Consumer PC sales are forecast to slow – again. CC-licensed photo by DocChewbacca on Flickr.

A selection of 14 links for you. Sorry, long extension. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Walmart is rolling out the robots • WSJ

Sarah Nassauer and Chip Cutter:

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Walmart is expanding its use of robots in stores to help monitor inventory, clean floors and unload trucks, part of the retail giant’s efforts to control labor costs as it spends more to raise wages and offer new services like online grocery delivery.

The country’s largest private employer said at least 300 stores this year will add machines that scan shelves for out-of-stock products. Autonomous floor scrubbers will be deployed in 1,500 stores to help speed up cleaning, after a test in hundreds of stores last year. And the number of conveyor belts that automatically scan and sort products as they come off trucks will more than double, to 1,200.

The company said the addition of a single machine can cut a few hours a day of work previously done by a human, or allow Walmart to allocate fewer people to complete a task, a large saving when spread around 4,600 US stores. Executives said they are focused on giving workers more time to do other tasks, and on hiring in growing areas like e-commerce.

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What’s the betting they’ll go with “allocate fewer people to complete a task”? A fast-food diner I occasionally go to used to have waiter service; now you go to the counter to make your order. The staff dislike it (less interaction with people), diners dislike it (more queing), but guess what: more money for the owners.
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Google’s founders haven’t shown up at its weekly town halls in 2019 • Buzzfeed News

Alex Kantrowitz and Caroline O’Donovan:

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Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have yet to make an appearance at any of the company’s weekly “TGIF” town halls in 2019, BuzzFeed News has learned. Their absence from these meetings, the longest attendance lapse in company history, comes at a time when Google is wrestling with tough questions from its employees on a variety of issues, ranging from harassment to censorship.

The town halls give Google employees a chance to ask questions of leadership with no limitations, and are a key element of Google’s transparent workplace culture. They regularly feature an introduction from leadership, a presentation from a team, followed by time for employee questions. For years, Page and Brin have attended, either individually or together, and faced questions from Google’s rank and file about the company and its direction. Asked when their last TGIF appearance was, Google declined to comment.

“I don’t think they’ve ever missed more than a few consecutively, and definitely not both,” one Google employee said. “It’s a double act! One of them was consistently always there at minimum.”

Their withdrawal isn’t entirely unexpected, according to a company source. The cofounders planned to step back their Google involvement when they formed Alphabet in 2015…

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Are they bored with their toy? Uninterested in their staff? Yet Google’s facing more questions than ever.
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Google’s Play Store is packed with nasty, violent games aimed at kids • WIRED UK

K.G Orphanides:

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Mad Max Zombies, an Android first-person shooter full of spurting blood, disturbing imagery of walking corpses and realistic firearms, was rated by its creator as Pegi 3 – a rating that’s considered suitable for all age groups, with no sounds or pictures that are likely to frighten young children and only the mildest, most childlike depictions of violence.

It’s just one gory example of a growing problem. The Play Store is full of apps that defy Google’s age rating policy and filtering tools. Some of these games have been installed millions of times. After we sent Google a sample of 36 games with inappropriate content for their ratings and a further 16 with other forms of dubious content and permissions, including some which tracked the location of users, 16 games have so far either been entirely removed or re-released with revised ratings and permissions…

…In contrast to Apple, which has a strict age rating policy and approval process on all apps, Google seemingly does not invest its profits into building a robust, human-monitored system to ensure that all age ratings across its platform are correct. In fact, there’s very little control whatsoever of ratings given to games that can be downloaded by children through the Play Store. Behind the scenes, each game’s age appropriateness is assigned automatically by a questionnaire filled in by its creator. For anyone downloading a game, the Play Store displays an official Pegi age rating, despite there being no manual monitoring and rating for individual titles.

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Too reliant on algorithms. If Apple can afford humans to check this stuff, why can’t Google?
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Chinese state planner wants to ban crypto mining • Decrypt

Ben Munster:

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Chinese state planners want to phase out China’s vast Bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining sector, in a move that will further push miners away from the country—which controls an estimated 74% of global Bitcoin mining power.

On Monday, the National Development and Reform Commission listed the enormous cryptocurrency mining sector among various other industries slated to be “eliminated,” saying the enormous wattage required to secure the Bitcoin network—and those of other cryptocurrencies—could be put to better use elsewhere, according to Reuters.

The news comes several months after China enacted a nationwide ban on cryptocurrencies, crypto news sites and crypto startups, while simultaneously building out its blockchain capabilities for surveillance purposes. Miners—many of which are situated in the energy rich provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan—have also begun to flee amid the clampdown, with mining giant Bitmain relocating to Singapore in January.

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Love the “building out its blockchain capabilities for surveillance purposes” – which is slightly “but it’s so UNFAIR that they’re using this and stopping that.” Think this is going to crimp bitcoin quite a bit, quite soon.
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YouTube is developing choose-your-own-adventure programs • Bloomberg

Lucas Shaw:

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YouTube is developing choose-your-own-adventure-style shows, exploring a new storytelling format that could increase viewers and ad sales for the world’s largest video website.

An new unit will develop interactive programming and live specials under Ben Relles, who had been overseeing unscripted programs, the Google-owned company said Tuesday. Relles, who has worked at YouTube for eight years, just started in the role and is still exploring the best ways for YouTube viewers to participate in stories.

Producers have tried for years to tell stories that let viewers pick different outcomes, but only recently has the technology advanced enough to entice large investments from some of the world’s top media companies.

“We now have amazing new tools and opportunities to create and tell multilayered and interactive stories,” Susanne Daniels, YouTube’s head of original programming, said in a statement.

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Notice that it has shut down its VR studios, but is opening up this avenue. Netflix has really blazed a trail here with Bandersnatch, but it’s difficult to pull that off again and again.
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Roblox games platform plans European expansion • Financial Times

Aliya Ram:

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About a quarter of the company’s users are based in Europe, where it has been growing faster than the US, according to Chris Misner, president of Roblox International. 

He said Roblox, which was founded in 2004, had completed its first wave of growth in the US and Commonwealth countries and would now look to continental Europe and Asian markets for further growth. 

“We expect Europe to overtake the US in the next one or two years,” he said. “In Asia we are seeing green shoots, and I’m spending time looking at different markets out there.”

Roblox’s rise has gone relatively unnoticed by many adults, but its monthly active userbase of 90m people rivals some of the world’s most popular games, including shooting blockbuster Fortnite and Microsoft’s Minecraft, which have 78.3m and 91m monthly active users respectively, according to figures reported last year.

Unlike those titles, Roblox acts as a marketplace where users build their own games and virtual worlds that become more or less prominent based on their popularity with users. In this respect, the platform has become like a YouTube for games, which founder David Baszucki said enables developers to monetise their inventions. 

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Cultural influences – principally, news organisation managers’ indifference to video games – means that this whole sector is underreported.
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What kind of local news is Facebook featuring on Today In? Crime, car crashes, and not too much community • Nieman Journalism Lab

Christine Schmidt:

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If you don’t know what “Today In” is, don’t feel too bad — not many Facebook users do. Only about 1.1 million users have opted in to it in their app. (Check the hamburger-menu tab; you may have to tap on “More” to see it. It may sometimes pop up in your News Feed.) It began in a few test cities in early 2018 and it’s now live in 400-plus cities in the United States.

To see what sort of news it was surfacing, I tracked Today In’s stories for 10 different cities over a Monday–Friday period. The cities are a mix of big and small, some of which you’ll probably recognize without the state — Raleigh, New Orleans, Akron, Boise — and some you might not — Somerville, Massachusetts; Kingsport, Tennessee; Fort Pierce, Florida; Katy, Texas; Lincoln, Nebraska, and Toms River, New Jersey. Some are close to places Facebook considers “news deserts”; others still have a comparatively rich local news ecosystem. I noted the first five stories shared each afternoon in each city. (You can get more by tapping a “see more” button.) It’s not the most scientific method, but it’s a pretty good scan of what Facebook is surfacing.

What did I see? Satire, obituaries from funeral home websites, lots of local TV, and a weird network of sites that scrape other local news and yet somehow make it into Facebook’s scanner. And again, over half of the news was just crime, courts, and dead bodies.

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Basically, having laid waste to local journalism (along with Google), Facebook now finds there’s none to report. But also: its algorithms don’t know how or where to look.
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Brexit ‘already causing medicine shortages’ at pharmacies in England • The Guardian

Lisa O’Carroll:

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Brexit has contributed to a shortage of certain medicines at pharmacies in England, according to a body that represents the sector.

It comes as a medical charity says anxiety over drugs shortages has risen among epilepsy patients because of Brexit, potentially causing them further health issues.

Supply issues partly blamed on Brexit contingency planning have caused an official list of “concession” priced medicines – those drugs for which the NHS will pay a higher than usual tariff – to reach its longest since 2014, when the system was introduced.

The Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee (PSNC), which draws up the list, said Britain’s planned exit from the EU coupled with manufacturers’ views of the country as a less attractive market had caused these significant problems.

Medicines are usually added to the concessions list when manufacturers or wholesalers raise their prices because of factors such as supply issues. The list is considered a good measure for increases in shortages.

Ninety-six medicines appear on the concessions list, including the common painkiller naproxen and certain morphine products prescribed to cancer patients.

Simon Dukes, the chief executive of PSNC, said: “Community pharmacies are reporting increasing problems sourcing some generic medicines for their patients.”

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The irony is that it’s the older demographic, who mostly voted for Leave, who are now being affected. It might even shorten their lives. (I heard exactly the same point about medicine shortages, and the same reason, from my doctor the morning this story appeared.)
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Record 83% of surveyed US teens own an iPhone • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

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A record 83% of U.S. teens own an iPhone as of spring 2019, according to investment bank Piper Jaffray’s semiannual “Taking Stock With Teens” survey of around 8,000 high school students. Respondents were roughly 54% male and 46% female with an average age of 16.3 years.

Meanwhile, 86% of U.S. teens expect their next smartphone to be an iPhone, matching an all-time high set in fall 2018. This metric has steadily grown in Apple’s favor over the years, rising from 75% in spring 2016.

iPhone popularity among teens is a good sign for Apple, as many of them could stick with the iPhone as an adult. Teens also become locked into the Apple ecosystem at an early age, becoming accustomed to services like iMessage, Apple Music, and iCloud as well as accessories like the AirPods and Apple Watch.

The survey found that 27% of US teens own a smartwatch, while 22% of respondents plan to purchase an Apple Watch within the next six months. By comparison, 20% of teens said they plan to purchase an Apple Watch in the next six months in the year-ago survey.

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That’s a lot of Apple Watches. Surely the peak audience.
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A powerful spyware app now targets iPhone owners • TechCrunch

Zack Whittaker:

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Security researchers have discovered a powerful surveillance app first designed for Android devices can now target victims with iPhones.

The spy app, found by researchers at mobile security firm Lookout, said its developer abused their Apple-issued enterprise certificates to bypass the tech giant’s app store to infect unsuspecting victims.

The disguised carrier assistance app once installed can silently grab a victim’s contacts, audio recordings, photos, videos and other device information — including their real-time location data. It can be remotely triggered to listen in on people’s conversations, the researchers found. Although there was no data to show who might have been targeted, the researchers noted that the malicious app was served from fake sites purporting to be cell carriers in Italy and Turkmenistan.

Researchers linked the app to the makers of a previously discovered Android app, developed by the same Italian surveillance app maker Connexxa, known to be in use by the Italian authorities.

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What’s not clear is whether the app could grab those contacts, photos etc without the user’s permission, or whether iOS’s permissions structure is robust against that threat. Of course the social engineering side – “this app needs to access…” – can still work.
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Just like cops snared the Golden State killer, we tried to track down BuzzFeed employees from their DNA • Buzzfeed News

Peter Aldhous:

»

How hard is it to crack cases in this way? And what issues does it raise, as police recruit genealogists to help them solve crimes by sifting through the perpetrators’ extended family trees?

To explore these questions, my editor Virginia Hughes and I conjured up an experiment: She would recruit BuzzFeed employees to play the role of “suspects” and get their DNA tested with a company used by genealogy enthusiasts. She’d then download their DNA profiles, containing data on hundreds of thousands of genetic markers, and send the files to me labeled with randomly chosen fake names. Then I’d play genealogy “detective” and try to figure out who they really were.

In the end, I identified 6 out of our 10 volunteers. Four of those cases I solved by tracking them down through their relatives’ family trees, much as the cops did with DeAngelo. In a twist I didn’t anticipate, I found two more not through their relatives, but simply because their ancestry indicated that their family came from a specific country — raising uncomfortable questions about genetic racial profiling.

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Pretty soon people are going to start doing this for their own entertainment. And then you’ll get people claiming to have solved murders. It could get to be a big mess.
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Global device shipments will be flat in 2019 • Gartner

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“For the eighth consecutive year, the PC market is at a standstill,” said Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner. “PC shipments will total 258 million units in 2019, a 0.6% decline from 2018.” Traditional PCs are set to decline 3% in 2019 to total 189 million units.

Worldwide Device Shipments by Device Type, 2018-2021 (Millions of Units)

Device Type	2018	2019	2020	2021
Traditional PCs (Desk-Based and Notebook)	195,317	189,472	182,823	175,058
Ultramobiles (Premium)	64,471	68,869	74,432	79,871
Total PC Market	259,787	258,341	257,255	254,929
Ultramobiles (Basic and Utility)	149,561	147,963	145,811	143,707
Computing Device Market	409,348	406,304	403,066	398,636
Mobile Phones	1,811,922	1,802,394	1,824,628	1,798,356
Total Device Market	2,221,270	2,208,697	2,227,694	2,196,992

Source: Gartner (April 2019)

Slow upgrade on phones (though by 2023 foldables might be 5% of high-end phones – that’s tiny), and consumers are retiring but not replacing their PCs. Tech stasis.

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We may be just days away from seeing a black hole for the first time ever • BGR

Mike Wehner:

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The Event Horizon researchers are going all-out with the announcement, which is scheduled for this Wednesday, and they’ll be holding press conferences in multiple languages simultaneously all around the globe.

The official announcement promises plenty of information as well as “audiovisual material” which we can only hope includes the first-ever images of a black hole.

Countless theories, calculations, and estimations have been made about black holes, leading science to suspect a jet black “pit” of sorts with gravitational pull so intense that nothing can escape it. What a real black hole actually looks like, however, could differ significantly. There’s a lot riding on what we see on Wednesday, and while we’ve seen black holes in science fiction for decades, we might be in for a surprise.

The images, once we see them, will have been made possible by a planet-wide network of telescopes working in unison to peer deeper into the galaxy than ever before. The Event Horizon Telescope project’s primary goal has always been to image a black hole, and they’re now just days away from delivering on that promise.

The announcement is scheduled for 0900 EST [1400 BST, 0600 PST] on Wednesday, April 10th. And the entire event will be streamed online via Facebook as well as the ESO’s official website.

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That’s today, if you’re reading this on April 10. Let’s hope it’s more than a slide with a black dot at the centre.
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Fiat Chrysler pools fleet with Tesla to avoid EU emissions fines • Financial Times

Patrick McGee and Peter Campbell:

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Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has agreed to pay Tesla hundreds of millions of euros so the electric carmaker’s vehicles are counted in its fleet in order to avoid large fines for breaking tough new EU emissions rules.

The move will allow FCA to offset CO2 emissions from its cars against Tesla’s, lowering its average figure to a permissible level. From next year, the EU’s target for average CO2 emissions from cars is 95g per kilometre.

In 2018, average emissions were 120.5g per kilometre, according to data supplier Jato Dynamics. FCA averaged 123g last year, according to UBS, which said the carmaker had the “highest risk of not meeting the target”.

Analysts at Jefferies forecast FCA could face fines in excess of €2bn in 2021 when the new targets become law. A study by PA Consulting last year said FCA was likely to exceed the target by 6.7g of CO2 per kilometre — the biggest gap among the 13 carmakers it profiled. 

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Tesla getting more money must be a good thing; its very existence is pushing other vehicle makers towards electric. But this is a scuzzy way to do it.
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Watching Netflix: but with whose password? CC-licensed photo by Stock Catalog on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Still not fired. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

US workers are highly taxed if you count premiums • People’s Policy Project

Matt Bruenig:

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The OECD may not be able to include employer-based health insurance premiums into its model, but I certainly can. And when I add them into the OECD model, I find that the average American worker has one of the highest compulsory payment rates in the developed world.

For this analysis, I take the information from the OECD’s Taxing Wages model and combine it with data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). The MEPS data shows the average premium for employer insurance, broken down by type of coverage (family or single) and payer (employer or employee). By counting those average premiums as NTCPs, we can compute a compulsory payment rate that is comparable to the compulsory payment rates the OECD produces for other countries.

To be clear about what I am doing here, the following graph provides a detailed breakdown of the difference between what we normally think of as “employee taxes” and the OECD concept of “compulsory payments.” This graph is for a married wage-earner with two kids who earns the average wage and has a family insurance plan through their employer.

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The Netherlands has compulsory private pensions as well as compulsory private health insurance. The UK’s down there at 26.1%; Denmark and Norway and Sweden, those crazy socialist places, are 26.7%, 32.4% and 38.3%. And the US up there at 43.2%.

Because private health insurance is inefficient compared to government-run healthcare. Monopsony works, sometimes.
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Does Google meet its users’ expectations around consumer privacy? This news industry research says no • Nieman Journalism Lab

Jason Kint:

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Digital Content Next surveyed a nationally representative sample1 to find out what people expect from Google — and, as with a similar study we conducted last year about Facebook, the results were unsettling.

Our findings show that many of Google’s data practices deviate from consumer expectations. We find it even more significant that consumer’s expectations are at an all-time low even after 2018, a year in which awareness around consumer privacy reached peak heights.

The results of the study are consistent with our Facebook study: People don’t want surveillance advertising. A majority of consumers indicated they don’t expect to be tracked across Google’s services, let alone be tracked across the web in order to make ads more targeted.

Q: Do you expect Google to collect data about a person’s activities on Google platforms (e.g. Android and Chrome) and apps (e.g. Search, YouTube, Maps, Waze)?
YES: 48%NO: 52%

Q: Do you expect Google to track a person’s browsing across the web in order to make ads more targeted?
YES: 43%NO: 57%

Nearly two out of three consumers don’t expect Google to track them across non-Google apps, offline activities from data brokers, or via their location history.

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Don’t expect – or perhaps aren’t aware that it’s capable of doing.
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Terrifying blog documents the times when the Google camera catches itself in a mirror • It’s Nice That

Liv Siddall:

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Internet-loving artist Mario Santamaria has taken advantage of Google’s scheme to take the world into art galleries and ornate buildings all over the world by collecting screenshots of moments where the Google camera catches its own reflection in a mirror.

Ghostly figures interact with the camera in some shots, and in others the machinery is draped with a weird silver cloth – first prize goes to the person who can identify what this cloth actually does. For me this is the best Google-related blog since Jon Rafman’s 9 Eyes and is hopefully a new dawn for simple, spine-tingling projects that linger with you just a smidge longer than you’d like.

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These are some weird, weird pictures. Like 2001’s end sequence.
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To stop copycats, Snapchat shares itself • TechCrunch

Josh Constine:

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Snapchat’s plan is to let other apps embed the best parts of it rather than building their own half-rate copies.

Why reinvent the wheel of Stories, Bitmoji, and ads when you can reuse the original? A high-ranking Snap executive told me on background that this is indeed the strategy. If it’s going to invent these products, and others want something similar, it’s smarter to enable and partly control the Snapchatification than to try to ignore it. Otherwise, Facebook might be the one to platform-tize what Snap inspired everyone to want.

The “Camera company” corrected course and took back control of its destiny this week at its first ever Snap Partner Summit in its hometown of Los Angeles. Now it’s a camera platform thanks to Snap Kit. Its new Story Kit will implant Snapchat Stories into other apps later this year. They can display a more traditional carousel of your friends’ Stories, or lace them into their app in a custom format. Houseparty’s Stories carousel shares what your buddies are up to outside of the group video chat app. Tinder will let you show off your Snapchat Story alongside your photos to seduce potential matches. But the camera stays inside Snapchat, with new options to share out to these App Stories.

This is how Snapchat colonizes the native app ecosystem similarly to how Facebook invaded the web with the Like button.

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I’ll admit, I don’t really get this. So we’re going to get the confusing Snapchat interface all over the place? Or Snapchat is going to learn what its interface ought to be?

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14% of Netflix users share passwords: survey • Recode

Peter Kafka and Rani Molla:

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Odds are very good that if you’re reading this, you watch Netflix. Are you paying for Netflix? That’s another story.

The streaming service says it has at least 139 million paid subscribers around the world. But there are decent odds that many more people are watching Netflix and letting someone else pay for it.

A new survey from analysts MoffettNathanson finds that 14% of US Netflix users admit that they’re watching the service using an account paid for by someone they don’t live with. That is, they’re watching Netflix even though they’re not technically supposed to be watching Netflix.

As analyst Michael Nathanson points out, Netflix (which has not gone out of its way — at all — to stop password sharers) can view this as a half-empty/half-full situation.

On the plus side, he figures Netflix non-payers currently represent some 8 million users who could eventually be persuaded to pay for Triple Frontier and other Netflix content. On the other hand, if those non-payers never end up paying, they end up reducing Netflix’s growth prospects.

Another very interesting data point from Nathanson’s survey is that Netflix users love stuff like Triple Frontier and Friends and everything else in the company’s huge catalog. But content isn’t the only reason they love Netflix: They love the Netflix product itself — an ad-free, on-demand service that lets you watch whatever you want (assuming Netflix has it), whenever you want, as many times as you want.

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Biggest reason people like Netflix? “I like not being interrupted by ads.” US TV is so screwed up. (Also: 55% of Netflix users say they have a personal subscription, 27% a family subscription. That 14% is probably low.)
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Feds: woman arrested at Mar-a-Lago had hidden-camera detector • Miami Herald

Jay Weaver, Sarah Blaskey, Caitlin Ostroff, and Nicholas Nehamas:

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A federal prosecutor argued in court Monday that Yujing Zhang, the Chinese woman arrested trying to enter President Donald Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach last month, “lies to everyone she encounters” and said a search of her hotel room uncovered more than $8,000 in cash, as well as a “signal-detector” device used to reveal hidden cameras.

Also uncovered in the search: $7,500 in US hundred-dollar bills and $663 in Chinese currency, in addition to nine USB drives, five SIM cards and other electronics, according to federal prosecutor Rolando Garcia.

Prosecutors are treating the case as a national-security matter and an FBI counterintelligence squad is investigating, sources familiar with the inquiry told the Miami Herald.

Zhang gave conflicting accounts of why she came to Mar-a-Lago on March 30, at one point saying she had been invited to attend a social event…

…Secret Service agent Samuel Ivanovich, who interviewed Zhang on the day of her arrest, testified at the hearing. He stated that when another agent put Zhang’s thumb-drive into his computer, it immediately began to install files, a “very out-of-the-ordinary” event that he had never seen happen before during this kind of analysis. The agent had to immediately stop the analysis to halt any further corruption of his computer, Ivanovich said. The analysis is ongoing but still inconclusive, he testified.

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D’oh! You put the thumb drive in your sikrit FBI Computer?! (Among suggested tags for this story: “idiots”.)
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Researchers find Google Play store apps were actually government malware • Motherboard

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Riccardo Coluccini:

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Hackers working for a surveillance company infected hundreds of people with several malicious Android apps that were hosted on the official Google Play Store for months, Motherboard has learned.

In the past, both government hackers and those working for criminal organizations have uploaded malicious apps to the Play Store. This new case once again highlights the limits of Google’s filters that are intended to prevent malware from slipping onto the Play Store. In this case, more than 20 malicious apps went unnoticed by Google over the course of roughly two years.

Motherboard has also learned of a new kind of Android malware on the Google Play store that was sold to the Italian government by a company that sells surveillance cameras but was not known to produce malware until now. Experts told Motherboard the operation may have ensnared innocent victims as the spyware appears to have been faulty and poorly targeted. Legal and law enforcement experts told Motherboard the spyware could be illegal.

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Italy’s government subsequently shut down the malware infrastructure and investigated the company behind the spyware.
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Dogs demonstrate the existence of an epileptic seizure odour in humans • Nature

A six-strong team at the University of Rennes:

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Although different studies have shown that diseases such as breast or lung cancer are associated with specific bodily odours, no study has yet tested the possibility that epileptic seizures may be reflected in an olfactory profile, probably because there is a large variety of seizure types. The question is whether a “seizure-odour”, that would be transversal to individuals and types of seizures, exists. This would be a pre requisite for potential anticipation, either by electronic systems (e.g., e-noses) or trained dogs.

The aim of the present study therefore was to test whether trained dogs, as demonstrated for cancer or diabetes, may discriminate a general epileptic seizure odor (different from body odours of the same person in other contexts and common to different persons). The results were very clear: all dogs discriminated the seizure odour. The sensitivity and specificity obtained were amongst the highest shown up to now for discrimination of diseases.

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You think you could get a machine to do this? Dogs are about 100,000 times more sensitive to such smells than electronic noses. They’re also able to detect colon cancer, and the onset of migraines.

And yet the internet is stuffed with cat videos?
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Amazon shoppers misled by ‘bundled’ star-ratings and reviews •| The Guardian

Hilary Osborne:

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The research found:

• Badly translated or updated Kindle versions of Emma by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, which include references to “moms”, “guys” and “buddies”, but appear to have 4.5-star ratings from hundreds of reviewers.

• A 2017 TV version of Dirty Dancing that shares the 4.5-star reviews of the original film, despite being described by Hollywood Reporter as a “bloated” remake “that nobody asked for and nobody is likely to truly enjoy”.

• Reviews for Wuthering Heights appearing under listings for Jane Eyre, and vice versa.

• Complaints from consumers who said they had been misled when buying books from a variety of authors – from JK Rowling to Shakespeare.

• Star ratings being combined for different products in other departments, from electronics to gardening equipment.

The problems with some reviews seem to go back years, with complaints from readers pointing out they were appearing under the wrong works and editions since at least 2014.

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What do we do when the antibiotics stop working? CC-licensed photo by mostly*harmless on Flickr.

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A selection of 11 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

A mysterious infection, spanning the globe in a climate of secrecy • The New York Times

Matt Richtel and Andrew Jacobs:

»

The germ, a fungus called Candida auris, preys on people with weakened immune systems, and it is quietly spreading across the globe. Over the last five years, it has hit a neonatal unit in Venezuela, swept through a hospital in Spain, forced a prestigious British medical center to shut down its intensive care unit, and taken root in India, Pakistan and South Africa.

Recently C. auris reached New York, New Jersey and Illinois, leading the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to add it to a list of germs deemed “urgent threats.”

The man at Mount Sinai died after 90 days in the hospital, but C. auris did not. Tests showed it was everywhere in his room, so invasive that the hospital needed special cleaning equipment and had to rip out some of the ceiling and floor tiles to eradicate it.

“Everything was positive — the walls, the bed, the doors, the curtains, the phones, the sink, the whiteboard, the poles, the pump,” said Dr. Scott Lorin, the hospital’s president. “The mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling, everything in the room was positive.”

C. auris is so tenacious, in part, because it is impervious to major antifungal medications, making it a new example of one of the world’s most intractable health threats: the rise of drug-resistant infections.

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Between this and climate change, we’re really racing towards giant problems in the next decades.
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Netflix confirms it killed AirPlay support, won’t let you beam shows to Apple TVs anymore • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

With no warning and little explanation, Netflix has removed the easiest way to sling its shows from one Apple device to another: AirPlay.

Netflix confirmed to The Verge that it pulled the wireless casting feature this past week, due to what it’s calling a “technical limitation.” But it’s not the kind of technical limitation you’d think.

You see, Apple recently partnered with most of the major TV brands to allow AirPlay 2 to send shows directly to their 2019 TV sets with a firmware update later this year, but a Netflix spokeperson tells me AirPlay 2 doesn’t have digital identifiers to let Netflix tell those TVs apart — and so the company can’t certify its users are getting the best Netflix experience when casting to those new sets.

So now, it’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater and pulling the plug on AirPlay, period. “We can’t distinguish which device is which, we can’t actually certify the devices… so we’ve had to just shut down support for it,” a Netflix spokesperson says.

To be clear, that means Apple TV set-top box users can no longer cast Netflix, either.

«

Oh, sure. “..to ensure our standard of quality for viewing is being met.” As if smart TVs don’t have a zillion settings – aspect ratio, zoom, motion smoothing – that Netflix completely ignores, even though they don’t give people the best quality for viewing.

It comes across as a pissant tit-for-tat, coming just after Apple announced its own video channel offering (but no date or price). All it does is inconvenience Netflix users; you’re not going to get people who own at least one Apple device (casting the show) to give it up just for this. And a smart TV will surely have the Netflix app on it, so this is doubly pointless.
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Google asked 5,600 employees about remote work. This is what they learned • Fast Company

Ruth Reader:

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Working remotely can be really tough. To get some insight into how to do it better, Google conducted a two-year study involving data from 5,600 employees across the US, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Approximately 30% of the company’s meetings involve staff in more than two time zones, and 39% involve more than two cities. Veronica Gilrane, manager of Google’s People Innovation Lab, oversaw the study and has written a guide for how to make the most of distributed teams. Today, she is releasing a report of her findings.

On the outset of the study, the team hypothesized that distributed teams might not be as productive as their centrally located counterparts. “We were a little nervous about that,” says Gilrane. She was surprised to find that distributed teams performed just as well. Unfortunately, she also found that there is a lot more frustration involved in working remotely. Workers in other offices can sometimes feel burdened to sync up their schedules with the main office. They can also feel disconnected from the team.

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Samsung Electronics flags earnings miss as chip prices slide • Reuters

Ju-min Park and Heekyong Yang:

»

Samsung Electronics said on Tuesday first-quarter profit would likely miss market expectations due to falls in chip prices and slowing demand for display panels, in an unprecedented statement ahead of its earnings guidance.

The announcement came after the Apple Inc supplier and rival told shareholders last week that slack global economic growth and softer demand for memory chips, its core business, would weigh on operations in 2019.

“The company expects the scope of price declines in main memory chip products to be larger than expected,” Samsung said in a regulatory filing pre-empting its earnings guidance due next week.

Samsung did not elaborate on the purpose of its filing. A company official confirmed the global leader in smartphones, televisions and computer chips had not previously provided comment before its official earnings estimate.

The firm was forecast to post a 7.2 trillion won (US$6.4bn) operating profit for the January-March period, according to Refinitiv SmartEstimate, more than 50% below the 15.6 trillion won recorded in the same period a year ago.

Its sales were expected to fall to 53.7 trillion won from 60.6 trillion won a year ago, Refinitiv shows.

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Chips and displays have been the driver of Samsung’s profits for a while now; memory chips have seen a glut worldwide, though.
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Exclusive: Google cancels AI ethics board in response to outcry • Vox

Kelsey Piper:

»

Thursday afternoon, a Google spokesperson told Vox that the company has decided to dissolve the panel, called the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC), entirely. Here is the company’s statement in full:

»

It’s become clear that in the current environment, ATEAC can’t function as we wanted. So we’re ending the council and going back to the drawing board. We’ll continue to be responsible in our work on the important issues that AI raises, and will find different ways of getting outside opinions on these topics.

«

The panel was supposed to add outside perspectives to ongoing AI ethics work by Google engineers, all of which will continue. Hopefully, the cancellation of the board doesn’t represent a retreat from Google’s AI ethics work, but a chance to consider how to more constructively engage outside stakeholders.

«

It was a total AI-wash (we need a better word), and good riddance. The board wouldn’t have agreed on anything, and there’s no indication Google would have taken any notice of what they said, or if they could have said it publicly. The puzzle is who at Google thought it was a good idea, and picked those people. Many more questions around this.
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Microsoft, Facebook, trust and privacy • Benedict Evans

Evans finds strong parallels, 25-odd years apart:

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much like the [creators of the] Microsoft macro viruses, the ‘bad actors’ on Facebook did things that were in the manual. They didn’t prise open a locked window at the back of the building – they knocked on the front door and walked in. They did things that you were supposed to be able to do, but combined them in an order and with malign intent that hadn’t really been anticipated.

It’s also interesting to compare the public discussion of Microsoft and of Facebook before these events. In the 1990s, Microsoft was the ‘evil empire’, and a lot of the narrative within tech focused on how it should be more open, make it easier for people to develop software that worked with the Office monopoly, and make it easier to move information in and out of its products. Microsoft was ‘evil’ if it did anything to make life harder for developers. Unfortunately, whatever you thought of this narrative, it pointed in the wrong direction when it came to this use case. Here, Microsoft was too open, not too closed.

Equally, in the last 10 years many people have argued that Facebook is too much of a ‘walled garden’ – that is is too hard to get your information out and too hard for researchers to pull information from across the platform. People have argued that Facebook was too restrictive on how third party developers could use the platform. And people have objected to Facebook’s attempts to enforce the single real identities of accounts. As for Microsoft, there may well have been justice in all of these arguments, but also as for Microsoft, they pointed in the wrong direction when it came to this particular scenario. For the Internet Research Agency, it was too easy to develop for Facebook, too easy to get data out, and too easy to change your identity. The walled garden wasn’t walled enough. 

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Fun fact: GPS uses 10 bits to store the week. That means it runs out… oh heck – April 6, 2019 • The Register

Shaun Nichols:

»

Older satnavs and such devices won’t be able to use America’s Global Positioning System properly after April 6 unless they’ve been suitably updated or designed to handle a looming epoch rollover.

GPS signals from satellites include a timestamp, needed in part to calculate one’s location, that stores the week number using ten binary bits. That means the week number can have 210 or 1,024 integer values, counting from zero to 1,023 in this case. Every 1,024 weeks, or roughly every 20 years, the counter rolls over from 1,023 to zero.

The first Saturday in April will mark the end of the 1,024th week, after which the counter will spill over from 1,023 to zero. The last time the week number overflowed like this was in 1999, nearly two decades on from the first epoch in January 1980.

You can see where this is going. If devices in use today are not designed or patched to handle this latest rollover, they will revert to an earlier year after that 1,024th week in April, causing attempts to calculate position to potentially fail. System and navigation data could even be corrupted, we’re warned.

«

Newer devices are fine, though the Samsung Galaxy S2 seems to be affected. The weird way GPS counts time (using 1.5 second increments) is worth reading.
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The people behind ByteDance’s app factory • The Information

Yunan Zhang:

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ByteDance’s huge headcount [of 40,000, more than Facebook’s 35,600 full-time staff] is the reflection of a nagging reality. The firm bills itself not as a content platform but as primarily an artificial intelligence business whose algorithms can automatically match any kind of content to users. But its operations are labor-intensive.

About half of the company’s labor force is engaged in either ad sales or content moderation. About 10,000 employees work on the ad sales side, trying to sell ad space in ByteDance apps to China’s small, medium and large enterprises. Many are employed in call centers, focused on recruiting new advertisers and trying to draw away advertisers from rival platforms like Baidu. These salespeople have high performance goals. Running the company’s monetization team is Zhang Lidong. Before joining ByteDance, he was an experienced journalist and head of advertising at a newspaper, the Beijing Times.

So far, ByteDance’s advertising revenue is nearly all derived from the domestic market. It’s unclear how it will build out a sales channel overseas once it starts marketing its platform to advertisers and whether it will require additional hires for sales teams.

Another 10,000 employees, spread across different products, monitor the content on ByteDance apps, including Toutiao and the domestic version of TikTok, called Douyin. Their task is to make sure content abides by China’s rules. China’s censorship rules are vague and often fluid. What’s OK to publish today is suddenly forbidden tomorrow, depending on opaque internal Communist Party dictates. President Xi Jinping has tightened the party’s grip on online expression. ByteDance has also faced claims that it is helping to spread gossip and disinformation.

ByteDance has in the past run afoul of China’s strict censorship regime, which even ordered the shutdown of a ByteDance popular comedy app. When last year ByteDance hired an extra 2,000 content moderators, it gave priority to hiring Communist Party members.

«

Got that? A quarter of its staff are there for content moderation. Depending on your viewpoint, that’s either proportionate, or crazy.
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Android TV update puts home-screen ads on multi-thousand-dollar Sony Smart TVs • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

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The advertising is a “Sponsored Channel” part of the “Android TV Core Services” app that ships with all Android TV devices. A “Channel” in Android TV parlance means an entire row of thumbnails in the UI will be dedicated to “sponsored” content. Google provided XDA Developers with a statement saying that yes, this is on purpose, but for now it’s a “pilot program.”

Sony has tersely worded a support page detailing the “Sponsored channel,” too. There’s no mention here of it being a pilot program. Sony’s page, titled “A sponsored channel has suddenly appeared on my TV Home menu,” says, “This change is included in the latest Android TV Launcher app (Home app) update. The purpose is to help you discover new apps and contents for your TV.”

Sony goes on to say, “This channel is managed by Google” and “the Sponsored channel cannot be customized.” Sony basically could replace the entire page with a “Deal with it” sunglasses gif, and it would send the same message.

Buying a product knowing it has ads in it is one thing, but users on Reddit and elsewhere are understandably angry about ads suddenly being patched into their devices—especially in cases when these devices are multi-thousand-dollar 4K Sony televisions. There is an option to disable the ads if you dig into the settings but users are reporting the ads aren’t staying disabled. For now, uninstalling updates for the “Android TV Core Services” app is the best way to remove the ads.

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“But that’s my nature,” said the scorpion.
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Apple hires AI expert Ian Goodfellow from Google • CNBC

Jordan Novet:

»

Goodfellow updated his LinkedIn profile on Thursday to acknowledge that he moved from Google to Apple in March. He said he’s a director of machine learning in the Special Projects Group. In addition to developing AI for features like FaceID and Siri, Apple also has been working on autonomous driving technology. Recently the autonomous group had a round of layoffs.

A Google spokesperson confirmed his departure. Apple declined to comment. Goodfellow didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Goodfellow is the father of an AI approach known as generative adversarial networks, or GANs. The approach draws on two networks, one known as a generative network and the other known as a discriminative network, and can be used to come up with unusual and creative outputs in the form of audio, video and text.

GAN systems have been used to generate “deepfake” fake media content.

Goodfellow got his Ph.D. at the University of Montreal in 2014, and since then he has worked at OpenAI and Google. At OpenAI he was paid more than $800,000, according to a tax filing. His research is widely cited in academic literature.

«

Quite what Apple is doing with machine learning remains unclear; there’s a paper on GANs published by one of its teams, and you don’t get any clue what application it has, except to other machine learning. But a big hire away from Google.
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What (probably) finally killed AirPower • iFixit

Craig Lloyd:

»

Wireless charging pads use electromagnetic induction to juice up your phone. Both the pad and your phone contain wire coils: the pad draws current from the wall and runs it through the coil, creating an electromagnetic field. That field induces an electric current in your phone’s wire coil, which it uses to charge the battery.

However, the electricity being transmitted to your phone isn’t perfectly clean or ideal. It generates some noise, which can interfere with other wireless devices. That’s why the FCC (and regulatory bodies in other countries) set strict limits on wireless emissions.

Noise from a single coil might not be a problem, but each charging coil generates a slightly different waveform. When those waves overlap, the constructive interference intensifies their strength. Just like when two ocean waves collide and combine their height, radio frequencies can combine their intensity as they interact.

Managing these overlapping harmonic frequencies is incredibly challenging, and gets harder the more coils that you are integrating. From patent filings, it looks like Apple’s ambitious plan was to use considerably more coils [maybe up to 32] than other charging pads on the market.

Other multi-device wireless chargers place two or three coils side-by-side, but require you to fiddle with your phone to find the “sweet spot” over one coil for it to start charging. With AirPower, Apple was trying to create one large charging surface using overlapping coils, allowing it to power multiple devices from anywhere on the mat. But that introduces multiple challenges.

We asked an engineer with experience building wireless charging systems what obstacles Apple was working to overcome. “Over time, these harmonics add up and they become really powerful signals in the air,” explains William Lumpkins, VP of Engineering at O & S Services. “And that can be difficult—that can stop someone’s pacemaker if it’s too high of a level. Or it could short circuit someone’s hearing aid.” If Apple’s multi-coil layout was spinning off harmonics left and right, it’s possible AirPower couldn’t pass muster with US or EU regulations.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You think you’re sending the army to the right place – but what if the reconnaissance photo is a deepfake? CC-licensed photo by Enough Project on Flickr.

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

Facebook ad algorithm is a race and gender stereotyping machine • The Intercept

Sam Biddle:

»

Rather than targeting a demographic niche, the researchers requested only that their ads reach Facebook users in the United States, leaving matters of ethnicity and gender entirely up to Facebook’s black box. As Facebook itself tells potential advertisers, “We try to show people the ads that are most pertinent to them.” What exactly does the company’s ad-targeting black box, left to its own devices, consider pertinent? Are Facebook’s ad-serving algorithms as prone to bias like so many others? The answer will not surprise you.

For one portion of the study, researchers ran ads for a wide variety of job listings in North Carolina, from janitors to nurses to lawyers, without any further demographic targeting options. With all other things being equal, the study found that “Facebook delivered our ads for jobs in the lumber industry to an audience that was 72% white and 90% men, supermarket cashier positions to an audience of 85% women, and jobs with taxi companies to a 75% black audience even though the target audience we specified was identical for all ads.” Ad displays for “artificial intelligence developer” listings also skewed white, while listings for secretarial work overwhelmingly found their way to female Facebook users.

Although Facebook doesn’t permit advertisers to view the racial composition of an ad’s viewers, the researchers said they were able to confidently infer these numbers by cross-referencing the indicators Facebook does provide, particularly regions where users live, which in some states can be cross-referenced with race data held in voter registration records.

In the case of housing ads — an area Facebook has already shown in the past has potential for discriminatory abuse — the results were also heavily skewed along racial lines.

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Machine learning specialists have observed that ML picks out little differences and emphasises them. That’s what this does – and magnifies the existing differences. So it amplifies existing discrimination.
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The newest AI-enabled weapon: ‘deep-faking’ photos of the Earth • Nextgov

Patrick Tucker:

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Worries about deep fakes—machine-manipulated videos of celebrities and world leaders purportedly saying or doing things that they really didn’t—are quaint compared to a new threat: doctored images of the Earth itself.

China is the acknowledged leader in using an emerging technique called generative adversarial networks to trick computers into seeing objects in landscapes or in satellite images that aren’t there, says Todd Myers, automation lead and Chief Information Officer in the Office of the Director of Technology at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

“The Chinese are well ahead of us. This is not classified info,” Myers said Thursday at the second annual Genius Machines summit, hosted by Defense One and Nextgov. “The Chinese have already designed; they’re already doing it right now, using GANs—which are generative adversarial networks—to manipulate scenes and pixels to create things for nefarious reasons.”

For example, Myers said, an adversary might fool your computer-assisted imagery analysts into reporting that a bridge crosses an important river at a given point.  

“So from a tactical perspective or mission planning, you train your forces to go a certain route, toward a bridge, but it’s not there. Then there’s a big surprise waiting for you,” he said.

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The concern seems a little overblown, but you have to worry about malicious actors, especially with open source.
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Social media bosses could be liable for harmful content, leaked UK plan reveals • The Guardian

Heather Stewart and Alex Hern:

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Under plans expected to be published on Monday, the government will legislate for a new statutory duty of care, to be policed by an independent regulator and likely to be funded through a levy on media companies.

The regulator – likely initially to be Ofcom, but in the longer term a new body – will have the power to impose substantial fines against companies that breach their duty of care and to hold individual executives personally liable.

The debate has been sharpened in recent months by the case of the British teenager Molly Russell and issues raised by the Christchurch shootings. Molly’s parents said she killed herself partly because of self-harm images viewed on social media.

The scope of the recommendations is broad. As well as social media platforms such as Facebook and search engines such as Google they take in online messaging services and file hosting sites.

Other proposals in the online harm white paper include:
• Government powers to direct the regulator on specific issues such as terrorist activity or child sexual exploitation
• Annual “transparency reports” from social media companies, disclosing the prevalence of harmful content on their platforms and what they are doing to combat it
• Co-operation with police and other enforcement agencies on illegal harms, such as incitement of violence and the sale of illegal weapons.

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Apple cuts price of HomePod worldwide, now $299 at the US Apple Store • 9to5Mac

Benjamin Mayo:

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Apple has officially lowered the price of the HomePod worldwide. In the price has fallen from $349 to $299, breaking the $300 level. HomePod has seen promotional discounts at many third party retailers (eg: it’s $279 right now at Best Buy) over its lifespan, but now Apple has dropped the smart speaker’s standard list price.

This price cut represents a roughly 15% drop and seemingly applies to every region, not just the US. For example, the UK price has fallen from £319 to £279.

It is rare for Apple to reduce the price of any of its products mid-cycle, but not unprecedented. Apple dropped the price of the third-generation Apple TV from $99 to $69 in March 2015; the tvOS successor did not debut until six months later.

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It’s not featured on the front of the site. The next thing it needs is a software update to play other services. What would be impressive – and sort of what you’d expect from a hardware company – would be if it got that before the annual iOS update in autumn.
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CFIUS forces PatientsLikeMe into fire sale, booting Chinese investor • CNBC

Christina Farr and Ari Levy:

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[US startup] PatientsLikeMe is being forced to find a buyer after the U.S. government has ordered its majority owner, a Chinese firm, to divest its stake.

PatientsLikeMe provides an online service that helps patients find people with similar health conditions. In 2017, the start-up raised $100m and sold a majority stake to Shenzhen-based iCarbonX, which was started by genomic scientist Jun Wang and is backed by Chinese giant Tencent.

That deal has recently drawn the attention of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is aggressively cracking down on Chinese investments in American companies, particularly when national security and trade secrets are at risk.

CFIUS is now forcing a divestiture by iCarbonX, meaning PatientsLikeMe has to find a buyer, according to several people with knowledge of the matter. PatientsLikeMe started receiving notifications from CFIUS late last year, said the people, who asked not to be named because the details are confidential.

The move could have dire implications for the start-up community, as Chinese investors are scared away or forbidden from participating in deals that can help emerging businesses.

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Also means CFIUS thinks that personal data is worth treating as a valuable national asset. That has big, big implications.
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Prince Harry calls for ‘addictive’ Fortnite to be BANNED – ‘It shouldn’t be allowed’ • Express.co.uk

Abbie Llewelyn:

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The Duke of Sussex urged parents to protect their children from these “irresponsible” games during a visit to a YMCA in West London. He added that social media is “more addictive than drugs and alcohol”. Harry was speaking to mental health experts about the effects of social media and violent video games.

He said parents don’t know what to do about their children’s addiction to Fortnite.

The Duke said: “The game shouldn’t be allowed. Where is the benefit of having it in your household? It’s created to addict, an addiction to keep you in front of a computer for as long as possible. It’s so irresponsible.”

“Parents have got their hands up – they don’t know what to do about it. It’s like waiting for the damage to be done.”

Fortnite, which has millions of fans across the globe, is a game where players hunt for weapons to kill each other.

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A brief note: the Daily Express, the newspaper which will surely run this story BIG in print, is notorious as a wildly right-wing paper catering to pensioners whose principal concern is whether it will be cold tonight, whether the value of their house is going to keep up, and the latest gossip about Princess Di, who died more than 20 years ago.

Anyhoooo, maybe Harry’s offspring will be explaining the attraction to him in 15 years or so. Or his father will explain that your young years are better spent playing strip billiards in Vegas. (Hard to argue with that, actually.)
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‘Dozens’ of whistleblowers are secretly cooperating with House Democrats • The Atlantic

Russell Berman:

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[Executive Oversight] Committee veterans told me, however, that the number of whistleblowers who’ve come forward since Trump became president is far higher than the number who cooperated with the panel during previous administrations. “The biggest difference wasn’t necessarily us switching to the majority; the biggest difference was Donald Trump being elected president,” said the Democratic aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the committee’s investigative work. Democrats began hearing from whistle-blowers almost immediately after Trump was sworn in, the aide said, beginning with a report that then–National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had been exchanging text messages with his business partner during the inauguration.

Of the dozens of whistleblowers Democrats said they are working with, they have publicly confirmed that a handful work in the White House. All but Newbold, however, have come forward on the condition that they remain anonymous. Newbold spoke to the committee as part of its investigation of White House security clearances, and she’s not the only whistleblower involved in that matter, the panel confirmed in a memo describing her testimony. “Committee staff have spoken with other whistleblowers who corroborated Ms. Newbold’s account, but they were too afraid about the risk to their careers to come forward publicly,” the memo reads. The White House did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

Members from both parties interact privately with whistleblowers, but under a longstanding agreement within the committee, those who want to make on-the-record testimony must agree to be questioned by Democrats and Republicans alike.

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The thing that puzzles me is that there are no sanctions when people are shown to have bent the law. The current outrage is that Jared Kushner was given a security clearance against the clear advice of the security clearance vetting agency. If you can’t properly sanction someone, all the “Oversight” and “Ethics Offices” are pointless. That, above all, is the lesson of Trump’s presidency: the checks and balances need to have some big sticks – such as jail time – they can wield.
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Big Tech’s original sin • The New York Times

Charlie Warzel:

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Facebook’s rapid rise to two billion-plus users, numerous privacy debacles and a steady stream of reported negative revelations suggest that, like its counterparts, the company’s quest for expansion trumped pressing concerns of privacy and transparency. A New York Times investigation last year reported that, “bent on growth,” Facebook executives “ignored warning signs” that Facebook could “disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe.”

Scale is also seductive at an engineering level, bottom line aside. Adding users and engagement, in one interpretation, might signal that you’re giving people what they want. In 2017, I asked a former senior Facebook employee if staff members had felt a sense of blame for Facebook’s inability to stop the spread of misinformation that plagued the platform during the 2016 election. Not exactly, the employee explained:

“They believe that to the extent that something flourishes or goes viral on Facebook — it’s not a reflection of the company’s role, but a reflection of what people want. And that deeply rational engineer’s view tends to absolve them of some of the responsibility, probably.”

We can see this sensibility today in the way the platforms tend to obfuscate and deflect responsibility. Just last week, a YouTube executive argued that its recommendation algorithms weren’t designed to nudge users toward more extreme videos. Similarly, Twitter has and will continue to argue it was not designed specifically to be disproportionately hostile to women and people of color. And Facebook will argue that it was certainly not designed to help foreign countries interfere in our elections.

But this defensive posture seems only concerned with intent. Even if we take the platforms at their word that they did not intend to profit from extremism or to become hubs for radicalization online, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Intent is far less important than the actual outcomes.

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The whisper room: moderates on Twitter are losing their voice • Missouri University News Bureau

»

Michael Kearney, an assistant professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, found that while partisan users form highly partisan social networks on Twitter, moderate users – or those less politically engaged – continue to avoid politics, potentially creating an important void on social media.

“We are not necessarily getting farther and farther apart – it’s just the people in the middle are becoming more quiet and withdrawn,” Kearney said. “If you fail to consider all the people in the middle who do not care about politics as much, it seems like there is a more clear division when there is not, so social media might be artificially creating this sense that we are becoming more polarized.”

Kearney found that rather than increasing exposure to diverse viewpoints or sheltering users with self-reinforcing filter bubbles, social media simply amplifies and reflects the trends found in broader media environments. This was the first study of its kind to examine change in real-time behaviors of political polarization by looking at who Twitter users choose to follow during a general election.

Using software that he created himself, Kearney examined the user networks of 3,000 random followers of well-known partisan and entertainment-oriented accounts. Data was collected over six months leading up the 2016 general election, beginning shortly after Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump became the two major party nominees. Kearney found that as the election drew nearer, Democrats followed more Democrats, Republicans followed more Republicans, and moderates did not greatly expand who they followed on either political side.

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Seriously, it’s taken him nearly three years to get this published? ArXiv is just over there, Prof Kearney, and it lets everyone take a gander at your possibly relevant work which would have been good to hear about a couple of years back. Not that it isn’t true now.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: yesterday’s calculation that today’s 40-year-olds would be tomorrow’s 65-year-olds in 15 years’ time attracted the notice of many people capable of maths. Yes, it should have said 25 years.

Warning: old folks online. CC-licensed photo by Valeri Pizhanski on Flickr.

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What an ageing population means for the future of the internet • Buzzfeed News

Craig Silverman:

»

Four recent studies found that older Americans are more likely to consume and share false online news than those in other age groups, even when controlling for factors such as partisanship. Other research has found that older Americans have a poor or inaccurate grasp of how algorithms play a role in selecting what information is shown to them on social media, are worse than younger people at differentiating between reported news and opinion, and are less likely to register the brand of a news site they consume information from.

Those digital and news consumption habits intersect with key characteristics of older Americans, such as being more likely to live in rural and isolated areas, and, perhaps in part as a result, to experience a high degree of loneliness. A survey conducted by AARP of Americans found that 36% of people ages 60–69 were lonely, while 24% of those ages 70 and older registered as lonely. (The survey focused on adults over 45.)

As a result, it’s now essential to better understand the effects of social media, loneliness, and a lack of digital literacy on older people, according to Vijeth Iyengar, a psychologist focused on aging at the US Department of Health and Human Services, and Dipayan Ghosh, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.

“With recent evidence that older adults are much more likely to disseminate fake news compared with their younger counterparts, coupled with the projected growth for this population segment in the decades to come, it is crucial to advance our understanding of the factors affecting the ways in which older adults engage with these platforms and how in turn these platforms are affecting how they function in society,” they wrote in a recent article for Scientific American.

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Although.. in 15 years, those 65-year-olds are going to be the people who are 40 now. Are they going to be as gullible as this current crop? Also, why is this current crop of 65yos so liable to get this stuff wrong?
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Why there’s so little left of the early internet • BBC Future

Stephen Dowling:

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Around a decade ago, I spent two years working on a rock music blog and on the music section of AOL, the sprawling internet pioneer now owned by US phone company Verizon. I edited or wrote hundreds of live reviews, music news stories, artists interviews and listicles. Facebook and Twitter were already massive audience drivers, and smartphones were connecting us to the Web between work and home; surfing the Web had become a round-the-clock activity.

You could, quite reasonably, assume that if I ever needed to show proof of my time there it would only be a Google search away. But you’d be wrong. In April 2013, AOL abruptly closed down all its music sites – and the collective work of dozens of editors and hundreds of contributors over many years. Little of it remains, aside from a handful of articles saved by the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based non-profit foundation set up in the late 1990s by computer engineer Brewster Kahle.

It is the most prominent of a clutch of organisations around the world trying to rescue some of the last vestiges of the first decade of humanity’s internet presence before it disappears completely.
Dame Wendy Hall, the executive director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton, is unequivocal about the archive’s work: “If it wasn’t for them we wouldn’t have any” of the early material, she says. “If Brewster Kahle hadn’t set up the Internet Archive and started saving things – without waiting for anyone’s permission – we’d have lost everything.”

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(So donate, people!)
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Editing in an age of outrage • Financial Times

Ian Buruma, reflecting on his decision to commission an article by a man who had been accused (but not convicted in court) of sexual assault and choking:

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free speech can never be absolute. Too much depends on who says what, when and to whom. Common courtesy also puts limits on what we say and under what circumstances. Members of a minority can make jokes about themselves more readily than outsiders can. A novelist or film-maker can express the darker side of human behaviour in ways that a diplomat, say, or a university president cannot, at least not in public. A stand-up comedian can be more outrageous than a politician.

One thing that makes our times so disturbing is that the usual rules in public life no longer apply. The US president can voice or tweet insults as much as he likes, whereas stand-up comedians are held to such rigid standards, that offence, let alone insult, can derail a career.

So where does that leave a magazine editor? And what lesson should we draw from the storm over Ghomeshi’s article? An editor of a serious publication is not as bound to the normal rules of propriety as a politician, but has to be a bit more cautious than a stand-up comedian. I came of age in the late 1960s when a certain amount of provocation was not only more permissible than it is now but actually considered a virtue (this was the time when the NYRB published instructions on how to construct a Molotov cocktail; a lapse of judgment, however, that was quickly recognised even then)…

…Like all serious publications, editors would filter out gratuitous malice and utter nonsense. This is not true of the Twittersphere, which is often ad-hominem, intimidating and unhinged. As a result, debate can be stifled, because people fear the wrath of the mob.

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‘Grassroots’ Facebook Brexit ads secretly run by staff of Lynton Crosby firm • The Guardian

Jim Waterson:

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A series of hugely influential Facebook advertising campaigns that appear to be separate grassroots movements for a no-deal Brexit are secretly overseen by employees of Sir Lynton Crosby’s lobbying company and a former adviser to Boris Johnson, documents seen by the Guardian reveal.

The mysterious groups, which have names such as Mainstream Network and Britain’s Future, appear to be run independently by members of the public and give no hint that they are connected. But in reality they share an administrator who works for Crosby’s CTF Partners and have spent as much as £1m promoting sophisticated targeted adverts aimed at heaping pressure on individual MPs to vote for a hard Brexit.

Repeated questions have been raised about who is backing at least a dozen high-spending groups that have flooded MPs’ inboxes with calls to reject Theresa May’s deal. Until now they were thought to be independent entities.

But according to the documents, almost all the major pro-Brexit Facebook “grassroots” advertising campaigns in the UK share the same page admins or advertisers. These individuals include employees of CTF Partners and the political director of Boris Johnson’s campaigns to be mayor of London, who has worked closely with Crosby in the past.

Their collective Facebook expenditure swamps the amount spent in the last six months by all the UK’s major political parties and the UK government combined.

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The UK doesn’t allow political advertising on TV. Print media is too fragmented to reach a large targeted group. Facebook has made the equivalent of political TV advertising feasible in the UK. The effect isn’t good.
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The end of the desktop? • Computerworld

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols:

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Of course, [Windows] Virtual Desktop is a play for business users — for now. I expect Virtual Desktop to be offered to consumers in 2020. By 2025, Windows as an actual desktop operating system will be a niche product.

Sound crazy? Uh, you do know that Microsoft already really, really wants you to “rent” Office 365 rather than buy Office 2019, don’t you?

But what about games, you say? We’ll always have Windows for games! Will we? Google, with its Google Stadia gaming cloud service, is betting we’re ready to move our games to the cloud as well. It’s no pipe dream. Valve has been doing pretty well for years now with its Steam variation on this theme.

So where is all this taking us?

I see a world where the PC desktop disappears for all but a few. Most of us will be writing our documents, filling out our spreadsheets and doing whatever else we now do on our PCs via cloud-based applications on smart terminals running Chrome OS or Windows Lite.

If you want a “real” PC, your choices are going to be Linux or macOS.

Well, maybe we’ll still have Linux and macOS. None of the major Linux companies — Canonical, Red Hat, SUSE — makes the desktop a priority anymore. The Linux desktop will continue on, but it will keep going in the same way it is now: a platform only for power-using enthusiasts.

MacOS, which also has Unix as its root, is essential in some fields. But Mac sales make up a smaller and smaller percentage of Apple’s bottom line. I know Computerworld’s own Jonny Evans hopes 2019 will be the year Macs make serious inroads into the PC market. I can’t see it.

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Hacker Eva Galperin has a plan to eradicate stalkerware • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

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“Full access to someone’s phone is essentially full access to someone’s mind,” says Galperin, a security researcher who leads the Threat Lab of the digital civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The people who end up with this software on their phones can become victims of physical abuse, of physical stalking. They get beaten. They can be killed. Their children can be kidnapped. It’s the small end of a very large, terrifying wedge.”

Now Galperin has a plan to end that scourge for good—or at least take a serious bite out of the industry. In a talk she is scheduled to give next week at the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit in Singapore, Galperin will lay out a list of demands: First, she’s calling on the antivirus industry to finally take the threat of stalkerware seriously, after years of negligence and inaction. She’ll also ask Apple to take measures to protect iPhone users from stalkerware, given that the company doesn’t allow antivirus apps into its App Store. Finally, and perhaps most drastically, she says she’ll call on state and federal officials to use their prosecutorial powers to indict executives of stalkerware-selling companies on hacking charges. “It would be nice to see some of these companies shut down,” she says. “It would be nice to see some people go to jail.”

Ahead of her talk, Galperin has notched her first win: Russian security firm Kaspersky announced today that it will make a significant change to how its antivirus software treats stalkerware on Android phones, where it’s far more common than on iPhones. Rather than merely flag those spy apps as suspect but label them with a confusing “not a virus” message, as it has for most breeds of stalkerware in the past, Kaspersky’s software will now show its users an unmistakeable “privacy alert” for any of dozens of blacklisted apps, and then offer options to delete or quarantine them to cut off their access to sensitive information.

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You may hate metrics. But they’re making journalism better • Columbia Journalism Review

Chris Moran:

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At 7am on Tuesday, March 18, Nick Dastoor, a member of The Guardian’s audience team, started working on the daily staff email that details how our audience responded to our stories the day before, and what we might learn from that.

He opened Ophan, the analytics tool that allows us to track stories in minute detail. He noticed a sustained spike in page views to an article about a church bombing in Pakistan.

He could tell that the 51,000 pageviews had come almost entirely from Facebook, that the audience was mainly viewing the story on their mobile phones, that the audience was global and mostly new to us, that we weren’t promoting the story ourselves, and that it was likely driven by niche Facebook pages. Many readers were spending just seconds on the 942-word story. It was clear to Dastoor that whatever was happening wasn’t about the journalism itself.  

He navigated, within Ophan, to see which tweets had sent people to the story: “Nothing on mainstream media,” “Just saying. . .,” “The news isn’t really talking about this, and many more like it. . .”

Apart from the fact that the authors of the tweets were condemning the mainstream media for not covering an event while linking to a mainstream media site covering the event, there was one other significant problem. The article was from 2013 and none of them seemed to know it.

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This drove the Guardian to add very visible year tags to images from old stories, so that nobody (in alt-right and extremist sites – as in this case) could misuse stories like this. Here’s the Before and After.

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Microsoft removes the Books category from the Microsoft Store • ZDNet

Mary Jo Foley:

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Microsoft is removing the Books category from the Microsoft Store as of today, April 2. This means users will no longer be able to buy, rent or pre-order books via the Store beginning now.

Previously purchased books and rentals will be accessible until early July, but after this, books will no longer be accessible, officials said in a customer-support article today. The company is promising full refunds for all content purchased from the Books category; anyone who bought books via the Store will receive further details on how to get refunds via email from Microsoft. 

Microsoft’s official reason for the move is it’s attempting to streamline the strategic focus of the Microsoft Store, I hear. GIven the timing of this announcement, I’m thinking the decision may have something to do with Microsoft’s next Windows 10 feature release (known as 1903, a k a the April 2019 Update) and/or the new Chromium-based Edge browser.

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You don’t think the decision might have been about nobody buying books on Microsoft’s Books category of its bookstore that pretty much nobody has heard of? At least there’s a refund.
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‘Beyond sketchy’: Facebook demanding some new users’ email passwords • Daily Beast

Kevin Poulsen:

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Facebook users are being interrupted by an interstitial demanding they provide the password for the email account they gave to Facebook when signing up. “To continue using Facebook, you’ll need to confirm your email,” the message demands. “Since you signed up with [email address], you can do that automatically …”

A form below the message asked for the users’ “email password.”

“That’s beyond sketchy,” security consultant Jake Williams told the Daily Beast. “They should not be taking your password or handling your password in the background. If that’s what’s required to sign up with Facebook, you’re better off not being on Facebook.”

In a statement emailed to The Daily Beast after this story published, Facebook reiterated its claim it doesn’t store the email passwords. But the company also announced it will end the practice altogether.  

“We understand the password verification option isn’t the best way to go about this, so we are going to stop offering it,” Facebook wrote.

It’s not clear how widely the new measure was deployed, but in its statement Facebook said users retain the option of bypassing the password demand and activating their account through more conventional means, such as “a code sent to their phone or a link sent to their email.” Those options are presented to users who click on the words “Need help?” in one corner of the page.

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Not stored, but fosters insecurity – if people are used to that on Facebook, they’ll do it on a phishing page disguised as Facebook too. And at the same time, third-party apps integrated to Facebook left a whole lot of stuff exposed on some Amazon cloud servers.
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Tesla boom lifts Norway’s electric car sales to record market share • Reuters

Lefteris Karagiannopoulos and Terje Solsvik:

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Almost 60% of all new cars sold in Norway in March were fully electric, the Norwegian Road Federation (NRF) said on Monday, a global record as the country seeks to end fossil-fueled vehicles sales by 2025.

Exempting battery engines from taxes imposed on diesel and petrol cars has upended Norway’s auto market, elevating brands like Tesla and Nissan, with its Leaf model, while hurting sales of Toyota, Daimler and others.

In 2018, Norway’s fully electric car sales rose to a record 31.2% market share from 20.8% in 2017, far ahead of any other nation, and buyers had to wait as producers struggled to keep up with demand.

The surge of electric cars to a 58.4% market share in March came as Tesla ramped up delivery of its mid-sized Model 3, which retails from 442,000 crowns ($51,400), while Audi began deliveries of its 652,000-crowns e-tron sports utility vehicle.

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So government action can make a difference. Though we did see that in the UK when the government made diesel vehicles effectively cheaper than petrol-fuelled ones in 2001: that has had the knock-on effect, years later, of far worse air quality in cities due to particulate emissions. Still, it would be hard for a shift to electric to make fossil fuel emissions worse, and it must make air quality better.
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The MacBook keyboard fiasco is way worse than Apple thinks • Signal v. Noise

David Hansson:

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Apple keep insisting that only a “small number of customers have problems” with the MacBook keyboards. That’s bollocks. This is a huge issue, it’s getting worse not better, and Apple is missing the forest for the trees.

The fact is that many people simply do not contact Apple when their MacBook keyboards fail. They just live with an S key that stutters or a spacebar that intermittently gives double. Or they just start using (1) an (2) external (3) keyboard (4). Apple never sees these cases, so it never counts in their statistics.

So here’s some anecdata for Apple. I sampled the people at Basecamp. Out of the 47 people using MacBooks at the company, a staggering 30% are dealing with keyboard issues right now!! And that’s just the people dealing with current keyboard issues. If you include all the people who used to have issues, but went through a repair or replacement process, the number would be even higher.

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As John Gruber notes, Apple must know this; it uses its laptops internally. As a thought experiment: if Apple were to offer scissor-style keys as a build-to-order option on its laptops, what proportion of buyers do you think would take it up?

There are only two ways to fix this, because the “naked butterfly” mechanism (as in laptops; used in its iPad Pro keyboards, which have a synthetic cover, it’s delightful) is fundamentally flawed. Return to the scissor mechanism, or introduce “force touch” keys. I wouldn’t entirely put the latter past Jony Ive’s team.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A child watches YouTube: is it in the hands of responsible adults? CC-licensed photo by Steve Schroeder on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Hacking your attention. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

YouTube executives ignored warnings, let toxic videos run rampant • Bloomberg

Mark Bergen:

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YouTube doesn’t give an exact recipe for virality. But in the race to one billion hours, a formula emerged: Outrage equals attention. It’s one that people on the political fringes have easily exploited, said Brittan Heller, a fellow at Harvard University’s Carr Center. “They don’t know how the algorithm works,” she said. “But they do know that the more outrageous the content is, the more views.”

People inside YouTube knew about this dynamic. Over the years, there were many tortured debates about what to do with troublesome videos—those that don’t violate its content policies and so remain on the site. Some software engineers have nicknamed the problem “bad virality.” 

Yonatan Zunger, a privacy engineer at Google, recalled a suggestion he made to YouTube staff before he left the company in 2016. He proposed a third tier: Videos that were allowed to stay on YouTube, but, because they were “close to the line” of the takedown policy, would be removed from recommendations. “Bad actors quickly get very good at understanding where the bright lines are and skating as close to those lines as possible,” Zunger said.

His proposal, which went to the head of YouTube policy, was turned down. “I can say with a lot of confidence that they were deeply wrong,” he said. 

Rather than revamp its recommendation engine, YouTube doubled down.

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Stunning piece of work by Bergen. There have been plenty of disaffected ex-YouTube staffers visible on Twitter, but he has pulled together the story of how money was allowed to trump safety.
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The Chinese takeover of Indian app ecosystem • FactorDaily

Shadma Shaikh:

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2018 is likely to be remembered as the year when the Chinese took over Indian smartphones. In December 2017, the top 10 mobile apps on Google Playstore looked a lot different than what they look from a year later. The Playstore rankings for India in 2018 have China written all over it. Five out of the top 10 mobile apps in India are Chinese — versus two at the end of 2017.

That’s not all. As of December 2017, there were 18 Chinese apps among the top 100 across various categories on Google Playstore. These included popular ones such as UCBrowser, SHAREit, and NewsDog. Fast forward to the end of 2018. The number of Chinese apps in the top 100 Playstore apps has reached 44. Beyond the top 100, there are others like Rozbuzz, a social entertainment content platform, and YouStar, a video chat room platform, that enjoy a more than one million downloads in India – a threshold that evokes grudging respect in this app community.

The growth of many of these global apps has a new hotspot: India. The message is clear for the Chinese — if you want growth, conquer India.

Several Chinese apps have become significantly popular over the last year in India: social content platforms such as Helo and SHAREit; entertainment and engagement apps such as TikTok, LIKE, and Kwai; video and live streaming ones such as LiveMe, Bigo Live, and Vigo Video; utility apps such as BeautyPlus, Xender and Cam Scanner; gaming leaders such as PUBG, Clash of Kings, and Mobile Legends; not to forget popular e-commerce apps including ClubFactory, SHEIN, and ROMWE.

A starking similarity not missed by observers of this industry is the target group of most of these platforms is the new internet users in India, specifically those from smaller cities and towns. To be fair, this market was first recognised by Bengaluru-based ShareChat that was founded back in 2015.

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Wonder how long it will take India to wrest this back with home-grown apps. You’d think they would have a cultural advantage. But many elements of successful apps – WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram – are cross-cultural. (Thanks Stormyparis for the link.)
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Pipdig update: dishonest denials, erased evidence, and ongoing offenses • Wordfence

Mikey Veenstra:

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In last week’s post, we reported on some concerning code identified in the Pipdig Power Pack (P3) plugin. The plugin, which is installed alongside WordPress themes sold by Pipdig, was found to contain a number of suspicious or malicious features. Among these features were a remote “killswitch” Pipdig could use to destroy sites, an obfuscated function used to change users’ passwords, and code which generated hourly requests with the apparent intent of DDoSing a competitor’s site.

In the days since we published that report, Pipdig has taken a series of increasingly questionable steps in their attempts to mitigate the fallout of their actions. Their team has issued baseless accusations that facts have been fabricated, collusion between their competitors had taken place, and that no wrongdoing of any sort had occurred.

These assertions stand in direct conflict with their actions. They’ve pulled down incriminating files from their sites, pushed undocumented updates to their plugins to remove additional malicious code, and have attempted to rewrite history by modifying dates of changelog entries. Then, perhaps most egregiously, Pipdig took down the Bitbucket repository containing a great deal of evidence of these actions. All of this had been done while an entire community of WordPress developers watched.

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Quite the detective story. Transparency in code, especially through repositories, has changed things a lot in the past decade. (Thanks Richard for the link.)
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This is why we can’t have nice things • DIGITS to DOLLARS

Jay Goldberg:

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A decade ago, we spoke with a small handset maker in Shenzhen who sold into China’s domestic market and a half dozen random emerging markets (Ukraine, El Salvador, Uruguay, etc.). His business was always cutthroat, shipping largely $25 feature phones and $100 smartphones. Unfortunately, he did not have enough resources to be able to build his own brand. (He tried; over the years we brought him a dozen marketing text books.) At one point, he tried offering his own software service – messaging, contacts, etc. But he knew that the only path to revenue for these was through selling customer data to ad brokers and others. He told us that his customers would not mind because many of them lived in markets where the government already intruded on users’ privacy in many ways. To his credit, he was very uncomfortable with this business model and did not pursue it. He went out of business five years ago.

Some companies have managed to thrive despite this. For instance, Xiaomi makes decent margins on their phones and is overall profitable (and to their credit still breaks out their unit shipments). Xiamoi had the funds to build their own brand, and to branch out into an ecosystem of related products (home networking, fitness bands, etc.). We do not know if Xiaomi sells its users’ data, but they do install a lot of their own software on phones, trying to build an Apple-like software ecosystem lock-in.

Another way to profit in this business is to bundle phone sales with other products. For example, they can sell base stations and networking products with phones thrown in as an adder, as in “would you like fries phones with that?”. That being said, we do not know if Huawei’s handset business is actually profitable. We are not convinced that Huawei itself knows the answer to this question. Our point is just that there are someways to stay in the business.

However, for the majority of the industry, the hard, cold reality is that handset profits are non-existent. And the only way for these companies to remain viable is to sell out their users.

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The only exception, he notes, is Apple, which of course collects all the profits.
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Abigail Disney has more money than she’ll ever spend. What’s that like? • The Cut

Sarah McVeigh:

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Q: In what ways did your dad change [as Disney’s stock took off], other than having a jet?
AD: Actually, having a jet is a really big deal. If I were queen of the world, I would pass a law against private jets, because they enable you to get around a certain reality. You don’t have to go through an airport terminal, you don’t have to interact, you don’t have to be patient, you don’t have to be uncomfortable. These are the things that remind us we’re human.

My dad’s plane was a 737, and it was insane to have a 737 as a private airplane. It had a queen-sized bed with one big long seatbelt across it, and a shower, and it was ridiculous. We would use the plane occasionally because I have four kids, so it was much easier, obviously, to ride on my dad’s plane with them. Then, at a certain point, I just said, “No, I think this is really bad for everybody.”

How did the jet change your dad?
It wasn’t just the plane, but it’s not a small thing when you don’t have to be patient or be around other people. It creates this notion that you’re a little bit better than they are. And for the past 40 years, everything in American culture has been reinforcing that belief. We say, “Job creators, entrepreneurs, these are the people who make America great.” So there are people walking around with substantial wealth who think that they have it because they’re better. It’s fundamental to remember that you’re just a member of the human race, like everybody else, and there’s nothing about your money that makes you better than anyone else. If you don’t know that and you have money, it’s the road to hell, no matter how much stuff you have around you.

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Fascinating interview; she sounds like a really nice person.
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Google’s new external AI ethics council apparently already falling apart • Bloomberg

Mark Bergen, Jeremy Khan and Gerrit de Vynck:

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In less than a week, the council is already falling apart, a development that may jeopardize Google’s chance of winning more military cloud-computing contracts.

On Saturday, Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist and privacy researcher, said he won’t be serving on the council. “While I’m devoted to research grappling with key ethical issues of fairness, rights and inclusion in AI, I don’t believe this is the right forum for me to engage in this important work,” Acquisti said on Twitter. He didn’t respond to a request for comment.

On Monday, a group of employees started a petition asking the company to remove another member: Kay Cole James, president of a conservative think tank who has fought against equal-rights laws for gay and transgender people. In less than two hours after it went live, more than 300 staff signed the petition anonymously…

…Some AI experts and activists have also called on Google to remove from the board Dyan Gibbens, the CEO of Trumbull Unmanned, a drone technology company. Gibbens and her co-founders at Trumbull previously worked on U.S. military drones. Using AI for military uses is a major point of contention for some Google employees.

Joanna Bryson, a professor of computer science at the University of Bath, in England, who was appointed to the Google ethics council, said she also had reservations about some of her fellow council members. “Believe it or not, I know worse about one of the other people,” she said on Twitter in response to a post questioning James’ appointment. “I know I have pushed (Google) before on some of their associations and they say they need diversity in order to be convincing to society broadly, e.g. the GOP.”

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Couldn’t they have had “board splinters” in the headline?
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Why videogames trigger the nightly meltdown—and how to help your child cope • WSJ

Julie Jargon:

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Children and adolescents don’t yet have the capability to stop doing a rewarding activity and move on to something less fun, neurologists say. That doesn’t mean a child is addicted to videogames. Although experts say children with depression and anxiety are more prone to immerse themselves in games as a coping mechanism, it’s just generally hard for most kids to stop. There are ways for parents to hack this problem, but first they have to understand their kids’ minds.

“What’s happening in our brains is that there are systems that evolved to sustain our interest. It will lead you to seek food for days until you find it, and that’s followed by satiety,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health, who has studied similarities between the effects of gaming and substance abuse.

Pulling the plug in the middle of a videogame—before a child has had the chance to feel satisfied by completing a level or mission—is a bit like yanking a half-eaten donut out of someone’s hand.

The anticipation of playing videogames results in a roughly 75% boost to baseline dopamine levels in the brain, according to Chris Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University in DeLand, Fla., who has analyzed studies on gaming. That’s far less than the boost associated with doing hard drugs, according to data from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, but it’s not much higher than the boost that comes from that donut.

Eating the donut is a finite act, however. Videogame makers build in a stream of intermittent rewards to keep people playing. In some games, there’s no real end or it can take hours to achieve.

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Have rules on time spent, stick to them, that’s about it.
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Facebook, Twitter sucked into India-Pakistan information war • Reuters

Drazen Jorgic and Alasdair Pal:

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[Pakistan social media campaigner Hanzala] Tayyab, 24, spends his days on Facebook and encrypted WhatsApp chatrooms organizing members of his Pakistan Cyber Force group to promote anti-India content and make it go viral, including on Twitter where he has more than 50,000 followers.

That ranges from highlighting alleged Indian human rights abuses to lionizing insurgents battling Indian security forces in Kashmir, a disputed Himalayan region at the heart of historic tensions between Pakistan and India.

Tayyab’s job became harder on Monday when the Pakistan Cyber Force’s Facebook account was taken down, one of 103 Pakistani accounts the social media giant said it had deleted because of “inauthentic behavior” and spamming. Some Indian nationalist accounts have also been suspended in recent weeks.

Portraying himself as an online combatant defending Pakistan from India’s attempts to destabilize his country, Tayyab plans to continue playing his role in the broader information war being fought between the nuclear-armed foes.

“We are countering the Indian narrative through social media, we are countering the enemies of Pakistan,” Tayyab told Reuters in the capital Islamabad.

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Lovely, delightful social media. Connecting the world.
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Fighting Ebola is hard. In Congo, fake news makes it harder • AAAS

Laura Spinney:

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The Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is providing a natural experiment in fighting fake news. Occurring in a conflict zone, amid a controversial presidential election, the epidemic has proved to be fertile ground for conspiracy theories and political manipulation, which can hamper efforts to treat patients and fight the virus’s spread. Public health workers have mounted an unprecedented effort to counter misinformation, saying the success or failure of the Ebola response may pivot on who controls the narrative.

Tensions are expected to rise again in the wake of the 10 January declaration by the DRC’s election commission that opposition leader Felix Tshisekedi won the election, held on 30 December 2018. Foreign observers and the Roman Catholic Church’s monitors say Martin Fayulu, another opposition figure, garnered more votes, and his supporters are alleging fraud. Health workers know rumors thrive amid uncertainty.

“I usually tell my teams that we fight two outbreaks, Ebola and fear,” says Carlos Navarro Colorado of the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) in New York City. “It is all about information.”

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Now that would be a truly scary thing to have to deal with.
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Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

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It’s only April, and 2019 has already been an absolutely brutal year for Google’s product portfolio. The Chromecast Audio was discontinued January 11. YouTube annotations were removed and deleted January 15. Google Fiber packed up and left a Fiber city on February 8. Android Things dropped IoT support on February 13. Google’s laptop and tablet division was reportedly slashed on March 12. Google Allo shut down on March 13. The “Spotlight Stories” VR studio closed its doors on March 14. The goo.gl URL shortener was cut off from new users on March 30. Gmail’s IFTTT support stopped working March 31.

And today, April 2, we’re having a Google Funeral double-header: both Google+ (for consumers) and Google Inbox are being laid to rest. Later this year, Google Hangouts “Classic” will start to wind down, and somehow also scheduled for 2019 is Google Music’s “migration” to YouTube Music, with the Google service being put on death row sometime afterward.

We are 91 days into the year, and so far, Google is racking up an unprecedented body count. If we just take the official shutdown dates that have already occurred in 2019, a Google-branded product, feature, or service has died, on average, about every nine days.

Some of these product shutdowns have transition plans, and some of them (like Google+) represent Google completely abandoning a user base. The specifics aren’t crucial, though. What matters is that every single one of these actions has a negative consequence for Google’s brand, and the near-constant stream of shutdown announcements makes Google seem more unstable and untrustworthy than it has ever been.

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Wellll.. as someone who once tried to catalogue all the Google products and services that had opened, closed and/or survived (the mean lifespan was 1459 days, ie just under four years), I can’t say that many of these closures have harmed my opinion of the Google brand. Though I did think then that it would harm developers’ view of Google services’ reliability. Perhaps this is a trope. But is it true?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

From this summer, you won’t have to put your laptop in here in a growing number of US airports. CC-licensed photo by Rakesh A on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Was your April Fool’s joke funny? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The day the dinosaurs died • The New Yorker

Douglas Preston on a find – in south west North Dakota (try saying it out loud) – of fossils from the day when the asteroid struck and wiped out the dinosaurs:

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[Robert] DePalma returned to do a preliminary excavation of the site. “Almost right away, I saw it was unusual,” he told me. He began shovelling off the layers of soil above where he’d found the fish. This “overburden” is typically material that was deposited long after the specimen lived; there’s little in it to interest a paleontologist, and it is usually discarded. But as soon as DePalma started digging he noticed grayish-white specks in the layers which looked like grains of sand but which, under a hand lens, proved to be tiny spheres and elongated droplets. “I think, Holy shit, these look like microtektites!” DePalma recalled. Micro tektites are the blobs of glass that form when molten rock is blasted into the air by an asteroid impact and falls back to Earth in a solidifying drizzle. The site appeared to contain micro tektites by the million.

As DePalma carefully excavated the upper layers, he began uncovering an extraordinary array of fossils, exceedingly delicate but marvellously well preserved. “There’s amazing plant material in there, all interlaced and interlocked,” he recalled. “There are logjams of wood, fish pressed against cypress- tree root bundles, tree trunks smeared with amber.” Most fossils end up being squashed flat by the pressure of the overlying stone, but here everything was three-dimensional, including the fish, having been encased in sediment all at once, which acted as a support. “You see skin, you see dorsal fins literally sticking straight up in the sediments, species new to science,” he said. As he dug, the momentousness of what he had come across slowly dawned on him. If the site was what he hoped, he had made the most important paleontological discovery of the new century.

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The thought at the back of one’s mind is always what struck one of the first people to realise what wiped out the dinosaurs: one day, this could easily happen to us. A 300-metre object would end world agriculture.
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Laptops to stay in bags as TSA brings new technology to airports • Bloomberg Government

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Air passengers at a growing number of US airports will no longer need to remove electronics, liquids, and other items from their carry-on luggage at security checkpoints as the Transportation Security Administration rolls out new technology.

The TSA took a major step in a broader plan to revamp its overall screening process with faster, more advanced technology when it signed a contract Thursday for hundreds of new carry-on baggage screening machines, Administrator David Pekoske said on a press call Friday. The agency has tested the new technology at more than a dozen airports since 2017, along with the relaxed protocols that allow passengers to leave items such as laptops and toiletries inside their luggage.

The rollout of the computed tomography, or CT, machines will begin this summer, Pekoske said. The $97m contract will buy 300 machines, but the list of airports receiving them has yet to be made final, Pekoske said.

The technology creates 3-D images of bags’ contents and will eventually be able to detect items automatically that the TSA now asks passengers to remove, he said.

“It’s not a little bit better, it’s a lot better,” Pekoske said of the technology.

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This is going to be introduced over the next eight years – so it’s going to be “do I need to..?” all over the place. By the time it’s everywhere, we’ll only notice the places where it’s slow.
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It’s tough being the first birth control app • Bloomberg

Esmé Deprez:

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[Elina] Berglund won’t divulge many details about [period-tracking/pregnancy likelihood predictor] Natural Cycles’ technology, lest competitors seek to copy it. But she does say it reliably predicts ovulation by taking into account a user’s menstruation dates, fluctuations in her body temperature, and data on the cycles of hundreds of thousands of women. It also adapts to each user: The app will err on the side of caution by showing additional red days when it doesn’t have enough information. The more data a user inputs, the more precise its red day-green day predictions become.

Clinical studies show Natural Cycles is 93% effective at preventing pregnancy with typical use, meaning that after a year, seven women out of 100 users will become pregnant. (With perfect use, Natural Cycles is 99% effective, according to its research.) That puts it about on par with hormonal birth control pills (91%) and beats condoms (82%) and the rhythm method (76%). But it’s less effective than long-acting reversible contraceptives such as intrauterine devices (almost 100%). Even though Natural Cycles wasn’t developed with proponents of so-called natural family planning methods such as the Catholic Church in mind, it’s won praise from those quarters because it isn’t “artificial” birth control that divorces sex from procreation.

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However, it then ran slap bang into a PR crisis. Side note: Berglund was on the team at CERN which discovered the Higgs Boson. Now she’s cofounded an app which has several hundred thousand users paying $99 per year. That’s serious money.
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Inside the Google employee backlash against the Heritage Foundation • The Verge

Colin Lecher:

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“This group [of outside people chosen for Google’s external advisory board on AI] will consider some of Google’s most complex challenges that arise under our AI Principles, like facial recognition and fairness in machine learning, providing diverse perspectives to inform our work,” the company said in an announcement. The board, called the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC), included recognized experts in AI research who had worked in the field for years.

But some members of the new board drew immediate scrutiny, especially Kay Coles James, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation. On social media, some characterized the decision as an attempt to cater to conservatives at the expense of true expertise in the field. By Saturday, one AI expert who was invited to the board had dropped out, vaguely noting that it may not be “the right forum” for the work.

Privately, several Google employees were also livid about the decision to include James, according to sources familiar with the discussions. On internal message boards, employees described James as “intolerant” and the Heritage Foundation as “amazingly wrong” in their policies on topics like climate change, immigration, and, particularly, on issues of LGBTQ equality. A person with James’ views, the employees said, “doesn’t deserve a Google-legitimized platform, and certainly doesn’t belong in any conversation about how Google tech should be applied to the world.”

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There’s also a Medium petition by Google employees. The Heritage Foundation is the sort of bonkers institution that could only grow up in the US. Why not ask a group that represents minorities or women, since they’ll be at far more risk from any inequity introduced by AI?
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Apple News+ could lead to a massive value destruction for the magazine industry • Monday Note

Frederic Filloux:

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To assess the impact of a fully deployed AppleNews+ I did the following calculation.
• In the United States, the magazine industry generates annual revenue of $27B, a loss of more than 40% in ten years.
• Divided by 225 million readers of magazines (according to the trade association), the Average Revenue per User (ARPU) amounts to $120 per reader and per year, all sources included.
• The revenue promised by Apple News+ is $9.9 a month => $119 a year. Minus Apple’s 50% cut, it gives a net income per reader of $59.
➜ By joining Apple News+, the US magazine industry will lose 50% of its revenue per reader.

Of course, we are talking of transfer here: magazine readers who will join Apple News+ will inevitably cancel their subscription to its preferred publication. (I will carefully review my personal subscription portfolio that amounts to $1500/year, although my most expensive subs — digital newspapers — won’t be in Apple News+, for a good reason)…

To put it differently, for each magazine reader switching to Apple News+, the platform would need to recruit one additional subscriber, only to preserve the size of the sector. The real uncertainty here is the ability of Apple to nearly double the number of people paying for a magazine in the United States where most subscriptions are already dirt cheap (only 13% of the magazines’ circulation revenue come from digital).

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These are pretty brutal numbers, though I think there’s a counter-argument that each subscriber *is* a new subscriber; that most Apple News+ users will be those who haven’t previously subscribed, rather than “churners”.
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“Are we at a party, or a wake?”: journalists wonder if Apple News+ is a trojan horse • Vanity Fair

Joe Pompeo:

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[Rafat Ali commented of News+:] “They’ll just cherry pick what they want via News+, and Apple will shave off a few cents for the publisher while owning all the data, customer relationship and power.”

That would appear to be the primary concern of the two major News+ holdouts: The New York Times and The Washington Post. Apple badly wanted to lock down at least one of them, and it began a vigorous courtship of the papers last spring, not long after the Texture deal closed and Apple’s plans for its content bundle were beginning to materialize, according to people familiar with the matter. “They put a tremendous amount of pressure on,” one source said. “Eddy Cue was in and out of their offices really trying to woo them.” Cue’s elevator pitch, according to people familiar with the discussions, was, “We’ll make you the most-read newspaper in the world.”

In multiple meetings with top brass at both newspapers, Apple made it clear that they wanted the whole shebang, as opposed to a pared down offering or a specialized sliver of stories. “They didn’t want to have limitations in terms of content,” according to a person with knowledge of the talks. But Apple dangled flexible terms governing the duration after which they could pull out, as well as exclusivity. “You’d be protected against a competitor coming in,” the same source said. “If this thing was really successful and everyone else came back to the table, there was a period where you’d have exclusivity.”

But the Times and the Post couldn’t be swayed. Over the past several years, both publications have developed substantial digital subscription businesses that are now vital moneymakers, helping to offset the industry’s advertising collapse. Those businesses continue to grow, and the Times and the Post, put simply, want their own subscribers, not Apple’s subscribers—and they certainly don’t want Apple subscribers if Apple is going to keep a 50% cut of the revenues.

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Huawei’s P30 Pro raises the bar for low-light photography • The Verge

Vlad Savov:

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It will still be a few days before I can publish my full review of the P30 Pro, but I spent this past weekend comparing its camera against Google’s Pixel 3 and struggling to believe my eyes. The Pixel 3’s Night Sight mode is algorithmic magic, granting that camera something akin to superhuman night vision. It requires up to six seconds of exposure time, during which you have to hold the phone steady to obtain a sharp image. Huawei has a similar night mode, but I find that completely unnecessary with the P30 Pro: this camera shoots better low-light photos than Google Night Sight without the need for a long exposure.

Let’s dive into some examples. This first one includes the output from the default Google Pixel camera to give you an idea of what the human eye sees. It’s also an accurate representation of what you’ll be able to obtain using an iPhone without the help of either the flash or RAW image processing. Even adapted to the pre-sunrise darkness in the room, my eyes couldn’t discern any color. Google’s Night Sight image is the best, I’m confident in saying, that any smartphone before the P30 Pro could achieve in the circumstances. And the P30 Pro makes that shot look like a splotchy mess.

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I’d love to know how Huawei is doing this; one would have thought that camera sensors were pretty much equal everywhere, and that Google was taking it further by its use of AI. But Huawei is pulling in photons that others lose. One for iFixit to answer, at least in part?

I was going to say that sometimes you want a night shot to look like a night shot, but of course you can just darken it in the edit.
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Great Escape: travel inspiration by price

Rather neat: finds cheap flights from nearby you to various points around the world. The sort of thing that could be enjoyable around the Easter break. Apologies to Australians and New Zealanders, though then again you’ve already got it good.
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Can we stop AI outsmarting humanity? • The Guardian

Mara Hvistendahl:

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[Skype co-founder Jaan] Tallinn warns that any approach to AI safety will be hard to get right. If an AI is sufficiently smart, it might have a better understanding of the constraints than its creators do. Imagine, he said, “waking up in a prison built by a bunch of blind five-year-olds.” That is what it might be like for a super-intelligent AI that is confined by humans.

The theorist Yudkowsky found evidence this might be true when, starting in 2002, he conducted chat sessions in which he played the role of an AI enclosed in a box, while a rotation of other people played the gatekeeper tasked with keeping the AI in. Three out of five times, Yudkowsky – a mere mortal – says he convinced the gatekeeper to release him. His experiments have not discouraged researchers from trying to design a better box, however.

The researchers that Tallinn funds are pursuing a broad variety of strategies, from the practical to the seemingly far-fetched. Some theorise about boxing AI, either physically, by building an actual structure to contain it, or by programming in limits to what it can do. Others are trying to teach AI to adhere to human values. A few are working on a last-ditch off-switch. One researcher who is delving into all three is mathematician and philosopher Stuart Armstrong at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, which Tallinn calls “the most interesting place in the universe.” (Tallinn has given FHI more than $310,000.)

Armstrong is one of the few researchers in the world who focuses full-time on AI safety. When I met him for coffee in Oxford, he wore an unbuttoned rugby shirt and had the look of someone who spends his life behind a screen, with a pale face framed by a mess of sandy hair. He peppered his explanations with a disorienting mixture of popular-culture references and math. When I asked him what it might look like to succeed at AI safety, he said: “Have you seen the Lego movie? Everything is awesome.”

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Why do we watch terrorist videos and what effect do they have on us? • New Statesman

Sophie McBain:

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The University of California study identified several traits that were associated with being more likely to view the video: being male, Christian and unemployed, watching a lot of TV, having a pre-existing heightened fear of terrorism and having previously being exposed to violence (such as having been the victim of assault or domestic violence, or having lost a loved one to suicide or murder).

Crucially, they found that even two years after the beheading videos went viral, those who watched them were more fearful of future events, including potential terrorist attacks. In this way then, when large numbers of people watch terrorist videos it helps further militants’ central aim: to spread terror.

Authoritarian regimes have long understood that public executions are an effective form of social control because they spread fear, terrorist groups such as Isis have learned that you don’t necessarily have to force people to witness such atrocities – many of us will seek them out.

Sarah Redmond, one of the authors of the report and a PhD student at the University of California, acknowledged that a different demographic might be attracted to graphic footage posted by far-right terrorists, and that we can’t confidently extrapolate much information from the Isis study about the types of people most likely to watch the mosque attacks online. But the study does underline why it’s crucial for internet companies to develop effective ways to block content posted by terrorist groups, or else risk aiding militants.

It also offers lessons for the media: the authors suggest that by publishing screen shots of the beheading and warning that the footage was too graphic to share, the media inadvertently stoked interest in the original footage, the horrifying images working in the manner of a film trailer

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

Chimpanzees’ propensity for murderous violence is quite unlike humans’. CC-licensed photo by Aaron Logan 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 13 links for you. Contains no April Fool’s jokes, and by the end of today you’ll probably be glad of that. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

YouTube’s product chief on online radicalization and algorithmic rabbit holes • The New York Times

Kevin Roose talks to Neal Mohan:

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KR: I hear a lot about the “rabbit hole” effect, where you start watching one video and you get nudged with recommendations toward a slightly more sort of extreme video, and so on, and all of a sudden you’re watching something really extreme. Is that a real phenomenon?

NM: Yeah, so I’ve heard this before, and I think that there are some myths that go into that description that I think it would be useful for me to debunk.

The first is this notion that it’s somehow in our interests for the recommendations to shift people in this direction because it boosts watch time or what have you. I can say categorically that’s not the way that our recommendation systems are designed. Watch time is one signal that they use, but they use a number of other engagement and satisfaction signals from the user. It is not the case that “extreme” content drives a higher version of engagement or watch time than content of other types.

I can also say that it’s not in our business interest to promote any of this sort of content. It’s not something that has a disproportionate effect in terms of watch time. Just as importantly, the watch time that it does generate doesn’t monetize, because advertisers many times don’t want to be associated with this sort of content.

And so the idea that it has anything to do with our business interests, I think it’s just purely a myth.

KR: So, why do people talk about this rabbit hole effect — you know, I went to watch one video about President Trump and now I’m just getting a stream of recommendations of increasingly more partisan content. Why do you think there’s this perception that this is what happens on YouTube?

This is one of the things that we looked at closely as we were developing the technology that went into that recommendation change that I described to you from a few weeks back.

We really looked at this to see what was happening on those “watch next” panels, in terms of the videos that were being recommended. And the first thing that I should say is that when we make recommendations after a video has been consumed, we don’t take into account any notion of whether that’s less or more extreme.

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Well, duh. Mohan dances around this, unconvincingly. It’s clearly on his radar, but clearly also he doesn’t know how to solve it (yet?), and also doesn’t want to admit it.
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Trump is world’s worst cheater at golf: book • NY Post

Gavin Newsham:

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“To say ‘Donald Trump cheats’ is like saying ‘Michael Phelps swims,’” writes Rick Reilly in the new book “Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump” (Hachette Book Group), out Tuesday. “He cheats at the highest level. He cheats when people are watching and he cheats when they aren’t. He cheats whether you like it or not. He cheats because that’s how he plays golf … if you’re playing golf with him, he’s going to cheat.”

Reilly, a former Sports Illustrated columnist who has played with Trump in the past, spoke to dozens of players — both amateur and professional — to recount some of the president’s worst cons on the course, starting with his declared handicap of 2.8.

In layman’s terms, the lower the handicap, the better the player. Jack Nicklaus, winner of a record 18 major golf titles and generally considered the greatest golfer in the history of the game, has a handicap of 3.4. Nicklaus’ handicap is listed on the same Golf Handicap and Information Network website used by Trump, where players post their scores.

“If Trump is a 2.8,” writes Reilly, “Queen Elizabeth is a pole vaulter.”

Shortly after he became president, Trump played with Tiger Woods, the current world No. 1 Dustin Johnson and the veteran PGA Tour pro Brad Faxon. Given the quality and profile of his companions, you might have thought Trump would have been on his best behavior. Not so.

On one hole, Trump dunked a shot into the lake, but as his opponents weren’t looking he simply dropped another ball — and then hit that into the water, too.

“So he drives up and drops where he should’ve dropped the first time and hits it on the green,” recalls Faxon.

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I guess we shouldn’t be surprised, but I had honestly thought this was one area where he had ability, and would respect the rul… OK, I see the mistake. And do read the piece for its last line.
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Portable TV and music • AVC

Fred Wilson:

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That is an AppleTV and a Sonos Connect in between my “shaving kit” and my sneakers.

I brought these two devices out west and connected the AppleTV to the one TV in the Airbnb and I connected the Sonos to the receiver that powered the in ceiling speakers in the main living space in the house.

Even if the Airbnb had come with an AppleTV and a Sonos device, I would have swapped out theirs for ours for the length of our stay because these two devices have all of our services pre-confgured on them and we are logged into all of the services.

That is where the big difference is for me and the reason it is worth schlepping these devices cross country and back. The devices aren’t crazy expensive. The AppleTV is around $150 and the Sonos Connect is around $300. But setting these devices up, connecting them to all of the various services we subscribe to, and logging into each and every one can be an hour or more of work each time you do it.

All I had to do was power them up, connect to Wi-Fi, and connect to the TV and/or the receiver, and we were good to go.

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Hadn’t thought about the logging-in nature of this, but it’s completely true. If, that is, you spend any time travelling. Might pack a HomePod in there too, for the sound quality.
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‘Those who obeyed the rules were favoured by evolution’ • SPIEGEL ONLINE

SPIEGEL ONLINE, Hamburg, Germany:

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DER SPIEGEL: If it wasn’t women, who tamed men?

Richard Wrangham [a British anthropologist who has worked with Jane Goodall]: Here we enter the terrain of speculation, because fossils don’t tell us exactly what happened. What we have to do instead is to see how today’s hunters and gatherers treat individuals that behave aggressively. There are, in fact, even in these generally peaceable peoples, some individuals who, like alpha chimpanzees, try to dominate the others by violence. How do the members of such a community react – without prisons, without military, without police? There is only one way for them to defend themselves against the determined perpetrator: He is executed. The killing is done by agreement among the other men in the society.

DER SPIEGEL: You argue that this is how aggressiveness was systematically eradicated from the gene pool of mankind?

Wrangham: Well yes, aggressiveness was reduced, even if it was not eradicated. Virtue seems to have evolved from something as violent as killing. But don’t misunderstand. I am not advocating executions in today’s world. Justice is fallible, so the death penalty inevitably leads to the killing of innocent people; furthermore, there is no evidence that it really effectively deters people from committing crimes.

DER SPIEGEL: It is quite a daring hypothesis to argue that the death penalty has made us what we are. How did you come up with it?

Wrangham: It was when I read a book by Christopher Boehm entitled “Hierarchy in the Forest”. In this book, he describes how aggression in communities of hunters and gatherers is controlled by executions. My goodness, I thought when I read this, maybe this mechanism has even shaped our evolution?

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A really fascinating interview; you think humans are violent, but it turns out we really aren’t, compared to pretty much everything else. Or at least not actively so. Passively, we’re terrific at wiping out species.
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AirPower fail: The latest victim of Apple’s OCD • ZDNet

Jason Perlow:

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Allegedly, based on conceptual patent filings, the AirPower was able to achieve this flexible orientation wireless charging by having many 3D coils in extremely close proximity to each other – which also required extremely complex power management in order to prevent the coils from generating excessive heat and to mitigate the generation of overlapping harmonic frequencies between the coils.

As it is, Apple’s own Qi implementation runs at a lower 7.5W rather than the maximum 10W and 15W of its Android competitors, reportedly because the newer generation iPhones with wireless charging capability got way too hot at those increased power levels.

Ultimately, I believe Apple did the right thing. Can you imagine the potential “PowerGate” of cooked iPhones, Watches and AirPods? It’s far less egg on Apple’s face to cancel the product outright than to release a dangerous dud.

Apple very rarely cancels products outright after announcing them. The last time it did this was in August of 1996, when it decided to cancel its Copland OS, which proved too difficult a project for the company. It eventually ended up migrating to Mac OS X, which is heavily based on NeXT’s (and Steve Jobs’) BSD UNIX OpenStep object-oriented graphical OS instead.

The public cancellation of AirPower is a huge embarrassment for Apple. But given the company’s obsession with bleeding edge engineering and its compulsion for thinner, lighter, faster, more densely packed and difficult-to-repair products, such an embarrassment was inevitable.

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*mumbles something about cancelling butterfly keyboards before they get out of the gate*
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The death of Apple’s AirPower’ may be the best thing for you and your iPhone • CNet

Jessica Dolcourt:

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we’d never seen AirPower in action beyond the video in Apple’s initial presentation. By postponing and then finally squashing it, Apple may have saved iPhone users – and its own reputation – from a poorly working product. Imagine your disappointment and anger if you bought AirPower and it never functioned smoothly.

AirPower could have also been costly. Apple never announced pricing, but an optional wireless charging case for the new generation of AirPods costs $80, and that’s to power up one device, not communicate with three. AirPower could have easily sold for $150. Meanwhile, plenty of other wireless charging pads sell for $30 or less.

Apple’s abdication of AirPower doesn’t mean it’s done with wireless charging. For all we know, it could have killed its darling to start work on a new wireless charging project for 2019 or 2020; maybe one – and this is pure speculation – that would also work with a foldable iPhone.

It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Samsung’s Galaxy S10 phones and Huawei’s P30 Pro have inspired Apple to give its next iPhone or MacBook Air the ability to wirelessly charge other devices.

AirPower may have withered on the vine, but I’m confident that Apple isn’t done with wireless charging yet. That’s clear by the tech giant’s continued investment in the feature for its iPhone and accessories. Consider this: we know that the first smartphone is slated to get over-the-air wireless charging in the near future. There’s no way Apple would miss out on a groundbreaking development like that.

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Nothing to do with foldable phones; and wirelessly charging other devices is not a functionality that I feel any need to have, ever. AirPower was just too difficult an engineering challenge: the risk was the thing would overheat something or other, because the batteries (AirPods, Watch, iPhone) are so different in their demands.
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Why bother with What Three Words? • Terence Eden’s Blog

The aforesaid Eden has some problems with the system that’s meant to make your life easier:

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W3W splits the world into a grid, and gives every square a unique three-word phrase. So the location 51.50799,-0.12803 becomes ///mile.crazy.shade

Brilliant, right?

No. Here’s all the problems I have with W3W.

1) It isn’t open
The algorithm used to generate the words is proprietary. You are not allowed to see it. You cannot find out your location without asking W3W for permission. If you want permission, you have to agree to some pretty long terms and conditions. And understand their privacy policy. Oh, and an API agreement. And then make sure you don’t infringe their patents. You cannot store locations. You have to let them analyse the locations you look up. Want to use more than 10,000 addresses? Contact them for prices! It is the antithesis of open.

2) Cost
W3W refuses to publish their prices. You have to contact their sales team if you want to know what it will cost your organisation. Open standards are free to use.

3) Earthquakes
When an earthquake struck Japan, street addresses didn’t change but that their physical location did.

That is, a street address is still 42 Acacia Avenue – but the Longitude and Latitude has changed.
Perhaps you think this is an edge case? It isn’t. Australia is drifting so fast that GPS can’t keep up.
How does W3W deal with this? Their grid is static, so any tectonic activity means your W3W changes.

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There’s also a few others – the internationalisation one is pretty big. I still don’t see it getting traction; we just send each other location blobs these days, and Google Maps is pretty much universal.
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The Sandy Hook hoax, and the parent who believed in conspiracy theories – until his child died there • NY Mag

Reeves Wiedeman:

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Lenny [Pozner] may have been the first Newtown parent to discover that conspiracy theorists didn’t believe his son had been killed, because he used to be a serious conspiracy theorist himself. “I probably listened to an Alex Jones podcast after I dropped the kids off at school that morning,” Pozner said, referencing the fearmongering proprietor of InfoWars. Pozner had entertained everything from specific cover-ups (the moon landing was faked) to geopolitical intrigue (the “real” reasons why the price of gold sometimes shifted so dramatically) and saw value in skepticism. But for him, the appeal of conspiracy theories was the same as watching a good science-fiction movie. “I have an imaginative mind,” he said.

When he first discovered the theories about Noah, Lenny, who grew up in Brooklyn, made only a halfhearted attempt to respond. “I feel that your type of show created these hateful people,” Pozner wrote in an email to Alex Jones, to which one of Jones’s employees replied that Jones would love to speak to him if “we confirm that you are the real Lenny Pozner.” Pozner declined, in part because he found himself unable to do much of anything.

While Noah’s death had given [his wife] Veronique a mission [advocating gun control], Lenny “was just numb,” he said. Lenny had worked for two decades as an IT consultant but now found the crisis management that the job required to be too overwhelming. In the year after Noah’s death, Lenny’s mother died following a battle with Alzheimer’s, and he and Veronique separated. “People tell me it’s supposed to get easier,” Lenny said at the shooting’s first anniversary. “We’re waiting for that to happen.”

But by the spring of 2014, as he watched the hoaxer movement bloom, Pozner decided to try fighting back. He released Noah’s death certificate, to convince those who believed he had not been killed, and his report card — “Noah is a bright, inquisitive boy” — for those who believed he had never lived at all. One Friday night, a year and a half after the shooting, he joined a Facebook group called Sandy Hook Hoax, one of the more prominent hoaxer meeting grounds. (Its logo features a ghostly child holding an index finger to her mouth.) Pozner told the group he was there to answer questions, and he expressed empathy for their mind-set. “I used to argue with people about 9/11 being an inside job,” he wrote.

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Eye-opening piece.
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Mistakes, we’ve drawn a few • The Economist

Sarah Leo:

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At The Economist, we take data visualisation seriously. Every week we publish around 40 charts across print, the website and our apps. With every single one, we try our best to visualise the numbers accurately and in a way that best supports the story. But sometimes we get it wrong. We can do better in future if we learn from our mistakes — and other people may be able to learn from them, too.

After a deep dive into our archive, I found several instructive examples. I grouped our crimes against data visualisation into three categories: charts that are (1) misleading, (2) confusing and (3) failing to make a point. For each, I suggest an improved version that requires a similar amount of space — an important consideration when drawing charts to be published in print.

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This is good to see being done. I like this one best:

And its advice: “aim for leaving at least 33% of the plot area free under a line chart that doesn’t start at zero.”
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Jeff Bezos’ investigator Gavin de Becker finds the Saudis obtained the Amazon chief’s private data • Daily Beast

De Becker points out that the Daily Beast wanted him and Bezos to sign a document saying there hadn’t been any electronic surveillance – before they’d suggested there had:

»

As has been reported elsewhere, my results have been turned over to federal officials. Since it is now out of my hands, I intend today’s writing to be my last public statement on the matter. Further, to respect officials pursuing this case, I won’t disclose details from our investigation. I am, however, comfortable confirming one key fact:

Our investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone, and gained private information. As of today, it is unclear to what degree, if any, AMI was aware of the details.

We did not reach our conclusions lightly. The inquiry included a broad array of resources: investigative interviews with current and former AMI executives and sources, extensive discussions with top Middle East experts in the intelligence community, leading cyber security experts who have tracked Saudi spyware, discussions with current and former advisers to President Trump, Saudi whistleblowers, people who personally know the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (also known as MBS), people who work with his close associate Saud al-Qahtani, Saudi dissidents, and other targets of Saudi action, including writer/activist Iyad el-Baghdadi.

Experts with whom we consulted confirmed New York Times reports on the Saudi capability to “collect vast amounts of previously inaccessible data from smartphones in the air without leaving a trace—including phone calls, texts, emails”—and confirmed that hacking was a key part of the Saudi’s “extensive surveillance efforts that ultimately led to the killing of [Washington Post] journalist Jamal Khashoggi.”

«

He doesn’t provide any of that evidence, though. Little tricky to put all one’s faith in that.
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Government delays controversial internet porn ‘block’ law • Sky News

Lucy Cotter:

»

The government’s much heralded porn “block” has been delayed once again.

Under the controversial plans, people will have to verify their age to access UK commercial pornographic websites in a bid to stop children accessing the content.

The legislation, which was passed as part of the 2017 Digital Economy Act, was initially expected to be in place by April 2018. After being delayed last year, the minister for the department of digital, culture, media and sport, Margot James, told MPs: “We expect it to be in force by Easter of next year”.

However, the department said a date has not been set for the roll-out of the policy. “This work is a world-leading step forward to protect our children from adult content which is currently far too easy to access online,” it said. “We are taking the time to get the implementation of this policy right and to ensure it is effective, and we will announce a commencement date shortly”.

Jim Killock from the Open Rights Group says the delays are due to serious concerns about privacy and data collection.

«

Yeaahh they’ve delayed it because they’re not going to get it through Parliament before the general election that without a doubt is coming as soon either as May’s Withdrawal Agreement gets Parliamentary approval, or the WA is finally drowned in a sack. (The latter would be worse, since it implies a no-deal exit.) It will then take at least another year before a new government gets round to implementing it – if it wants to follow on.
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Sony to slash smartphone workforce 50% by 2020 • Nikkei Asian Review

Akihide Anzai and Wataru Suzuki:

»

The decision to scale back its smartphone workforce, which could see up to 2,000 of the total 4,000 jobs cut by March 2020, is part of a move to reduce fixed costs in the business, and also includes procurement reform.

Some of the Japanese employees affected by the decision will be transferred to other divisions, but the company will offer voluntary retirement in its Europe and China operations.

Sony will limit smartphone sales in Southeast Asia and other areas to focus on Europe and East Asia.

The company’s smartphone sales for fiscal 2018 are projected to come in at a dismal 6.5m units, half the previous year’s figure and just one-sixth that of five years ago.

In fiscal 2014, Sony pulled 1,000 employees from its smartphone operations, but sales have plunged faster than expected, necessitating a further round of cuts.

Sony’s smartphone business generates annual revenue of about 500bn yen, but is expected to post an operating loss for the third straight year through fiscal 2019. By halving operating expenses from fiscal 2017, the company hopes the business will turn a profit by fiscal 2020.

«

So when I wondered about the magical thinking protecting jobs, I guess I wasn’t accounting for the senior management who can spot it where they see it.

The mobile division is going to be on a one-way ride to the mountains pretty soon.
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Asus was warned of hacking risks months ago, thanks to leaky passwords • TechCrunch

Zack Whittaker:

»

A security researcher warned Asus two months ago that employees were improperly publishing passwords in their GitHub repositories that could be used to access the company’s corporate network.

One password, found in an employee repo on the code sharing, allowed the researcher to access an email account used by internal developers and engineers to share nightly builds of apps, drivers and tools to computer owners. The repo in question was owned by an Asus engineer who left the email account’s passwords publicly exposed for at least a year. The repo has since been wiped clean, though the GitHub account still exists.

“It was a daily release mailbox where automated builds were sent,” said the researcher, who goes by the online handle SchizoDuckie, in a message to TechCrunch. Emails in the mailbox contained the exact internal network path where drivers and files were stored…

…The researcher’s findings would not have stopped the hackers who targeted Asus’ software update tool with a backdoor, revealed this week, but reveals a glaring security lapse that could have put the company at risk from similar or other attacks. Security firm Kaspersky warned Asus on January 31 — just a day before the researcher’s own disclosure on February 1 — that hackers had installed a backdoor in the company’s Asus Live Update app.

«

That’s two strikes against Asus; not looking good. Security is hard, especially when you do it badly.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Credit cards: the next thing to get disrupted by Apple after smartphones and tablets? CC-licensed photo by Thomas Kohler 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 13 links for you. Meaningful? Vote! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How Apple Card works • TechCrunch

Matthew Panzarino, with some interesting detail:

»

Perhaps the biggest security feature of the offering is that Apple Card can generate virtual card numbers for online non-Apple Pay purchases. Though Apple said that the app would display your card info during the event, they weren’t specific on what that info would be so I got some more detail here.

• The physical Apple Card, of course, has no number. The app displays the last 4 digits of the card number that is on the mag stripe of the card only, you never see the full card number.
• Instead, Apple provides a virtual card number and virtual confirmation code (CVV) for the card in the app. You can use this for non-Apple Pay purchases online or over the phone. This number is semi-permanent, meaning that you can keep using it as long as you want.
• But you can hit a button to regenerate the PAN (primary account number), providing you with a new credit card number at any time. This is great for situations where you are forced to tell someone your credit card number but do not necessarily completely trust the recipient.
• Card numbers are manually regenerated only, and do not automatically rotate. There is, currently, no single-use number support or single-merchant number support.
• Each purchase requires a confirmation code, a fantastic additional security feature outlined by Zack Whittaker earlier in the week. This makes it even harder for someone to use your card, even if skimmed or copied, to make online purchases.

«

Credit cards are so prone to being copied and stolen. We’ve had widespread use of smartphones for nearly a decade. It’s about time this got changed.
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This woman doesn’t feel pain; two tiny mutations may be why • Live Science

Yasemin Saplakoglu:

»

Doctors first realized that there was something different about the woman when she had hand surgery and reported feeling no pain before or after the procedure. She later told doctors that a year earlier, she was diagnosed with osteoarthritis in her hip and scans showed she had severely degenerated joints — yet she felt no pain.

The revelations prompted a group of researchers at the University College London and the University of Oxford to carry out genetic tests to see what could be driving her pain insensitivity.

The team found two specific mutations in her genes.

One mutation was a tiny deletion in a not-well-documented “pseudogene” — a segment of DNA that is thought of as a nonfunctional copy of a parent gene — called FAAH-OUT. The second was a mutation in the original gene, called FAAH.

After being duplicated from the FAAH gene, the FAAH-OUT pseudogene accumulated a number of mutations that prevent it from coding for a protein like the FAAH gene does, said co-senior report author James Cox, a senior lecturer in pain genetics at University College London. As a result of these mutations, FAAH-OUT “has probably evolved a whole new function,” though it’s unclear what that function is.

(These FAAH-OUT mutations aren’t unique to the woman in Scotland, however. What is unique in her case is the tiny portion that’s deleted from the pseudogene.)

«

Geneticists love daft names for genes. But this protein discovery is amazing: is it a way towards an incredible painkiller? How much would it be worth?
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Mueller report exceeds 300 pages, raising questions about four-page summary • The New York Times

Nicholas Fandos, Adam Goldman and Katie Benner:

»

The still-secret report on Russian interference in the 2016 election submitted last week by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, was more than 300 pages long, the Justice Department acknowledged on Thursday.

Mr. Barr wrote to Congress on Sunday offering what he called the “principal conclusions” of the report — including that Mr. Mueller had not found that the Trump campaign had taken part in a conspiracy to undermine the election. But he had notably declined to publicly disclose its length.

The total of 300-plus pages suggests that Mr. Mueller went well beyond the kind of bare-bones summary required by the Justice Department regulation governing his appointment and detailed his conclusions at length. And it raises questions about what Mr. Barr might have left out of the four dense pages he sent to Congress.

Answering those questions is likely to prove difficult for lawmakers and the public. Mr. Barr has indicated to two congressional chairmen that it will most likely take weeks to redact the report for classified and grand jury information the department deems unfit for public consumption.

«

I really don’t understand why it hasn’t been published already. The Starr Report was delivered to Congress on September 9, 1998, and published online on September 13. I remember downloading it, just because we could.
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EU bans single-use plastics in restaurants from 2021 • Bloomberg

:

»

The European Union decided to ban plastic consumer items including plates, cutlery and straws as of 2021 to help clean up oceans.

The prohibition on single-use plastics approved by the European Parliament on Wednesday in Strasbourg, France, also applies to beverage cups, food containers and cotton bud sticks. EU governments have already signaled support for the ban, making their final approval due on April 15 a formality.

With plastics accounting for around 80% of marine litter, the EU rushed through deliberations on the planned restrictions in less than a year. The European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, proposed the curbs in May 2018 and representatives of EU governments and the 751-seat Parliament reached a negotiated deal in December.

“Plastics poison our seas,” said Frederique Ries, a Belgian member who steered the draft law through the 28-nation assembly. “If we do not take action, by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans.”

«

Can’t wait for all the Bufton Tuftons to declare that this is the EU interfering too much and that the UK needs to be able to have single-use plastics killing off the fish that we now own the right to net.
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The FCC has fined robocallers $208m. It has collected $6,790 • WSJ

Sarah Krouse:

»

Since 2015, the Federal Communications Commission has ordered violators of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, a law governing telemarketing and robodialing, to pay $208.4m. That sum includes so-called forfeiture orders in cases involving robocalling, Do Not Call Registry and telephone solicitation violations.

So far, the government has collected $6,790 of that amount, according to records obtained by The Wall Street Journal through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The total amount of money secured by the Federal Trade Commission through court judgments in cases involving civil penalties for robocalls or National Do Not Call Registry-related violations, plus the sum requested for consumer redress in fraud-related cases, is $1.5bn since 2004. It has collected $121m of that total, said Ian Barlow, coordinator of the agency’s Do Not Call program, or about 8%. The agency operates the National Do Not Call Registry and regulates telemarketing.

“That number stands on its own. We’re proud of it; we think our enforcement program is pretty strong,” Mr. Barlow said.

«

Total of 26.3bn (unwanted) robocalls made to US mobile phones in 2018. That number stands on its own too.
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The filter bubble is actually a decision bubble • Baekdal Plus

Thomas Baekdal:

»

we don’t have a filter bubble, at least not for the younger generation. It’s a myth that is very easily debunked. What we do have, however, is a decision bubble. Something we see all the time is that there are many people who end up believing something that simply isn’t true, and it is quite painful to watch.

Let me give you a simple example. Take the flat-Earthers. I mean… they are clearly bonkers in their belief that the world is flat, and when you look at this you might think that this is because they are living in a filter bubble.

But it isn’t. You see, the problem with the flat-Earthers isn’t that they have never heard that the Earth is round. They are fully aware that this is what the rest of us believe in. They have seen all our articles and they have been presented with all the proof.

In fact, when you look at how flat-Earthers interact online, you will notice that they are often commenting or attacking scientists any time they post a video or an article about space.

So flat-Earthers do not live in a filter bubble. They are very aware that the rest of us know the Earth is actually round, because they spend every single day attacking us for it.

It’s the same with all the other examples where we think people are living in a filter bubble. Take the anti-vaccination lunatics. They too are fully aware that society as a whole, not to mention medical professionals, all recommend that you get vaccinated. And, they also know that the rest of us think about them as idiots.

They are not living in a filter bubble, but something has happened that has caused them to choose not to believe what is general knowledge.

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Damning Huawei security report: the top 10 key takeaways • Computer Business Review

Ed Targett:

»

These are Computer Business Review’s Top 10 takeaways from the Huawei security report [pdf].

1: Huawei’s build processes are dangerously poor
Huawei’s underlying build process provides “no end-to-end integrity, no good configuration management, no lifecycle management of software components across versions, use of deprecated and out of support tool chains (some of which are non-deterministic) and poor hygiene in the build environments” HCSEC said.

2: Security officials don’t blame Beijing
The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) which oversees HCSEC, said it “does not believe that the defects identified are a result of Chinese state interference.”

3: Pledges of a $2bn overhaul mean nothing, yet…
Huawei promises to transform its software engineering process through the investment of $2bn over five years are “currently no more than a proposed initial budget for as yet unspecified activities.” Until there is “evidence of its impact on products being used in UK networks” HCSEC has no confidence it will drive change.

4: The vulnerabilities are bad…
Vulnerabilities identified in Huawei equipment include unprotected stack overflows in publicly accessible protocols, protocol robustness errors leading to denial of service, logic errors, cryptographic weaknesses, default credentials and many other basic vulnerability types, HCSEC reported.

«

Also there: old issues aren’t fixed, managing the risk will grow, UK operators may have to replace hardware because of the “significant risk”, it’s using outdated OSs, and the lack of progress is becoming critical. You wonder if this is new? Read on.
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Huawei bungled router security, leaving kit open to botnets, despite alert from ISP years prior • The Register

Gareth Corfield:

»

Huawei bungled its response to warnings from an ISP’s code review team about a security vulnerability common across its home routers – patching only a subset of the devices rather than all of its products that used the flawed firmware.

Years later, those unpatched Huawei gateways, still vulnerable and still in use by broadband subscribers around the world, were caught up in a Mirai-variant botnet that exploited the very same hole flagged up earlier by the ISP’s review team.

The Register has seen the ISP’s vulnerability assessment given to Huawei in 2013 that explained how a programming blunder in the firmware of its HG523a and HG533 broadband gateways could be exploited by hackers to hijack the devices, and recommended the remote-command execution hole be closed.

Our sources have requested anonymity.

After receiving the security assessment, which was commissioned by a well-known ISP, Huawei told the broadband provider it had fixed the vulnerability, and had rolled out a patch to HG523a and HG533 devices in 2014, our sources said. However, other Huawei gateways in the HG series, used by other internet providers, suffered from the same flaw because they used the same internal software, and remained vulnerable and at risk of attack for years because Huawei did not patch them.

One source described the bug as a “trivially exploitable remote code execution issue in the router.”

«

And exploited it was. Repeatedly. But Huawei would only patch as it was told about exploits, model by model, despite them all using the same firmware.
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YouTube’s child viewers may struggle to recognise adverts in videos from ‘virtual play dates’ • The Conversation

Rebecca Mardon:

»

Ryan’s channel has become a lucrative business, complete with 25 employees, including video editors, writers and production assistants. It achieved initial commercial success by allowing more traditional “pre-roll” adverts to appear before its videos, which mostly saw Ryan playing with toys – which his parents say they buy. The channel later began to embed advertising content for major brands, such as Walmart, within Ryan’s own videos. More recently, the business launched a range of Ryan’s World toys that often feature in his video content.

Ryan’s videos do include what seem like clear, child-friendly disclosures surrounding sponsored content. But the question is whether children actually recognise these disclosures and understand what advertising is, and whether all YouTube videos aimed at children adequately disclose marketing messages.

Research shows that children have lower advertising literacy than adult viewers. They struggle to recognise adverts when they are embedded in organic content, and may not recognise YouTube videos featuring paid advertising content, vloggers’ own-brand merchandise, or free products “gifted” by brands as marketing.

Children are particularly likely to struggle to identify advertising messages by their favourite vloggers. Viewers often come to feel personal attachments to YouTube stars. Fans of beauty vlogger Zoella, for instance, see her as a sister or best friend, and my own research has found that fans often defend and excuse vlogger actions that might otherwise be seen as problematic or unethical as a result of this relationship.

«

By the way, Ryan is aged seven and reckoned to have earned $22m between June 2017 and June 2018.
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What Facebook is getting wrong in the fight against fake news • VICE

David Uberti:

»

From her home in San Diego, [Brooke] Binkowski sees the stakes of the info war in nearby Tijuana, where the asylum seekers known as “The Caravan” remain in limbo after a journey across Central America that received a lot of publicity riddled with misinformation. The real-world implications don’t end there: Parents of Sandy Hook victims are pursuing a defamation suit against Infowars huckster Alex Jones—a case on which Binkowski is consulting as an expert witness—for claiming the school shooting was a hoax. “I love talking shit to people who lie on the internet,” she said. “I’m pretty much born for this.”

I caught up with Binkowski by phone to talk Facebook, fact-checking, and how fake news has changed since she joined Snopes in late 2015.

VICE: Did you have any sense of how big the problem was on Facebook or to what extent they were taking it seriously?
Brooke Binkowski: They didn’t share shit with us. I felt that we were crisis PR: They could point to us and say, Look, we’re doing something about it. We hired Snopes. They also [included] The Weekly Standard and [considered including] The Daily Caller in their fact-checking teams, because they didn’t want to be perceived as left-wing fact-checker friendly. I was like, You guys don’t know how this fucking works, do you? You should not be doing this. You need to hire people internally.

V: They’re reacting to conservative criticism the exact same way a legacy media company might react.
BB: Their reaction has been very telling. That’s another reason I’ve gone on this offensive. I’m broke as shit—always. I don’t have a lot of personal power. But what I really have right now is a megaphone. I have a voice. And they’re very sensitive to public opinion. So I’m just going to keep kicking them in the teeth publicly as long as I can, because they’re fucking up.

V: So you think the power lies with them?
BB: One hundred percent. For them, they’ve been in denial about being a media company, not just for legal reasons, but also because they can tell themselves media may be prone to being swayed one way or the other. Tech is morally neutral—it’s all in the way people use it. That’s obviously not true. It never was.

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UK opens up access to oil and gas data • Out-law

»

Terabytes of data on the UK’s oil and gas fields and infrastructure has been made freely available for use by industry.

The Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) said the release of the data can help industry recover the 20 billion barrels of oil and gas that are estimated to remain untapped in the UK’s Continental Shelf (UKCS).
The data is accessible via a new national data repository (NDR) established by the OGA, and includes “130 terabytes of well, geophysical, field and infrastructure data … covering more than 12,500 wellbores, 5,000 seismic surveys, and 3,000 pipelines”.

Bob Ruddiman, specialist in oil and gas at Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, said: “This is a significant development in the evolution of the UKCS. The future prospectivity of the basin will be significantly enhanced by the free availability of data. Innovators will look differently at the many opportunities which undoubtedly exist and the future will undoubtedly include developments previously overlooked or discarded but which will be enhanced by application of new technology to existing data.”

«

Er, well, open data, so that’s good. But it would be better to leave these reserves buried.
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How the UK lost the Brexit battle • POLITICO

Tom McTague:

»

Had [Downing Street] been prepared for Brexit on June 24, 2016, the negotiations might have played out differently.

“The British government should have offered something very, very quickly,” said one high-ranking official of a large EU country. “If the UK had said: ‘Here’s the plan,’ we might have accepted it.”

“The British strength was being one member state, being able to define its national interest quickly and making its move quickly,” the official said. “It did not do that.”

Instead, in the aftermath of the referendum, Cameron resigned as prime minister; Labour MPs attempted to oust their party’s leader Jeremy Corbyn; Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, vowed to hold a second independence referendum; and Martin McGuinness, then deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, called for a vote on whether the British territory should leave the UK and become part of the Republic of Ireland.

The seeds of the crisis Britain faced today were planted by Cameron, said Foreign Office Minister Alan Duncan. “He called the referendum too early, ran a crappy campaign and then walked out, leaving a vacuum.”

“It is a crisis caused by bad decisions on top of bad decisions, turning a short-term gambit into a long-term catastrophe,” he added. “You can trace the whole thing back to the start. The crash was always coming.”

…One adviser on European affairs to a prominent EU27 leader said Dublin had begun lobbying other EU countries in the months before the referendum to ensure Ireland was protected in the event of decision by the UK to leave…

Northern Irish peer Paul Bew, one of the chief architects of the Good Friday Agreement, said Dublin’s preparation was typical of the Irish in their long history of negotiations with Britain. “They are on top of the detail, and we [the British] are incurious. The people at the top of the UK government are also paralyzed by imperial guilt.”

The contrast with London was stark. While Cameron refused to allow officials to prepare for a Leave vote — barring officials from putting anything on paper — Ireland had produced a 130-page Contingency Plan with an hour-by-hour checklist.

«

Excellent in-depth piece which shows how many times the UK got this wrong – ie pretty much at every turn. So much for the EU being a sclerotic organisation that can’t tie its shoelaces.
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Sony to close smartphone plant in China, shift production to Thailand • Reuters

Pei Li and Miakiko Yamazaki:

»

Sony Corp will close its smartphone plant in Beijing in the next few days, a company spokesman said, as the Japanese electronics giant aims to cut costs in the loss-making business.

Sony will shift production to its plant in Thailand in a bid to halve costs and turn the smartphone business profitable in the year from April 2020, the spokesman said on Thursday. He said the decision was not related to Sino-U.S. trade frictions.

Sony’s smartphone business is one of its few weak spots and is bracing for a loss of 95 billion yen ($863m) for the financial year ending this month.

Some analysts say Sony should sell the business amid acute price competition with Asian rivals. The company has a global market share of less than 1%, shipping just 6.5 million units this financial year mainly for Japan and Europe.

But Sony has said it has no intention to sell as it expects smartphones to be central to technologies for fifth-generation wireless networks, where cars and various devices would be connected.

«

What is the magical thinking that leads Sony execs to think that 5G will make its smartphone business profitable? Competition then will come from more places than ever, and Sony isn’t in the 5G space to any appreciable extent. I suspect it comes from people whose jobs are at risk if they confess the division is never going to break even again. Which is, let’s be fair, understandable.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Online dating: it’s the way people hook up now. CC-licensed photo by %u2593%u2592%u2591 TORLEY %u2591%u2592%u2593 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The rise of online dating, and the company that dominates the market • Visual Capitalist

Frank Cardona:

»

Tinder globally popularized app-based matchmaking when it launched on iPhones in 2012, and later on Android in 2013. Unlike traditional dating websites, which required lengthy profiles and complicated profile searches, Tinder gamified online dating with quick account setups and its “swipe-right-to-like” approach. By 2017, Tinder had grown to 57 million active users across the globe and billions of swipes per day.

Since the launch of Tinder, hundreds of dating services have appeared on app stores worldwide. Investors are taking notice of this booming market, while analysts estimate the global online dating market could be worth $12bn by next year…

Today, nearly all major dating apps are owned by the Match Group, a publicly-traded pure play that was spun out of IAC, a conglomerate controlled by media mogul Barry Diller.

IAC saw the online dating trend early, purchasing early online dating pioneer Match.com way back in 1999. However, with online dating shifting into the mainstream over recent years, the strategy quickly shifted to aggressively buying up major players in the market.

In addition to its prized app Tinder – which doubled its revenue in 2018 to $805m – Match Group owns popular online dating services like OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, Hinge, and has even bought out international competitors like Meetic in Europe, and Eureka in Japan. The dating giant reported revenues of $1.73bn in 2018. According to reports, Match Group now owns more than 45 dating-related businesses, including 25 acquisitions.

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The long, complicated, and extremely frustrating history of Medium, 2012–present • Nieman Journalism Lab

Laura Hazard Owen:

»

I don’t blame people who go do something for Medium. Seriously, grab that money while it’s there. In 2015, after I was laid off, I talked to people at Medium about starting a parenting publication there. It was something that I might have received a few thousand dollars to do. I joined Nieman Lab instead, but that freedom (?) and potential money still float in and out of my mind. Some of the news stories I’ve written about Medium have been too credulous; I’ve taken too much of Williams’ startup speak at face value. I (and many others) devoted what now seems like way too much mental energy to the “Is Medium a platform or a publisher?” question. Sure, Williams’ frequently shifting stated vision didn’t help, but that angst still feels ridiculously quaint in 2019.

Why spend so much time worrying about what Medium is? Maybe because we wanted to know whether it was a friend or an enemy. The answer is that it’s neither. It’s a reflection of what the media industry has worried about, and hoped for, and not received. But Medium was never something that we would get to define. Instead, it’s turned out to be an endless thought experiment into what publishing on the internet could look like. That’s not much fun for people who got burned along the way, but Medium was never exactly ours to begin with.

«

Medium really is a puzzle. What’s its model now? What will its model be in a year? Without enough certainty, it’s impossible to know whether to write for it or not. But its sugar daddy means that it never has to think too hard about that.
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Sony has sold 4.2 million PlayStation VR headsets • Venturebeat

Jeff Grubb:

»

That sold-through designation [on the 4.2m number] is important because it’s not just “shipped.” Instead, 4.2 million people have actually purchased the device.

This means that PSVR likely still has a lead in the premium VR headset market. But Facebook and HTC don’t share exact sales numbers for their devices. Even without that data, however, industry intelligence firm IDC estimates that PSVR shipped 463,000 headsets in the fourth quarter of 2018. That put it ahead of 300,000 Oculus Rifts and 230,000 HTC Vives.

Sony has continued to use its advantages in the gaming space to pitch the PSVR to customers. Unlike Vive or Rift, you only need a PlayStation 4 instead of an expensive gaming PC. PlayStation is also a globally recognized gaming brand with numerous developer partnerships. The publisher has leveraged those relationships to bring big-name VR experiences to the PSVR first. That includes hits like Tetris Effect and Resident Evil 7. And that’s on top of its first-party efforts like Farpoint and Astro Bot: Rescue Mission.

«

Personally I’ve gone from being highly optimistic about VR to pessimistic – again. 4.2m is a good figure, but it’s entirely self-contained to games.
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Appl still hasn’t fixd its MacBook kyboad problm • WSJ

Joanna Stern (with Elliot Bentley):

»

Nop, I havn’t fogottn how to wit. No did my dito go on vacation.

You s, to sha th pain of using an Appl laptop kyboad that’s faild aft fou months, I could only think of on ida: tak all th bokn ltts out of my column. Thn I alizd that would mak th whol thing unadabl. So to…

Why is th baking of my MacBook Ai kyboad so insanly maddning? Lt’s tak a tip down Mmoy Lan…

Apil 2015: Appl Inc. lass th all-nw MacBook with a “buttfly” kyboad. In od to achiv xtm thinnss, th kys a much flatt than old gnations but th buttfly mchanism undnath, fo which th kyboad is namd, aims to plicat th bounc of a mo taditional kyboad.

Octob 2016: Th MacBook Po aivs with a scond-gnation buttfly kyboad. A fw months lat, som bgin to pot that ltts o chaacts don’t appa, that kys gt stuck o that ltts unxpctdly pat.

That’s why I’d lik to off you th oppotunity to…

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Eugh. I wonder if Apple will finally, finally, finally listen to this. When you get stories like this in international papers from well-respected writers, it destroys your reputation. This has gone on for years now and it still isn’t fixed. I’ve never known Apple to be so indifferent to a serious problem that has gone on for so long across an entire product line.
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The Boeing 737 Max crash is a warning to drivers, too • Slate

Henry Grabar:

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automation has not made pilots’ jobs easier, says Steve Casner, a pilot and research psychologist at NASA’s Ames Research Center: “You’d think it would dumb down the role of the pilot. Contrary to expectation, you have to know more than ever.”

Casner is one of a number of pilots and analysts who see a parallel between the introduction of automation in airplanes more than 30 years ago and its arrival in cars today, as drivers prepare to relinquish the burdens of navigating the blacktop.

“It’s like 1983 all over again,” Casner told me Monday. Where airlines by and large got it right, he thinks car-makers may be overeager in sticking humans in the car with unfamiliar technologies. “I’m very concerned that even though aviation has shown us how to do it, we’re about to make a big mistake with cars. Sitting there waiting like a potted plant for the lights to blink is not one of our fortes.”

Together with the cognitive psychologist Edwin Hutchins, Casner is the author of a new paper, “What Do We Tell the Drivers? Towards Minimum Driver Training Standards for Partially Automated Cars.” One of their main points is that automation would not have made commercial flight as safe as it is today without pilots who understood how the systems worked.

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We’re already seeing crashes where the human driver doesn’t realise that the system isn’t functioning correctly. Disengaging it might get harder.
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Boeing 737 MAX software fix: easy to upload, harder to approve • Reuters

Eric Johnson, David Shepardson and Allison Lampert:

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Boeing engineers armed with laptops and thumb drives will be able to upload a crucial software fix for the 737 MAX anti-stall system in about an hour. That’s the easy part.

Before Boeing’s workhorse of the future can resume flying, the upgrade must first be approved by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and then by wary regulators around the globe who have grounded it in the wake of two deadly crashes.

Regulators in China, Europe and Canada have signaled they will not rubber stamp an FAA decision to allow the planes back into the air but conduct their own reviews.

With the FAA under pressure for its role in certifying the newest 737, and other regulators challenging its leadership of the airline safety system, Boeing’s money-spinning jet could remain parked for months.

“We are guessing this thing’s not going to be put to bed until the July or August time frame,” said Charlie Smith, chief investment officer at Fort Smith Capital Group, which holds shares in Boeing.

The world’s largest planemaker has been working on the upgrade for its MCAS stall-prevention system since October’s Lion Air crash, when pilots are believed to have lost a tug of war with software that repeatedly pushed the nose down.

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The FAA now has the same problem as Boeing: persuading people that its decisions are safe. Just a part of Trump’s legacy (the FAA director position hasn’t been formally filled).
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Standing against hate • Facebook Newsroom

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over the past three months our conversations with members of civil society and academics who are experts in race relations around the world have confirmed that white nationalism and separatism cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and organized hate groups. Our own review of hate figures and organizations – as defined by our Dangerous Individuals & Organizations policy – further revealed the overlap between white nationalism and separatism and white supremacy. Going forward, while people will still be able to demonstrate pride in their ethnic heritage, we will not tolerate praise or support for white nationalism and separatism.

We also need to get better and faster at finding and removing hate from our platforms. Over the past few years we have improved our ability to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to find material from terrorist groups. Last fall, we started using similar tools to extend our efforts to a range of hate groups globally, including white supremacists. We’re making progress, but we know we have a lot more work to do.

Our efforts to combat hate don’t stop here. As part of today’s announcement, we’ll also start connecting people who search for terms associated with white supremacy to resources focused on helping people leave behind hate groups.

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No name attached to it. But anyway, about time. A lot of people have been telling Facebook about this literally for years.
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Magic Leap heads to AT+T stores, along with AR Game of Thrones experience • CNet

Scott Stein:

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AT+T was originally supposed to be a retail partner for Magic Leap at launch last fall, but that never ended up happening. This retail launch of the $2,295 AR headset will be pretty limited: It will arrive April 1 in Boston at one store (Boylston), April 3 in Chicago (on Michigan Avenue) and April 6 in San Francisco (at 1 Powell).

The hardware will be exactly the same as what’s already been available previously. The self-contained AR hardware runs off an Nvidia Tegra X2 processor and creates 3D effects meshed into reality through its tethered goggles. But it doesn’t have cellular onboard yet. Instead, it requires Wi-Fi.

AT+T is planning to make a move to 5G and bring Magic Leap along, but for now those developments will be limited to deploying 5G at Magic Leap’s Florida headquarters later this year for 5G AR testing.

As for these retail Magic Leap Game of Thrones experiences, it could be worth a drop-in. The “Dead Must Die” encounter, according to AT+T’s press release: “…challenges the bravest of fans to confront a White Walker and lead the fight for the living. Curious visitors will be fitted with a Magic Leap One and step into a physical representation of King’s Landing, which instantly transforms into an ominous, icy scene that begs investigation…

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Nope. I just don’t see this making it. I think Magic Leap’s investors can kiss their money goodbye.
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More stunning falls in solar and battery storage costs put fossil fuels on notice • RenewEconomy

Giles Parkinson:

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More speculator falls in the costs of solar PV and battery storage technologies is ensuring that renewables are not only vastly cheaper than coal and gas power plants on generation costs, but also competitive with fossil fuel generation when it comes to dispatchable generation.

The latest technology cost analysis released by research company BloombergNEF shows that battery storage costs have fallen by more than one third since the first half of 2018, and even wind and solar have also fallen by another 10-18% respectively over that time. Offshore wind is down 24% over the last year.

The big mover, and the most significant for the unfolding low carbon energy transition has been the cost of lithium-ion battery storage, which BNEF says has fallen by 35% to $US187/MWh. That means it is competing with, and in some cases, easily beating gas generation for tenders for peaking plants, including in the US where gas is supposed to be cheaper than elsewhere.

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Forget Tesla, it’s China’s E-buses that are denting oil demand • Bloomberg NEF

Alaric Nightingale:

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The oil industry needn’t be too concerned, for now, about how Tesla’s electric cars are denting demand. China and its bus fleet could be more of a worry.

By the end of this year, a cumulative 270,000 barrels a day of diesel demand will have been displaced by electric buses, most of it in China, according to a report published last week by BloombergNEF. That’s more than three times the displacement by all the world’s passenger electric vehicles (a market where Tesla has a share of about 12%.).

Despite rapid growth, the impact on the oil market from electric vehicles remains relatively small. Collectively, buses and electric vehicles account for about 3% of oil demand growth since 2011, and 0.3% of current global consumption, according to BloombergNEF figures and data from the International Energy Agency.

Buses matter more because of their size and constant use. For every 1,000 electric buses on the road, 500 barrels of diesel are displaced each day, BloombergNEF estimates. By comparison, 1,000 battery electric vehicles remove just 15 barrels of oil demand.

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So there’s an obvious policy open goal for politicians to aim at: replace every diesel bus. (In passing, I think “NEF” in this Bloomberg tag stands for “New Energy Futures”, but can’t be certain. Might be “Fundamentals”.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified