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:

»

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:

»

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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:

»

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:

»

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.

«

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.)

«

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.”

«

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:

»

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:

»

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:

»

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:

»

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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.

«

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.

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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:

»

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. 

«

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:

»

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.

«

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

:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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”:

»

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.

«

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:

»

[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.”

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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:

»

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.).

«

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

Physical helms: the way forward for US destroyers, after a fatal accident with touchscreens. CC-licensed photo by Official U.S. Navy Page on Flickr.

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

A selection of 12 links for you. Fair warning: after this week, The Overspill will go on a two-week break and return on September 2nd. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How YouTube radicalized Brazil • The New York Times

Max Fisher and Amanda Taub:

»

Members of the nation’s newly empowered far right — from grass-roots organizers to federal lawmakers — say their movement would not have risen so far, so fast, without YouTube’s recommendation engine.

New research has found they may be correct. YouTube’s search and recommendation system appears to have systematically diverted users to far-right and conspiracy channels in Brazil.

A New York Times investigation in Brazil found that, time and again, videos promoted by the site have upended central elements of daily life.

Teachers describe classrooms made unruly by students who quote from YouTube conspiracy videos or who, encouraged by right-wing YouTube stars, secretly record their instructors.

Some parents look to “Dr. YouTube” for health advice but get dangerous misinformation instead, hampering the nation’s efforts to fight diseases like Zika. Viral videos have incited death threats against public health advocates.

And in politics, a wave of right-wing YouTube stars ran for office alongside [President] Bolsonaro, some winning by historic margins. Most still use the platform, governing the world’s fourth-largest democracy through internet-honed trolling and provocation.

YouTube’s recommendation system is engineered to maximize watchtime, among other factors, the company says, but not to favor any political ideology. The system suggests what to watch next, often playing the videos automatically, in a never-ending quest to keep us glued to our screens.

But the emotions that draw people in — like fear, doubt and anger — are often central features of conspiracy theories, and in particular, experts say, of right-wing extremism.

As the system suggests more provocative videos to keep users watching, it can direct them toward extreme content they might otherwise never find. And it is designed to lead users to new topics to pique new interest — a boon for channels like Mr. Moura’s that use pop culture as a gateway to far-right ideas.

The system now drives 70% of total time on the platform, the company says. As viewership skyrockets globally, YouTube is bringing in over $1bn a month, some analysts believe.

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Verizon to sell Tumblr to WordPress owner • WSJ

Sarah Krouse:

»

Verizon Communications has agreed to sell its blogging website Tumblr to the owner of popular online-publishing tool WordPress, unloading for a nominal amount a site that once fetched a purchase price of more than $1bn.

Automattic Inc. will buy Tumblr for an undisclosed sum and take on about 200 staffers, the companies said. Tumblr is a free service that hosts millions of blogs where users can upload photos, music and art, but it has been dwarfed by Facebook , Reddit and other services.

Verizon became Tumblr’s owner through the carrier’s 2017 acquisition of Yahoo as part of a bid to build a digital media and advertising business. The wireless carrier began seeking a buyer for Tumblr earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported…

…A decision last year by Verizon to ban adult content on Tumblr alienated some users.

[Automattic CEO Matt] Mullenweg said his company intends to maintain the existing policy that bans adult content. He said he has long been a Tumblr user and sees the site as complementary to WordPress.com. “It’s just fun,” he said of Tumblr. “We’re not going to change any of that.”

Tumblr has a strong mobile interface and dashboard where users follow other blogs, he said. Executives will look for ways WordPress.com and Tumblr can share services and functionality.

«

So not Pornhub then. Guess that keeps their brand. But Tumblr was never truly worth $1bn (nor $750m, as Yahoo ludicrously “wrote it down” to). Perhaps $200m? Sources say it went for “well south of $20m” this time.
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New York Times still detects Chrome Incognito Mode after fix • 9to5Google

Kyle Bradshaw:

»

With the release of Chrome 76, Google attempted to put a stop to web developers and publishers detecting people using Chrome’s Incognito Mode. Unfortunately, it seems their efforts may be all for naught, as at least one major news outlet, The New York Times, has managed to put their hard paywall back up for those using Chrome Incognito.

We’ve been tracking Google’s effort to block Incognito Mode detection since February when we discovered a document laying out the Chrome development team’s intentions. Since then, Google rolled out the functionality to all devices with the release of Chrome 76.

Of course, since then multiple security researchers have discovered at least two new ways of detecting Incognito Mode, which can just as easily be copied to almost any website. Google knew this was inevitable, which is why they publicly explained their desire for user privacy and urged sites to consider not circumventing this Incognito Mode protection method.

«

Google’s explanation was “Our News teams support sites with meter strategies and recognize the goal of reducing meter circumvention, however any approach based on private browsing detection undermines the principles of Incognito Mode. We remain open to exploring solutions that are consistent with user trust and private browsing principles.”

Nice, but the News team and its “exploring solutions” isn’t actually paying the bills at the NYT and elsewhere. The paywall is.
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The Rule of 140 • The Margins

Ranjan Roy:

»

I think I search these things for affirmation, but I always find confirmation that others are thinking the same thing. It happens so often, I’ve dubbed it the Rule of 140 (as an homage to Rule 34, along with the original Twitter character count):

“There are no original thoughts around a shared cultural experience (political, entertainment, sports, news). Every idea or observations that passes through your head has not only been thought of by a number of other people, it’s also been posted on social media. The hive mind is always one step ahead.”

…If you believe in the The Rule of 140 as I do, it means you can find any thought related to any event posted by someone, on some social media platform. I tend to view things in economic terms, and embedding tweets or social media comments is an arbitrage opportunity to exploit.

A publisher can make any argument, and corroborate it with a few simple embedded tweets and a headline that includes “people are saying”. The cost of production is so low, you can create a high volume of articles like this and something is bound to catch fire. Throw on a few Taboola modules and you’re in business. It captures every distorted economic incentive that plagues the current media ecosystem. It’s the proverbial free money.

It would be one thing if it were simply relegated to the confines of Yahoo Movies and CNN’s Entertainment section. But it’s widespread and in major media outlets. And of significantly greater consequence, it’s an area that is a prime target for disinformation campaigns, specifically of the Russian variety. Almost every major media outlet was found to have published articles that used tweets from Russian disinformation accounts.

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Be wonderful if publishers didn’t do this. So wonderful. Unfortunately…
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Even DSLR cameras are vulnerable to ransomware • Engadget

Steve Dent:

»

researchers have discovered that some DSLRs and mirrorless cameras are actually vulnerable to ransomware attacks, of all things. Once in range of your camera’s WiFi, a bad actor could easily install malware that would encrypt your valuable photos unless you paid for a key.

Check Point Software noticed that the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) – which is unauthenticated in both wired and wireless modes – is particularly vulnerable to malware attacks. Ironically, they were able to uncover flaws in the Canon EOS 80D by using firmware originally cracked by Magic Lantern, which supplies its own open source app with extra features to Canon EOS owners.

In a video, the researchers showed how they first set up a rogue WiFi access point. Once the attackers were range of the camera, they ran an exploit to access the camera’s SD card and encrypt any photos. The surprised owner would then see a message that his pictures are no longer available unless he’s willing to pay a ransom.

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Inside the hidden world of elevator phone phreaking • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

»

“I can dial into an elevator phone, listen in on private conversations, reprogram the phone so that if someone hits it in an emergency it calls a number of my choosing,” [security researcher Will] Caruana told me in our first conversation. Elevator phones typically emit audible beeps in the elevator when they connect. But if someone has dialed into the phone of the elevator you’re riding before you enter it, Caruana warned me, the only indication might be a red light on the phone’s panel. “It’s hard to notice if you’re not looking for it,” Caruana says.

Over the last year, Caruana has assembled what he believes is the largest public list of elevator phone numbers, which he plans to make available to a limited audience—although he declined to say where exactly he’s publishing it. He says he’s releasing the list of 80-plus numbers not just because he wants to foster more elevator phone phreaking as an opportunity for whimsy and chance encounters, but also to draw attention to the possibility that elevator phones could be abused for serious privacy invasion and even sabotage. Call up most elevator phones and press 2, and you’ll be asked to enter a password to reprogram them. In far too many cases, Caruana says, phone installers and building managers don’t change those passwords from easily guessable default codes, allowing anyone to tamper with their settings.

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Though who’d expect someone to create a list of all the phone numbers for lifts in the world?
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Who will regulate digital political ads? • BBC News

Amol Rajan:

»

there is, frankly, something weird going on here. Everyone agrees that we urgently need new legislation in this terrain.

Indeed Damian Collins MP, the chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, says the time has come for emergency legislation.

“Our electoral law is hopelessly out of date. And what that means is that people can set up dummy campaigns promoting causes that are there to support an official candidate, but hide who’s doing it, hide where the money’s coming from,” he said.

“You can use technology to effectively launder money into political campaigns in micro donations including from overseas and our electoral law was established to make sure voters could see who’s campaigning on what, who’s paying for it, who it’s there to promote. And yet technology allows people to sidestep all of those rules and regulations.”

He went on: “I don’t understand why the government is taking so long. I think we should be looking at emergency legislation to bring our electoral law up to date. At least to establish the basic principles that the same requirements that exist in a poster or a leaflet should exist in an online ad and on Facebook as well.”

If Damian Collins MP can’t understand why no new legislation has been passed, what hope the rest of us?

…Across the political spectrum and across the world, social media is giving a platform to powerful forces who are able to avoid scrutiny.

While it is true that, for reasons outlined above, coming up with effective regulation is tough, it’s also true that at some point voters will begin to wonder why, years after we first started talking about it, voters are still being influenced by untraceable money.

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Introducing Evermore: become a Youtube explainer cartoon • YouTube

This, by Victoria Hogan, is one of the most unsettling little film shorts you’ll see in a while: like an episode of Black Mirror that lasts three minutes. It’s just her and a computer. (Think about how it was made once you’re watched it.)

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Study reveals what consumers would pay for their favorite free apps • McGuffin Creative Group

:

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Have you ever considered the value you place on your favorite free apps? Many services remain free thanks to advertising. But what if things changed? Suppose Google and consumers had to agree on a price for Google Maps? Would its value to you translate into a monthly dollar amount — or none at all?

We’re attached to so many free services, yet we know rumbling beneath the surface of each service is an ambitious business navigating a complex and changing market.

In a recent study, we set out to measure the value regular users placed on 16 of the most widely-used apps, asking respondents what they’d pay if a subscription fee was required. They had the option to say they would pay nothing and discontinue use, without access to a free alternative.

What did we hope to learn? Our goal wasn’t to offer bankable projections for Silicon Valley but, instead, to provide some indicators to inform an ongoing discussion of how value is created and perceived in the digital age.

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This gets interesting on two levels: first, the (averaged) amounts that people would pay per month/year for these services, and then how much money these companies are (theoretically) leaving on the table by using advertising rather than subscriptions. Ah, but: subscriptions are so often promises, unkept.
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Samsung Galaxy Note 10 5G now best phone camera • Android Authority

C. Scott Brown:

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According to the venerable camera review site DxOMark, the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus 5G is now the top smartphone camera across the entire industry. It steals the crown away from the Huawei P30 Pro, which held the top spot since its launch in March of this year.

The Note 10 Plus 5G’s score for its rear camera tops the P30 Pro’s rear camera by one point (113 against 112 respectively). Additionally, the front camera on the Note 10 Plus 5G now tops the previous record-holder for the selfie cam, too: the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G. That means, according to DxOMark, the Note 10 Plus 5G is now the best overall phone camera you can buy whether you are looking for rear shots or selfies shots.

«

Nothing against Samsung, or Huawei, but I think these “scoring” systems long ago began looking foolish. DxOMark insists that its tests are objective, except that “We also get asked how a device’s Overall score can be higher than its sub-scores. The Overall score is not a weighted sum of the sub-scores. It is a proprietary and confidential mapping of sub-scores into a combined score.”

That “proprietary and confidential” mapping sounds ever so slightly fishy to me. Why can’t they publish it? Are they suggesting manufacturers would tweak their systems to win? And, honestly: the Note10 beats the P30 Pro by one point, less than 1%? The room for improvement is clearly asymptotic.
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Navy reverting DDGs back to physical throttles, after fleet rejects touchscreen controls • USNI News

Megan Eckstein:

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The Navy will begin reverting destroyers back to a physical throttle and traditional helm control system in the next 18 to 24 months, after the fleet overwhelmingly said they prefer mechanical controls to touchscreen systems in the aftermath of the fatal USS John S. McCain (DDG-56) collision.

The investigation into the collision showed that a touchscreen system that was complex and that sailors had been poorly trained to use contributed to a loss of control of the ship just before it crossed paths with a merchant ship in the Singapore Strait. After the Navy released a Comprehensive Review related to the McCain and the USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) collisions, Naval Sea Systems Command conducted fleet surveys regarding some of the engineering recommendations, Program Executive Officer for Ships Rear Adm. Bill Galinis said.

“When we started getting the feedback from the fleet from the Comprehensive Review effort – it was SEA 21 (NAVSEA’s surface ship lifecycle management organization) that kind of took the lead on doing some fleet surveys and whatnot – it was really eye-opening. And it goes into the, in my mind, ‘just because you can doesn’t mean you should’ category. We really made the helm control system, specifically on the [DDG] 51 class, just overly complex, with the touch screens under glass and all this kind of stuff,” Galinis said during a keynote speech at the American Society of Naval Engineers’ annual Fleet Maintenance and Modernization Symposium.

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I saw this via Tony Fadell (as in, the iPod and Nest). Now if Elon Musk had tweeted it, that would have been really notable and I’d have expected retrofits on Teslas. As it is…

Also, the reason why the iPhone had a touchscreen was to allow a single screen to do multiple jobs via software. That’s just not the case for an engine throttle, which is a classic YHOJ.
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Joaquin Castro’s tweet was not doxxing • The New York Times

Suzanne Nossel is CEO of PEN America (a lobby group for “literature and human rights”):

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In the wake of the El Paso shootings, Representative Joaquin Castro of Texas created a stir with a tweet on his official account listing the names and employers of 44 residents of the San Antonio area who had contributed up to the legal limit to the Trump campaign. The information was a matter of public record but not widely known.

“Sad to see so many San Antonians as 2019 maximum donors to Donald Trump,” wrote Mr. Castro, who is the chairman of his twin brother Julián’s presidential campaign. He tagged two establishments, accusing their owners of “fueling a campaign of hate that labels Hispanic immigrants as ‘invaders.’”

…While it is possible that some supporters could have harassed those named in the tweet — news reports recount at least one profane voice mail message — Mr. Castro cannot be held legally responsible for others’ harassing conduct that he did not urge. While some Twitter users did say that they would boycott the establishments named, refraining from patronizing a business is plainly not harassment.

In recent years, we have witnessed attempts to stretch legal definitions of harassment to cover speech that result in speculative forms of psychological harm like the embarrassment or vulnerability that individuals on the list may genuinely have felt. But defense of the First Amendment and open discourse demands resisting that wider and fuzzier definition. Involvement in politics — even as a donor — entails a certain willingness to engage in the rough-and-tumble of discourse with those who may make you feel uncomfortable for the views you hold. Being called out publicly, as opposed to menaced personally, is fair game.

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There was a whole lot of ridiculous pearl-clutching over this – none worse than Kimberley Strassel, a WSJ opinionist, who really can’t see the trees for the imaginary forest. Transparency about political funding is the bare minimum the US needs right now.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Some people “aged” over 100 actually aren’t – it’s just that birth records were a mess. CC-licensed photo by Kevin Dooley on Flickr.

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

A selection of 12 links for you. Reboot! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Was email a mistake? • The New Yorker

Cal Newport:

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Anyone who works in a standard office environment has firsthand experience with the problems that followed the enthusiastic embrace of asynchronous communication. As the distributed-system theorists discovered, shifting away from synchronous interaction makes coördination more complex. The dream of replacing the quick phone call with an even quicker e-mail message didn’t come to fruition; instead, what once could have been resolved in a few minutes on the phone now takes a dozen back-and-forth messages to sort out. With larger groups of people, this increased complexity becomes even more notable. Is an unresponsive colleague just delayed, or is she completely checked out? When has consensus been reached in a group e-mail exchange? Are you, the e-mail recipient, required to respond, or can you stay silent without holding up the decision-making process? Was your point properly understood, or do you now need to clarify with a follow-up message? Office workers pondering these puzzles—the real-life analogues of the theory of distributed systems—now dedicate an increasing amount of time to managing a growing number of never-ending interactions.

Last year, the software company RescueTime gathered and aggregated anonymized computer-usage logs from tens of thousands of people. When its data scientists crunched the numbers, they found that, on average, users were checking e-mail or instant-messenger services like Slack once every six minutes. Not long before, a team led by Gloria Mark, the U.C. Irvine professor, had installed similar logging software on the computers of employees at a large corporation; the study found that the employees checked their in-boxes an average of seventy-seven times a day. Although we shifted toward asynchronous communication so that we could stop wasting time playing phone tag or arranging meetings, communicating in the workplace had become more onerous than it used to be. Work has become something we do in the small slivers of time that remain amid our Sisyphean skirmishes with our in-boxes.

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The more email you get, the less work you do.
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Operator of email management service Unroll.me settles FTC allegations that it deceived consumers • Federal Trade Commission

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An email management company will be required to delete personal information it collected from consumers as part of a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over allegations that the company deceived some consumers about how it accesses and uses their personal emails.

In a complaint, the FTC alleges that Unrollme Inc., falsely told consumers that it would not “touch” their personal emails, when in fact it was sharing the users’ email receipts (e-receipts) with its parent company, Slice Technologies, Inc.

E-receipts are emails sent to consumers following a completed transaction and can include, among other things, the user’s name, billing and shipping addresses, and information about products or services purchased by the consumer. Slice uses anonymous purchase information from Unrollme users’ e-receipts in the market research analytics products it sells.

Unrollme helps users unsubscribe from unwanted subscription emails and consolidates wanted email subscriptions into one daily email called the Rollup. The service requires users to provide Unrollme with access to their email accounts.

“What companies say about privacy matters to consumers,” said Andrew Smith, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “It is unacceptable for companies to make false statements about whether they collect information from personal emails.”

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Pity there isn’t a fine too. Unroll.me “closed” to EU customers back in May 2018 because it couldn’t comply with GDPR; and had been discovered in early 2017 selling its data to Uber and others. (The CEO’s mea culpa from April 2017, which I linked to here, has mysteriously vanished from the company blog, which is filled instead with utter pap, and it doesn’t seem to figure in the retrospective. I did some digging on the Waybaack Machine: it was removed from the blog some time between mid-July and early August of 2018.)
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February 2013: Why email spam is on the decline • Fortune

Dan Mitchell, in February 2013:

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Those weird little ads on the right side of your Facebook page—the ones depicting ugly shoes or pitching iffy continuing education degrees—are partly the result of the changing economics of both spam and online advertising in general.

Email spam became a huge business—and a huge problem for both Internet users and network managers—because marginal costs are near zero. Once a sleazy pitch for gray-market Viagra or a porn site is written, the additional cost of each spam message sent is almost nothing. Sending out millions of emails doesn’t cost much more than sending out just one. Very few people fall for the usually scammy offers, so sending them in bulk is necessary to actually snag paying customers.

But improvements to spam-blocking technologies, together with ever-cheaper “legit” advertising have worked to decrease email spam, according to a report from Kaspersky Lab, a maker of antivirus software. “With the emergence of Web 2.0,” the report states, “advertising opportunities on the Internet have skyrocketed: banners, context-based advertising, and ads on social networks and blogs.”

The percentage of email identified as spam is still huge—72.1% in 2012, according to the report. But it’s been dropping every year recently, and is the lowest it’s been in five years.

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Wonder how this looks now. Facebook is definitely not too troubled about who advertises there; it’s only if they have huge problems – such as some cryptocurrency ads – that they block them. Statista, meanwhile, has some stats saying that spam now is about 56% of email.
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Revealed: Microsoft contractors are listening to some Skype calls • VICE

Joseph Cox:

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Contractors working for Microsoft are listening to personal conversations of Skype users conducted through the app’s translation service, according to a cache of internal documents, screenshots, and audio recordings obtained by Motherboard. Although Skype’s website says that the company may analyze audio of phone calls that a user wants to translate in order to improve the chat platform’s services, it does not say some of this analysis will be done by humans.

The Skype audio obtained by Motherboard includes conversations from people talking intimately to loved ones, some chatting about personal issues such as their weight loss, and others seemingly discussing relationship problems. Other files obtained by Motherboard show that Microsoft contractors are also listening to voice commands that users speak to Cortana, the company’s voice assistant…

…”The fact that I can even share some of this with you shows how lax things are in terms of protecting user data,” a Microsoft contractor who provided the cache of files to Motherboard said. Motherboard granted the source anonymity to speak more candidly about internal Microsoft practices, and because the person is under a non-disclosure agreement with the company.

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At this rate we’re going to find out that everything involving voice has a chance of being listened to by a human at some point. And Microsoft will get whacked by the European data protection agencies for such slack practices.
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Study: many of the “oldest” people in the world may not be as old as we think • Vox

Kelsey Piper:

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We’ve long been obsessed with the super-elderly. How do some people make it to 100 or even 110 years old? Why do some regions — say, Sardinia, Italy, or Okinawa, Japan —produce dozens of these “supercentenarians” while other regions produce none? Is it genetics? Diet? Environmental factors? Long walks at dawn?

A new working paper released on bioRxiv, the open access site for prepublication biology papers, appears to have cleared up the mystery once and for all: It’s none of the above.

Instead, it looks like the majority of the supercentenarians (people who’ve reached the age of 110) in the United States are engaged in — intentional or unintentional — exaggeration.

The paper, by Saul Justin Newman of the Biological Data Science Institute at Australian National University, looked at something we often don’t give a second thought to: the state of official record-keeping.

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As the article (and paper) also shows, all the other places – Italy, Japan – with “supercentenarians” tend to have lousy records too.
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YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki: ‘Where’s the line of free speech – are you removing voices that should be heard?’ • The Guardian

Emine Saner:

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For all her careful, frustratingly corporate answers, Wojcicki is in an almost impossible position. Aside from the gargantuan task of trying to sift through the never-ending torrent of content, she has to contend with the fact that removing far-right commentators’ videos turns them into free-speech martyrs. She also has to keep “creators”, many of whom make a handsome living through the site, happy. I have no reason to disbelieve Wojcicki when she says “responsibility has been my number one priority”. The question is whether it is a task beyond her – and whether Google will tolerate changes that result in lower profits…

…Does she have time for anything else? “I like to garden,” she says. “I like animals.” She has chickens and goats. “I like to grow things. I love getting away by doing something completely different from technology, whether it’s learning about bees and having honey, or learning about different types of chickens, or varieties of fruit.” It sounds lovely, I say. She visibly relaxes and says: “It is.”

The day before we meet, the tech site Gizmodo publishes a piece on how extremist channels remain on YouTube, despite the new policies. In the face of fairly constant criticism, does Wojcicki ever feel like walking away? “No, I don’t. Because I feel a commitment to solving these challenges,” she says. “I care about the legacy that we leave and about how history will view this point in time. Here’s this new technology, we’ve enabled all these new voices. What did we do? Did we decide to shut it down and say only a small set of people will have their voice? Who will decide that, and how will it be decided? Or do we find a way to enable all these different voices and perspectives, but find a way to manage the abuse of it? I’m focused on making sure we can manage the challenges of having an open platform in a responsible way.”

Still, it is hard to resist picturing Wojcicki in her garden on a day off, attempting to nurture something beautiful while holding back the unstoppable force of weeds that just keep coming.

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Trump’s racist tweets: is the media part of the problem? • Vox

Ezra Klein:

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Let me start by being transparent about my own thinking. When I choose to cover racist comments like the ones Trump made, my implicit rationale for focusing on that story rather than anything else is something like this: It is newsworthy that the president of the United States is an unreconstructed racist. It is important that the public knows he is an unreconstructed racist. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

But as the media scholar Whitney Phillips has argued, the problem lurks inside the metaphor. Sunlight isn’t only, or even mainly, a disinfectant. What sunlight mostly does is help things grow. When Trump says of his racist arguments that “many people agree with me,” I agree with him. I believe, as many do, that there’s a lot of racism in America, and that one reason we don’t see more of it is it’s held in check by social opprobrium.

What I fear Trump is doing, with the media — including, at times, me — as his accomplice, is suffusing one of the hardiest weeds in American life with sunlight. These controversies are a constant signal to racists. They say, in short: You are not alone. You do not have to hide. You have powerful allies.

Phillips, whom I discussed this with on my podcast, argues that the “sunlight” metaphor has led the media astray. She prefers an ecological metaphor, where journalists are one of many groups trying to maintain the health of a public ecosystem. In this frame, some of what we cover is best understood as pollution — perhaps an inevitable byproduct of the ecosystem, but not something we want to disproportionately dump into the waterways.

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That’s a terrific, and much better, metaphor for what the media does with Trump. Stop polluting the airwaves is a much better call to arms.
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Video games don’t cause mass shootings. But gamer culture encourages hate • The Washington Post

Brianna Wu:

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Why are so many gamers angry and isolated? I often ask myself this question, because game developers are generally friendly and social people, as are the journalists who cover us. Yet our industry’s corrosive ideas about manhood and power bleed into too many of the products we ship. We’ve told one kind of player that they are the center of the universe, and we’ve catered to their every whim for 30 years. Consider the default video game protagonist: white, male and with a gun in hand as the solution to every problem. Meanwhile, in games from Smash TV to Super Mario, the default female character functions as a reward at the end of the adventure. Now that players are becoming more diverse, these tropes feel dated. But rather than change with the times, some revanchist players feel like their culture is being stolen — a sense of aggrieved resentment that will seem familiar to anyone who’s watched a Trump rally.

You can see all of this in our virtual worlds. In the Western action game “Red Dead Online,” for example, black players have reported being called the n-word by other gamers, their virtual avatars being hanged from cliffs in mock lynchings. One player has even built a YouTube following by recording taboo scenarios that he claims viewers want him to “test,” like whether it’s possible to feed a feminist character to an alligator. (It is.)

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“A gun in hand as the solution to every problem” is, in many ways, the defining American trope: it’s the founding myth of how the country was conquered, its inhabitants displaced, its slaves subjugated. Wu has hit on a key point. What’s different is that the US hasn’t recognised that it has no new lands to conquer.
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Atlanta appears to lead nation in e-scooter fatalities • Curbed Atlanta

Sean Keenan:

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according to industry observers and our research, Atlanta appears to be the only U.S. city to have seen at least three e-scooter riders die on its streets—four now, if including the recent death of a man run over while riding in nearby East Point, just south of downtown.

E-scooters have operated on Atlanta streets since May 2018, but all fatalities have occurred in the past three months.

Atlanta Bicycle Coalition leader Rebecca Serna told Curbed Atlanta that even one e-scooter-related death is unacceptable.

But what many people—city officials included—appear to be overlooking, she said, is that automobiles are far more deadly than any alternative mode of transportation.

“Having the context that 115 people died in one year of car crashes in Fulton County and 95 in DeKalb puts things in perspective,” she said. “Even one [death] is too many, but let’s recognize that our streets are unsafe for everyone, not just for scooters.”

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Well, OK, that’s fair context.
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Samsung is spamming Galaxy phones with multiple Note10 ads • Android Police

Corbin Davenport:

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Samsung is once again spamming Galaxy phones with advertisements, this time for the Note10.

This time around, push notifications advertising the Note10 are being sent out by at least three pre-installed applications — Samsung Pay, Bixby, and the Samsung Push Service. Bixby wants you to ask it about the Note10, Samsung Pay is offering points when you look at the phone’s product page, and Samsung Push Service just gives you a banner ad with no indication of where it came from. I received the Bixby ad on my international Galaxy S10e, but I haven’t personally seen the others.

To make matters even worse, Samsung has blocked disabling these alerts by holding down on them, at least for the Bixby app (again, I can’t verify the other types of alerts). To disable the Bixby notifications, you have to open Bixby, tap the menu icon at the top-right, select Settings, and set ‘Marketing notifications’ to off.

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“Marketing notifications” are a thing? That’s amazing. But of course nothing stands in the way of the rapacious desire of big corporations to Sell You Stuff.
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Google employees weighed free speech concerns before 2016 elections • CNBC

Jennifer Elias:

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In the 2016 [internal email] thread, titled “More political censorship and witch hunts in tech,” workers debated YouTube’s efforts to curb violent content.

YouTube has been under fire for failing to moderate widespread extremism content and misinformation. YouTube also recently faced backlash for its vague policies, including when it suspended the monetization of a popular conservative user Steven Crowder hours after defending him. Soon after, the company updated its policies by banning content that displays supremacy, but critics continue asking CEO Susan Wojcicki for more specifics on moderation efforts.

In the 2016 email thread, employees discussed a company effort called YouTube Heroes, a program where YouTube community members could sign up to act as additional mediators to flag content.

One employee noted that Heroes had been publicly criticized for enabling censorship, but others disagreed, saying that Heroes was simply a way to “scale up” moderation efforts without hiring more moderators…

…Perhaps most notably, in a precursor to the current fierce debates over conservative censorship within the company, one wrote, “I just hope the alt- right isn’t taking an innocent concept like free speech and perverting it for their own ends.”

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Gosh, who would imagine that they might do that.
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How a Norwegian Viking comedy producer hacked Netflix’s algorithm • Hollywood Reporter

Scott Roxborough:

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Netflix had given [“Norsemen” showrunner Anders] Tangen an Aug. 18, 2017, date for the premiere of Norsemen in its English-language territories (the show shot back-to-back versions in Norwegian and English). Three weeks before launch, he set up a campaign on Facebook, paying for targeted posts and Facebook promotions. The posts were fairly simple — most included one of six short (20- to 25-second) clips of the show and a link, either to the show’s webpage or to media coverage.

They used so-called A/B testing — showing two versions of a campaign to different audiences and selecting the most successful — to fine-tune. The U.S. campaign didn’t cost much — $18,500, which Tangen and his production partners put up themselves — and it was extremely precise. Tangen focused the initial campaign in and around major US cities (L.A., New York, Miami, Chicago) with additional pushes in Minnesota, Wisconsin and South Dakota, three states with large ethnic Norwegian populations. He broke potential Norsemen fans down into seven separate target groups, with each getting its own tailored Facebook campaign.

In just 28 days, the Norsemen campaign reached 5.5 million Facebook users, generating 2 million video views and some 6,000 followers for the show. Netflix noticed. “Three weeks after we launched, Netflix called me: ‘You need to come to L.A., your show is exploding,'” Tangen recalls.

Netflix’s algorithm had started to kick in.

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Neat. And now everyone is going to do this (if they aren’t already – the show aired two years ago, it seems).
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified