big ideas on technical subjects. The lab was ahead of its time in understanding that the industry and the government alike needed cooler, more interactive technology that was not provided by the traditional cold war contractors.

Everything else followed suit. Thus, Negroponte became a speaker at the very first Technology, Entertainment, Design conference (the famous Ted Talks) in 1984, which, a few decades later, emerged as the pre-eminent promoter of the “third culture”: no politics, no conflict, no ideology – just science, technology, and pragmatic problem-solving. Ideas as a service, neatly packaged in 18-minute intellectual snacks.

“Third culture” was a perfect shield for pursuing entrepreneurial activities under the banner of intellectualism. Infinite networking with billionaires but also models and Hollywood stars; instant funding by philanthropists and venture capitalists moving in the same circles; bestselling books tied to soaring speaking fees used as promotional materials for the author’s more substantial commercial activities, often run out of academia.

That someone like Jeffrey Epstein would take advantage of these networks to whitewash his crimes was almost inevitable. In a world where books function as brand extensions and are never actually read, it’s quite easy for a rich and glamorous charlatan of Epstein’s stature to fit in.

One of Brockman’s persistent laments was that all the billionaire techies in his circle barely read any of the books published by his clients. Not surprisingly, his famed literary dinners – held during the Ted Conference, they allowed Epstein (who kept Brockman’s Edge Foundation on a retainer) to mingle with scientists and fellow billionaires – were mostly empty of serious content.

As Brockman himself put it after one such dinner in 2004, “last year we tried ‘The Science Dinner’. Everyone yawned. So this year, it’s back to the money-sex-power thing with ‘The Billionaires’ Dinner’.”

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All is ruination. This isn’t quite a comeuppance for Negroponte, but it further devalues his legacy.
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Apple takes flak for disputing iOS security bombshell dropped by Google • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

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Apple seems to be saying that evidence suggests that the sites that Google found indiscriminately exploiting the iOS vulnerabilities were operational for only two months. Additionally, as reported by ZDNet, a researcher from security firm RiskIQ claims to have uncovered evidence that the websites didn’t attack iOS users indiscriminately, but rather only visitors from certain countries and communities.

If either of those points are true then it’s worth taking note, since virtually all media reports (including the one from Ars) have said sites indiscriminately did so for at least two years. Apple had an opportunity to clarify this point and say precisely what it knows about active use of the five iPhone exploit chains Project Zero found. But Friday’s statement [from Apple about the hacks] said nothing about any of this, and Apple representatives didn’t respond to a request to comment for this post. A Google spokesman said he didn’t know precisely how long the small collection of websites identified in the report were operational. He said he’d try to find out, but didn’t respond further.

In a statement, Google officials wrote: “Project Zero posts technical research that is designed to advance the understanding of security vulnerabilities, which leads to better defensive strategies. We stand by our in-depth research which was written to focus on the technical aspects of these vulnerabilities. We will continue to work with Apple and other leading companies to help keep people safe online.”

Former NSA hacker and founder of the firm Rendition Infosec Jake Williams told Ars that ultimately, the time the exploit sites were active is immaterial. “I don’t know that these other 22 months matter,” he explained. “It feels like their statement is more of a straw man to deflect away from the human rights abuses.”

Also missing from Apple’s statement is any response to the blistering criticism the Project Zero report made of Apple’s development process, which the report alleges missed vulnerabilities that in many cases should have been easy to catch with standard quality-assurance processes.

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Also worth reading: Volexity’s report on how Android devices were targeted, and OAuth for Google Applications and Gmail, along with “doppelganger domains” that look like Google, the Turkistan Times and the Uyghur Academy.
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How Twitter solved one of its oldest problems • OneZero

Will Oremus:

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The average user with Twitter’s algorithmic timeline — now the default — follows 10% to 15% more people than those who have reverted to the old reverse-chronological timeline, the company told OneZero this week in response to an inquiry. In other words, not only are users following more people now than they used to, but it also seems clear that the algorithm is at least partly the cause.

To understand the significance of that data point requires a trip down social media memory lane, to an era when tweets were 140 characters [and peopel worried that following more people would overwhelm their timeline]…

…While it’s hard to pinpoint the effects of over-following on Twitter’s business, the era in which it was a major concern coincided with a low point in the company’s history. After going public in 2013 to expectations of fantastic growth, the platform instead began to stagnate. New users found it confusing, and old ones felt it growing stale, perhaps in part because they were hesitant to follow new people. In 2014, the Atlantic even published a eulogy for Twitter.

Then came the algorithmic timeline, which Twitter officially called “show me the best tweets first.” Contrary to the predictions of outraged users, who responded to the news with the hashtag #RIPTwitter, the shift didn’t immediately destroy the service. It changed it in ways that seemed relatively straightforward at first, though in retrospect, it’s hard to assess their full impact. Twitter has disclosed relatively little data on the algorithm’s effects, leaving users and critics to speculate on how it has altered dynamics such as virality, filter bubbles, dunking, and outrage cycles. One thing we know for sure is that the company has credited the algorithm with spurring user growth and engagement, and Twitter’s stock has nearly tripled from its mid-2016 nadir.

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Turns out algorithms are good, until you get the unintended consequences of excess engagement.
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The vaping lung illness epidemic has now broken out in 33 states • Buzzfeed News

Dan Vergano:

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A nationwide epidemic of severe lung injuries tied to vaping now encompasses 450 reported cases, and at least five deaths in 33 states, health officials reported Friday.

“While this investigation is ongoing, people should consider not using e-cigarettes,” said CDC’s Dana Meaney-Delman during a briefing on the outbreak, in which agency officials discussed three deaths. A “chemical agent” in vaping liquids is seen as the most likely culprit in the cases, she suggested, responsible for causing the lung injuries.

State health agencies reported more deaths in the multi-state outbreak on Friday, bringing the total to five. Minnesota announced the death of a THC-vaping 65-year-old patient, a fourth case, soon after the CDC briefing, and Los Angeles County reported investigation of a fifth such death later on Friday afternoon.

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THC seems to be a key factor. In The Observer:

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Martin Dockrell, head of Tobacco Control at Public Health England, drew a distinction between vaping in the US and the UK. He said reports suggested that most cases in the US had been linked to people using illicit vaping fluid, bought on the streets or homemade, some containing cannabis products, like THC, or synthetic cannabinoids, like spice.

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The real Donald Trump is a character on TV • The New York Times

James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic of the NYT, and this is the best take I’ve ever read on that guy:

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if you actually want a glimpse into the mind of Donald J. Trump, don’t look for a White House tell-all or some secret childhood heartbreak. Go to the streaming service Tubi, where his 14 seasons of “The Apprentice” recently became accessible to the public.

You can fast-forward past the team challenges and the stagey visits to Trump-branded properties. They’re useful in their own way, as a picture of how Mr. Burnett buttressed the future president’s Potemkin-zillionaire image. But the unadulterated, 200-proof Donald Trump is found in the boardroom segments, at the end of each episode, in which he “fires” one contestant.

In theory, the boardroom is where the best performers in the week’s challenges are rewarded and the screw-ups punished. In reality, the boardroom is a new game, the real game, a free-for-all in which contestants compete to throw one another under the bus and beg Mr. Trump for mercy.

There is no morality in the boardroom. There is no fair and unfair in the boardroom. There is only the individual, trying to impress Mr. Trump, to flatter Mr. Trump, to commune with his mind and anticipate his whims and fits of pique. Candidates are fired for giving up advantages (stupid), for being too nice to their adversaries (weak), for giving credit to their teammates, for interrupting him. The host’s decisions were often so mercurial, producers have said, that they would have to go back and edit the episodes to impose some appearance of logic on them.

What saves you in the boardroom? Fighting. Boardroom Trump loves to see people fight each other. He perks up at it like a cat hearing a can opener. He loves to watch people scrap for his favor (as they eventually would in his White House). He loves asking contestants to rat out their teammates and watching them squirm with conflict. The unity of the team gives way to disunity, which in the Trumpian worldview is the most productive state of being.

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Just perfect; and explains why those hoping for him to “become presidential” are hoping in vain. He never will; he doesn’t understand the concept. (As if you’d still expect it now anyway.)
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Apple iPhone 11 event 2019: what to expect • The Verge

Chaim Gartenberg:

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It’s almost iPhone time (or, as other people call it, “the beginning of September”), and Apple is set to take the stage on September 10th to announce the new iPhone 11 lineup.

Of course, Apple doesn’t just make iPhones, so we also expect news on the Apple Watch, Apple TV, all the new software Apple announced earlier this year, and maybe even a MacBook Pro-shaped surprise or two.

The Verge will be live on the scene to bring you all of the latest news from Apple Park as soon as it happens. Until then, here’s what to expect…

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You can probably guess all this. I think there will be a bigger emphasis on services; as Marco Arment said in the latest Accidental Tech Podcast, “services segments are going to be the new game demos in keynotes, the time when everyone takes a bathroom break”.

I’ll be writing something about it for OneZero on Medium.
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Huawei Mate X initial review: foldable champ • Pocket Lint

Cam Bunton:

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Folded up, from the front the Mate X has the appearance of a large regular smartphone, and that’s arguably the Huawei method’s biggest advantage over the Galaxy Fold. It’s still very much usable as a smartphone even when it’s closed, that full screen on the front doesn’t pose the limitations that Samsung’s outer screen might. 

Of course, this poses an issue when it comes to durability. Since there’s no flexible glass on the market yet, current foldable smartphones rely on a transparent polymer covered by a protective film, similar to a screen protector. And that means that when it’s shut, there’s potential for that folded edge to be exposed to the elements, and that includes any rough impurities in your pocket, inevitably leading to scuffing; which is why Huawei is supplying the Mate X with a gorgeous leather case. 

In appearance, it doesn’t look too dissimilar to the type of soft leather case you might get for your sunglasses. In fact, it’s just about the right size for sunglasses too (we were curious, so we tried it). It’s soft, and slim, feels great in the hand and has a large magnetic portion inside the flap, to keep it securely fastened when shut, while also making it easy to open and get to your phone than if it had a clasp or fastener of some kind. 

What we liked about the Huawei Mate X is that with the phone unfolded and opened up in its larger form factor, using the full square screen, the hinge feels surprisingly sturdy and solid, like it locks into place and stays relatively rigid, and needs a little force to fold it back up again. That means you don’t have to worry about the phone wobbling or feeling fragile when you’re using it this way. 

The resistance offered by the hinge also means that it does need a little catch to hold it in place when folded, coupled with a release button which – when pressed – releases the display. Once released, the screen springs out part of the way, and then needs unfolding manually into its open, flat position. In use, it’s addictively clicky when pressed. So much so, we found ourselves repeatedly releasing, clicking the screen back in place and releasing it, over and over again (sorry Huawei). Let’s just hope it’s built to last. 

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Let’s just hope! Price of hope: €2,299. (About the same in £.) So it looks great but then you have to cover it with a case and then you have to take the case off because it’s in the way.
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Global headphone revenue growth exceeds 40% in Q2 2019 • Futuresource Consulting

:

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Premium headphones continue to capture the imagination of consumers, with global revenues in Q2 2019 growing nearly four times faster than shipments, at 44% year-on-year. That’s according to the latest quarterly tracker report from Futuresource Consulting.

“True wireless now accounts for almost one in every five shipments and has established itself as the driving force behind the unshakeable growth in headphones,” says Adriana Blanco, Senior Market Analyst at Futuresource Consulting. “Apple remains ahead in true wireless, though its lead is being eroded by an ever-growing raft of rivals, all vying for market share. Xiaomi and Huawei are making a significant impact in China and beyond, while Samsung continues to put in a strong global performance.”

Beyond true wireless, all other form factors continue to experience a year-on-year slump in shipments. The in-ear, excluding true wireless, segment has taken the biggest hit, with most damage sustained in the mid-price bracket, though some geographies have been less badly affected. After five consecutive quarters of price growth, the over-ear segment returned a flat result in Q2. This was primarily due to special offers on some premium models, which may be nearing their next refresh cycle.

Conversely, the wireless headphones segment, which includes true wireless, grew 40% year-on-year, accounting for 60% of total shipments and 87% of total revenue.

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Wish I knew what non-true wireless is. Bluetooth headphones linked by a wire to each other?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

YouTube knew underage kids were watching videos on its site, and was fined; now content creators will pay the price. CC-licensed photo by Jon Pinder 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. Friday already? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How social networks can be used to bias votes • Nature

Nature Editorial Board:

»

Politicians’ efforts to gerrymander — redraw electoral-constituency boundaries to favour one party — often hit the news. But, as a paper published in Nature this week shows, gerrymandering comes in other forms, too.

The work reveals how connections in a social network can also be gerrymandered — or manipulated — in such a way that a small number of strategically placed bots can influence a larger majority to change its mind, especially if the larger group is undecided about its voting intentions (A. J. Stewart et al. Nature 573, 117–118; 2019: “Information gerrymandering and undemocratic decisions”).

The researchers, led by mathematical biologist Alexander Stewart of the University of Houston, Texas, have joined those who are showing how it can be possible to give one party a disproportionate influence in a vote.

It is a finding that should concern us all.

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From the paper:

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Our mathematical analysis uncovers a phenomenon that we call information gerrymandering: the structure of the influence network can sway the vote outcome towards one party, even when both parties have equal sizes and each player has the same influence. A small number of zealots, when strategically placed on the influence network, can also induce information gerrymandering and thereby bias vote outcomes. We confirm the predicted effects of information gerrymandering in social network experiments with n = 2,520 human subjects.

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Lenovo Mirage AR headset with Marvel games goes on sale for $250 • Variety

Janko Roettgers:

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called the Lenovo Mirage AR headset, the device once again relies on a consumer’s phone, and an app that can be downloaded for free, to super-impose pictures over their view of the real world. “You are still grounded in your world,” said Lenovo senior product marketing manager Wahid Razali. “You are bringing the heroes into your space.”

And while the first iteration of the headset shipped with lightsaber controllers, this new version comes with a pair of more generic grip controllers that can be used to power a variety of games.

When Lenovo came out with the first iteration of the headset, the two companies tried a variety of games, including their own take on holochess. Turns out that players care a lot more about fighting Stormtroopers than playing chess in AR, which is why the two companies refocused on life-sized battles for their new collaboration.

In the case of “Star Wars: Jedi Challenges,” the game allows players to turn into Doctor Strange, Captain America, Thor, Black Panther, Captain Marvel and Star-Lord, and face off against adversaries like Loki and the Winter Soldier. “You’ll be playing as iconic heroes fighting iconic villains,” said Razali.

In addition to a story mode that allows those one-on-one face-offs, the game also supports a survival mode that tasks players with fighting back waves of enemies, and a co-op mode that lets multiple players team up, and compete for the highest score. The latter naturally requires multiple headsets, which won’t come cheap: At launch, the new Lenovo Mirage AR headset retails for $249.99.

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Weird how so many companies think the first game people will want to play on a new medium is chess. Not only do computers thrash us at it, but fewer people can play it with any competence. Give us mindless sword games with unlimited lives any day.
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Creating a data set and a challenge for deepfakes • Facebook AI

Mike Schroepfer, chief technology officer:

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“Deepfake” techniques, which present realistic AI-generated videos of real people doing and saying fictional things, have significant implications for determining the legitimacy of information presented online. Yet the industry doesn’t have a great data set or benchmark for detecting them. We want to catalyze more research and development in this area and ensure that there are better open source tools to detect deepfakes. That’s why Facebook, the Partnership on AI, Microsoft, and academics from Cornell Tech, MIT, University of Oxford, UC Berkeley, University of Maryland, College Park, and University at Albany-SUNY are coming together to build the Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC).

The goal of the challenge is to produce technology that everyone can use to better detect when AI has been used to alter a video in order to mislead the viewer. The Deepfake Detection Challenge will include a data set and leaderboard, as well as grants and awards, to spur the industry to create new ways of detecting and preventing media manipulated via AI from being used to mislead others. The governance of the challenge will be facilitated and overseen by the Partnership on AI’s new Steering Committee on AI and Media Integrity, which is made up of a broad cross-sector coalition of organizations including Facebook, WITNESS, Microsoft, and others in civil society and the technology, media, and academic communities.

It’s important to have data that is freely available for the community to use, with clearly consenting participants, and few restrictions on usage. That’s why Facebook is commissioning a realistic data set that will use paid actors, with the required consent obtained, to contribute to the challenge. No Facebook user data will be used in this data set. We are also funding research collaborations and prizes for the challenge to help encourage more participation. In total, we are dedicating more than $10m to fund this industry-wide effort.

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YouTubers say kids’ content changes could ruin careers • The Verge

Julia Alexander on the fallout from the FTC nailing YouTube for collecting data about children, and forcing it to stop:

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If [YouTube] channels can’t send notifications for certain videos, fewer people will watch those videos within the first crucial hours. This could lead to YouTube recommending fewer videos from that creator because people are less engaged. If videos aren’t recommended as much, it means fewer views, which means less money.

Wojcicki acknowledged that these changes won’t be easy for creators. These changes “will have a significant business impact on family and kids creators,” she said in the post, adding that “this won’t be easy for some creators and are committed to working with them through this transition.”

But creators are coming to terms with exactly how hard it could be. Forrest, a gaming YouTuber with more than 750,000 subscribers who goes by “KreekCraft,” told The Verge that the changes are scary for him. Reading Wojcicki’s blog post only made him feel worse as he tried to figure out, like other YouTube creators, whether his content would be affected by the new system. Would Let’s Play series, tutorials, or even gameplay compilations be considered targeted at children? What’s the difference between family-friendly content and those targeted at kids? No one in the community knows the answers, but everyone is expecting an uphill battle on YouTube under the new system. A YouTube spokesperson pointed The Verge to Wojcicki’s blog when asked for further comment.

“It’s kind of like they’re killing video game content,” Forrest told The Verge. “The top three games on YouTube right now are Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox, which are generally non-violent and child-centric games, especially Roblox. Now, we can’t make videos on more mature video games because they’ll get demonetized, but if we make videos on child-friendly games, they’re also now going to get demonetized. What do we do?”

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Their problem is that YouTube led them up this path, which turned out to be illegal and unsustainable. The failure is YouTube’s, but it won’t feel it.
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Graphene-based fabric protects against mosquitoes • Physics World

Sam Jarman:

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Graphene-based fabrics could provide an effective new way to protect against mosquitoes according to Robert Hurt and colleagues at Brown University. Using live mosquitoes, the team showed that films of reduced graphene oxide (rGO) are bite-resistant and can block the chemicals that mosquitoes use to detect the presence of skin – even when the material is wet. The group’s insights could provide a basis for new skin coverings that prevent the spread of infectious diseases.

Every year hundreds of millions of people are infected with mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue and yellow fever – causing about one million deaths worldwide. Preventing mosquito bites therefore plays an important role in public health programmes in many countries.

In recent years, graphene-based materials have been proposed for a wide array of applications, including biomonitoring, sensors, and wearable electronics. Until now, however, protection from mosquito-borne diseases has remained almost entirely unexplored.

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Because… it’s really expensive?
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Beware the Apple iCloud phone phishing scam • Frequent Business Traveler

Anna Breuer:

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Scammers have a new and improved way to fool people. A new phone-based phishing scam spoofing Apple’s official support number is likely to take a lot of people by surprise and result in those being called providing the scammers with sensitive information.

The call mimics an official Apple support call, displaying Apple’s logo, Cupertino address, and real toll-free number (800 692-7753). This is the same number, displayed as 800 MY-APPLE, when Apple customers request a call from the company.

Several FBT staffers have reported getting such calls in recent weeks. The calls are not identified by T-Mobile (the mobile operator used by our parent company, Accura) as “Scam Likely” even though it is clear that Apple’s number is being spoofed.

The automated message states that the recipient’s iCloud account “has been compromised” and that he should “stop going online.” The automated message then prompts the caller to dial a toll-free number with an 866 prefix for Apple support.

Typically, Apple’s automated system would prompt the caller to press “1” to be connected to Apple support.

I tried calling the 866 number, which was answered by a main greeting that told me I had reached Apple support and provided an expected wait time. The call was answered by a man with a vague Indian accent who, after asking the reason for my call, disconnected it.

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So much excess capacity in Indian call centres; seems like they’ve found a new version of their virus scam.
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Sonos’ first portable speaker is the $399 Move • The Verge

Dan Seifert:

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At almost 10 inches [25cm] tall and weighing over six and a half pounds [3kg], the Move is considerably larger than the Sonos One, making it a bit more to carry around than the typical UE Boom Bluetooth speaker. So Sonos designed a handle directly into the Move’s molded plastic shell to make it easy to pick up and move from room to room or take out of the house. The charging base, which has two pogo pins that line up with the contacts on the back of the Move, give the speaker a “home” when it’s not in use, ensuring it’s charged and ready to go when you need it. If you’re on the go and need to top up the battery, there’s also a USB-C port on the back.

The Move’s larger footprint provides it with more volume and power than the Sonos One. It’s equipped with two Class-D amplifiers, which push a single tweeter and a mid-woofer driver. Sonos says the Move is powerful enough to overcome the rapid falloff in volume that happens when you play music outdoors. The Move also has an IP56 water and dust resistance rating, and the company claims it’s strong enough to withstand accidental falls, rain and moisture, sand and dust, and other elements that might be encountered when a speaker is taken outside of the house.

The Move is also the first Sonos speaker with automatic TruePlay tuning, which lets the speaker adapt its sound for its environment. With earlier Sonos speakers, TruePlay tuning required walking around a room with an iPhone or iPad while a beeping tone played from the speaker to “map” the room. The Move can use its own microphones to adjust its sound within about 30 seconds of playback, which is much easier than the prior method and convenient for a speaker that will migrate from place to place on a regular basis.

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One beta tester told me “it weighs a ton!” That’ll be the battery. Life is quite a challenge for Sonos, which is facing disruption below from cheap Bluetooth speakers, and competition alongside from Amazon and Google, and kinda from above from Apple. Its best hope is being the cross-platform solution that plays nicely with all of them. But: not cheap. $399 in the US, £399 in the UK.
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Samsung and EE bring Galaxy Fold 5G to the UK • Samsung Newsroom U.K.

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Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. has today announced that the Galaxy Fold 5G will be available to buy from 18th September in the UK via an exclusive operator partnership with EE, as well as from Samsung Experience Stores. The device will also be displayed at Samsung KX, Harrods and Selfridges for customers to experience.
 
The Galaxy Fold 5G, which will be available in Cosmos Black and Space Silver, pushes the boundaries of innovation and introduces a whole new smartphone category. Armed with 5G network capabilities, the Galaxy Fold 5G is a device built for the future…

…The Samsung Galaxy Fold 5G will be available from Samsung at an RRP of £1,900 and all devices will come with wireless Galaxy Buds and a Galaxy Fold 5G Aramid case. EE price plans will be announced in due course.

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EE doesn’t offer any Sim-only 5G plans, so it’s impossible to say what extra you might be paying annually. EE offers seven 5G phones, with the cheapest being £44 per month for a refurbished Galaxy S10.

For comparison, the Galaxy Note10+ 5G costs £1,099 for the 256GB model (with no network connectivity). EE wants £84 per month for unlimited text, data and talktime at 5G – but it doesn’t say how long the contract lasts. 12, 18, 24 months? It’s never specified. Let me know if you find out. A 12-month contract would cost £1,008; an 18-month one, £1,512. A 24-month one (which I suspect it is) would be £2,016. Also, the price would rise by inflation (RPI) every March. As ever, it’s better to buy the phone and get a Sim.
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Why ‘SIM swapping’ is a growing security nightmare • The New York Times

Nathaniel Popper:

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“I’ve been looking at the criminal underground for a long time, and SIM swapping bothers me more than anything I’ve seen,” said Allison Nixon, the director of research at the security firm Flashpoint. “It requires no skill and there is literally nothing the average person can do to stop it.”

Criminals have learned how to convince mobile phone providers like T-Mobile and AT&T to switch a phone number to a new device that is under their control.

The number is switched from a tiny plastic SIM card, or subscriber identity module, in the target’s phone to a SIM card in another device.

Sometimes hackers get phone numbers by calling a customer help line for a phone carrier and pretending to be the intended victim. In other recent incidents, hacking crews have paid off phone company employees to do the switches for them, often for as little as $100 for each phone number.

Once the hackers have control of the phone number, they ask companies like Twitter and Google to send a temporary login code, via text message, to the victim’s phone. Most major online services are willing to send those messages to help users who have lost their passwords.

But the temporary code is sent to the hackers.

Phone companies have been aware of the problem for years, but the only routine solution they have come up with is offering pin codes that a phone owner must provide in order to switch devices. Even this measure has proved ineffective. Hackers can get the pin codes by bribing phone company employees.

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Personally, I don’t use two-factor systems that send phone codes, if at all possible. Even Twitter has finally – finally! – moved to a system where the 2FA can rely on a time-limited code generated by an app.
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Drone bubble bursts, wiping out startups and hammering VC firms • Bloomberg

Jack Pitcher:

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Once well-funded startups are struggling as hordes of self-employed pilots drive down prices, Chinese technology races ahead and non-drone companies across industry pull their unmanned aerial operations in-house. Federal regulation of the aircraft has been slow to catch up, and is holding back many businesses from expanding.

French manufacturer Parrot SA announced in July that it would halt production of most of its drone lines. Software startup Airware raised $118m from investors before shutting its doors and laying off 140 employees in late 2018. GoPro exited the drone business and laid off hundreds last year, citing an “extremely competitive” market.

But while some startups are testing investor patience, others are seeing an opportunity for growth. At least 67 drone startups have been sold since their inception, according to Crunchbase, which collects data on private companies. Buyers range from rival drone operators to companies in other industries, such as Verizon Communications…

…Venture capitalists poured $2.6bn into drones from the beginning of 2012 to June 2019, according to Teal Group, an industry researcher. The rapture began to evaporate last year as startups founded during ‘peak hype’ in the commercial drone industry ran out of money before they could generate profit and couldn’t secure additional funding, said Wackwitz.

At least 25 drone startups have shut their doors this decade, with the largest burning through a total of $183m in funding, according to Crunchbase’s online reports.

“The venture capitalists are less enthused now,” said Dan Burton, CEO of Dronebase, a drone pilot network that’s held on through the turmoil.

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Gee, ya think? But it does illustrate how what seems like an absolute slam-dunk of a market – hey, we can take pictures from way up high! – turns out to have a seriously limited addressable market. Films and TV use drones regularly, farmers do, planners might, but those billions invested were probably 10x the total market size.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

YouTube’s in hot water again. It must be a day ending with a ‘y’.CC-licensed photo by Jorge Correa on Flickr.

A selection of 11 links for you. Try that for size. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

YouTube removes more videos, but still misses a lot of hate • WIRED

Paris Martineau:

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On Tuesday, YouTube said it removed more than 17,000 channels and over 100,000 videos between April and June for violating its hate speech rules. In a blog post, the company pointed to the figures—which are five times as high as the previous period’s total—as evidence of its commitment to policing hate speech and its improved ability to detect it. But experts warn that YouTube may be missing the forest for the trees.

“It’s giving us the numbers without focusing on the story behind those numbers,” says Rebecca Lewis, an online extremism researcher at Data + Society whose work primarily focuses on YouTube. “Hate speech has been growing on YouTube, but the announcement is devoid of context and is missing [data on] the moneymakers actually pushing hate speech.”

Lewis says that while YouTube reports removing more videos, the figures lack context needed to assess YouTube’s policing efforts. That’s particularly problematic, she says, because YouTube’s hate speech problem isn’t necessarily about quantity. Her research has found that users who encounter hate speech are most likely to see it on a prominent, high-profile channel, rather than from a random user with a small following.

A study of over 60 popular far-right YouTubers conducted by Lewis last fall found that the platform was “built to incentivize” polarizing political creators and shocking content. “YouTube monetizes influence for everyone, regardless of how harmful their belief systems are,” the report found. “The platform, and its parent company, have allowed racist, misogynist, and harassing content to remain online—and in many cases, to generate advertising revenue—as long as it does not explicitly include slurs.”

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YouTube fined $170m for violations of children’s privacy • Ars Technica

:

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YouTube does not require a user to register in order to view videos, the complaint (PDF) points out. As such, most videos are not age-gated. Anyone can view them, and millions of children under age 13 do. YouTube even boasted to toy companies Mattel and Hasbro that “YouTube was unanimously voted as the favorite website for kids 2-12” and “93% of tweens visit YouTube to watch videos,” the complaint says.

But while the company was boasting of its popularity with children in public, in private it promised that COPPA was not a concern, the FTC alleges. One Google employee wrote in an email obtained by the FTC that, “we don’t have users that are below 13 on YouTube and platform/site is general audience, so there is no channel/content that is child-directed and no COPPA compliance is needed.”

The company also does not treat channels or content explicitly aimed at children differently from other content for the purposes of advertising, the complaint says—that includes earning revenue from behavioral advertising, which relies on data collected from users.

“YouTube touted its popularity with children to prospective corporate clients,” FTC Chairman Joe Simons said. “Yet when it came to complying with COPPA, the company refused to acknowledge that portions of its platform were clearly directed to kids. There’s no excuse for YouTube’s violations of the law.”

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YouTube’s indifference to the age of its users has always bugged me; you’re either under 18 or over, which ignores the gigantic differences between a 13-year-old and a child the day before they turn 18.

And that’s not a big fine for studiously ignoring the law for years and years. In fact, it’s derisory towards those affected.
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Why California may go nuclear • Forbes

Michael Shellenberger:

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Last week, a California state legislator introduced an amendment to the state’s constitution that would classify nuclear energy as “renewable.” 

If the amendment passes, it would likely result in the continued operation of the state’s last nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, well past 2025, its current closure date.

Diablo generates 9% of California’s electricity and 20% of its clean, carbon-free electricity. 

It is also the most spectacular nuclear plant in the world, made famous by an employee’s photo of a humpback whale breaching in front of the plant.

“I’m not going to argue it’s not a long shot,” said the legislation’s sponsor, Assemblymember Jordan Cunningham. “But we can’t make a serious dent in slowing the warming trend in the world without investment in nuclear power.”

If Governor Gavin Newsom decides to support the legislation it would likely become law and Diablo Canyon could continue operating to 2045 or even 2065. 

That’s because Newsom, who was elected last year with an astonishing 62% of the vote, exercises extraordinary power over the legislature, particularly on energy.

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California’s electricity utility, PG+E, effectively went bust earlier this year. They need nuclear.
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Google accused of secretly feeding personal data to advertisers • Financial Times

Madhumita Murgia:

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New evidence submitted to an investigation by the Irish data regulator, which oversees Google’s European business, accused the US tech company of “exploiting personal data without sufficient control or concern over data protection”.

The regulator is investigating whether Google uses sensitive data, such as the race, health and political leanings of its users, to target ads. In his evidence, Johnny Ryan, chief policy officer of the niche web browser Brave, said he had discovered the secret web pages as he tried to monitor how his data were being traded on Google’s advertising exchange, the business formerly known as DoubleClick.

The exchange, now called Authorized Buyers, is the world’s largest real-time advertising auction house, selling display space on websites across the internet.

Mr Ryan found that Google had labelled him with an identifying tracker that it fed to third-party companies that logged on to a hidden web page. The page showed no content but had a unique address that linked it to Mr Ryan’s browsing activity.

Using the tracker from Google, which is based on the user’s location and time of browsing, companies could match their profiles of Mr Ryan and his web-browsing behaviour with profiles from other companies, to target him with ads.

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Sneaky. And nobody in the US would know about it, of course.
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How Mexican app Bridgefy is connecting protesters in Hong Kong • LatAm List

Bridget Wood:

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Bridgefy is a Mexican startup based in San Francisco that makes apps send messages directly from one device to another, without using Internet or SMS. The app is currently being used by protestors in Hong Kong, sometimes gathered up to one million strong, when the cell network is unable to keep up with demand. Protests in Hong Kong have been going on for months as the territory argues overs sovereignty with China and have flared up again in the past month. 

LatAm List interviewed Bridgefy co-founder and CEO, Jorge Rios, to learn more about the story behind the software and how it is being used to connect protesters in Hong Kong. 

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The protesters also don’t want to use the mobile networks because they don’t want to be traced. Despite the government there rowing back on its extradition bill, the protests seem set to go on.
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Real-time maps warn Hong Kong protesters of police • Quartz

Mary Hui:

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One of the most widely used real-time maps of the protests is HKMap.live, a volunteer-run and crowdsourced effort that officially launched in early August. It’s a dynamic map of Hong Kong that users can zoom in and out of, much like Google Maps. But in addition to detailed street and building names, this one features various emoji to communicate information at a glance: a dog for police, a worker in a yellow hardhat for protesters, a dinosaur for the police’s black-clad special tactical squad, a white speech-bubble for tear gas, two exclamation marks for danger.

HKMap during a protest on August 31, 2019

Founded by a finance professional in his 20s and who only wished to be identified as Kuma, HKMap is an attempt to level the playing field between protesters and officers, he said in an interview over chat app Telegram. While earlier on in the protest movement people relied on text-based, on-the-ground  live updates through public Telegram channels, Kuma found these to be too scattered to be effective, and hard to visualize unless someone knew the particular neighborhood inside out.

“The huge asymmetric information between protesters and officers led to multiple occasions of surround and capture,” said Kuma. Passersby and non-frontline protesters could also make use of the map, he said, to avoid tense conflict zones. After some of his friends were arrested in late July, he decided to build HKMap.

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Spam in your Google Calendar? Here’s what to do • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

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all that a spammer needs to add an unwelcome appointment to your calendar is the email address tied to your calendar account. That’s because the calendar applications from Apple, Google and Microsoft are set by default to accept calendar invites from anyone.

Calendar invites from spammers run the gamut from ads for porn or pharmacy sites, to claims of an unexpected financial windfall or “free” items of value, to outright phishing attacks and malware lures. The important thing is that you don’t click on any links embedded in these appointments. And resist the temptation to respond to such invitations by selecting “yes,” “no,” or “maybe,” as doing so may only serve to guarantee you more calendar spam.

Fortunately, the are a few simple steps you can take that should help minimize this nuisance. To stop events from being automatically added to your Google calendar:

• Open the Calendar application, and click the gear icon to get to the Calendar Settings page.
• Under “Event Settings,” change the default setting to “No, only show invitations to which I have responded.”

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Apple had a problem with this in 2016; now it’s Google’s turn to be targeted, which is happening (and Google says it’s working on a fix).
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Android 10 review • BirchTree

Matt Birchler:

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Writing this review made me realize that iOS and Android are more in lock step with each other than I think they ever have been before. Things like dark mode are getting added to iOS and Android literally like 2 weeks apart and each of their digital wellness features are growing up at about the same time and pace. Meanwhile, lots of the new and welcome updates to Android 10 had this iOS user going “finally!” more than a few times. Updates around security, privacy, and gestures all made this iOS fan like Android more, all the while feeling very familiar. This is neither good nor bad, but inevitable. These platforms are getting quite mature and there is only so much low hanging fruit to be had.

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It’s not the most in-depth review you’ll read, but I think it notes the things worth knowing. The differences between the two is becoming minimal. Android even gets apps to ask you if they can use your location! See what you’re going to have four years from now, Android folks.
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Trusted Face smart unlock method has been removed from Android devices • Android Police

Rita el Khoury:

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Face unlock is more widely available on smartphones nowadays, but many of us seem to forget that Android has always had a barebones — albeit easily fooled — equivalent of the feature for years. Android Smart Lock’s Trusted face was added in 2014 and has been accessible to users on all Android devices until recently. Now, it’s completely gone from stock and OEM devices, running Android 10 or below.

The feature was accessible under Settings -> Security -> Smart Lock -> Trusted face. It didn’t use any biometric data for security, instead just relying on your face to unlock your device. A photo could easily fool it. The writing was on the wall for its removal: It was broken on Android Q Beta 6 and we know Google has been working on a more secure face authentication method.

But it’s not only Android 10 that no longer has the Trusted face option. We’ve verified that the option is gone from the OnePlus 6T, Samsung Galaxy S9 and S10, Nokia 3.2, all of which are running Android Pie stable. That’s because Smart Lock was never really part of the firmware, but was always controlled by Google Play Services…

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And Google Play Services gets updated, and it goes away. Strange that after five years Google has only now decided that it’s not secure enough.
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USB-IF to continue confusing name scheme with USB4 Gen 3×2 • TechRepublic

James Sanders:

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USB4 will be formally published at the USB Developer Days Seattle on September 17, and the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) is expected to continue the widely maligned naming scheme for USB speeds introduced in February for USB 3.2, an engineer familiar with the USB-IF’s plans told TechRepublic.

As a quick recap, USB 3.1 Gen 2, increased the lane speed to 10 Gbps. A second 10 Gbps lane was added in the USB 3.2 standard, which the USB-IF calls “USB 3.2 Gen 2×2.” USB4 (which is not written as “USB 4.0”) will reach speeds of 40 Gbps, doubling the speeds again. USB4 was first previewed in March, when the USB Promoter Group announced that USB4 would be based on Intel’s Thunderbolt 3 specification, though specific details are expected later this month.

“Once the specifications are released, there will be a new round of confusion,” the source told TechRepublic. “It’s going to be USB4, but you have to qualify what USB4 means, because there are different grades. USB4, by definition, has to be [at least] Gen 2×2, so it will give you 10 Gbps by 2, that’s 20 Gbps. There’s going to be USB4 Gen 3×2, which is 20 Gbps per lane. 20 by 2 will give you 40 Gbps.”

The branding policy of the USB-IF is an apparent war against common sense, as new versions retroactively rename previously published standards, leading to widespread confusion among consumers.

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You’re going to need to pass an exam to know which of these means what. Plus any cable over 50cm will need active circuitry included. Can’t cables just be, well, cables?
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Samsung’s Galaxy Fold will go on sale on September 6 in South Korea: source • Reuters

Ju-min Park:

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Samsung Electronics Co Ltd’s first foldable smartphone, the Galaxy Fold, will go on sale on Friday in South Korea, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said on Wednesday.

The highly anticipated device from the world’s top smartphone maker was originally due to hit the US market in April but the launch was delayed by screen defects detected in samples.

The phone will cost about 2.4 million won ($1,980) for South Korean buyers, the source from one of the country’s major mobile carriers told Reuters, requesting anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. The source did not provide further details.

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Not cheap. Not cheap at all. If it isn’t robust, Samsung’s reputation will take quite a hit.
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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.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: it seems that what people want the Apple Tag thing to do is locate their keys, backpacks, bicycles and suitcases. Sounds like it might sell OK, then.

The arrival of AM radio meant womens’ voices were cut off – on purpose. CC-licensed photo by alexkerhead 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. All-encompassing. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Huawei was prepared for anything—except losing Google • The Information

Juro Osawa:

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To reduce its reliance on American-made chips inside its phones, for example, Huawei switched to alternatives that it made in-house.

But when it came to one of its most critical American business partners—Google, the creator of the Android mobile operating system that powered all of Huawei’s smartphones—the Chinese company had trouble imagining a parting of ways. In 2016, a top Huawei executive passed on an opportunity to partner with the maker of an Android alternative called Sailfish, seeing little need for a Plan B, according to people familiar with the matter. To the contrary, Huawei explored ways to become more intertwined with Google: A few years ago, the two companies discussed whether Huawei could help the US company bring Google Photos to China, where most Google internet services are blocked by the country’s regime, a person with knowledge of the talks said.

Now its failure to anticipate life without Google has come to haunt Huawei [because it won’t be able to pre-install Google Play or Google apps on phones; that won’t be popular in Europe and other overseas markets where buyers expect those.]

…Huawei has said that it will hold an event in Munich on Sept. 19 to unveil its new flagship model, the Mate 30. But at the event, Huawei may not be able to say when it will actually start selling the Mate 30 in Europe and other overseas markets, employees familiar with the situation said. Huawei still is trying to figure out how to address the problem of missing Google services, the employees said.

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Fraudsters used AI to mimic CEO’s voice in unusual cybercrime case • WSJ

Catherine Stupp:

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Criminals used artificial intelligence-based software to impersonate a chief executive’s voice and demand a fraudulent transfer of €220,000 ($243,000) in March in what cybercrime experts described as an unusual case of artificial intelligence being used in hacking.

The CEO of a UK-based energy firm thought he was speaking on the phone with his boss, the chief executive of the firm’s German parent company, who asked him to send the funds to a Hungarian supplier. The caller said the request was urgent, directing the executive to pay within an hour, according to the company’s insurance firm, Euler Hermes Group SA.

Euler Hermes declined to name the victim companies.

Law enforcement authorities and AI experts have predicted that criminals would use AI to automate cyberattacks. Whoever was behind this incident appears to have used AI-based software to successfully mimic the German executive’s voice by phone. The UK CEO recognized his boss’ slight German accent and the melody of his voice on the phone, said Rüdiger Kirsch, a fraud expert at Euler Hermes, a subsidiary of Munich-based financial services company Allianz SE.

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New technology uses: first for porn, next for crime. It’s as predictable as sunrise.
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Exploit sellers say there are more iPhone hacks on the market than they’ve ever seen • VICE

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Joseph Cox:

»

On Tuesday, vulnerability broker Zerodium announced new prices for Android zero-days, which are bugs and exploits that are unknown to the companies that make the software or hardware, and coveted by sophisticated attackers such as law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Zerodium will pay $2.5m to security researchers who provide exploits that allow for the complete takeover of Android phones without requiring the target to click on anything, while the same type of exploits for iOS are still worth $2m.

“The zero-day market is flooded by iOS exploits, mostly Safari and iMessage chains, mainly due [to] a lot of security researchers having turned their focus into full time iOS exploitation,” Chaouki Bekrar, the founder of Zerodium, said in an online chat. “They’ve absolutely destroyed iOS security and mitigations. There are so many iOS exploits that we’re starting to refuse some of them.”

Andrea Zapparoli Manzoni, director of Crowdfense, a company that buys zero-day exploits and sells them to governments, also said that there are more iOS exploit chains on the market, but with a caveat.

“There are more iOS chains on the market but not all of them are ‘intelligence-grade,'” he wrote in an email.

«

Interesting article; worth also looking at this thread from “The Grugq”, a security researcher who sells secured Android smartphones, and says that “a secured Android phone is safer than an iOS device.” Note the use of “secured” as a qualifier there; the “average” Android device, he says, “can trivially be infested with malware”. Even so, this unwelcome (from Apple’s POV) attention is surely why Apple has started giving security researchers specially unlocked phones so they can find flaws. (Thanks #stormyparis for the link.)
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Study shows some political beliefs are just historical accidents • Ars Technica

Scott Johnson:

»

A new study by a Cornell team led by Michael Macy approaches these questions with inspiration from an experiment involving, of all things, downloading indie music. That study set up separate “worlds” in which participants checked out new music with the aid of information about which songs other people in their experimental world were choosing. It showed that the songs that were “hits” weren’t always the same—there was a significant role for chance, as a song that got trending early in the experiment had a leg up.

To see if this sort of “accident of history” model could apply to political divisions, the researchers set up a similar experiment. A total of over 4,500 online participants were split into two experiments where each had an equal number of self-identified Democrats and Republicans. The researchers then created ten separate “worlds” in each experiment.

For the first experiment, all the participants were asked whether they agreed with 20 different statements that had been chosen to plausibly be politically controversial, but not actively subjects of argument today. Topics included things like cryptocurrency, a proposal to switch to licensed professional jurors, and gene-editing. In two of the ten experimental worlds, people simply saw these statements and were asked, “As a [Democrat/Republican], do you agree or disagree with this statement?”

The other eight worlds are where it got fun. After the first person had responded to these statements, every other participant would also see whether Republicans or Democrats were more likely to agree with the statement, with that statistic updated following each response.

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The results are quite weird.
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A tariff theory about Apple’s iOS 13 surprise • OneZero

I wrote about my suspicion on why Apple abruptly forked its betas a week ago:

»

Imagine it’s midsummer 2019 and you’re in charge of planning at Apple. You’ve been watching Trump’s tweets threatening more tariffs on Chinese-made goods for months now. And on August 1, Trump tweets that he’s going to impose 10% tariffs on all of the $300bn of goods imported from China that don’t already have punitive tariffs on them. Smartphones would be among the products affected.

Neither China nor its exporters pay the tariffs. Trump says otherwise, but is either deluded or lying. They’re paid by Americans. It might be the importer, the distributor, the retail customer, or some combination of the three.

But you know Apple wouldn’t want to bear this cost. It protects its gross margins jealously, and the iPhone is its biggest single business. So, like many companies in the US, it would pass the tariffs on to its customers.

You might think Apple’s customers aren’t price-sensitive and that iPhone sales are price-inelastic, but in reality, at the margin, a number of would-be customers will look at an elevated price tag and say, “uh, maybe some other time.” If the iPhone price is pushed up by tariffs, there would be a ton of stories about that, and about Samsung not being affected by them because its phones are made in South Korea rather than China. Those are the sort of stories Apple doesn’t like around newly released phones.

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Includes ways to tell whether I’m right or wrong on this. (Yeah, Good Place watchers, I’m quite proud of “Holy forking tarballs“.)
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It’s official: USB4 incorporates Thunderbolt 3 • Thurrott.com

Paul Thurrott:

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The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) today published the official USB4 specification, which is based on Thunderbolt 3.

“The USB4 specification is a major update to deliver the next-generation USB architecture that complements and builds upon the existing USB 3.2 and USB 2.0 architectures,” the organization announced. “The USB4 architecture is based on the Thunderbolt protocol specification recently contributed by Intel Corporation to the USB Promoter Group. It doubles the maximum aggregate bandwidth of USB and enables multiple simultaneous data and display protocols.”

To be clear, this is a good thing: Thunderbolt 3 functionality has been available via USB-C for several years now, but adoption has been spotty, with some PC makers mixing and matching between traditional USB-C ports and more powerful USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports. (Only one PC maker, Microsoft, has completely ignored Thunderbolt 3 for some reason.)

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So…. is USB4 only available on USB-C connectors, which are effectively Thunderbolt 3 connectors? It’s confusing enough as it is. (Also, can we standardise between no space, hyphen, space?) (Thanks #stormyparis for the link.)
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A century of “shrill”: how bias in technology has hurt women’s voices • The New Yorker

Tara Tillon:

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The proliferation of AM (amplitude-modulated) radio stations in the early nineteen-twenties led to frequent signal interference, and by 1927 Congress decided to intervene by regulating the bandwidth allotted to each station. Both as a result of these limitations and advances in telephony research, most broadcasters and equipment manufacturers eventually limited their signals to a range between 300Hz and 3.4kHz—a range known as “voiceband”—which was viewed as the bare minimum amount of frequency information needed to adequately transmit speech. Unfortunately, the researchers and regulators who were deciding on this range primarily took lower voices into account when doing so…

…Experiments by the scientists Harvey Fletcher and Wilden Munson in 1933 showed that the human hearing apparatus is naturally more sensitive to frequencies between a 1kHz and 7kHz, and that sounds in those ranges will be perceived as louder when emitted at an equal volume as those below 1kHz. This sensitivity likely has roots in evolutionary biology; warning calls for many species also sit in this range, and failure to hear them could mean death. For modern listeners, this sensitivity aids in the perception of consonants, which result from short, high-frequency noise bursts that punctuate the more continuous, lower-frequency pitched components that we perceive as vowels. However, for female voices, these noise bursts generally occur between 5kHz and 7kHz, whereas, for men, they lie below 5kHz. Capping a signal at 3.4kHz didn’t significantly impact intelligibility for many men, but it certainly did so for most women, because it removed a significant portion of the sonic information critical for consonant identification.

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Not sure if Caroline Criado-Perez has heard about this, but she should. (On stories like this, the New Yorker’s insistence on spelling out numbers remains an annoyance, so I’ve put them back into numbers for comprehensibility.)
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Photovoltaic energy is cheaper than spot market electricity across Europe • pv magazine International

Emiliano Bellini:

»

Solar power is already the cheapest source of electricity in several European markets. That headline finding has come out of the report: Impact of weighted average cost of capital, capital expenditure and other parameters on future utility scale PV levelized cost of electricity.

The research team behind the study includes Christian Breyer, professor of solar economy at Finland’s Lappeenranta University of Technology. The report claims the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for power generated by large scale PV projects – and including a 7% nominal weighted average cost of capital (WACC) – ranges from €24/MWh in Malaga, southern Spain, to around €42 in Helsinki, Finland. Those figures, the researchers state, are considerably lower than spot electricity prices in both markets: €47/MWh in Finland and €57 in Spain.

“This means that PV is already cheaper than average spot market electricity all over Europe,” the study’s authors wrote.

The researchers expect the LCOE of solar farm-generated power to drop further in Malaga, to €14/MWh in 2030 and €9 in 2050. In Helsinki they predict respective prices of €24 and €15.

The report noted feed-in tariffs are becoming scarce and utility scale PV is ready to compete in the free market through power purchase agreements or the direct sale of power to the spot market.

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Samsung plans 6.7in foldable phone that collapses into square • Bloomberg

Sohee Kim:

»

The South Korean smartphone giant is working on a device with a 6.7in inner display that shrinks to a pocketable square when it’s folded inward like a clamshell, according to people familiar with the product’s development. Samsung is seeking to make its second bendable gadget more affordable and thinner than this year’s Galaxy Fold, they said. The launch of the successor device may, however, hinge on how well the Fold performs after its imminent launch, one of the people said…

…The new foldable phone will have a hole-punch selfie camera at the top of the inner display, just as on the recently released Samsung Galaxy Note 10, according to one person familiar with the device. On the outside, it will have two cameras that face the rear when the phone is open or the front when it’s flipped closed.

“I’m intrigued to see if a manufacturer can deliver a clamshell design that takes the current smartphone footprint and lets you fold in half like a wallet in a similar manner to mobile phones of yesterday such as the iconic Motorola Razr,” said Ben Wood, an analyst with CCS Insight. “That’s what the world is probably waiting for.”

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I don’t think clamshells were the dominant form factor when it was possible to have them. I never used one, personally. Foldables remain an unknown.
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Sony Mobile division in Sweden will close as part of corporate restructuring • Android Police

Corbin Davenport:

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Earlier this year, Sony announced that all its consumer electronics divisions would be merged, following years of decline in the company’s mobile sector. Merges inevitably mean job losses, and in addition to cutting around 2,000 employees, Sony is also making plans to shut down the Sweden-based Sony Mobile Communications AB.

Sony’s mobile division currently has two main offices – Sony Mobile Communications Inc. in Japan, and Sony Mobile Communications AB in Sweden. According to local media, 60 more positions are expected to be cut in the Sweden office, on top of the 200 employees already let go. Some workers will be offered positions at Sony Nordic, the company’s general European branch.

Sony’s office in Lund, Sweden is a significant part of its legacy. The location was formerly the main headquarters for Ericsson Mobile Communications, which became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony in early 2012.

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I missed the news of the Sony restructuring, which seems to be a way to hide the mobile division’s losses. But the latter is just circling the drain now. It’s mobile phones as performance art, not a viable business with any future.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Here’s how the UK’s big electricity blackout in August began: with a lightning strike. CC-licensed photo by Katy 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. Ah, you’re back. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Chinese deepfake app Zao sparks privacy row after going viral • The Guardian

AFP:

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A Chinese app that lets users convincingly swap their faces with film or TV characters has rapidly become one of the country’s most downloaded apps, triggering a privacy row.

Released on Friday, the Zao app went viral as Chinese users seized on the chance to see themselves act out scenes from well-known movies using deepfake technology, which has already prompted concerns elsewhere over potential misuse.

Users provide a series of selfies in which they blink, move their mouths and make facial expressions, which the app uses to realistically morph the person’s animated likeness on to movies, TV shows or other content.

The company was forced to issue a statement on Sunday pledging changes after critics attacked the app’s privacy policy, which it had “free, irrevocable, permanent, transferable, and relicenseable” rights to all user-generated content.

There has been growing concern over deepfakes, which use artificial intelligence to appear genuine. Critics say the technology can be used to create bogus videos to manipulate elections, defame someone, or potentially cause unrest by spreading misinformation on a massive scale.

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It’s remarkable stuff: this tweet has an example of a Chinese user’s face overlaid on Leonardo Di Caprio’s.

My first link to a “deep fake” was in December 2017, though it wasn’t called that; it involved the face of Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman) being put onto someone else’s body for a porn video. 19 months later, it’s an app.
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This rock has a voice and you can listen to it • Outside Online

Samantha Yadron:

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like other large rock formations, Castleton Tower [near Moab, Utah] hums. It vibrates from energy produced by earthquakes, ocean waves, cities, trains, and road traffic, or even from wind or aviation noise in the air. 

And thanks to a group of geologists at the University of Utah—and a couple of ambitious rock climbers—now you can hear it. 

The researchers, led by geologist Jeffrey R. Moore, published a study on Tuesday in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America that shared a recording of the tower’s vibrations. To make the recording, Moore’s team used seismometers, devices that pick up slight movements in the earth in three dimensions. They then amplified and sped up the nearly three-hour recording to a frequency audible to humans. 

You can listen to the rock here:

“It has ebbs and flows to it, but it’s largely a sort of droning sound, emphasizing how the tower is always vibrating as energy comes up through the earth,” says Paul R. Geimer, PhD, an author on the study. 

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It’s pretty quiet. But it would make quiet a relaxing background if you put it onto a loop.
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What really happened in the UK blackouts? • Mitch O’Neill

Mitch O’Neill:

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I’ll be focusing on the 76 seconds between 4:52:33PM when the intial event occured, through to 4:53:49 PM when the load shedding occured.

4:52:33 PM

The grid begins in a stable operating state. These next four events all happen within 1 second:

1) Lightning hits the Eaton Socon – Wymondley transmission circuit. A normal and unremarkable occurrence. The circuit disconnects and opens after 70ms [milliseconds!] to clear the fault. This circuit will re-energise and come back online in 20 seconds. This is good and normal!

2) The lightning strike created a transient voltage disturbance which caused the loss of 500MW of small embedded distributed generation (solar, small gas and diesel) on the transmission circuit. This is good and normal and meant to happen when lightning strikes a line!

3) “Hornsea started deloading”. Not good! Hornsea, a large offshore wind farm changes output from 799MW to 62MW, a 737MW reduction in output.

4) “Little Barford Steam Turbine trips 244MW instantaneously”. Doubly not good!

What begins as a lightning strike cascades to a 1481MW loss in generation.

Frequency begins to fall.

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This is fascinating, based on the interim report from the UK National Grid. A glimpse of the incredible complexity that lies behind the socket on the wall.
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Tesla batteries are keeping Zimbabwe’s economy running • Bloomberg

Antony Sguazzin:

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Amid power outages of as long as 18 hours a day, Econet Wireless, Zimbabwe’s biggest mobile-phone operator, is turning to the Palo Alto, California-based automaker and storable-energy company for batteries that can keep its base stations running. The southern African country faces chronic shortages of physical cash, so almost all transactions are done digitally, and many via mobile phones.

“Telecommunications have become the lifeblood of the economy,” said Norman Moyo, the chief executive officer of Distributed Power Africa, which installs the batteries for Econet. “If the telecom network is down in Zimbabwe, you can’t do any transactions.”

The installation of 520 Powerwall batteries, with two going into each base station, is the largest telecommunications project in which Tesla has participated to date, Moyo said. With Econet having about 1,300 base stations in the country and two other mobile-phone companies operating there, Distributed Power intends to install more batteries and could eventually roll the project out to other power-starved countries in Africa, such as Zambia, Lesotho and the Democratic Republic of Congo, he said.

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Solar panels power the base stations; excess energy charges the battery, which takes over when it’s dark or overcast. Diesel is too expensive (and runs out).
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Just Delete Me : A directory of direct links to delete your account from web services.

:

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Many companies use dark pattern techniques to make it difficult to find how to delete your account. JustDelete.me aims to be a directory of urls to enable you to easily delete your account from web services.

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A service, apparently, from Backgroundchecks.org. Turns out that Facebook is only “medium” difficult to delete yourself from; some services (lookin’ at you, Animal Crossing) are “impossible”.
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Programmers imagine the most ridiculous ways to enter a phone number into a form • Quartz

Keith Collins:

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What we have here is a dystopian vision of what the internet might look like if web developers suddenly stopped caring about user-friendliness. Usually, programmers write code to validate the information people enter into these forms. The validation code ensures that people have entered only letters for their names, and only numbers for their phone numbers. Because, believe it or not, sometimes people don’t.

Writing validation code can be a bit of a pain. So imagine a developer who’s new to making forms or otherwise very lazy, and decides to force users to enter letters and numbers in the right places. They might come up with something like the image above. It’d be difficult to enter the wrong kind of information into a dropdown list like that one, which contains all of the thousands of combinations of numbers between 0000 and 9999.

The image was originally posted last month to Reddit, and then to Twitter. We haven’t yet been able to verify whether it’s a joke or a screenshot of an actual website.

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Oh, but it gets better: the Quartz article shows the many, many examples that programmers thought of which would be worse for entering your phone number. And some are truly fiendish. (The mouse movement one might be my, um, favourite.)
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Pre-register for the Samsung Galaxy Fold (again) • Android Authority

C. Scott Brown:

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If you had your sights set on buying the Samsung Galaxy Fold, you probably pre-registered to buy the device back in April when the company opened up that system. However, all pre-registrations — and eventual pre-orders — were canceled when things took a turn.

Now, Samsung is re-opening pre-registrations for the Galaxy Fold in the United States.

To be clear, pre-registration is not pre-ordering. With a pre-reg, all you’re doing is letting Samsung know that you are interested in buying the Fold at some point in the future. By pre-registering, you’ll be notified by email as soon as Samsung opens the new pre-order system.

However, it is possible that Samsung could skip pre-orders. The sign-up page doesn’t make any mention about pre-orders at all, so it’s possible Samsung could simply notify people once the device is available for sale.

Unfortunately, there is still no word on the actual re-launch date of the company’s first foldable smartphone. Although the re-emergence of this pre-registration page likely means we’re only a few weeks out, or possibly a month at most.

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Taking the temperature before shipping; makes sense. But registration isn’t ordering, as Brown points out; so will those who “pre-register” all go on to order? Or might some have second thoughts when they see the (still unknown) price?
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Revealed: how a secret Dutch mole aided the U.S.-Israeli Stuxnet cyberattack on Iran • Yahoo News

Kim Zetter and Huib Modderkolk:

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For years, an enduring mystery has surrounded the Stuxnet virus attack that targeted Iran’s nuclear program: How did the US and Israel get their malware onto computer systems at the highly secured uranium-enrichment plant?

The first-of-its-kind virus, designed to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program, effectively launched the era of digital warfare and was unleashed some time in 2007, after Iran began installing its first batch of centrifuges at a controversial enrichment plant near the village of Natanz.

The courier behind that intrusion, whose existence and role has not been previously reported, was an inside mole recruited by Dutch intelligence agents at the behest of the CIA and the Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad, according to sources who spoke with Yahoo News.

An Iranian engineer recruited by the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD provided critical data that helped the US developers target their code to the systems at Natanz, according to four intelligence sources. That mole then provided much-needed inside access when it came time to slip Stuxnet onto those systems using a USB flash drive.

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Why the Dutch, you ask? Because:

»

the centrifuges at Natanz were based on designs stolen from a Dutch company in the 1970s by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. Khan stole the designs to build Pakistan’s nuclear program, then proceeded to market them to other countries, including Iran and Libya.

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I wonder if the Stuxnet story has been optioned for a film. It really should have been.
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iOS 13 code suggests Apple testing AR headset with ‘Starboard’ mode, ‘garta’ codename, and more • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

documentation seen by MacRumors in an internal build of iOS 13 suggests development of a head-mounted augmented reality display has continued.

Namely, internal builds of iOS 13 include a “STARTester” app that can switch in and out of a head-mounted mode, presumably to replicate the functionality of an augmented reality headset on an iPhone for testing purposes. There are two head-mounted states for testing, including “worn” and “held.”

There is also an internal README file in iOS 13 that describes a “StarBoard” system shell for stereo AR-enabled apps, which implies a headset of some kind. The file also suggests Apple is developing an augmented reality device codenamed “Garta,” possibly as one of several prototypes under the “T288” umbrella.

Digging further into the internal iOS 13 code, we uncovered numerous strings related to a so-called “StarBoard mode” and various “views” and “scenes.” Many of the strings reference augmented reality, including “ARStarBoardViewController” and “ARStarBoardSceneManager.”

Multiple sources have claimed that Apple plans to release augmented reality glasses as early as 2020…

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Internal build, eh? That’s quite a leak, since internal builds would also have details of forthcoming devices such as phones.
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Ten years on, Foursquare is now checking in to you • NY Mag

James D. Walsh on the “I’m the mayor of…” company’s pivot to a business-to-business model, which it made in 2014:

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It projected iPhone sales in 2015 based on traffic to Apple stores and, in 2016, the huge drop in Chipotle’s sales figures (thanks to E. coli) two weeks before the burrito-maker announced its quarterly earnings. (It also used its data to show that foot traffic to Trump properties began declining after he announced his presidential campaign, and that traffic to Nike stores increased after the Colin Kaepernick ad.)

Co-founder and executive chairman Dennis Crowley says the human check-ins gave Foursquare engineers and data scientists the ability to verify and adjust location readings from other sources, like GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. As it turns out, the goofy badges for Uncle Tony that made Foursquare easy to dismiss as a late-2000s fad were an incredibly powerful tool. “Everyone was laughing at us, ‘Oh, what are you, just people checking in at coffee shops?’” Crowley says. “Yeah, and they checked in billions of times. So we had this corpus of data, an army of people, who every day were like, ‘I’m at Think Coffee.’ ‘I’m at Think Coffee.’ ‘I’m at Think Coffee.’” Because of the “corpus” of data generated by people like Uncle Tony, Foursquare knows when the dimensions of storefronts change and can tell the difference between an office on the eighth floor and one of the ninth floor.

In addition to all of those active check-ins, at some point Foursquare began collecting passive data using a “check-in button you never had to press.” It doesn’t track people 24/7 (in addition to creeping people out, doing so would burn through phones’ batteries), but instead, if users opt-in to allow the company to “always” track their locations, the app will register when someone stops and determine whether that person is at a red light or inside an Urban Outfitters. The Foursquare database now includes 105 million places and 14 billion check-ins. The result, experts say, is a map that is often more reliable and detailed than the ones generated by Google and Facebook.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Guess which is the latest app to be used for hate speech inciting violence. CC-licensed photo by Christoph Scholz 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. Back for Labo(u)r Day: read at your leis(u)re. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Exclusive: Apple’s Tile competitor will include ‘Items’ tab in iOS 13’s Find My App and much more • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol and Steve Moser:

»

Apple is developing a Tile-like accessory that will help users keep track of their personal belongings, such as their keys, wallets, and backpacks, according to an internal build of iOS 13 seen by MacRumors.

The internal build contains an image of the accessory that suggests it will be a small, circular tag with an Apple logo in the center, similar to many other Bluetooth trackers. The image could be a mockup or placeholder, however, so the final design of the tag may vary at least slightly.

This image looks similar to one shared by 9to5Mac’s Guilherme Rambo, who was first to reveal Apple’s plans for this product in April.

MacRumors can confirm the tags are codenamed “B389” within Apple, and there are many strings that are a dead giveaway as to what this product’s purpose will be, such as “tag your everyday items with B389 and never lose them again.”

The tags will be closely integrated with the new Find My app in iOS 13, which merged Apple’s previous Find My iPhone and Find My Friends apps into one.

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I’ve had a couple of Tile-style things, and I’ve never been able to choose a thing I wanted to tag. Suitcase? It’s on a plane, or it’s coming. Bicycle? Maybe. (Would you put it under the saddle to stop it being spotted?) Really can’t think of other things to tag. Any suggestions?
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Kiwibots win fans at UC Berkeley as they deliver fast food at slow speeds • SFChronicle.com

Carloyn Said:

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Version 1 was a small shopping basket perched on a remote-control car with training wheels; the “face” was simply printed on a sticker. A low-slung pizza delivery bot didn’t make the cut — the current Kiwibot can handle only personal-size pizzas but the next version will accommodate bigger pies. A hulking trash can-size model designed to enter restaurants to pick up food also didn’t work out.

Kiwi strives to make the robots endearing, like little R2-D2s.

“The concept is ‘kawaii,’” a Japanese word for cute, said CEO Felipe Chavez, citing examples like Pokémon’s Pikachu character. “You create an authentic connection when people feel characters are very cute.”

No matter how adorable, a robot that hogs the sidewalk won’t win fans. “The sidewalks are sacred; we need to make sure the robot will interact in the easiest way with citizens,” Chavez said.

The Kiwibots do not figure out their own routes. Instead, people in Colombia, the home country of Chavez and his two co-founders, plot “waypoints” for the bots to follow, sending them instructions every five to 10 seconds on where to go.

As with other offshoring arrangements, the labor savings are huge. The Colombia workers, who can each handle up to three robots, make less than $2 an hour, which is above the local minimum wage.

Another cost saving is that human assistance means the robots don’t need pricey equipment such as lidar sensors to “see” around them. Manufactured in China and assembled in the U.S., Kiwibots cost only about $2,500 each, Iatsenia said.

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A real Wizard of Oz moment.
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Talk to Transformer • OpenAI code

Adam King:

»

See how a modern neural network completes your text. Type a custom snippet or try one of the examples. Built by Adam King (@AdamDanielKing) as an easier way to play with OpenAI’s new machine learning model. In February, OpenAI unveiled a language model called GPT-2 that generates coherent paragraphs of text one word at a time.

For now OpenAI has decided only to release three smaller versions of it which aren’t as coherent but still produce interesting results. This site runs the largest released model, 774M, which is half the size of the full model.

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I tried “It was a dark and stormy night.” and got back a Hemingway-esque murder mystery. Trying the first two lines of Jabberwocky – “Twas brilling, and the slithey toves/ Did gyre and gimbal in the wabe” produced what looked like Olde English. Have fun!
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The truth about faster internet: it’s not worth it • WSJ

Shalini Ramachandran,Thomas Gryta,Kara Dapena,Patrick Thomas:

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Americans are spending ever more for blazing internet speeds, on the promise that faster is better. Is that really the case?

For most people, the answer is no.

The Wall Street Journal studied the internet use of 53 of our journalists across the country, over a period of months, in coordination with researchers at Princeton University and the University of Chicago.

Our panelists used only a fraction of their available bandwidth to watch streaming services including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube, even simultaneously. Quality didn’t improve much with higher speeds. Picture clarity was about the same. Videos didn’t launch quicker.

Broadband providers such as Comcast Corp., Charter Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. are marketing speeds in the range of 250, 500 or even 1,000 megabits a second, often promising that streaming-video bingers will benefit. “Fast speeds for all of your shows,” declares one online ad from Comcast.

But for a typical household, the benefits of paying for more than 100 megabits a second are marginal at best, according to the researchers. That means many households are paying a premium for services they don’t need.

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Terrific investigation. Of course, 100Mbps – which is what you need – is only feasible with fibre; and that also enables symmetric connectivity (upload and download speeds equal). Another WSJ investigation, about the same time, found that ISPs were providing “free” upgrades – say, from 75Mbps to 150Mbps – and then charging people more after the “free promotional period” expired. So evil.
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Deconstructing Google’s excuses on tracking protection • Freedom To Tinker

Jonathan Mayer and Arvind Narayanan:

»

Blocking cookies is bad for privacy. That’s the new disingenuous argument from Google, trying to justify why Chrome is so far behind Safari and Firefox in offering privacy protections. As researchers who have spent over a decade studying web tracking and online advertising, we want to set the record straight.
Our high-level points are:

1) Cookie blocking does not undermine web privacy. Google’s claim to the contrary is privacy gaslighting.

2) There is little trustworthy evidence on the comparative value of tracking-based advertising.

3) Google has not devised an innovative way to balance privacy and advertising; it is latching onto prior approaches that it previously disclaimed as impractical.

4) Google is attempting a punt to the web standardization process, which will at best result in years of delay.

What follows is a reproduction of excerpts from yesterday’s announcement, annotated with our comments.

«

This is quite a takedown of Google’s claims that it would really love to do what Safari and Firefox are doing in terms of cooking blocking, but, uh, it’s complicated.
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iPhone hackers caught by Google also targeted Android and Microsoft Windows, say sources • Forbes

Thomas Brewster:

»

The unprecedented attack on Apple iPhones revealed by Google this week was broader than first thought. Multiple sources with knowledge of the situation said that Google’s own Android operating system and Microsoft Windows PCs were also targeted in a campaign that sought to infect the computers and smartphones of the Uighur ethnic group in China. That community has long been targeted by the Chinese government, in particular in the Xinjiang region, where surveillance is pervasive.

Google’s and Microsoft’s operating systems were targeted via the same websites that launched the iPhone hacks, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

That Android and Windows were targeted is a sign that the hacks were part of a broad, two-year effort that went beyond Apple phones and infected many more than first suspected. One source suggested that the attacks were updated over time for different operating systems as the tech usage of the Uighur community changed. Android and Windows are still the most widely used operating systems in the world. They both remain hugely attractive targets for hackers, be they government-sponsored or criminal.

«

This puts something of a different cast onto the Google Project Zero blogpost, which gives the strong impression that only iOS was targeted. If Google knew about attacks on Android and Windows, why didn’t it blog those? If it didn’t, how did it miss them, since they must have been on the same sites, at the same time?
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TikTok is fuelling India’s deadly hate speech epidemic • WIRED UK

Nilesh Christopher:

»

Vijay’s death went largely unnoticed. It took place in a remote part of India that most of the country’s 1.3 billion people wouldn’t be aware of. However, it demonstrates the rising tide of hate speech filled videos circulating on TikTok and the massive problems the company faces in the country.

During June and July, WIRED identified more than 500 examples of caste-based hate, threats, violence and ridicule attacking different communities within the Tamil language on TikiTok. Users extol the virtues of specific castes and verbally attack local caste-leaders, which can trigger hate crimes.

India’s caste structure is a feudal system of social division stratifying people into hierarchical groups based on their background and work. These include: priests, warriors, farmers/traders, labourers and outcasts. Dalits, formerly the ‘untouchables,’ fall outside the system and are widely persecuted.

Videos found on TikTok include casteist-hate speech posted by users identifying themselves from high castes while celebrating and singing the praises of their communities. These quickly spill into threats of physical violence with members of some communities claiming dominance over other castes.

“We must sever, not the fingers, but the heads of those who dare to lay their hands on us (our community),” one user says in a video, identifying himself as part of the Nadar community.

«

Unmediated uploading allows people who really pose a risk to the public to, well, pose a threat. What’s the solution? Yesterday it was WhatsApp, today it’s TikTok.
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A walk in Hong Kong • Idle Words

Maciej Cieglowski went to the Hong Kong protesters as an observer, having come to the US as a child from communist-era Poland:

»

coming in to the Hong Kong protests from a less developed country like the United States is disorienting. If you have never visited one of the Zeroth World cities of Asia, like Taipei or Singapore, it can be hard to convey their mix of high density, mazelike design, utterly reliable public services, and high social cohesion, any more than it was possible for me or my parents to imagine a real American city, no matter how many movies we saw. And then to have to write about protests on top of it!

It’s hard to write articulately about the Five Demands when one keeps getting brought up short by basic things, like the existence of clean public bathrooms.

The time and location of protests are set via social media alchemy; once you get notified about one, you descend through a spotless mall onto a bright and clean train platform, get whisked away by a train that arrives almost immediately, step out into another mall, then finally walk outside into overwhelming heat and a gathering group of demonstrators.

When it’s over, whether the demonstrators have dispersed of their own will, or are running from rubber bullets and tear gas, you duck into another mall, and another train, and within minutes are back in a land of infinite hypercommerce, tiny alleys and posh hotels with their lobby on the 40th floor of a skyscraper.

Not everyone lives in a luxury hotel, man! I get it. But my eyes are like saucers. I ask forgiveness of Hong Kongers if at times I am still that six year old kid, dazzled by what to you is ordinary. You live in a kind of city we Americans can only aspire to, and it’s no wonder you love your home so much you will take any risk to save it.

«

And then there’s the protests, which Zeynep Tufekci also attended. (Also: which is the most advanced American city? I’ve been to a few, but none has struck me as ahead of any major one in Europe.)
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[Cryptography] Bitcoin Royale: peer-to-peer no-theft electronic gold • Cryptography mailing list

Philip Hallam-Baker, commenting on a new “no this time it’s safe” cryptocurrency:

»

I have been tracing crypto-currency payment schemes since I wrote the survey paper while I was at MIT 24 years ago and the field hasn’t moved since. Proof of work is an application of the peppercoin scheme Adi Shamir developed with Ron Rivest. Blockchain is the Haber-Stornetta hash chain notary.

The only thing that has changed in all that time is that we have moved fromthe store of value moving from the promise that someone has chunks of gold in escrow to the promise that if we all clap our hands and say we believe in tinkerbell, we all become rich.

Ten years on, BitCoin still defends itself from all criticism with the bald statement that it is early days and nobody can know how the system will adapt to meet the challenges. That is total hogwash. We know how the system will adapt because we have been watching for ten years – it won’t adapt at all.

Ten years after the financial crash, BitCoiners still splutter about the corruption of the global financial system while the BitCoin float is stolen over and over again. Fraud accounts for much less than 1% of actual value transfers in real world payment systems. Actual value transfers account for much less than 1% of the fraud in the BitCoin system.

Ten years ago, the largest online retailer of note to accept BitCoin for payments was Overstock.com. Ten years later the largest online retailer of note that accepts BitCoin for payments is Overstock.com. And they will be dropping BitCoin in the coming months as the CEO has had to resign after having an affair with a woman now in jail for being a Russian spy and then posting bizarre rants about the deep state.

«

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The 2018 MacBook Pro keyboard drives me crazy • Ryan Bigg

Over to you, Ryan:

»

Apple is all about the thinness of their laptops. I do not particularly care about the thinness of this device. For the most part, it sits on one of two desks that I use or it sits on my lap on the train. Maybe I use it on the couch from time-to-time. I do not care about the thinness of this device while I am using it. I only care about it when I store it away, in my backpack.

This keyboard has a key travel distance that, I am sure, is measured in microns or perhaps nanometers. It feels like I am typing on a concrete slab. Key presses inexplicably duplicate. Or don’t register at all. All for thinness.

This keyboard is a catastrophic engineering failure, designed by a company that should know better. A company with more money in the bank than several countries combined. This keyboard would be, by far, the part of the MacBook Pro that is used the most by everybody who owns one, and it is so poorly engineered for the pursuit of thinness.

Apple must fix this problem in their upcoming MacBook Pro releases. I want a fat MacBook pro keyboard, one that has a travel distance of the older wireless keyboards and doesn’t have that “concrete slab” feel.

«

As I said: if design isn’t how it looks but how it works, this is poor design.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

An LG Smart Fridge: not, it turns out, a device that you can tweet from. CC-licensed photo by Rob Pegoraro on Flickr.

 
The Overspill is on a break for two weeks. See you again on September 2.

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 8 links for you. And two weeks’ holiday for The Overspill. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Teens exposed to highly charged political ads on Facebook and Instagram • Sky News

Rowland Manthorpe:

»

Political parties are showing partisan, highly charged adverts to teenagers on Facebook and Instagram, Sky News can reveal.

The Children’s Commissioner has described the practice of targeting young people as “irresponsible”.

Sky News has seen 208 political ads shown to 13 to 17-year-olds on Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram, where advertisers can target campaigns according to age. The majority of the ads came from the Conservatives, which showed 102 ads to teenagers, mostly featuring Boris Johnson.

Sky News revealed last month that the Tories had welcomed the new prime minister with an online ad blitz costing tens of thousands of pounds. Labour only showed four ads to 13 to 17-year-olds, but these were extremely partisan.

Two Instagram ads from the party featured a picture of Nigel Farage next to Tommy Robinson, and claimed that: “The only way to stop the far-right from winning is by voting Labour.” Users were urged to “double tap this and then share it to your story”.

Ads for Change UK featured news articles and videos of Mr Farage, saying that the party “would not stand idly by whilst others whip up fear, division and hatred”.

Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner, who promotes and protects the rights of children, told Sky News this lack of balance could be misleading for young people.

«

Ironically, Sky News had to check with lawyers before it could show this story on TV because of the UK’s strict rules on political advertising. The age targeting is what’s different: this is a generation growing up with partisan political ads that they wouldn’t see on billboards or in newspapers being directed at them.
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New research: lessons from Password Checkup in action • Google Online Security Blog

:

»

Back in February, we announced the Password Checkup extension for Chrome to help keep all your online accounts safe from hijacking. The extension displays a warning whenever you sign in to a site using one of over 4 billion usernames and passwords that Google knows to be unsafe due to a third-party data breach. Since our launch, over 650,000 people have participated in our early experiment. In the first month alone, we scanned 21 million usernames and passwords and flagged over 316,000 as unsafe – 1.5% of sign-ins scanned by the extension.

Today, we are sharing our most recent lessons from the launch and announcing an updated set of features for the Password Checkup extension. Our full research study, available here, will be presented this week as part of the USENIX Security Symposium.

Which accounts are most at risk?

Hijackers routinely attempt to sign in to sites across the web with every credential exposed by a third-party breach. If you use strong, unique passwords for all your accounts, this risk disappears. Based on anonymous telemetry reported by the Password Checkup extension, we found that users reused breached, unsafe credentials for some of their most sensitive financial, government, and email accounts. This risk was even more prevalent on shopping sites (where users may save credit card details), news, and entertainment sites.

In fact, outside the most popular web sites, users are 2.5x more likely to reuse vulnerable passwords, putting their account at risk of hijacking.

«

Users are the problem, I guess. 4 billion username/password combinations are unsafe? That’s really a lot.
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You should definitely track your loved ones’ phones. Actually maybe not • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

»

When Lauren Goodman, 19, heard about the shooting at a Walmart in El Paso earlier this month, the University of Texas at Austin sophomore immediately pulled up Find My Friends to make sure none of her loved ones were there. “I was relieved when I saw they were back at home,” she said.

Many parents also opt to use these features when their children start to drive. Life360, specifically, can detect crashes and report other driving situations. When the app is open, Life360 refreshes location about every three seconds. When open, Find My Friends refreshes every minute, though when iOS 13 comes out this fall—and the app is renamed simply Find My—refresh will drop to 30 seconds. In Google Maps, location is refreshed only when you view a friend’s location.

This past June one anxious mom used Find My Friends to look for her teenage daughter when she had missed curfew. She tracked the phone about 20 yards off the side of a tree-covered embankment, where the teenager had gotten into a car accident and had been trapped for almost seven hours. (The family confirmed the story but declined to comment.)

Counterpoint: In that case, location helped in an emergency but location doesn’t tell the full story. In an age of mass shootings, you’d likely want more info than just where someone is when news reports hit.

«

Some people track enormous numbers of others. We call it “Stalk My Family”, which is pretty much how we use it.
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Can you channel Kerouac in an electric car? • Financial Times

Henry Mance:

»

We hire a Tesla Model 3 on a peer-to-peer car hiring website. On pick-up, the car immediately suggests that we install a 25-minute software update. What is this — the car of the future, or a four-wheeled version of Adobe Acrobat? Even the glovebox is operated from the touchscreen.

The Model 3 is the most basic Tesla, though prices start at the far-from-basic $40,000. The long-range version can travel up to 310 miles, but charging it fully shortens the battery life.

My dashboard says we have charge for 244 miles. I pick up Jason the photographer, Yui and the kids nearby, and somehow we are down to 238. This still should be OK, I think. Reno — via picturesque Nevada City — is about 230 miles away. If things get tight, we can recharge at Truckee, 30 miles nearer.

You know you have left Silicon Valley when the billboards stop advertising enterprise software and start advertising religion. I suppose they are both forms of saving things in the cloud. “Jesus said ALL THINGS are possible to those that believe,” reads one billboard. A nearby shop sells 35 flavours of wild-game jerky.

Our first stop is the California State Fair in Sacramento. The attractions include dogs “long jumping” into a huge tank of water. “You’re going to see some crazy dogs jumping,” says an announcer. “There is a technique to this,” he adds, unconvincingly. Is this the real America? The first dog throws itself 13ft 6in into the water. It’s some way short of the world record — 35ft 3in, set by an Ohio whippet named Slingshot.

We wander through a barn where farmers are blow-drying their cows. The bins are covered in plastic American flags. The kids win a soft toy by throwing ping-pong balls into floating cups. A stall is offering test drives of Ram pick-up trucks. The trucks are nearly two metres tall — the gas-guzzling antithesis of an electric car. Do I need a car like this if I live in San Francisco, I ask an attendant. “It parallel-parks itself,” he points out, hopefully.

«

Just lovely.
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What3words: The app that can save your life • BBC News

Duncan Leatherdale:

»

Police have urged everyone to download a smartphone app they say has already saved several lives. What is it and how does it work?

Kicked. Converged. Soccer.

These three randomly chosen words saved Jess Tinsley and her friends after they got lost in a forest on a dark, wet night.

They had planned a five-mile circular stroll through the 4,900 acre (2,000 hectare) woodland Hamsterley Forest, in County Durham, on Sunday evening, but after three hours they were hopelessly lost.

“We were in a field and had no idea where we were,” the 24-year-old care worker from Newton Aycliffe said.

“It was absolutely horrendous. I was joking about it and trying to laugh because I knew if I didn’t laugh I would cry.”

At 22:30 BST they found a spot with phone signal and dialled 999.

“One of the first things the call-handler told us to do was download the what3words app,” Ms Tinsley said.

“I had never heard of it.”

Within a minute of its download, the police said they knew where the group was and the soaked and freezing walkers were swiftly found by the Teesdale and Weardale Search and Mountain Rescue Team.

«

The issue is that W3W is a private company. (It charges for certain API use.) But then again, it’s a useful service: doesn’t need a phone signal to work (though of course you need one to call the emergency services), is precise to within a few metres. One of the cases: “Humberside Police were able to quickly resolve a hostage situation after the victim was able to tell officers exactly where she was being held.” 👀
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Working on Microsoft’s Cortana is laborious and poorly paid • VICE

Joseph Cox:

»

A cache of leaked documents obtained by Motherboard gives insight into what the human contractors behind the development of tech giants’ artificial intelligence services are actually doing: laborious, repetitive tasks that are designed to improve the automated interpretation of human speech. This means tasks tech giants have promised are completed by virtual assistants and artificial intelligence are trained by the monotonous work of people.

The work is magnified by the large footprint of speech recognition tools: Microsoft’s Cortana product, similar to Apple’s Siri, is implemented in Windows 10 machines and Xbox One consoles, and is also available as on iOS, Android, and smart speakers.

“The bulk of the work I’ve done for Microsoft focused on annotating and transcribing Cortana commands,” one Microsoft contractor said. Motherboard granted the source anonymity to speak more candidly about internal Microsoft processes, and because they had signed a non-disclosure agreement.

The instruction manuals on classifying this sort of data go on for hundreds of pages, with a dizzying number of options for contractors to follow to classify data, or punctuation style guides they’re told to follow. The contractor said they are expected to work on around 200 pieces of data an hour, and noted they’ve heard personal and sensitive information in Cortana recordings. A document obtained by Motherboard corroborates that for some work contractors need to complete at least 200 tasks an hour.

«

OK, you probably didn’t imagine that it was going to be a life full of joy doing that. They get paid between $12 and $14 per hour. Though it’s not clear where they’re located.
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The “teen girl tweeting from fridge” story is likely fake • Buzzfeed News

Stephanie McNeal:

»

So, finally, she got desperate and tweeted via voice dictation from her “LG Smart Refrigerator.” She wrote, “I do not know if this is going to tweet I am talking to my fridge what the heck my Mom confiscated all of my electronics again.”

The source text on the tweet read “LG Smart Refrigerator.” The tweet soon went viral, and everyone thought it was hilarious.

Twitter and appliance manufacturer LG Electronics even showed their support, tweeting at Dorothy using the hashtag #FreeDorothy.

Dorothy soon thanked everyone for their support, again from the “refrigerator.”

Dorothy even did interviews with news outlets like the Guardian, which claimed it had exchanged messages with the teen using “her cousin’s iPad.” Dorothy told the outlet she was 15 years old and had been banned from using electronics after starting a fire while cooking. The story was also reported by CBS News, BBC, and others.

The Guardian reported that Dorothy wouldn’t reveal her last name and LG wouldn’t comment, but noted that “the tweet source confirms it was sent from the device.”

But what these stories failed to note is that it is surprisingly easy to pretend to tweet from basically anywhere by creating your own Twitter source. A step-by-step guide posted by one Twitter user and this Reddit post lay out a “fridge” example.

It’s so easy, in fact, that tweeting “from” random places is a meme.

Like this guy, who went viral earlier this year.

«

Oh. Still, well played, anonymous fan account for Ariana Grande. And of course, how is someone who interviews “her” going to be able to confirm any of this without speaking to the mother, and visiting the house? Modern journalism is both easier to do and harder to get right.
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Huawei Mate X release date pushed back, but next version may have even more screens • TechRadar

David Lumb:

»

The foldable Huawei Mate X is unlikely to come out before November, which means a delay from the previously slated September launch, TechRadar learned at a press event at Huawei’s Shenzhen headquarters today.

There’s no possibility of a September launch date anymore, which leaves the door open for the Samsung Galaxy Fold to be the first foldable to market. However, Huawei is certain the Mate X will launch before the end of 2019.

We also got wind of more exciting news: the next Mate X could have more screens, and it might come out as soon as next year.

Where will the Huawei Mate X follow-up fit more displays? By swapping out the steel rear cover in the current Huawei Mate X with a glass back, and those glass surfaces could become usable, touchable displays. 

It’s a big engineering challenge to say the least – it might end up being years before the issues are worked out and we get glass backs on foldable phones. We don’t even have them on the upcoming Mate X’s 8in front display yet.

«

More screens. Suuuuure. Why not also say it’ll be origami and fold into a swan when not in use?

It’s been fascinating to watch Samsung and Huawei racing to be second on this. It’s like watching two runners, both trying to lose. “Oooh my calf! Agh! No, go ahead, you have it.” “Fine, I’ll– aah my tendon! That’s it for me I’m afraid!” If foldables are the next big thing, they’re suffering a midwife shortage.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Not Egypt’s pyramids; it’s indium selenide atop epitaxial graphene. The latter could make your phone battery better. CC-licensed photo by Penn State on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. One more before the holiday. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

WeWork gave founder loans as it paid him rent, IPO filing shows • Bloomberg

Ellen Huet:

»

The [WeWork] IPO filing details many more instances and indicates that Neumann, who chairs the company’s all-male board, remains the central figure at WeWork. The name Adam appears 169 times in the financial prospectus, far more than any other. The company wrote in the filing that it provided the disclosures to “avoid the appearance of any conflict of interest.” A spokesman for WeWork declined to comment.

In 2016, Neumann borrowed $7m from WeWork at a generous annual interest rate of 0.64%. Neumann paid it back early, in November 2017, with about $100,000 in interest. It was one of several times Neumann borrowed company money. “From time to time over the past several years, we made loans directly to Adam or his affiliated entities,” WeWork wrote in the filing.

Neumann took out a much bigger loan from WeWork a few months ago. The company lent him $362m in April at 2.89% interest to help him exercise options to buy stock. This month, Neumann repaid the debt by surrendering the shares back to the company. It’s not clear from the filing why these transactions happened.

The business is, in some respects, a family affair. Rebekah Neumann, the CEO’s wife and a cousin of Gwyneth Paltrow, is listed as a founder, chief brand and impact officer of WeWork and founder and CEO of WeGrow, a corporate project to build and run private elementary schools. She was also among those behind a proposal this summer to hire Martin Scorsese to direct promotional videos for WeWork, Bloomberg reported last week.

Avi Yehiel, Neumann’s brother-in-law and a former professional soccer player in Israel, has served as WeWork’s head of wellness since 2017. He receives a salary of less than $200,000, according to the prospectus. WeWork hired another one of Neumann’s immediate family members to host eight events last year for a total of less than $200,000, the filing said. The events coincided with the Creator Awards, a live pitch competition with celebrity judges hosted by WeWork.

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It’s a disaster that’s not even waiting to happen – it lost $900m in the first six months of this year on (doubled) revenues of $1.54bn.
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A new way to help students turn in their best work • Google Blog

Brian Hendricks, product manager for Google Suite for Education:

»

Today’s students face a tricky challenge: In an age when they can explore every idea imaginable on the internet, how do they balance outside inspiration with authenticity in their own work? Students have to learn to navigate the line between other people’s ideas and their own, and how and when to properly cite sources.
We’ve heard from instructors that they copy and paste passages into Google Search to check if student work is authentic, which can be repetitive, inefficient and biased. They also often spend a lot of time giving feedback about missed citations and improper paraphrasing. By integrating the power of Search into our assignment and grading tools, we can make this quicker and easier. 

That’s why Google is introducing originality reports. This new feature—with several reports included free in every course—will be part of Classroom and Assignments, which was also announced today. We create originality reports by scanning student work for matched phrases across hundreds of billions of web pages and tens of millions of books. 

«

My initial reaction was that this is totally depressing – that you’re forced to twiddle words around so they’re desperately different from what you found in a book, and even then you might fall afoul of a book or paper you’ve never actually read, because how many ways are there to frame some sentences? Maybe the reality will be better. Maybe the teachers should have to take it too.
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Google’s algorithm for detecting hate speech is racially biased • MIT Technology Review

Charlotte Jee:

»

Researchers built two AI systems and tested them on a pair of data sets of more than 100,000 tweets that had been annotated by humans with labels like “offensive,” “none,” or “hate speech.” One of the algorithms incorrectly flagged 46% of inoffensive tweets by African-American authors as offensive. Tests on bigger data sets, including one composed of 5.4 million tweets, found that posts by African-American authors were 1.5 times more likely to be labeled as offensive. When the researchers then tested Google’s Perspective, an AI tool that the company lets anyone use to moderate online discussions, they found similar racial biases.

A hard balance to strike: Mass shootings perpetrated by white supremacists in the US and New Zealand have led to growing calls from politicians for social-media platforms to do more to weed out hate speech. These studies underline just how complicated a task that is. Whether language is offensive can depend on who’s saying it, and who’s hearing it. For example, a black person using the “N word” is very different from a white person using it. But AI systems do not, and currently cannot, understand that nuance.

«

That’s weird. Like, really weird. Unless the corpus had a ton of seriously offensive tweets.
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UK advertising watchdog upholds complaints against BitMEX bitcoin promotion • Yahoo News

:

»

The U.K. Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has upheld complaints over a bitcoin ad placed by crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX (HDR Global Trading).

The advertising regulator published its decision on Wednesday, saying that it supported the four complaints against the ad that had claimed it “failed to illustrate the risk of the investment,” “exaggerated the return on the investment” and “challenged whether it was misleading.”

…In its ruling, the watchdog pointed out that the graph “used a logarithmic scale on its y-axis which meant that the equally spaced values on that scale did not increase by the same amount each time and instead increased by orders of magnitude.”

While it acknowledged that log graphs can be “a valid and useful way of presenting data,” the agency said that interpreting the graph would need some specialist knowledge of the topic and that, without an accompanying explanation, the graph “was unlikely to be familiar or readily understandable to the national newspaper audience to whom the ad was directed.”

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Logarithmic graphs considered harmful. Agree.
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Netflix’s biggest bingers get hit with higher internet costs • Los Angeles Times

Gerry Smith:

»

James Wright had never worried about staying under his data cap.

Then he bought a 4K TV set and started binge-watching Netflix in ultra-high definition. The picture quality was impressive, but it gobbled up so much bandwidth that his internet service provider, Comcast Corp., warned that he had exceeded his monthly data limit and would need to pay more.

“The first month I blew through the cap like it was nothing,” said Wright, 50, who lives with his wife in Memphis, Tenn. With a 4K TV, he said, “It’s not as hard to go through as you’d think.”

All that bingeing and ultra-HD video can carry a high price tag. As online viewing grows, more subscribers are having to pay up for faster speeds. Even then, they can run into data limits and overage fees. Some opt for an unlimited plan that can double the average $52-a-month internet bill.

Wright is what the cable industry calls a power user — someone who chews through 1 terabyte of data or more each month. Though still rare, the number of power users has doubled in the past year as more families stream TV shows, movies and video games online. They should continue to grow as new video services from Walt Disney Co., AT+T, Apple and NBCUniversal arrive in coming months.

In the first quarter of this year, about 4% of internet subscribers consumed at least 1 terabyte of data — the limit imposed by companies such as Comcast, AT&T and Cox Communications Inc. That’s up from 2% a year ago, according to OpenVault, which tracks internet data usage among cable subscribers in the US and Europe.

«

What’s amazing is that the cable executives are even surprised by this. But of course they’re going to gouge people for it.
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Google in jobs search dispute • Reuters

Foo Yun Chee and Paresh Dave:

»

Google’s fast-growing tool for searching job listings has been a boon for employers and job boards starving for candidates, but several rival job-finding services contend anti-competitive behaviour has fuelled its rise and cost them users and profits.

In a letter to be sent to EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager and seen by Reuters, 23 job search websites in Europe called on her to temporarily order Google to stop playing unfairly while she investigates. Similar to worldwide leader Indeed and other search services familiar to job seekers, Google’s tool links to postings aggregated from many employers. It lets candidates filter, save and get alerts about openings, though they must go elsewhere to apply.

Google places a large widget for the two-year-old tool at the top of results for searches such as “call-centre jobs” in most of the world.

Some rivals allege that positioning is illegal because Google is using its dominance to attract users to its specialised search offering without the traditional marketing investments they have to make.

Other job technology firms say Google has restored industry innovation and competition.

The tensions expose a new front in the battle between Google and online publishers reliant on search traffic, just as EU and US competition regulators heed calls to scrutinise tech giants including Google…

…Lack of action could spur the signatories, which include British site Best Jobs Online to German peers Intermedia and Jobindex, to follow with formal complaints against Google to Vestager, a person familiar with the matter said.

Berlin-based StepStone, which operates 30 job websites globally, and another German search service already have taken that step, another source said.

«

Same as so many others: Google scrapes the sites and then re-presents the information, but to its own advantage.
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He tried to prank the DMV. Then his vanity license plate backfired big time • Mashable

Jack Morse:

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Everyone hates parking tickets. Not everyone, however, is an information security researcher with a mischievous side and a freshly minted vanity license plate reading “NULL.”

That would be Droogie (his handle, if that’s not obvious), a presenter at this year’s DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas and man with a very specific problem: He’s on the receiving end of thousands of dollars worth of tickets that aren’t his. But don’t tell that to the DMV.

It wasn’t, of course, supposed to end up this way. In fact, exactly the opposite. Droogie registered a vanity California license plate consisting solely of the word “NULL” —  which in programming is a term for no specific value — for fun. And, he admitted to laughs, on the off chance it would confuse automatic license plate readers and the DMV’s ticketing system. 

“I was like, ‘I’m the shit,'” he joked to the crowd. “‘I’m gonna be invisible.’ Instead, I got all the tickets.”

Things didn’t go south immediately. As Droogie explained, he’s a cautious driver and didn’t get any tickets for the first year he owned the vanity plate. Then he went to reregister his tags online, and, when prompted to input his license plate, broke the DMV webpage. 

It seemed the DMV site didn’t recognize the plate “NULL” as an actual input. 

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It’s a real-world version of little Bobby Drop Tables.
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Major breach found in biometrics system used by banks, UK police and defence firms • The Guardian

Josh Taylor:

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The fingerprints of over 1 million people, as well as facial recognition information, unencrypted usernames and passwords, and personal information of employees, was discovered on a publicly accessible database for a company used by the likes of the UK Metropolitan police, defence contractors and banks.

Suprema is the security company responsible for the web-based Biostar 2 biometrics lock system that allows centralised control for access to secure facilities like warehouses or office buildings. Biostar 2 uses fingerprints and facial recognition as part of its means of identifying people attempting to gain access to buildings.

Last month, Suprema announced its Biostar 2 platform was integrated into another access control system – AEOS. AEOS is used by 5,700 organisations in 83 countries, including governments, banks and the UK Metropolitan police.

The Israeli security researchers Noam Rotem and Ran Locar working with vpnmentor, a service that reviews virtual private network services, have been running a side project to scans ports looking for familiar IP blocks, and then use these blocks to find holes in companies’ systems that could potentially lead to data breaches.

In a search last week, the researchers found Biostar 2’s database was unprotected and mostly unencrypted. They were able to search the database by manipulating the URL search criteria in Elasticsearch to gain access to data.

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Not clear how you could use the fingerprints, though.
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Inverted yield curve rattles investors wary of dying stock bull market • Reuters

:

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A closely watched section of the US yield curve inverted on Wednesday for the first time in over 12 years, rattling investors already worried that a US-China trade war might trigger a global recession and kill off a decade-long bull market on Wall Street.

The yield on the US 10-year Treasury note tipped 1.4 basis points below 2-year Treasury yields, the first time this spread has been negative since 2007, which was the end of a trend of negative yield curves that started in 2005, according to Refinitiv data.

A yield curve typically has an upward slope — when the yields are plotted on a graph — because investors expect greater compensation for the risk of owning longer-maturity debt. An inversion, when shorter-dated yields are higher than longer-dated ones, is considered a warning of a looming recession.

With inverted yield curves widely viewed on Wall Street as a major danger signal for the economy, Bank of America Merrill Lynch warned this week that Wall Street’s decade-long rally is also under threat.

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Just to explain: if you get a better rate for loaning the government your money for two years rather than 10, it implies that something’s going to go bad in between. A yield curve inversion has preceded recession by about 15 months since 1978 (range 10-22 months).
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Huawei technicians helped African governments spy on political opponents • WSJ

Joe Parkinson, Nicholas Bariyo and Josh Chin:

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According to these officials, the team, based on the third floor of the [Ugandan] capital’s police headquarters, spent days trying to penetrate [opposition leader Bobi] Wine’s WhatsApp and Skype communications using spyware developed by an Israeli company, but failed. Then they asked for help from the staff working in their offices from Huawei, Uganda’s top digital supplier.

“The Huawei technicians worked for two days and helped us puncture through,” said one senior officer at the surveillance unit. The Huawei engineers, identified by name in internal police documents reviewed by the Journal, used the Israeli-made spyware to penetrate Mr. Wine’s WhatsApp chat group, named Firebase crew after his band. Authorities scuppered his plans to organize street rallies and arrested the politician and dozens of his supporters.

The incident in Uganda and another in Zambia, as detailed in a Wall Street Journal investigation, show how Huawei employees have used the company’s technology and other companies’ products to support the domestic spying of those governments.

Since 2012 the US government has accused Huawei—the world’s largest maker of telecom equipment and second largest manufacturer of smartphones—of being a potential tool for the Chinese government to spy abroad, after decades of alleged corporate espionage by state-backed Chinese actors. Huawei has forcefully denied those charges.

The Journal investigation didn’t turn up evidence of spying by or on behalf of Beijing in Africa. Nor did it find that Huawei executives in China knew of, directed or approved the activities described. It also didn’t find that there was something particular about the technology in Huawei’s network that made such activities possible.

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Samsung phone with graphene battery coming by 2021? • SamMobile

“Abhijeet M”:

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Samsung is reportedly hoping to have “at least one handset either next year or in 2021” with a graphene battery instead of a lithium-ion battery. Yes, many of you are probably shaking your head right now, as we have been hearing about graphene batteries becoming a viable solution for smartphones for years at this point. And the latest rumor, courtesy of leakster Evan Blass (aka evleaks), suggests that there is still a couple of years to go before we see a phone powered by a graphene battery.

Last year, rumors of Samsung being close to using graphene batteries in smartphones started floating around on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo, but as we all know, no such device has made its way to market yet. Why are graphene batteries so important? Well, thanks to a material Samsung calls “graphene ball”, graphene batteries can charge up to five times faster than lithium-ion batteries. The material can also increase battery capacities by 45%, and these batteries can also handle higher temperatures.

All of those benefits would be right at home on smartphones, especially as manufacturers continue to insist on making their phones as thin as possible.

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Graphene for the cathode has been suggested as offering huge improvements for some years now. But it’s definitely getting closer to full-scale manufacturing implementation.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Apple’s Card is really designed to keep you on Apple’s platform. CC-licensed photo by Marco Verch Professional Photographer and Speaker 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. Three more before the holiday. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Man who built the retweet: “we handed a loaded weapon to four-year-olds” • Buzzfeed News

Alex Kantrowitz:

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[Chris] Wetherell, a veteran tech developer, led the Twitter team that built the retweet button in 2009. The button is now a fundamental feature of the platform, and has been for a decade — to the point of innocuousness. But as Wetherell, now cofounder of a yet-unannounced startup, made clear in a candid interview, it’s time to fix it. Because social media is broken. And the retweet is a big reason why.

He’s not the only one reexamining the retweet. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told BuzzFeed News he is too: “Definitely thinking about the incentives and ramifications of all actions, including retweet,” he said. “Retweet with comment for instance might encourage more consideration before spread.”

Yet emphasizing that retweet with comment won’t necessarily solve Twitter’s ills. Jason Goldman, the head of product when Wetherell built the retweet, said it’s a key source of Twitter’s problems today. “The biggest problem is the quote retweet,” Goldman told BuzzFeed News. “Quote retweet allows for the dunk. It’s the dunk mechanism.”

…After the retweet button debuted, Wetherell was struck by how effectively it spread information. “It did a lot of what it was designed to do,” he said. “It had a force multiplier that other things didn’t have.”

“We would talk about earthquakes,” Wetherell said. “We talked about these first response situations that were always a positive and showed where humanity was in its best light.”

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In the old days, you had to manually retweet something by typing “RT @handle…” and copying the text. And there were only 140 characters to do it in! Personally, I think quote-tweeting too easily becomes odious – essentially, crowing to your followers about how foolish someone you disagree with is. (Sure, I use it that way myself, sometimes. But not as a method of debate.)
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Twitter tests letting users follow topics in the same way they follow accounts • The Verge

Casey Newton:

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Twitter will begin allowing users to follow interests, the company said today, letting users see tweets about topics of their choosing inside the timeline. When the feature goes live, you’ll be able to follow topics including sports teams, celebrities, and television shows, with a selection of tweets about them inserted alongside tweets in your home feed.

Topics will be curated by Twitter, with individual tweets being identified through machine learning rather than editorial curation, the company said. For now, only sports-related interests can be followed, said Rob Bishop, a Twitter product manager. The feature is now being tested on Android.

The move represents Twitter’s latest effort to help users find the best content on the platform even if they don’t know which accounts to follow. For years, the company has sought to make it easier for people to find value in Twitter, which can be foreboding for newcomers. Previously, Twitter Moments allowed people to follow events such as the Oscars or a sports game.

One reason to restrict the interests that can be followed in the testing phase is to see how amplifying them via the new feature affects the overall Twitter experience.

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Superficially, a good idea. Wonder how well they’ve gamed it out, though: surely people (or bots) will be inserting spam and (natch) outrage into those topics, especially if “machine learning” (aka rough guesses) is involved.
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Ebola now curable after trials of drugs in DRC, say scientists • The Guardian

Sarah Boseley:

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Ebola can no longer be called an incurable disease, scientists have said, after two of four drugs being trialled in the major outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were found to have significantly reduced the death rate.

ZMapp, used during the massive Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, has been dropped along with Remdesivir after two monoclonal antibodies, which block the virus, had substantially more effect, said the World Health Organization and the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which was a co-sponsor of the trial.

The trial in the DRC, which started in November, has now been stopped. All Ebola treatment units will now use the two monoclonal antibody drugs.

“From now on, we will no longer say that Ebola is incurable,” said Prof Jean-Jacques Muyembe, the director general of the Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale in DRC, which has overseen the trial. “These advances will help save thousands of lives.”

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US to delay some China tariffs until stores stock up for holiday shoppers • The New York Times

Ana Swanson:

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The Trump administration on Tuesday narrowed the list of Chinese products it plans to impose new tariffs on as of Sept. 1, delaying levies on cellphones, laptop computers, toys and other goods to spare shoppers from higher prices during the back-to-school and holiday seasons. Stocks soared on the news.

The move, which pushed a new 10% tariff on some goods until Dec. 15 and excluded others entirely, came as President Trump faces mounting pressure from businesses and consumer groups over the harm they say the continuing trade war between the United States and China is doing.

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Wiser heads prevailed. But the tariffs are still going to be a drag on the economy.
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Less than half of Google searches now result in a click • SparkToro

Rand Fishkin:

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We’ve passed a milestone in Google’s evolution from search engine to walled-garden. In June of 2019, for the first time, a majority of all browser-based searches on Google.com resulted in zero-clicks.

Throughout this post, I’ll be using numbers from the clickstream data company, Jumpshot. They are, in my opinion, the best, most reliable source of information on what happens inside web browsers because of how they gather, process, and scale their estimates. That’s why SparkToro, and Moz (my previous company) are both customers of Jumpshot. Given all the nice things I say about them, it might sound like they’re paying me, but the opposite is true; we’re paying them. You can find more on their methodology in the endnote on this post.

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That 4.4% of searches leading to ad clicks is huge, in my view. I bet a lot of those are accidental on mobile, or people not realising that the first screen of mobile search results is essentially all ads and that most of the top of the desktop results are ads too.

As Fishkin also points out, Google is wriggling like mad to avoid answering this question in public, despite being asked by a US Congressman.
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Three years of misery inside Google, the happiest company in tech • WIRED

Nitsha Tiku:

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In a lot of ways, Google’s internal social networks are like a microcosm of the internet itself. They have their filter bubbles, their trolls, their edgelords. And contrary to popular perception, those networks are not all populated by liberals. Just as the reactionary right was rising on YouTube, it was also finding ways to amplify itself inside Google’s rationalist culture of debate.

For some time, for instance, one of the moderators of the company’s Conservatives email list was a Chrome engineer named Kevin Cernekee. Over the years, Google employees have described Cernekee fairly consistently: as a shrewd far-right provocateur who made his presence felt across Google’s social network, trolling both liberals and conservatives.

In August 2015, the giant IndustryInfo mailing list broke into a roiling debate over why there were so few women in tech. The previous year, Google had become the first Silicon Valley giant to release data on the demographics of its workforce—and revealed that 82% of its technical workers were male. To many inside the IndustryInfo thread, the number constituted clear and galling evidence that Google had to change. When the conversation devolved into a brawl over the merits of diversity—one that Cernekee joined—a senior vice president at Google attempted to shut it down. Cernekee proceeded to bombard the executive’s Google+ page with posts about his right to critique the pro-diversity “Social Justice political agenda.” “Can we add a clear statement of banned opinions to the employee handbook,” he wrote, “so that everybody knows what the ground rules are?” In response, Google HR issued Cernekee a written warning for “disrespectful, disruptive, disorderly, and insubordinate” comments.

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The stuff about Cernekee feels like the only particularly new stuff in this long, long piece. He sounds like a jerk.
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Snap, in augmented reality push, launches new Spectacles version • Reuters

Sheila Dang:

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Snap Inc said Tuesday it will launch a new version of its Spectacles sunglasses that will have the capability of capturing photos and videos and uploading them directly to its unit Snapchat.

Snap has struggled to make money from its Spectacles business, and wrote down $40 million in unsold glasses in 2017.

Production will be smaller for its new Spectacles 3 version, allowing Snap to continue experimenting with augmented reality, a key focus for the technology company.

Spectacles 3, which will begin shipping in the fall, will cost $380, almost twice the $200 cost of the previous version.

It will have dual cameras to add depth and dimension to photos and videos. After uploading the content to the messaging app Snapchat, users can add new lighting, landscapes and three-dimensional effects to the images, Snap said.

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First time, in September 2016: sold about 150,000 units, took $40m bath in November 2017. September 2018: tries again with Spectacles 2. First the first six months of this year it has said “revenue from the sales of Spectacles was not material.”

Don’t see why this situation will change, unless another well-known company introduces AR glasses and they become a huge category.
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Here’s what to do if you have an Apple Card and lose your iPhone • Buzzfeed News

Nicole Nguyen:

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Apple Card is a new cash-rewards credit card that — Apple purports — is designed to be simple and transparent. But it’s also aimed at keeping you locked into your iPhone.

There are no paper statements with the digital-first Apple Card. Unlike a traditional credit card, everything is accessed through the Wallet app on the iPhone, including transaction histories, total balances, previous statements, and payments. There’s no website to view the latest transactions made on the card or make a payment if you lose access to that Wallet app.

So, how do you pay your Apple Card bill if your iPhone is misplaced or stolen? You could always wait until you buy a new phone, or recover your old one, but a late payment would result in interest charges which, obviously, would not be ideal. Because Apple’s support website doesn’t say, BuzzFeed News posed the question to a customer service representative through Apple’s phone and text message support system (Apple Card is currently available to a limited number of people and members of the press).

According to Apple Support, your options are: 1. Use an iPad or other iOS device to access the Wallet app, or 2. Call Apple Support (not, presumably, with the phone you just lost) and a representative will connect you to an Apple Card specialist at Goldman Sachs, Apple’s bank partner. You’ll need your full name, date of birth, last four digits of your Social Security number, and the phone number associated with your account to make a payment over the phone.

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That’s pretty clever platform lock-in. Switched to Android? Sorry, you’ll have to ring up to clear your balance. Presumably you could use it like a phone-only card. Though given that the attraction about the card is meant to be that it gives you a discount on Apple purchases, it would be a trifle perverse not to use Apple kit while using an Apple card. (Though the Wallet app isn’t available on a Mac, presently.)

Personally, I have a card from a big store chain which gives me cash back on purchases; more if I use it in one of the chain’s stores. So I use it a lot. It’s how the incentives work.
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Facebook paid contractors to transcribe user audio files • Bloomberg

Sarah Frier:

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Facebook has been paying hundreds of outside contractors to transcribe clips of audio from users of its services, according to people with knowledge of the work.

The work has rattled the contract employees, who are not told where the audio was recorded or how it was obtained – only to transcribe it, said the people, who requested anonymity for fear of losing their jobs. They’re hearing Facebook users’ conversations, sometimes with vulgar content, but do not know why Facebook needs them transcribed, the people said.

Facebook confirmed that it had been transcribing users’ audio and said it will no longer do so, following scrutiny into other companies. “Much like Apple and Google, we paused human review of audio more than a week ago,” the company said Tuesday. The company said the users who were affected chose the option in Facebook’s Messenger app to have their voice chats transcribed. The contractors were checking whether Facebook’s artificial intelligence correctly interpreted the messages, which were anonymized.

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But of COURSE Facebook was doing this, same as everyone else. Clearly this was an open secret within the voice assistant industry.
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Easy-to-make frame comparisons • JuxtaposeJS

Knight Foundation Lab:

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Juxtapose helps storytellers compare two pieces of similar media, including photos, and GIFs. It’s ideal for highlighting then/now stories that explain slow changes over time (growth of a city skyline, regrowth of a forest, etc.) or before/after stories that show the impact of single dramatic events (natural disasters, protests, wars, etc.).

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This code (and the page) is about four years old, but I only just noticed it. Produces stuff like this (of the Sochi Olympic site). You never know, you might find a use for it.

https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/juxtapose/latest/embed/index.html?uid=87bb1a18-bdeb-11e9-b9b8-0edaf8f81e27
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified