Nadal and Federer at Wimbledon. They’re like smartphones, honest. Photo by Georgio 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.

A bug in Samsung’s default texting app is sending random pics to other people • Gizmodo

Sam Rutherford:

»

Sending pictures to others is one of the most basic functions of a smartphone, but when your phone’s texting app starts randomly pushing out photos without your knowledge, you got a problem.

And unfortunately, according to a smattering of complaints on Reddit and the official Samsung forums, it seems that’s exactly what happened to a handful of Samsung phone users, including owners of late model devices such as the Galaxy Note 8 and Galaxy S9.

According to user reports, the problem stems from Samsung Messages, the default texting app on Galaxy devices, which (for reasons that haven’t been determined), is erroneously sending pictures stored on the devices to random contacts via SMS. One user on Reddit even claims that instead of sending one pic, Samsung Messages sent out their entire photo gallery to a contact in the middle of the night.

Luckily for that person (or maybe not), those pictures were sent to their partner. But for others who may have had pics sent to more sensitive recipients like a business partner or boss, the bug could give other people an unwanted peek into their private life.

«

“Unwanted peek” indeed.
link to this extract

HTC lays off 1,500 people in latest cost-cutting effort • UploadVR

Ian Hamilton:

»

HTC’s leadership is laying off around one fifth of its workforce in an attempt to put the company on a path to sustainability.

According to a tweet from Bloomberg journalist Samson Ellis, HTC is cutting 1,500 people from its Taiwan workforce. That’s roughly 22% of employees.

The move is the latest attempt by HTC’s leaders to find a sustainable business in the shadow of giants like Google and Samsung.  Late last year the company received a $1.1bn injection from Google in exchange for key teams involved in the creation of the Pixel smartphone. Meanwhile, HTC’s engineering and marketing teams soldier on with launches like the Vive Focus standalone VR headset and  Vive Pro.

«

Apparently it’s not on the VR side of the business. Though I can’t imagine that’s thriving either. Nearly a quarter of the workforce going? Its revenues are already smaller than in 2005; it’s only that cash pile that’s keeping it afloat, one feels.
link to this extract

Bird’s $400m in 4 months is the poster child for Silicon Valley • Business Insider

Julie Bort:

»

so many people have bombarded Bird investors with questions on their thinking that some have taken to publicly defending their investment.

For instance, Mark Suster, a partner in LA firm Upfront Ventures, who invested in Bird’s $15 million A round as well as its last two enormous big rounds wrote just such a blog post.

“While this reaction to such a valuation is understandable, to anybody who has seen the meteoric rise in consumer demand and actual revenue the valuation is much less surprising and may turn out to be quite conservative,” he said.

Maybe.

More likely is that Bird, based in Santa Monica, is an example of the kind of more-is-always better, follow-the-herd venture investments that power the tech industry.

VCs see a young startup with a novel idea doing well, and pound down its door to be among the first investors. The premise is that it’s better to spend wildly to grow fast and be first than it is to be fiscally responsible. If you move too slowly, the thinking goes, you might end up watching an upstart steal your idea and your market.

With gobs of money and a bunch of VCs on the board, a young company may continue to flourish. But it’s also risky.

«

But where’s the penalty for being an investor? If it all goes south, sure, that’s money gone. But if things flourish, you’re in the money (after some time). There’s no opportunity cost in funding even something that looks hopeless, because there are so many companies to fund. Sometimes the herd is right; sometimes, the fact of having the herd there makes it the correct decision.
link to this extract

Ceres Imaging gets $25M to intelligently scan crops from above • TechCrunch

Lucas Matney:

»

Agtech startup Ceres Imaging, which uses computer vision and spectral imaging tech to deliver insights about crops to farmers, has closed a new round of funding.

The Oakland-based company has pulled in a $25m round led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from Romulus Capital. They have raised around $35m to date.

Since the company closed their Series A, they’ve continued expanding their efforts beyond vineyards and orchards into “row crops” like corn, soybeans and wheat. While those crops may be lower margin by nature, they offer a big opportunity when it comes to scaling up their operations and tackling problems on a bigger scale.

«

Europe has had pretty much this, via satellite monitoring, for absolutely ages – it even uses it to monitor when farmers are falsely claiming “set-aside” payments (for fields left fallow). What’s new about this? It even uses piloted aircraft. That’s bonkers. Is it just that there’s more crazy venture capital money washing around the US? Or that the EU funds better science which quietly gets done?
link to this extract

Dell to return to public markets with tracking stock • The New York Times

Michael J de la Merced:

»

Mr. Dell and Silver Lake are expected to announce as early as Monday that they have struck a $21.7bn deal to buy out investors in a special class of shares created in 2016 to help Dell buy the networking company EMC. That stock effectively tracks the performance of Dell’s 82% stake in VMware, the fast-growing network software company that Dell inherited when it bought EMC. (The other 18% of VMware is publicly traded as a different stock.)

The deal, which was approved by the boards of Dell and VMware on Sunday evening, would simplify the stock structure of Dell and its publicly traded subsidiary. But it would also mark the return of Dell to the public markets, with a twist: The special shares held by Mr. Dell and Silver Lake would give them more votes than other investors.

The transaction represents in some ways the culmination of a nearly $100bn bet by Mr. Dell and Silver Lake that, away from the harsh glare of public markets, they could retool a company best-known for making personal computers and traditional servers for an age of smartphones and cloud computing. Dell still supplies the machines that sit on the desks inside many office buildings, and has also found a ready market selling equipment and software to the kinds of networked computing services that were once thought to spell its end.

“In 2012, people were saying the PC was dead. It wasn’t,” Mr. Dell said in a telephone interview. “Three years ago, people were saying that everything’s going to the public cloud. Turns out that was completely wrong, too.”

«

Dell’s buyout in 2013 was $24bn; the way it has mushroomed in size, with EMC and VMWare, is amazing. Wonder if we will get any visibility into the profitability of its PC business again.
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Why Wimbledon is an iPhone launch, and Nadal is Samsung, and tennis is the smartphone business • Medium

I wrote a thing:

»

It’s Wimbledon time again! That time of year when people the world over remember that tennis professionals actually exist, having forgotten for the past 50 weeks. (If you want to interest kids, say they’re playing for a fortnight and hope they mishear it as Fortnite.)

So for the next two weeks, we’ll hear lots about Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, Murray, Serena Williams, and the rest. I used to cover tennis; for years the pro circuit was my journalistic meat and drink. Now I cover technology. And just as the tennis circuit rises and falls, and just as tennis has risen and fallen in popularity and interest, so, it seems to me, with smartphones.

«

Basically, it’s Shira Ovide’s fault.
link to this extract

Uganda to block VPNs after people begin avoiding new social media tax • TorrentFreak

“Andy”:

»

Passed in May by the Ugandan parliament, the legislation requires local Internet service providers to block a wide range of social media and telecoms platforms until subscribers pay a flat fee of 200 shillings (US$0.051) per day. While just shy of US$19 per year might not initially sound like much, per capita income stands at US$600 and millions of Ugandans survive on less than a dollar per day

In a joint statement, ISPs MTN, Airtel, and Africell informed their customers that the services listed above would be blocked until payment is made. Payment must be made in advance via mobile phones, with a small discount available if customers pay a month up front.

“Access will be granted for a calendar day until 12:00 AM for the day, i.e until midnight if the customer has paid for one day,” the notice reads.

While this kind of taxation appears unique, people’s desire to avoid taxes is universal. In this case, that is easily achieved by using a VPN, since they’re able to circumvent ISP restrictions placed on the sites listed above. As a result, VPNs are now suddenly at the height of fashion in Uganda, with searches reaching an all-time high on Google.

But with Ugandans restoring their online freedom in droves, the government isn’t happy at the prospect of losing its revenue. Within hours of the news that VPNs were gaining in popularity, the government stepped in to do something about it.

In a statement, Uganda Communications Commission Executive Director Godfrey Mutabazi said that Internet service providers would be ordered to block VPNs to prevent citizens from avoiding the social media tax.

«

I don’t see this ending well for the government, but it’s going to be fun to watch. Next stop Tor, I’d imagine.
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Tech’s ‘dirty secret’: the app developers sifting through your Gmail • WSJ

Douglas MacMillan:

»

One of those companies is Return Path Inc., which collects data for marketers by scanning the inboxes of more than two million people who have signed up for one of the free apps in Return Path’s partner network using a Gmail, Microsoft Corp. or Yahoo email address. Computers normally do the scanning, analyzing about 100 million emails a day. At one point about two years ago, Return Path employees read about 8,000 unredacted emails to help train the company’s software, people familiar with the episode say.

In another case, employees of Edison Software, another Gmail developer that makes a mobile app for reading and organizing email, personally reviewed the emails of hundreds of users to build a new feature, says Mikael Berner, the company’s CEO.

Letting employees read user emails has become “common practice” for companies that collect this type of data, says Thede Loder, the former chief technology officer at eDataSource Inc., a rival to Return Path. He says engineers at eDataSource occasionally reviewed emails when building and improving software algorithms.

“Some people might consider that to be a dirty secret,” says Mr. Loder. “It’s kind of reality.”

Neither Return Path nor Edison asked users specifically whether it could read their emails. Both companies say the practice is covered by their user agreements, and that they used strict protocols for the employees who read emails. eDataSource says it previously allowed employees to read some email data but recently ended that practice to better protect user privacy.

«

People do see value in having these companies scan their email (though Return Path is not really directly useful to you or I). But the lack of control is as bad as some Twitter API accesses.
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The age of flux • The American Interest

Peter Pomerantsev:

»

Pollsters used to predict elections based on ideas of economic class and ideology, nowhere more so than where I live in the UK. Then, as the old economy changed and the Cold War ended, this became a poorer predictor of how one votes. In a world where government was a consumer service provider, marketing labels predominated. Sales firms such as Experian served up concepts like “the Ford Mondeo Man”—the swing voter whose desire for a certain type of car politicians had to fulfill. Now Mondeo Man seems far too fuzzy. Political targeting is more granular, looking for the little trigger which will get you out to vote.

Social media both helped crack open the vessels in which the old ideologies and identities were pickled in, and to ferment a new approach. Tom Borwick, digital director of the official Brexit campaign in the UK, thinks that for a population of 20 million, one usually needs 70 to 80 types of targeted social media messages: Animal Rights and Pot Holes, Death Penalty and Health Services. And, as Pavlovsky already knew in 1990s Russia, in a situation where groups you target are so varied, where identity itself is so fractured, one unites them round a vague feeling, as any concrete ideology would get in the way: Drain The Swamp or Take Back Control. And instead of a coherent vision of the future, conspiracy becomes the way you lassoo your vote together. The Deep State (for Trump). The CIA (for Putin). The Establishment (for everyone).

“Conspiracy,” says the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev, “is what you have after ideology has died.”

«

This is like a companion piece to the Thomas Friedman piece from yesterday: the old certainties and identities, especially in politics, are dissolving.
link to this extract

A simple way for computers to improve our economic forecasts • Tim Harford

Tim Harford:

»

If the computers do produce some insight [into forecasts], it may be because they can tap into data that we could hardly have imagined using before. Satellite imaging can now track the growth of crops or the stockpiling of commodities such as oil. Computers can guess at human sentiment by analysing web searches for terms such as “job seekers allowance”, mentions of “recession” in news stories, and positive emotions in tweets.

And there are stranger correlations, too. A study by economists Kasey Buckles, Daniel Hungerman and Steven Lugauer showed that a few quarters before an economic downturn in the US, the rate of conceptions also falls. Conceptions themselves may be deducible by computers tracking sales of pregnancy tests and folic acid.

Back in 1991, a psychologist named Harold Zullow published research suggesting that the emotional content of songs in the Billboard Hot 100 chart could predict recessions. Hits containing “pessimistic rumination” (“I heard it through the grapevine / Not much longer would you be mine”) tended to predict an economic downturn. His successor is a young economist named Hisam Sabouni, who reckons that a computer-aided analysis of Spotify streaming gives him an edge in forecasting stock market movements and consumer sentiment.

Will any of this prove useful for forecasting significant economic and political events? Perhaps. But for now, here is an easy way to use a computer to help you forecast: open up a spreadsheet, note down what you believe today, and regularly revisit and reflect. The simplest forecasting tip of all is to keep score.

«

Rather as experts can make good diagnoses by tapping into data they’re not even consciously aware of, computers with access to more data and a well-trained machine learning system might “feel” an answer even when there’s no obvious way to tell.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Apple Maps’s introduction didn’t go well; now it’s going for a big reboot. Photo by Noel Hidalgo 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. Yes, I did write a subroutine, and tested against a comma. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Science, engineering and games in Excel • Excel Unusual

George Lungu:

»

Welcome to Excel Unusual, the home of the most unique Microsoft Excel animated spreadsheets.

All the animated models in the thumbnails above are created using plain MS Excel.
All the Excel files and PDF tutorials can be downloaded from MODELS & TUTORIALS page.
All the downloads on this site are FREE and there are hundreds of them.

«

He’d like your donations, of all sorts. Come on, it’s Excel!
link to this extract

Best Western® Hotels & Resorts and IBM Watson Advertising introduce AI-powered ad to help consumers • PR Newswire

»

Consumers can start a conversation with Best Western’s AI-powered ad by simply engaging the ad and providing information on their current or upcoming travel plans. Through a series of dialogue prompts, the consumer will be guided seamlessly through a conversation about their travel needs and the AI-powered ad will respond with tailored suggestions on how to make the most out of their vacation and how they can take advantage of Best Western’s locations across North America.

«

How great to come up with a product that literally nobody will want to use.
link to this extract

Why are so many political parties blowing up? (Part 1) • The New York Times

Thomas Friedman:

»

We’re going through a change in the climate of globalization: We’re going from an interconnected world to an interdependent world. In an interdependent world your friends can kill you faster than your enemies. If banks in Greece or Italy — both NATO allies — go under tonight, your retirement fund will feel it. And in an interdependent world, your rivals falling becomes more dangerous than your rivals rising. If China takes six more islands in the South China Sea tonight, you won’t lose sleep; if China loses 6% growth tonight, you could lose your job.

Lastly, we’re going through a change in the climate of technology. Machines are acquiring most of the unique attributes of humans — particularly the ability to learn, analyze, reason, maneuver and drive on their own.

From 1960 to 2000, Quartz reported, U.S. manufacturing employment stayed roughly steady at around 17.5 million jobs. But between 2000 and 2010, thanks largely to digitization and automation, “manufacturing employment plummeted by more than a third,” which was “worse than any decade in U.S. manufacturing history.” And we’ve digitized only about 20% of the economy, meaning there’s tremendous technological climate change yet ahead.

These climate changes are reshaping the ecosystem of work — wiping out huge numbers of middle-skilled jobs — and this is reshaping the ecosystem of learning, making lifelong learning the new baseline for advancement.

These three climate changes are also reshaping geopolitics. They are like a hurricane that is blowing apart weak nations that were O.K. in the Cold War — when superpowers would shower them with foreign aid and arms, when China could not compete with them for low-skilled work and when climate change, deforestation and population explosions had not wiped out vast amounts of their small-scale agriculture.

«

This is very much what I’ve been thinking. Things are changing, and very rapidly.
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Future of smartphones: folding screens, many cameras, fingerprint readers and air charging • The Washington Post

Geoffrey Fowler:

»

Picture this: You pull your phone out of your pocket and unfold it like a napkin into a tablet. You press your finger on the screen, and it unlocks. You switch to the camera app, and a spider-like array of lenses shoot simultaneously to capture one giant photo.

These are all things I’ve seen phones do — some in prototype form, others in models you can get only in China. Analysts in Korea say we might see a folding “Galaxy X” phone from Samsung as soon as next year. When I look into my crystal ball, I’m convinced we’re on the cusp of the most significant changes to the design and functionality of smartphones since they first arrived.

The shake-up couldn’t come soon enough. You probably couldn’t live without your phone but feel as excited about it as you do running water. And the water company doesn’t hold an event every year to hype slimmer faucets. From the front, the iPhone 8 is pretty much indistinguishable from the iPhone 6 that came out nearly four years ago. Americans are holding onto old phones longer than ever — 25.8 months, according the most recent research from Kantar Worldpanel.

The tech industry has been doubling down on software and artificial intelligence capabilities, which still hold huge potential. But there’s a lot to be done on improving phone hardware, too, the number one reason most people upgrade.

«

Sounds fun. Though still essentially phones, right?
link to this extract

Apple gets second supplier for OLED iPhone screens • Bloomberg

Min Jeong Lee and Sam Kim:

»

South Korea’s LG Display Co. will initially supply between 2 million and 4 million units, small relative to Apple’s sales, as it continues to work on ramping up capacity, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. That would however help Apple gain leverage in price negotiations with Samsung, the sole supplier of OLED displays for the iPhone X and Apple’s primary rival in smartphones. The expense of that component is a key reason iPhone X pricing starts at $1,000 and sales haven’t met initial expectations.

A successful supply deal would help both Apple and LG. The Cupertino, California-based company would be able to buy significant volumes from LG for next year’s iPhone model, as it tries fight off a slump in smartphone sales. LG needs a fresh source of revenue as it battles a slide in the price of liquid crystal displays.

«

That’s a really tiny number of screens compared to the number of OLED phones Apple will be looking to sell; remarkable if it has taken all this time – at least a year – to ramp up so little.
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Google weeps as its home state of California passes its own GDPR • The Register

Kieren McCarthy:

»

California has become the first state in the US to pass a data privacy law – with governor Jerry Brown signing the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 into law on Thursday.

The legislation will give new rights to the state’s 40 million inhabitants, including the ability to view the data that companies hold on them and, critically, request that it be deleted and not sold to third parties. It’s not too far off Europe’s GDPR.

Any company that holds data on more than 50,000 people is subject to the law, and each violation carries a hefty $7,500 fine. Needless to say, the corporations that make a big chunk of their profits from selling their users’ information are not overly excited about the new law.

“We think there’s a set of ramifications that’s really difficult to understand,” said a Google spokesperson, adding: “User privacy needs to be thoughtfully balanced against legitimate business needs.”

Likewise tech industry association the Internet Association complained that “policymakers work to correct the inevitable, negative policy and compliance ramifications this last-minute deal will create.”

So far no word from Facebook, which put 1.5 billion users on a boat to California back in April in order to avoid Europe’s similar data privacy regulations.

«

The result came too late for Friday’s edition (sorry) but it means that California avoids the ballot measure that would have been worse, had it passed (and it looked likely to pass).
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“Inventor of email” appeals ruling that tossed his libel suit against Techdirt • Ars Technica

Cyrus Farivar:

»

The appeal to the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals comes more than a year after a federal judge dismissed the libel lawsuit brought by Shiva Ayyadurai, an entrepreneur who is now also running as a longshot candidate for the United States Senate.

In the lower court ruling, US District Judge F. Dennis Saylor found that because it is impossible to define precisely and specifically what email is, Ayyadurai’s “claim is incapable of being proved true or false.”

In Ayyadurai’s lawyers’ Thursday filing, they argued Techdirt previously published articles and comments that contained numerous antagonistic words used to describe Ayyadurai—a “fraud,” a “charlatan,” a “liar,” a “fake”—that a “reasonable reader” would find as asserting a factual statement rather than a protected opinion. Because of this, Ayyadurai’s team believes, Techdirt’s work can constitute defamation.

The appeal also argues that because Techdirt disregarded “extensive factual evidence,” the publication “consciously disregarded” the truth and knowingly acted with “actual malice.” Based on that, Ayyadurai and his attorneys claim, the case should be allowed to go forward.

However, numerous legends of Internet history—including Vint Cerf himself, a co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol—have publicly dismissed Ayyadurai’s claims regarding email.

«

Who you gonna believe, though, the internet legend or some guy with a vague grievance? Though I like the judge’s sidestep on this: can’t define exactly what email is, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . Add this to “lawsuits that have gone on too long and should never have started”.
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How North Korea could go from hermit kingdom to factory hub • Foreign Policy

Elias Groll:

»

The summit, and the prospect of an end to international economic sanctions, could lead to a flood of foreign capital that could transform North Korea from a hermit kingdom into an economic juggernaut, concludes the study by Samsung Securities.

“If South Korea combines its wealth and industrialization knowhow with North Korea’s human and natural resources, the economies of both nations could make a quantum leap over the long term,” the authors write.

The report offers a nearly 200-page blueprint detailing how foreign capital could revamp North Korea’s battered infrastructure, strengthen its mining sector, and turn a nearly autarkic economy into a manufacturing and logistics hub thanks to its privileged position between some of the world’s biggest economies. The report riffs on the US demand for “complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement” of North Korea’s nuclear program to argue instead for “complete, visible, irreversible prosperity.”

Granted, realizing the report’s vision will require overcoming a formidable list of obstacles, including a wide-ranging sanctions regime against Pyongyang, corporate reluctance to jump into an economy rife with illicit activity, and heavy-handed state control over nearly all aspects of the economy.

Iran’s disappointing bid to attract foreign investment after winning its own sanctions relief in 2016 as part of the nuclear deal is a case in point, said Jonathan Schanzer, a sanctions expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish Washington think tank.

«

North Korea has an advantage over Iran: it’s right next door to a gigantic manufacturing power. But does Kim Jong-un really want to give up his dictatorial grip? The benefits for everyone would be great. I’m hopeful, though not optimistic.
link to this extract

Apple is rebuilding Maps from the ground up • TechCrunch

Matthew Panzarino:

»

It’s doing this by using first-party data gathered by iPhones with a privacy-first methodology and its own fleet of cars packed with sensors and cameras. The new product will launch in San Francisco and the Bay Area with the next iOS 12 Beta and will cover Northern California by fall.

Every version of iOS will get the updated maps eventually and they will be more responsive to changes in roadways and construction, more visually rich depending on the specific context they’re viewed in and feature more detailed ground cover, foliage, public pools, pedestrian pathways and more.

This is nothing less than a full re-set of Maps and it’s been 4 years in the making, which is when Apple began to develop its new data gathering systems. Eventually, Apple will no longer rely on third-party data to provide the basis for its maps, which has been one of its major pitfalls from the beginning…

…[Eddy] Cue points to the proliferation of devices running iOS, now numbering in the hundreds of millions, as a deciding factor to shift its process.

“We felt like because the shift to devices had happened — building a map today in the way that we were traditionally doing it, the way that it was being done — we could improve things significantly, and improve them in different ways,” he says. “One is more accuracy. Two is being able to update the map faster based on the data and the things that we’re seeing, as opposed to driving again or getting the information where the customer’s proactively telling us. What if we could actually see it before all of those things?”

«

Going to be a long time before Apple can cast off third-party suppliers everywhere; though it might be able to wave goodbye to paid ones. (OpenStreetMap, for example, is free, though there might be a give-back licence on changes.) This is quite a move, though. OSM got its start by getting motorcyclists to map London with GPS trackers. Next step: the world. (Panzarino also has a post answering many questions arising. Such as: might do “street view”; will locate doors of buildings; will use AI to read business names.)
link to this extract

Neural network trained on UKC logbooks: the results • UKClimbing

Natalie Berry:

»

We recently shared the work of Janelle Shane, who trained a neural network on a database of route names from Joshua Tree (5,633) and Boulder, Colorado (4,527). The results were both amusing and baffling. We wondered how the generated names might differ if we provided Janelle with our much larger database of 432,000 route names, which we split by country.

A reminder of what a neural network is, for those who are unsure:

‘A neural network is a type of computer program that learns by example, rather than being told exactly how to solve a problem. Based on thousands of examples of route names, it had to figure out the rules that let it generate more like them. At a low temperature* setting, it will generate names that it thinks are very quintessential – they’ll end up a bit repetitive, but it will mostly be correct. At a higher temperature setting, it will be more daring when it generates names, going with less common sounds and phrases.’

* Temperature is a hyperparameter of LSTMs (and neural networks generally) used to control the randomness of predictions by scaling the logits before applying softmax…apparently…

«

The names are wonderfully realistic: The Stuff, Rocket Sheep, Ramp of Lies, Strangershine, Candy Storm, The Dog Sand, Holy Mess, Left Hand Monster, The Scratching One, The Angel’s Crack, Suckstone Gully, The Folly Cloud, and many more. For those who don’t know: in rock climbing, if you are the first ever to climb a route, you get to name it. British route names tend to the sardonic. (There’s a [human-named] route called Strawberries; nearby, a subsequent one called Dream Topping. There’s Lord of the Flies; and Lord of the Mince Pies. Elsewhere there’s one called Comes The Dervish, whose derivation I’ve never understood.)

It’s lovely to see this work loop around to UKClimbing: in 1995, when I was trying to figure out this “world wide web” thing, I created a web page with a listing of indoor climbing walls in the UK. Soon after, some other climbers got in touch and said they were looking to create a website – climbing in the UK? UKClimbing? – and wanted to include the indoor walls listing. But the grand aim was to have a listing for every route in the UK, and perhaps abroad too. Turns out there are more than 150,000 routes in the UK, though we didn’t know that at the time – nobody did.

We crowdsourced a lot of it; and a lot of our experiences in trying to create lat/long pairings from postcodes (for the climbing walls, so you could figure which was the nearest to you) led to my advocacy for the Free Our Data project so that we could include maps, tide times (which matter, a lot, for sea cliff climbing) and location data without busting our tiny budget.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Could a chatbot really do this job better than a human? Photo by Daniel Bachhuber on Flickr.

(No, you didn’t miss 13 editions. I found some lurking, miscategorised. Promise, it’s 868 now.)

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. Artisan-made. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Former Equifax manager charged with insider trading • SEC.gov

»

The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged a former Equifax manager with insider trading in advance of the company’s September 2017 announcement of a massive data breach that exposed Social Security numbers and other personal information of approximately 148 million U.S. customers. This is the second case the SEC has filed arising from the Equifax data breach.  In March, the former chief information officer of Equifax’s U.S. business unit was charged with insider trading. 

In a complaint filed in federal court in Atlanta today, the SEC charged that Equifax software engineering manager Sudhakar Reddy Bonthu traded on confidential information he received while creating a website for consumers impacted by a data breach.

«

You have to be a special kind of stupid to sell your shares when you’re building the website that’s going to tell people how screwed they are. (Bonthu was told it was being done for “an unnamed potential client” but didn’t take long to figure out it was his employer.). He bought put options (the chance to sell at a specific price) and netted $75,000 after the stock price fell 14%. The SEC says that’s a 35-fold return on his investment. (Exercise: how much stock did he buy?)
link to this extract

Apple engineers its own downfall with the Macbook Pro keyboard • iFixit

Kyle Wiens runs iFixit, which offers guides to fixing devices of all kinds:

»

Ask any Touch Bar owner if they would trade a tenth of a millimeter for a more reliable keyboard. No one who has followed this Apple support document instructing them to shake their laptop at a 75 degree angle and spray their keyboard with air in a precise zig-zag pattern will quibble over a slightly thicker design.

This is design anorexia: making a product slimmer and slimmer at the cost of usefulness, functionality, serviceability, and the environment.

A repairable pro laptop is not an unreasonable ask. Apple has a history of great keyboards—they know how to make them. There are very successful laptop manufacturers who consistently earn 10/10 on our repairability scale. Apple fans are already making noise about the dearth of new Macs, especially upgradable options for professionals. Fortunately, Apple seems to be listening with their new warranty program.

Which brings us back to the point. Why did it take so long, and so many complaints, for the repair program to be put in place? Why do you need to send your MacBook Pro away for upwards of a week for a repair? That’s easy: because Apple made their product hard for them to repair, too. Apple’s new warranty program is going to cost them a lot of money.

Apple’s profit on every machine that they warranty under this new program has been decimated. There is a real business impact caused by unrepairable product design. Samsung recently had a similar experience with the Note7. Yes, the battery problem was a manufacturing defect. But if the battery had been easy to replace, they could have recalled just the batteries instead of the entire phone. It was a $5bn design mistake.

But this isn’t just about warranty cost—there is a loud outcry for reliable, long-lasting, upgradeable machines. Just look at the market demand for the six-year-old 2012 MacBook Pro—the last fully upgradeable notebook Apple made. I use one myself, and I love it.

«

The point about the cost is a good one. This is going to wipe out a lot of profit (the keyboards are glued to the battery, or vice-versa). Perhaps one day the full story of this engineering screwup will be told.
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Cryptocoin graveyard fills up fast as ICOs meet their demise • Bloomberg

Olga Kharif:

»

That mournful sound you hear? It’s the funeral procession of yet another cryptocurrency.

As the digital money frenzy of the past few years cools, the crypto coin graveyard is filling up. Dead Coins lists around 800 tokens that are bereft of life, while Coinopsy estimates that more than 1,000 have bought the farm.

The carnage is mostly the consequence of failed projects from the thousands of startups that used initial coin offerings to raise billions in funding, and a global regulatory crackdown on questionable practices and scams. Names like CryptoMeth, Droplex and Roulettecoin may have been a clue to the coins’ dim prospects.

“There has obviously been a lot of fraud and hype in the ICO market,” Aaron Brown, a business author and investor who writes for Bloomberg Prophets, said in an email. “I accept figures I have seen that 80% of ICOs were frauds, and 10% lacked substance and failed shortly after raising money. Most of the remaining 10% will probably fail as well.”

«

Just the fact that there can be a difference of 200 in the number of “dead” coins indicates how many of them there are. I thought this tweet summed up the potential uses far better:

»

“Blockchains are security software: a cryptographic data structure to *prevent* things. For BTC [bitcoin], it’s double spending. Normal software let’s you do things. Security software restricts things. Unless you can define what a blockchain is helping you prevent, you don’t need one.”

«

link to this extract

Exactis said to have exposed 340 million records, more than Equifax breach • CNET

Abrar Al-Heeti:

»

If you’re a US citizen, your personal information — your phone number, home address, email address, even how many children you have — may have just become easily available to hackers in an alleged massive data leak.

Florida-based marketing and data aggregation firm Exactis exposed a database containing nearly 340 million individual records on a publicly accessible server, Wired reported. Earlier this month, security researcher Vinny Troia found that nearly 2 terabytes of data was exposed, which seems to include personal information on hundreds of millions of US adults and millions of businesses, the report said.

“It seems like this is a database with pretty much every US citizen in it,” Troia told Wired.

Exactis didn’t respond to a request for comment or confirmation.

«

How many multiple copies of American citizens’ details are there out there? Equifax, this… the list must be long. And there are all these unheard-of companies which do all this “data aggregation”. Though not unheard-of to the hackers.
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Babylon claims its chatbot beats GPs at medical exam • BBC News

Jen Copestake:

»

The chatbot AI has been tested on what Babylon said was a representative set of questions from the Membership of the Royal College of General Practitioners exam.

The MRCGP is the final test set for trainee GPs to be accredited by the organisation. Babylon said that the first time its AI sat the exam, it achieved a score of 81%. It added that the average mark for human doctors was 72%, based on results logged between 2012 and 2017.

But the RCGP said it had not provided Babylon with the test’s questions and had no way to verify the claim. “The college examination questions that we actually use aren’t available in the public domain,” added Prof Martin Marshall, one of the RCGP’s vice-chairs.

Babylon said it had used example questions published directly by the college and that some had indeed been made publicly available. “We would be delighted if they could formally share with us their examination papers so I could replicate the exam exactly. That would be great,” Babylon chief executive Ali Parsa told the BBC.

«

Anyone remember expert systems? Back in the 1980s, they were going to take doctors’ jobs too. Didn’t. This could be useful as a backup, or assistant.
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The public, the political system and American democracy • Pew Research Center

This dates from April, but it’s still relevant:

»

Americans don’t spare themselves from criticism. In addressing the shortcomings of the political system, Americans do not spare themselves from criticism: Just 39% say “voters are knowledgeable about candidates and issues” describes the country very or somewhat well. In addition, a 56% majority say they have little or no confidence in the political wisdom of the American people. However, that is less negative than in early 2016, when 64% had little or no confidence. Since the presidential election, Republicans have become more confident in people’s political wisdom.

Cynicism about money and politics: most Americans think that those who donate a lot of money to elected officials have more political influence than others. An overwhelming majority (77%) supports limits on the amount of money individuals and organizations can spend on political campaigns and issues. And nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) say new laws could be effective in reducing the role of money in politics.

«

link to this extract

Google invests $22m in the OS powering Nokia feature phones • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Google is investing $22m into KaiOS, the feature phone operating system that has risen from the ashes of Mozilla’s Firefox OS. While Google rules the smartphone world with Android, KaiOS is slowly emerging as a popular choice for feature phones, particularly in emerging markets. KaiOS started last year as a forked version of Firefox OS, and the operating system ships on some Nokia-branded feature phones like the Nokia 8110. Devices from TCL and Micromax are also powered by KaiOS.

Google’s investment might seem odd given its Android dominance, and its efforts with Android Go, but it’s clearly strategic. “Google and KaiOS have also agreed to work together to make the Google Assistant, Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Search available to KaiOS users,” says KaiOS CEO Sebastien Codeville. KaiOS itself is web-based, designed for developers to use HTML5, Javascript, and CSS for apps. That makes it easy for Google to get these apps running on KaiOS, and strategically ensure feature phones are using Google’s services and not competitors.

«

It’s aimed at making sure Google services are available on low-end devices. Strategic, just as Android was strategic – making sure that Google not Microsoft could dominate search on the emerging space of smartphones in 2005.
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Oct 2017: Appeals court keeps alive the never-ending Linux case, SCO v. IBM • Ars Technica

Cyrus Farivar:

»

A federal appeals court has now partially ruled in favor of the SCO Group, breathing new life into a lawsuit and a company (now bankrupt and nearly dead) that has been suing IBM for nearly 15 years.

Last year, US District Judge David Nuffer had ruled against SCO (whose original name was Santa Cruz Operation) in two summary judgment orders, and the court refused to allow SCO to amend its initial complaint against IBM.

SCO soon appealed. On Monday, the 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals found that SCO’s claims of misappropriation could go forward while also upholding Judge Nuffer’s other two orders.

As Ars reported, SCO (then named Caldera Systems) filed suit (PDF) against IBM in March 2003 for allegedly contributing sections of commercial UNIX code from UNIX System V—which the SCO Group claimed it owned—to the Linux kernel’s codebase. SCO Group claimed that the alleged presence of its proprietary code in the open source kernel devalued its proprietary code. By making the source code available, IBM had violated its license agreement with SCO Group, according to SCO. Along the way, SCO filed for bankruptcy, and the group claimed that anyone who used Linux owed them money. All the while, Novell successfully claimed ownership of the allegedly infringing code and agreed to indemnify Linux users.

If SCO is ultimately successful, it could stand to take in billions of dollars from IBM.

«

I had thought that Apple-Samsung was the longest-running patent case around, but my thanks to Stormyparis who pointed out in yesterday’s comments that this one is, oh my lord, still going. This article dates from October 2017, but since they haven’t wrapped it up, it’s still on.
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Scientists develop thermal camouflage that can fool infrared cameras • The Guardian

Nicola Davis:

»

The design was inspired by the colour-shifting capabilities of cuttlefish, says Coskun Kocabas, a co-author of the research from the University of Manchester.

The approach involves using electricity to alter the properties of the film, so that it changes from acting more like a “black body” – which absorbs and emits electromagnetic radiation but does not reflect it – to becoming more like a metal, which reflects radiation but is not good at absorbing or emitting it.

Kocabas said the film could have a number of uses. “One obvious application is of course camouflage, but the novelty in this is it is adaptive camouflage,” he said, adding it could also be useful for covering radiators on satellites, allowing them to be tweaked to reflect heat when facing the sun and emit excess heat when facing deep space.

Writing in the journal Nano Letters, Kocabas and colleagues in the US and Turkey reveal how they created the material using a stack made of nylon, gold, polyethylene soaked in a liquid composed of charged molecules, and multiple layers of graphene.

«

Everyone likes inventing invisibility cloaks, which is probably the fastest thing to go from “wild idea in a book/TV series/film” to “actual thing”. (Don’t @ me about Minority Report.)
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There’s no Brexit dividend. Nobody [who can change that] cares • Bloomberg

Therese Raphael:

»

There is no sign of new free-trade deals to follow or any regulatory overhaul that would turn the UK into a Singapore-on-the-Thames. There is no chance that the EU will grant May the full control she wants as well as the access to EU markets she’s asking for, especially for financial services. Brexit is only the fourth most important item to be discussed at the European summit Thursday and Friday.

Logic might seem to dictate that, at this point, more people should want to call the whole thing off. But far from accepting the Remain case on the economy, the latest troubles have caused Brexiters to dig in, point the finger at business for stoking fears and accuse Remainers of being pessimistic and impatient. Chief Leaver Jacob-Rees-Mogg has dismissed businesses that warn of the costs of Brexiting with “wanting to suck up to the Treasury,” the ministry that Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson derided as the “heart of Remain.”

As psychologists of decision-making have found, emotional signals trump objective information for voters. This is evident in attitudes toward immigration, which remain instinctively hostile despite a dramatic drop-off in European migration and skills shortages in parts of the economy, including the health service and technology sectors.

Remainers (some 100,000 demonstrated in London last weekend) point to shifts in public opinion and hope their arguments are holding more sway. It’s true that if you ask people whether they thought the vote was right or wrong, more people now say it was wrong. But it’s far from clear how a second vote would go, or even what the question would be. And it seems that the shift that’s being observed has more to do with those who didn’t vote for Brexit now taking a skeptical view, than Leavers actually changing sides.

Britain is thus caught in a vicious circle. The factors that created Brexit are only being worsened by Brexit, but as the pain grows, it brings more criticism of the establishment, business and other perceived enemies.

«

I changed the headline: it said “nobody cares”, but actually, a lot of people care. If there actually *were* a demonstrable Brexit dividend, a lot of “Remainers” would be very happy. But there isn’t. And people do care.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You think you’re going to win that car in the shopping centre sweepstake? Afraid not. Photo by Conny Sandland on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Count them and report back. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Twitter ramps up fight against abuse and malicious bots • Bloomberg

Selina Wang:

»

For the first time, Twitter is going to require confirmation of an email address or phone number to sign up for an account. The company, which promotes itself as a place for public conversation over news and events, has long been criticized for making it too easy for malicious actors to create multiple spam accounts. Twitter said it would work with experts to make sure the changes don’t harm users in high-risk environments where anonymity is important.

Since the revelations that Russian troll accounts sowed discord on social-media platforms during the 2016 US presidential election, Twitter has released a series of updates to clamp down on suspicious activity. Earlier this year, Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey acknowledged the San Francisco-based company inadvertently helped spread misinformation, harassment and manipulation via bots, or automated accounts. Last week, Twitter acquired security startup Smyte to help fight online spam, abuse and fraud.

“These issues are felt around the world, from elections to emergency events and high-profile public conversations,” Twitter said Tuesday in a blog post. “As we have stated in recent announcements, the public health of the conversation on Twitter is a critical metric by which we will measure our success in these areas.”

The company is also developing machine learning algorithms that proactively find problematic accounts, rather than waiting until someone flags the bad behavior.

«

It hasn’t previously insisted on confirmation? That’s crazy. Will it apply this retrospectively too?
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Apple and Samsung settle seven-year-old iPhone patent dispute • WSJ

Maria Armental:

»

Terms of the agreement weren’t disclosed, but the companies filed a notice in California federal court on Wednesday saying that they had reached an resolution and agreed to drop the legal case with prejudice, meaning another complaint can’t be filed on the same claims.

Apple declined to comment, referring instead to its comment last month after a federal jury decided the South Korean electronics giant violated patents related to Apple’s iPhone design. Samsung was ordered to pay $539m.

“We believe deeply in the value of design,” the company said at the time. “This case has always been about more than money. Apple ignited the smartphone revolution with iPhone, and it is a fact that Samsung blatantly copied our design.”

«

Can we say finally?
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Another ten years later • The ISP Column

Geoff Huston reflects on the changes – and non-changes – of internet infrastructure over the past ten years:

»

The most notable aspect of the network that appears to stubbornly resist all forms of pressure over the last decade, including some harsh realities of acute scarcity, is the observation that we are still running what is essentially an IPv4 Internet.

Over this past decade we have exhausted our pools of remaining IPv4 addresses, and in most parts of the world the IPv4 Internet is running on some form of empty. We had never suspected that the Internet would confront the exhaustion of one its most fundamental pillars, the basic function of uniquely addressing connected devices, and apparently shrug it off and continue on blithely. But, unexpectedly, that’s exactly what’s happened.

Today we estimate that some 3.4 billion people are regular users of the Internet, and there are some 20 billion devices connected to it. We have achieved this using some 3 billion unique IPv4 addresses. Nobody thought that we could achieve this astonishing feat, yet it has happened with almost no fanfare.

Back in the 1900’s we had thought that the prospect of address exhaustion would propel the Internet to use IPv6. This was the successor IP protocol that comes with a four-fold increase in the bit width of IP addresses. By increasing the IP address pool to some esoterically large number of unique addresses (340 undecillion addresses, or 3.4 x 1038) we would never have to confront network address exhaustion again. But this was not going to be an easy transition. There is no backward compatibility in this protocol transition, so everything has to change. Every device, every router and even every application needs to change to support IPv6. Rather than perform comprehensive protocol surgery on the Internet and change every part of the infrastructure to support IPv6, we changed the basic architecture of the Internet instead. Oddly enough, it looks like this was the cheaper option!

«

Yeah, one tends to forget this. “IPv4 exhaustion” stories were all over the place a couple of years back. Now? Nothing.
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We have reached peak screen. Now revolution is in the air • The New York Times

Farhad Manjoo reckons we’ve had enough of screens:

»

There are two ways we may break our fevered addiction to screens.

First, we will need to try to use our phones more mindfully, which requires a combination of willpower and technology.

Help is on the way. For the last week, I’ve been using Screen Time, one of the new features in Apple’s next version of its mobile operating system. The software gives you valuable information about how much you are using your phone, and it can even block you from using apps that you deem unhealthy. I found Screen Time very well designed, and I suspect it will profoundly change how we use our phones.

But in addition to helping us resist phones, the tech industry will need to come up with other, less immersive ways to interact with digital world. Three technologies may help with this: voice assistants, of which Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant are the best, and Apple’s two innovations, AirPods and the Apple Watch.

All of these technologies share a common idea. Without big screens, they are far less immersive than a phone, allowing for quick digital hits: You can buy a movie ticket, add a task to a to-do list, glance at a text message or ask about the weather without going anywhere near your Irresistible Screen of Splendors.

These are all works in progress. Voice assistants still cannot do everything for you, though Google and Amazon have thousands of engineers working to improve them. AirPods are fantastic — they have fewer connection issues than any other wireless headphones — and after years of refinement, the Apple Watch shows you just enough stuff from your phone to make it useful without becoming overbearing.

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link to this extract

Feds ran a bitcoin-laundering sting for over a year • The Verge

Russell Brandom:

»

More than 40 alleged dark-web drug dealers have been arrested as part of a sweeping federal effort described by the Department of Justice as “the first nationwide undercover operation targeting dark net vendors.” The core of the operation was an online money-laundering business seized by agents from Homeland Security Investigations and operated as a sting for over a year. By offering cash for bitcoin, HSI agents were able to identify specific drug dealers, ultimately tracing more than $20 million in drug-linked cryptocurrency transactions.

“For the past year, undercover agents have been providing money-laundering services to these dark net vendors, specifically those involved in narcotics trafficking,” said HSI Special Agent in Charge Angel Melendez, in a press conference earlier today. Melendez led the operation from New York.

The hijacked money-laundering service was offered across a number of different marketplaces, with agents claiming at least some presence on AlphaBay, Dream Market, Wall Street, and others. In the past, law enforcement efforts have focused on taking down marketplaces in full, most notably Silk Road, Silk Road 2.0, and AlphaBay. But Melendez says his office has shifted focus to the individual dealers, who often operate independent of any single site.

«

And now look at the sorts of drugs they were targeting:

»

the same raids seized large quantities of Schedule IV pharmaceuticals — including 100,000 tramadol pills and over 24 kilograms of Xanax — as is typical of trade on dark net markets. Agents also recovered more than 300 models of liquid synthetic opioids and roughly 100 grams of fentanyl.

«

They haven’t specified how they matched the wallets to the drug buys. Which would have been useful.
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North Korea is rapidly upgrading nuclear site despite summit vow • WSJ

Jonathan Cheng:

»

North Korea is upgrading its nuclear research center at a rapid pace, new satellite imagery analysis suggests, despite Pyongyang’s commitment to denuclearization at a summit with the US this month.

The analysis from 38 North, a North Korea-focused website published by the Stimson Center in Washington, found that Pyongyang, in recent weeks, appears to have modified the cooling system of its plutonium-production reactor and erected a new building near the cooling tower. New construction could also be observed at the site’s experimental light-water reactor, the report said.

The satellite pictures, captured on June 21, nine days after the Singapore summit meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, showed no immediate effort to begin denuclearization at North Korea’s key nuclear research site.

«

Oh well, we tried. Still, at least they’ve given up that nuclear site that collapsed. Um.
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Samsung will shut down Bixby feature that bribed you to use it • The Verge

Ashley Carman:

»

Samsung’s Bixby assistant had a rough time of it. Not only did no one want to use the assistant, but Samsung even recognized that it’d have to bribe users to do so. The company announced this week that it’s shutting down those gamification efforts — called My Bixby Level — on August 10th. The feature rewarded users for playing with and learning how to use Bixby. They received new background color options and Samsung Pay points that could be cashed in for discounts or toward contest entries to win Samsung products. The background colors will still be available to use and might be made available to everyone; it’s unclear from Samsung’s messaging.

«

Sooo.. is Bixby continuing? Guess so. But as it says, not clear whether this is a good or bad sign.
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Google and Facebook accused of manipulating users in privacy settings • Fortune

David Meyer:

»

In a report called “Deceived By Design,” the Norwegian Consumer Council accused Facebook and Google—as well as Microsoft with Windows 10, to a lesser extent—of employing “design, symbols and working that nudge users away from the privacy friendly choices.”

Facebook and Google come under particular criticism for threatening users “with loss of functionality or deletion of the user account if the user does not choose the privacy intrusive option.”

“These companies manipulate us into sharing information about ourselves,” said Finn Myrstad, the watchdog’s director of digital services. “This shows a lack of respect for their users, and [the companies] are circumventing the notion of giving consumers control of their personal data.”

Is this all illegal, though? The consumer authorities argue it is, because the new EU privacy regime says people have to genuinely consent to having their personal data processed by tech companies. “However, the practices deployed by companies raise questions as to whether consent in this case can be considered informed and freely given,” reads the Norwegian Consumer Council’s letter to that country’s data protection authority.

The letter also says users aren’t “given the full picture” about how their information will be used, and the privacy settings “make it difficult for individuals to protect their personal data.” Both of these may also violate the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)—a law that threatens companies with fines of up to 4% of global annual revenues for serious violations.

«

The NCC report is in English, and well worth reading.
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Why nobody ever wins that car giveaway at the mall • The Hustle

Zachary Crockett dug into what’s really going on:

»

The car is a loaner from local dealer, Acura of Fremont — and despite what the sweepstakes’ marketing may suggest, it’s not up for grabs. (We called the dealer and they confirmed that the vehicle on display isn’t part of the giveaway at all.)

What you’re really signing up for is the opportunity to win an opportunity to possibly win a small amount of taxable cash.

Here’s what actually happens: 1) You enter the sweepstakes; 2) You have to attend a 90-minute timeshare presentation; 3) You get a scratch-off lotto ticket; 4) If you’re a “grand prize winner,” you get to play a game for a chance to win $100k.

The “game” is that the finalist gets to open 4 “mystery envelopes” with random amounts of cash. Last year’s two “big winners” walked away with checks for $575 and $700 — about enough to buy one side view mirror for your Acura..

That’s the absolute best-case scenario of entering one of these contests. Other aren’t so lucky.

Days after entering to win the car, Maggie Nicholson received a call informing her that her name was drawn. After sitting through a 2-hour timeshare presentation with Boiler Room-like sales tactics, she was told there was no car — but she was eligible for a vacation package.

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And then there’s the way all your details get sold on, and sold on, and sold on… and you give up your do not call rights.
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Talking to Google Duplex: Google’s human-like phone AI feels revolutionary • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo got invited to a restaurant to be the head waiter (for phone calls):

»

this was much more than I was expecting: Google PR, Google engineers, restaurant staff, and several other journalists were intently watching and listening to me take this call over the speaker. I was nervous. I’ve never taken a restaurant reservation in my life, let alone one with an audience and an engineering crew monitoring every utterance. And you know what? I sucked at taking this reservation. And Duplex was fine with it.

Duplex patiently waited for me to awkwardly stumble through my first ever table reservation while I sloppily wrote down the time and fumbled through a basic back and forth about Google’s reservation for four people at 7pm on Thursday. Today’s Google Assistant requires authoritative, direct, perfect speech in order to process a command. But Duplex handled my clumsy, distracted communication with the casual disinterest of a real person. It waited for me to write down its reservation requirements, and when I asked Duplex to repeat things I didn’t catch the first time (“A reservation at what time?”), it did so without incident. When I told this robocaller the initial time it wanted wasn’t available, it started negotiating times; it offered an acceptable time range and asked for a reservation somewhere in that time slot. I offered seven o’clock and Google accepted.

From the human end, Duplex’s voice is absolutely stunning over the phone. It sounds real most of the time, nailing most of the prosodic features of human speech during normal talking. The bot “ums” and “uhs” when it has to recall something a human might have to think about for a minute. It gives affirmative “mmhmms” if you tell it to hold on a minute. Everything flows together smoothly, making it sound like something a generation better than the current Google Assistant voice.

One of the strangest (and most impressive) parts of Duplex is that there isn’t a single “Duplex voice.” For every call, Duplex would put on a new, distinct personality. Sometimes Duplex come across as male; sometimes female. Some voices were higher and younger sounding; some were nasally, and some even sounded cute.

«

The people who took part were all very impressed. But Google says it will have humans to act as backup, just in case.
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Facebook scraps plans to build drone to deliver internet access • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

»

The drone, named Aquila by the company, was initially created by British aerospace engineer Andrew Cox, whose company Ascenta was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $20m (£15m). It was folded into Facebook’s Internet.org project, which had a stated goal of “connecting the whole world”, and was intended to be used to fly at a higher altitude than commercial planes, relaying laser-based internet signals down to base-stations on the ground.

Now, however, Facebook says it will no longer design and construct its own aircraft. Yael Maguire, the company’s director of engineering, said that the decision was prompted by the growing interest in the field from aerospace companies, which left Facebook’s own efforts superfluous.

“Going forward, we’ll continue to work with partners like Airbus on Haps [high altitude platform station] connectivity generally, and on the other technologies needed to make this system work, like flight control computers and high-density batteries,” Maguire wrote in a blogpost announcing the closure of the Bridgwater facility, where Aquila was built.

The announcement comes a day after a report from Business Insider revealing that Cox had left Facebook in May.

Aquila’s history at Facebook was mixed. Maguire touts successes including “two successful full-scale test flights”, and “setting new records using millimeter-wave (MMW) technology in air-to-ground and point-to-point communication,” but the drone project also resulted in criticism for the company, which was accused of covering up a crash at the end of a test flight which the company had previously told reporters was successful.

«

One by one, the lights are going out all over Silicon Valley’s big dreamland. Anyone checked in on Google’s Loon project recently?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Yes, I’ve started numbering them. Turns out it’s quite a lot already.

It’s 0.4% the size of Google. So how does it make money? Photo by pixishared on Flickr.

A selection of 11 links for you. Back on track. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

California has 48 hours to pass this privacy bill or else • Gizmodo

Kashmir Hill:

»

Recent headlines have suggested that California lawmakers are considering a bill that would give Californians “unprecedented control over their data.” This is true but that is not the whole story.

What’s really happening is that California lawmakers have 48 hours to pass such a bill or the policy shit is going to hit the direct democracy fan. Because if lawmakers in the California Senate and House don’t pass this bill Thursday morning, and if California governor Jerry Brown doesn’t sign this bill into law Thursday afternoon, a stronger version of it will be on the state ballot in November. Then the 17 million or so people who actually vote in California would decide for themselves whether they should have the right to force companies to stop selling their data out the back door. Polls predict they would vote yes, despite the claims of tech companies that passage of the law would lead to businesses fleeing California. And laws passed via the ballot initiative process, rather than the legislative process, are almost impossible to change, so California would likely have this one on its books for a very long time.

This, more than, say, an urgent need to address the data scandals that have dominated the tech industry so far this year, is why lawmakers are scrambling to get a bill passed.

«

link to this extract

What is the revenue generation model for DuckDuckGo? • Quora

Gabriel Weinberg is the CEO of DuckDuckGo.com, a search engine that he says has been profitable since 2014 – without tracking users at all. So why don’t Google and Facebook give up trackers?

»

Google now deploys hidden trackers on 76% of websites across the web to monitor your behavior and Facebook has hidden trackers on about 25% of websites, according to the Princeton Web Transparency & Accountability Project. It is likely that Google and/or Facebook are watching you on most sites you visit, in addition to tracking you when using their products.

As a result, these two companies have amassed huge data profiles on individuals, which can include interests, past purchases, search, browsing and location history, and much more. This personal data is stored indefinitely and used for invasive targeted advertising that can follow you around the Internet.

This advertising system is designed to enable hyper-targeting, which has many unintended consequences that have dominated the headlines in recent years, such as the ability for bad actors to use the system to influence elections, to exclude groups in a way that facilitates discrimination, and to expose your personal data to companies you’ve never even heard of.

The operative question is, though, is all of this tracking necessary to make substantial profits? Is this the only way to run a profitable digital consumer focused service company? Not in my opinion. The fact is, these companies would still be wildly profitable if, for example, they dropped all of these hidden trackers across the web and limited the amount of data they keep to only what is most necessary.

Yes, this additional tracking probably helps them compete with each other and adds some incremental revenue, but I believe the vast majority of their revenue would still exist if the tracking dial was turned way down, and they backed far away from the creepy line.

The reason is simple: Google and Facebook are the undisputed champions of audience and reach across the internet, something advertisers will always pay for. Their business models don’t need to be this invasive.

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DDG (which I use) now has 20m queries per day; in 2014 it went from 2.7m to 5.4m queries per day. It must be very profitable now with that much larger search volume. (Google handles more than 5bn search queries per day.)
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The day I drove for Amazon Flex • The Atlantic

Alana Semuels:

»

On the surface, these jobs, like many others in the gig economy, seem like a good deal. But Flex workers get no health insurance or pension, and are not guaranteed a certain number of hours or shifts a week. They are not covered by basic labor protections like minimum wage and overtime pay, and they don’t get unemployment benefits if they suddenly can’t work anymore. And when workers calculate how much they’re pulling in on a daily basis, they often don’t account for the expenses that they’ll incur doing these jobs. “A lot of these gig-type services essentially rely on people not doing the math on what it actually costs you,” Sucharita Kodali, a Forrester analyst who covers e-commerce, told me.

One Amazon Flex driver in Cleveland, Chris Miller, 63, told me that though he makes $18 an hour, he spends about 40 cents per mile he drives on expenses like gas and car repairs. He bought his car, used, with 40,000 miles on it. It now has 140,000, after driving for Flex for seven months, and Uber and Lyft before that. That means he’s incurred about $40,000 in expenses—things he didn’t think about initially, like changing the oil more frequently and replacing headlights and taillights. He made slightly less than $10 an hour driving for Uber, he told me, once he factored in these expenses; Flex pays a bit better.

Miller’s wife has a full-time job with benefits, so his Flex earnings are helpful for paying off his family’s credit-card bills. But “if I were trying to make this work as a single guy on my own, it would be tough to do that,” he said. His costs might actually be lower than what most drivers spend: The standard mileage rates for use of a car for business purposes, according to the IRS, are 54.5 cents a mile in 2018.

I became an Amazon Flex independent contractor by downloading an app, going through a background check, and watching 19 videos that explained in great detail the process of delivering packages.

«

link to this extract

Two Keyboards at a Bar • Rands in Repose

Michael Lopp:

»

APPLE EXTENDED II sits at the bar nursing a Macallan 18. Next to him is MACBOOK PRO who has not taken a sip of his glass of water.

APPLE EXTENDED II: Lonely times, man. Lonely times. First, it was scissors then butterflies. Do you want to know what I miss? Electric Alps switches. That was the dream, right?

MACBOOK PRO (nervous, staring at the bar, napkins in both hands): Did you clean up before I sat down? It looks clean, but…

APPLE EXTENDED II (interrupting): Kids today. They don’t appreciate the reliable, credible haptic feedback of a single healthy keystroke. It’s all hunt, peck, and swipe swipe swipe.

TOUCHBAR (arrives): Hey! Nobody told me we were going out to drinks . This is great!

APPLE EXTENDED II: Wait, who invited him?

MACBOOK PRO: Sorry, we’re a package deal. It’s not…

«

Brilliant. Stemming, of course, from John Gruber’s wonderful set:
• “The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface Theme” (2005)
• “iLife ’06 From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal Interface” (2006) and
• “An Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal Interface Theme Shows Up for the WWDC Preview Build of Mac OS X Leopard” (2007)
link to this extract

Yelp, The Red Hen, and how all tech platforms are now pawns in the culture war • Buzzfeed

Charlie Warzel:

»

Though the brigading of review sites and doxxing behavior isn’t exactly new, the speed and coordination is; one consequence of a never-ending information war is that everyone is already well versed in their specific roles. And across the internet, it appears that technology platforms, both big and small, must grapple with the reality that they are now powerful instruments in an increasingly toxic political and cultural battle. After years attempting to dodge notions of bias at all costs, Silicon Valley’s tech platforms are up against a painful reality: They need to expect and prepare for the armies of the culture war and all the uncomfortable policing that inevitably follows.

Policing and intervening isn’t just politically tricky for the platforms, it’s also a tacit admission that Big Tech’s utopian ideologies are deeply flawed in practice. Connecting everyone and everything in an instantly accessible way can have terrible consequences that the tech industry still doesn’t seem to be on top of. Silicon Valley frequently demos a future of seamless integration. It’s a future where cross-referencing your calendar with Yelp, Waze, and Uber creates a service that’s greater than the sum of its parts. It’s an appealing vision, but it is increasingly co-opted by its darker counterpart, in which major technology platforms are daisy-chained together to manipulate, abuse, and harass…

…The tech industry likes to talk, with increasing zeal, about the power of machine learning. Yet when it can’t prevent something simple, like a sudden influx of restaurant reviews from people hundreds or thousands of miles away (identifying users’ locations is trivial), it plays into the hands of those who want to wage information war.

Meanwhile, pro-Trump trolls, as well as supporters of Sanders and the administration, are accusing Yelp of “censoring” reviews. Kirk suggested that brigading restaurant reviews was a just consequence of refusing a diner service. “This is the market at work,” he tweeted (Kirk’s rationale knowingly misrepresents Yelp’s role as a site that should reflect customer experience, not the political opinion of any outraged bystander).

«

But, as Warzel also points out, it doesn’t have to be this way. (Though he doesn’t make suggestions, some sort of circuit-breaker – stopping reviews when too many come in, or they’re too low or high – would make sense.)
link to this extract

The biggest digital heist in history isn’t over yet • Bloomberg

Charlie Devereux , Franz Wild , and Edward Robinson:

»

Before WannaCry, before the Sony Pictures hack, and before the breaches that opened up Equifax and Yahoo!, there was a nasty bit of malware known as Carbanak. Unlike those spectacular attacks, this malware wasn’t created by people interested in paralyzing institutions for ransom, publishing embarrassing emails, or taking personal data. The Carbanak guys just wanted loot, and lots of it.

Since late 2013, this band of cybercriminals has penetrated the digital inner sanctums of more than 100 banks in 40 nations, including Germany, Russia, Ukraine, and the U.S., and stolen about $1.2 billion, according to Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency. The string of thefts, collectively dubbed Carbanak—a mashup of a hacking program and the word “bank”—is believed to be the biggest digital bank heist ever. In a series of exclusive interviews with Bloomberg Businessweek, law enforcement officials and computer-crime experts provided revelations about their three-year pursuit of the gang and the mechanics of a caper that’s become the stuff of legend in the digital underworld.

Besides forcing ATMs to cough up money, the thieves inflated account balances and shuttled millions of dollars around the globe. Deploying the same espionage methods used by intelligence agencies, they appropriated the identities of network administrators and executives and plumbed files for sensitive information about security and account management practices. The gang operated through remotely accessed computers and hid their tracks in a sea of internet addresses. “Carbanak is the first time we saw such novel methods used to penetrate big financial institutions and their networks,” says James Chappell, co-founder and chief innovation officer of Digital Shadows Ltd., a London intelligence firm that works with the Bank of England and other lending institutions. “It’s the breadth of the attacks, that’s what’s truly different about this one.”

«

Sounds a bit like a nation-state player who decided to mint it.
link to this extract

Google criticised for push against EU copyright reform • Financial Times

Matthew Garrahan and Mehreen Khan:

»

Google has sparked criticism by encouraging news publishers participating in its Digital News Initiative to lobby against proposed changes to EU copyright law at a time when the beleaguered sector is increasingly turning to the search giant for help.

Google opposes the copyright directive, which it says would impede the free flow of information, and in a recent email to publishers suggested they contact members of the European Parliament to express their views.

The search engine has developed close ties with publishers via its DNI programme, which provides support for digital journalism as well as innovation grants from a €150m fund.

In the email to the members of the DNI working group — and which has been seen by the FT — Madhav Chinnappa, Google’s director of strategic relations, wrote that the “timing is urgent” and provided a link to a directory of MEPs. “If you feel strongly about this, please consider contacting the MEPs,” he said.

Jason Kint, chief executive of Digital Content Next, said the company had gone too far. “It’s outrageous that Google would once again be using a forum it publicly convened to help the publishing industry as a vehicle to lobby on behalf of Google’s own interests and confuse the market,” he said.

«

You can sort of understand Google’s position. But it wasn’t a clever move.
link to this extract

Oldest domains in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs • Cambus.net

Frederic Cambus:

»

As someone interested in DNS and Internet history, I’ve always been enjoying facts and articles about early registered domain names. Wikipedia has a page on the subject, but the list is extremely short for .net and .org domains.

Using the DDN NIC domain summaries, it shouldn’t be too difficult to extract a list of domains, perform whois queries to get registration dates, and sort the results. Let’s find out.

For the record, the oldest issue I could find, dating from December 1987, doesn’t list nordu.net, the first .net domain ever registered. So I opted for the August 1995 edition to be on the safe side. While I could also find an issue from 1996, there are a lot more domains listed so the whois lookups would take a lot more time, for no evident benefit.

«

Looking through the dot-coms is quite the history lesson.
link to this extract

Europe’s first solar panel recycling plant opens in France • Reuters

Geert de Clercq:

»

The first ageing photovoltaic (PV) panels – which have lifespans of around 25 years – are just now beginning to come off rooftops and solar plants in volumes sufficiently steady and significant to warrant building a dedicated plant, Veolia said.

Up until now, ageing or broken solar panels have typically been recycled in general-purpose glass recycling facilities, where only their glass and aluminum frames are recovered and their specialty glass is mixed in with other glass. The remainder is often burned in cement ovens.

In a 2016 study on solar panel recycling, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) said that in the long term, building dedicated PV panel recycling plants makes sense. It estimates that recovered materials could be worth $450 million by 2030 and exceed $15 billion by 2050.

The robots in Veolia’s new plant dissemble the panels to recuperate glass, silicon, plastics, copper and silver, which are crushed into granulates that can used to make new panels.

A typical crystalline silicon solar panel is made up of 65-75% glass, 10-15% aluminum for the frame, 10% plastic and just 3-5% silicon. The new plant does not recycle thin-film solar panels, which make up just a small percentage of the French market.

«

link to this extract

Chinese group engaging in cyber espionage against US companies, report says • Fox News

Brooke Crothers:

»

One of the most disturbing attacks was directed at a satellite communications operator, Symantec said.

“The attack group seemed to be particularly interested in the operational side of the company, looking for and infecting computers running software that monitors and controls satellites, “Symantec said. “This suggests to us that Thrip’s motives go beyond spying and may also include disruption.” 

Another target was an organization involved in geospatial imaging and mapping. In this case, Thrip targeted computers running MapXtreme GIS (Geographic Information System) as well as machines running Google Earth Server and Garmin imaging software.

Other targets included three different telecoms operators, all based in Southeast Asia.

“In all cases…it appeared that the telecoms companies themselves and not their customers were the targets of these attacks,” Symantec added.

There was also a defense contractor that was targeted. When asked by Fox News, Symantec would not elaborate on the nature of the threat or the defense contractor’s identity.

«

This sort of stuff has been going on literally for years.
link to this extract

Why North Korea’s hacking should have been on the agenda at the Trump-Kim summit • Fast Company

Tim Bajarin:

»

Prevention of nuclear war needed to be a top priority in the five-hour meeting, but to ignore the hacking threat that North Korea poses is irresponsible. The harm that could be caused by cyber warfare may seem less immediate than that from nuclear war, but it’s a major threat that could easily escalate to more direct forms of warfare.

“The reason North Korea has been harassing other countries is to demonstrate that North Korea has cyber-war capacity,” a North Korean defector told the BBC in 2015. “Their cyber attacks could have similar impacts as military attacks, killing people and destroying cities.”

North Korean hackers attacked private ATM accounts in South Korea to steal money from private citizens, and, more recently, they have been taking aim at banks around the world, including the US Federal Reserve.

The Daily Beast reported that North Korea may also be planning to attack the US power grid, something that could paralyze our financial systems, and demobilize major cities around the country.

«

Bajarin mentions Wannacry, but not the possibility that somebody could have died due to the ransomware infections of hospitals in the UK. (No deaths have been ascribed to it as far as I know, but it was probably a close thing.) In that sense, North Korea’s cyber threat has already come much closer to killing people than its nuclear one.

By the way, I discuss North Korea’s focus on hacking as a nation state priority in my book Cyber Wars…
link to this extract

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

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Intel dominated the chip industry for years. What went wrong? Photo by Mark Sze 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.

Because WordPress sometimes decides to ignore the “category” tag for blogposts when I upload it, and because the correct category is essential for posts to go out by email, and because I expect computers not to change these things on their own and so didn’t check it, Monday’s post didn’t go out by email. You can find it here.

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

The laws behind ‘Fortnite’s’ PS4, Nintendo Switch woes • Variety

Trevor Ruben:

»

When Epic and Nintendo dropped Fortnite on the day of Nintendo’s E3 showcase, fulfilling the expectations of many and finally delivering unto the Nintendo Switch the world’s most popular game, a significant number of players were met with a second surprise. They encountered an unexpected roadblock when trying to load the in-game purchases they had made on another platform: “This Fortnite account is associated with a platform which does not allow it to operate on Switch.”

That platform was the PS4, and had that player loaded their account for even one second previously on a PS4, whatever purchases they made on that account and whatever progress they had achieved were now locked to that console, with no recourse. PS4 players cannot transfer their account to another video game console, nor completely disassociate their account with the PS4.

They were, and still are, stuck. One might ask if this kind of restriction is legal, considering the vast and possibly embarrassing amount of money some might have spent on the game. The answer to that is there is no answer. Our current laws simply fail to acknowledge the problem. In fact, our legal system exacerbates it by placing the rule-making in the hands of the profiteers…

…Sony’s only statement on the matter thus far, delivered to the BBC, is a thinly-veiled boast and something only a market-leader would feel it could get away with:

“With… more than 80 million monthly active users on PlayStation Network, we’ve built a huge community of gamers who can play together on ‘Fortnite’ and all online titles.”

“We also offer ‘Fortnite’ cross-play support with PC, Mac, iOS, and Android devices, expanding the opportunity for Fortnite fans on PS4 to play with even more gamers on other platforms,” adding, “we have nothing further to add beyond this at this point.”

«

Sony might think it’s being clever; but non-PS4 players look down on Sony players as “no-skins” who can’t communicate when you’re playing squad mode. (Ask a child.) This isn’t helping Sony at all.
link to this extract

Apple to unveil high-end AirPods, over-ear headphones for 2019 • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman and Debby Wu:

»

The Cupertino, California-based company is working on new AirPods with noise-cancellation and water resistance, the people said. Apple is trying to increase the range that AirPods can work away from an iPhone or iPad, one of the people said. You won’t be swimming in them though: the water resistance is mainly to protect against rain and perspiration, the people said.

Slated for 2019, the earbuds will likely cost more than the existing $159 pair, and that could push Apple to segment the product line like it does with iPhones, one of the people said. Apple is also working on a wireless charging case that’s compatible with the upcoming AirPower charger.

The company has also internally discussed adding biometric sensors to future AirPods, like a heart-rate monitor, to expand its health-related hardware offerings beyond the Apple Watch, another person said. The current AirPods will be refreshed later this year with a new chip and support for hands-free Siri activation, Bloomberg News reported.

«

Noise cancellation is good, water resistance useful. But we’ve known about the wireless case compatible with AirPower since Apple showed the promo video for AirPower in, er, September. Meanwhile…
link to this extract

Apple admits its computers are broken • The Outline

Casey Johnston:

»

While the the repair and replacement program covers costs and notes that Apple will repair both single keys as well as whole keyboards when necessary, it doesn’t note whether the replacements will be a different, improved design that will prevent the problem from happening again (and again, and again). Having become a one-woman clearinghouse for people complaining about these keyboards since I broke this story, I feel justified in saying that keyboard failures – dead keys, sticking keys, double-spacing spacebars – appear to happen early and often, and repairs do not permanently fix the issue. I also feel justified in saying that the design on offer as recently as February still presented the exact same issues as the design I purchased in the fall of 2016.

In the same vein, it is worth noting that, prior to the announcement of the program, repairs involved almost exclusively swapping out the entire top case of the keyboard. This process required shipping the computer out to one of Apple’s remote service centers, and then shipping it back either to the customer or the Apple store, a total turnaround time of about five days if the computer was brought directly to an Apple store in the first place.

Apple did not immediately return a request from this reporter for comments on whether repairs may now be done on site at stores to shorten the time customers must be without their computers; whether the keyboard design has changed such that a repair may eliminate the problem rather than prop up a faulty design; or whether Apple anticipates releasing updated hardware that is not so prone to failure at any point in the future. Perhaps their keyboards, too, are broken.

«

In similar vein: The Register’s take on the same topic, by the owner of one of those keyboards. My present laptop dates from 2012. Its keyboard is fine by me – all the mistakes are mine.
link to this extract

The Visual Chatbot • Letting neural networks be weird

Janelle Shane:

»

There is a delightful algorithm called Visual Chatbot that will answer questions about any image it sees. It’s a demo by a team of academic researchers that goes along with a recent machine learning research paper (and a challenge for anyone who’d like to improve on it), and its performance is pretty state-of-the-art, meant to demonstrate image recognition, language comprehension, and spatial awareness.

However, there are a couple of interesting things to note about this algorithm.

• It was trained on a large but very specific set of images.
• It is not prepared for images that aren’t like the images it saw in training.
• When confused, it tends not to admit it.

Now, Visual Chatbot was indeed trained on a huge variety of images. It can answer fairly involved questions about a lot of different things, and that’s impressive. The problem is that humans are very weird, and there are still many things it’s never seen. (This turns out to be a major challenge for self-driving cars.) And given Visual Chatbot’s tendency to react to confusion by digging itself a deeper hole, this can lead to some pretty surreal interactions.

«

So Ms Shane unleashes a few pictures on Visual Chatbot. Oh, you know – Darth Vader v Obi-wan Kenobi (“a person standing in a doorway of a train station”) – and takes it from there. Hugely entertaining. And you can play too!
link to this extract

Consent, data-driven inequities, and the risks of sharing administrative data • Powered by Data

Lorraine Chuen:

»

[Welfare rights organizer, and author of the 2018 book “Automating Inequality” Virginia] Eubanks highlights how administrative data-sharing has already facilitated a new form of “automated inequality”. She points to the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST) as a case study in how data-driven tools can further profile poor communities and communities of colour.  The AFST is a tool meant to help child welfare staff identify and prioritize the most “at risk” children in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. The tool links data between twenty-nine different administrative data sources from the county’s Department of Human Services (DHS), including data on whether families have accessed or interacted with mental health services, child protective services, correction systems, drug/alcohol services, and more. This linked administrative data is fed into an algorithm used to flag which cases need intervention from General Protective Services—which often looks like separating a child from their family.

Unfortunately, many of the variables used to predict abuse in the model are simply measures for poverty (e.g. use of the SNAP nutrition assistance program), or reflections of systems that disproportionately affect poor & racialized communities (e.g. juvenile probation). The DHS also holds less data on affluent families—who are afforded more privacy simply by accessing mental health and drug treatment programs that are private, rather than public. Eubanks also points out the frustrating and heartbreaking paradox of parents being seen as greater risks to their children through the algorithm when they access public services to try and improve their situation.

«

Yes: the algorithms think that trying to help your children means you’re trying to harm your children.
link to this extract

End of the line: our guide to the death of the telephone • The Guardian

Rhik Samadder:

»

I remember an hour-long argument with the phone company when I moved into my flat, on being informed that I had to have a landline if I wanted the internet. I felt like a bald man being sold pomade. The company advised me I could call friends and family cheaply if I signed up to special packages. I can call them for free using the internet, I replied. Besides, I’m not calling any friends or family, unless I need a kidney or a place to stay.

The landline’s primary use is on TV, as a signifier you’re watching a period drama, ie anything set in 1995. They were so inefficient they bordered on surreal. Upon picking up, you never knew who would be on the other end: the National Lottery or Beryl from down the road or his Holiness the Pope. Weirdly, you were expected to identify yourself, though they had called you. That’s because manual dialling led to a lot of miscalls. Large portions of the day were spent convincing strangers that you weren’t Darren, didn’t know Darren, and were sure he was sorry for what he’d done. Relics of a time when we remembered phone numbers, a disproportionate number of calls to landlines are probably from people needing bail. The only funny way to use a landline in recent years was to send a text message to one, and have a robotic voice read it aloud in a way that was guaranteed to unsettle your mother.

Landlines are solely for older relatives who haven’t got to grips with mobiles. Having said that, it’s possible they’ll make a comeback, in the same way the streaming age saw the resurgence of record players and vinyl. Imagine dialling a friend on a rotary phone, which takes about 20 minutes if you don’t make any mistakes. Imagine taking time out of your overstimulated, hectic day to do that. Quite nice, no? With that curly, twirlable wire tethering you to one spot, and their lack of screen, the practical limitations of the landline could see it become a mindfulness tool, encouraging us to sit and you know, really talk. Could – but almost certainly won’t. These days landlines are cordless, and come with Caller ID, and are really just mobile phones that never finished their degree.

«

A hilarious, but also true, piece which also looks at video calls, voicemail and more.
link to this extract

The case against teaching kids to be polite to Alexa • Fast Company

Mike Elgan:

»

Today’s toddlers are the first generation to grow up without any memory of the world before ubiquitous artificial intelligence devices in homes. Parents are justifiably concerned about how these gadgets affect their children. One concern is manners. According to the UK research organization Childwise, children almost never say “please” or “thank you” to virtual assistant appliances (unlike adults, who often do).

Parents aren’t happy. But at least two companies are trying to help: Amazon and Google.

In April, Amazon introduced a politeness feature for its Alexa virtual assistant, along with a colorful line of Echo Dot devices just for kids. The manners feature, called Magic Word, is part of FreeTime, a wider range of child-specific features and content. It’s designed to encourage children to say “please” and “thank you” when speaking to Alexa assistant. After consulting outside child development experts, Amazon decided on positive reinforcement, with no “penalty” when a child is rude. For example, when a child says “please” in a request, Alexa might respond with “Thanks for asking so nicely.” Alexa replies to “Thank you” with “You’re welcome” or something similar. But if a child doesn’t say “please” or “thank you,” there’s no consequence.

An Amazon spokesperson told me that parents had requested help with reinforcing polite speech when their kids talk to Alexa. The company says it’s “still super early days” with the Magic Word feature, and expects to make future improvements based on customer feedback.

«

Count me among the group that doesn’t say please.
link to this extract

Uber test car driver streamed Hulu before fatal crash • Consumer Reports

Jeff Plungis and Keith Barry:

»

The Tempe police report says distraction was a factor in the crash that killed the pedestrian, Elaine Herzberg.

During Vasquez’s ride in the Uber vehicle, which was recorded on video inside the vehicle as part of the testing, she looked down 204 times, mostly in the direction of the lower center console near her right knee, according to the police report. She was looking down for 5.2 of the final 5.7 seconds prior to the crash, the report says.

A log of Vasquez’s account provided by the video-streaming service Hulu, under a search warrant, showed that “The Voice” was streaming on her account in the final 43 minutes of the drive and that the streaming ended at 9:59 p.m., the approximate time of the collision, the police report says. 

The police concluded that the crash wouldn’t have occurred if Vasquez had been paying attention to the roadway, and indicated that she could be charged with vehicular manslaughter. Details from the police report were published Thursday by the Arizona Republic, Reuters, and other media outlets.

«

In which case what’s the point of it being “self-driving”? It’s the limitations that make this pointless. You couldn’t trust it on motorways, side roads, at night. In which case there’s no point having it. Self-driving systems have to be really, really good, or else not employed at all, because driver inattention will be a thing, and accidents will keep happening.
link to this extract

Intel and the danger of integration • Stratechery

Ben Thompson:

»

TSMC [founded in 1987! on the promise that it wouldn’t compete with its customers to design chips, only make them] got better, in large part because it had no choice: soon its manufacturing capabilities were only one step behind industry standards, and within a decade had caught-up (although Intel remained ahead of everyone). Meanwhile, the fact that TSMC existed created the conditions for an explosion in “fabless” chip companies that focused on nothing but design. For example, in the late 1990s there was an explosion in companies focused on dedicated graphics chips: nearly all of them were manufactured by TSMC. And, all along, the increased business let TSMC invest even more in its manufacturing capabilities.

This represented into a three-pronged assault on Intel’s dominance:

• Many of those new fabless design companies were creating products that were direct alternatives to Intel chips for general purpose computing. The vast majority of these were based on the ARM architecture, but also AMD in 2008 spun off its fab operations (christened GlobalFoundries) and became a fabless designer of x86 chips.
• Specialized chips, designed by fabless design companies, were increasingly used for operations that had previously been the domain of general purpose processors. Graphics chips in particular were well-suited to machine learning, cryptocurrency mining, and other highly “embarrassingly parallel” operations; many of those applications have spawned specialized chips of their own. There are dedicated bitcoin chips, for example, or Google’s Tensor Processing Units: all are manufactured by TSMC.
• Meanwhile TMSC, joined by competitors like GlobalFoundries and Samsung, were investing ever more in new manufacturing processes, fueled by the revenue from the previous two factors in a virtuous cycle.

«

When you consider the victory that modularisation has wrought in the right-hand part of that image, you have to marvel at how Apple has managed to navigate the rapids to get to where it is. Every company has to integrate to a degree; the question is how much, and when to stop/start. At Intel, it seems to have continued just that bit too long because the money was so good.
link to this extract

Brexit’s big short: how pollsters helped hedge funds beat the crash • Bloomberg Business

Cam Simpson:

»

These hedge funds [which had bought early access to private polling data on Brexit] were in the perfect position to earn fortunes by short selling the British pound. Others learned the likely outcome of public, potentially market-moving polls before they were published, offering surefire trades.

Hedge fund managers, of course, try to beat the market by getting the best information they can. For exit polling data, that’s a tricky business. Pollsters have always sold surveys to private clients, but UK law restricts them from releasing exit-poll data before voting ends. While some of the practices discovered by Bloomberg fall into a gray area, the law is clear: It would have been a violation if, prior to the polls closing, “any section of the public” had gotten the same data the pollsters sold privately to hedge funds.

One person with questions still to answer is [Nigel] Farage, a former commodities broker who also went to work for a London currency trading company after he moved into politics. He twice told the world on election night that Leave had likely lost, when he had information suggesting his side had actually won. He also has changed his story about who told him what regarding that very valuable piece of information.

Bloomberg’s account is based in part on interviews over seven months with more than 30 knowledgeable current and former polling-company executives, consultants and traders, nearly all of whom spoke only on the condition they not be named because of confidentiality agreements. Pollsters said they believed Brexit yielded one of the most profitable single days in the history of their industry. Some hedge funds that hired them cleared in the hundreds of millions of dollars…

«

Farage suddenly has a lot of questions to answer – about this, and about Russian influence in the Brexit vote.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Reports of a simple iPhone passcode hack turned out to be wrong. Photo by portal gda on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. It’s not my fault. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Thermostats, locks and lights: digital tools of domestic abuse • The New York Times

Nellie Bowles:

»

One woman had turned on her air-conditioner, but said it then switched off without her touching it. Another said the code numbers of the digital lock at her front door changed every day and she could not figure out why. Still another told an abuse help line that she kept hearing the doorbell ring, but no one was there.

Their stories are part of a new pattern of behavior in domestic abuse cases tied to the rise of smart home technology. Internet-connected locks, speakers, thermostats, lights and cameras that have been marketed as the newest conveniences are now also being used as a means for harassment, monitoring, revenge and control.

In more than 30 interviews with The New York Times, domestic abuse victims, their lawyers, shelter workers and emergency responders described how the technology was becoming an alarming new tool. Abusers — using apps on their smartphones, which are connected to the internet-enabled devices — would remotely control everyday objects in the home, sometimes to watch and listen, other times to scare or show power. Even after a partner had left the home, the devices often stayed and continued to be used to intimidate and confuse…

…Muneerah Budhwani, who takes calls at the National Domestic Violence Hotline, said she started hearing stories about smart homes in abuse situations last winter. “Callers have said the abusers were monitoring and controlling them remotely through the smart home appliances and the smart home system,” she said.

Graciela Rodriguez, who runs a 30-bed emergency shelter at the Center for Domestic Peace in San Rafael, Calif., said some people had recently come in with tales of “the crazy-making things” like thermostats suddenly kicking up to 100 degrees or smart speakers turning on blasting music.

«

Like something from a screenplay. No doubt this stuff will get incorporated into a screenplay very soon.
link to this extract

Non-invasive malaria test wins Africa engineering prize • Associated Press

Rodney Muhumuza:

»

Malaria is the biggest killer in Africa, and the sub-Saharan region accounts for about 80% of the world’s malaria cases and deaths. Cases rose to 216 million in 2016, up from 211 million cases in 2015, according to the latest World Malaria Report, released late last year. Malaria deaths fell by 1,000, to 445,000.

The mosquito-borne disease is a challenge to prevent, with increasing resistance reported to both drugs and insecticides.

The new malaria test kit works by shining a red beam of light onto a finger to detect changes in the shape, color and concentration of red blood cells, all of which are affected by malaria. The results are sent within a minute to a computer or mobile phone linked to the device.

A Portugal-based firm has been contracted to produce the components for Matibabu, the Swahili word for “treatment.”

“It’s a perfect example of how engineering can unlock development – in this case by improving health care,” Rebecca Enonchong, Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation judge, said in a statement. “Matibabu is simply a game changer.”

«

Won by a 25-year-old Ugandan computer scientist, Brian Gitta. Initial accuracy 80%; they’re working for 90%. The mobile phone makes it so much cheaper and flexible, too.
link to this extract

Inside a heist of American chip designs, as China bids for tech power • The New York Times

Paul Mozur:

»

Micron’s accusations focus on efforts by Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit, a state-backed chip maker, to build a $5.7bn factory in China’s Fujian Province. Two years ago, Jinhua tapped UMC, a Taiwanese company, to help it develop technology for the factory. Instead of going through the lengthy steps required to design the technology, Micron said in its suit, UMC and Jinhua decided to steal it.

A UMC spokesman denied the allegations and declined to comment further. Jinhua did not respond to requests for comment.

First, UMC lured away engineers from Micron’s Taiwan operations with promises of raises and bonuses, according to the Taiwanese authorities. Then, it asked them to take some of Micron’s secrets with them, according to Micron’s court filings and the authorities. The engineers illegally took with them more than 900 files that contained key specifications and details about Micron’s advanced memory chips, the authorities said.

Micron grew suspicious, according to its court documents, after discovering that one of its departing engineers had turned to Google for instructions on how to wipe a company laptop. Later, at a recruiting event in the United States aimed at Micron employees, Jinhua and UMC showed PowerPoint slides that used Micron’s internal code names when discussing future chips it would make, according to the court documents.

Alerted by Micron, the Taiwanese police tapped the phone of one Micron engineer, Kenny Wang, who was being recruited by UMC. According to an indictment in Taiwan against Mr. Wang and others, UMC reached out to Mr. Wang in early 2016 using Line, the smartphone messaging app, while he was still working for Micron. UMC explained it was having problems developing its memory chip technology. Mr. Wang then grabbed the information it needed from Micron’s servers, and later used it to help UMC’s design. The police said Mr. Wang received a promotion at UMC.

«

link to this extract

Google’s endless app overlap: what’s going on? • Android Authority

Anthony Hayt starts off displeased with Google Tasks, but finds he’s frustrated overall with Google’s lack of discipline:

»

Tasks may be great at one small thing for some folks, but it doesn’t really need to exist. It only complicates and fragments Google’s world that much more. In this regard, Tasks reminds me a lot of Google’s current crop of messaging apps, including Hangouts, Hangouts Chat, Messages, and Allo. All of these apps have different functions for different people — none provide a single, cohesive solution for everyone.

Tasks seems like yet another app Google has debuted essentially as a placeholder for some future development. Or, looked at another way, it is yet another beta product from Google’s throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach to product development.

Tasks seems designed solely to test out the integration of  Gmail, Calendar, and a “Future Unnamed Keep-Tasks Hybrid” app (or something). No real thought seems to have gone into how productivity or enterprise users would actually want to effectively employ it. Indeed, for Google to really compete with apps like Asana or Trello, it will need to merge Hangouts Meet, Tasks, Keep, and Calendar in a way that integrates them all in one window. That is a lot to ask, but Tasks doesn’t really get us any closer to that goal.

«

This will sound weird, but I think Google’s big problem with apps is that it never had a desktop OS to keep it focussed. A mobile OS is a big undertaking, sure, but you can add apps to it endlessly. You can’t do that on a desktop OS: the opportunity cost is too high.

But what about ChromeOS? That’s more of a browser on top of Linux. Not the same thing.
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Apple pushes back on hacker’s iPhone passcode bypass report • ZDNet

Zack Whittaker:

»

We reported Friday on [Matthew] Hickey’s findings, which claimed to be able to send all combinations of a user’s possible passcode in one go, by enumerating each code from 0000 to 9999, and concatenating the results in one string with no spaces. He explained that because this doesn’t give the software any breaks, the keyboard input routine takes priority over the device’s data-erasing feature.

But Hickey tweeted later, saying that not all tested passcodes are sent to a the device’s secure enclave, which protects the device from brute-force attacks.

“The [passcodes] don’t always go to the [secure enclave processor] in some instances – due to pocket dialing [or] overly fast inputs – so although it ‘looks’ like pins are being tested they aren’t always sent and so they don’t count, the devices register less counts than visible,” he tweeted.

Hickey credited Stefan Esser for his help.

“I went back to double check all code and testing,” said Hickey in a message Saturday. “When I sent codes to the phone, it appears that 20 or more are entered but in reality its only ever sending four or five pins to be checked.”

Apple is rolling out a new feature, called USB Restricted Mode, in its upcoming iOS 12 update, which is said to make it far more difficult for police or hackers to get access to a person’s device – and their data.

«

This would have been an amazing hack, if true. But it’s not. ZDNet left the URL for this updated story untouched rather than write a new one and redirect from the old; the old URL is “a-hacker-figured-out-how-to-brute-force-an-iphone-passcode”.

I don’t think Whittaker rushed to (virtual) print on this; the fault was the researcher’s, who didn’t test it thoroughly before going public. A little embarrassing.
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Bitmain controls almost 51% of bitcoin mining hashrate • Bitcoin Newswire

The Bitmain group overtly controls 42% of mining power, and could marshal another 3% from power presently used mining other coins:

»

The BTC mining hash rate has tripled since December 2017, while the price of Bitcoin has dropped to approximately a third of its value within the same period.

With the drop in prices and the increasing hashrate, it is currently more difficult to mine Bitcoin than it was in December 2017. For smaller mining operations, the price drop is a significant problem that could render them unable to continue the business. If they close up shop and new miners don’t enter the market, there is the possibility of Bitmain grabbing control of a much larger share of the hashrate. Since Bitmain manufactures its hardware, it can most likely survive for much longer even in the face of increasing mining difficulty and reducing prices.

Bitcoin is currently down to its lowest level since the start of 2018. BTC prices fell below $6,000 for the first time in 2018 as the top-ranked crypto continues to struggle.

«

So bitcoin, the great decentralised project, is becoming centralised as hell – more so than fiat finance.
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This is how many people we’d have to send to Proxima Centauri to make sure someone actually arrives • MIT Technology Review

»

The Parker Solar Probe, to be launched this year, will travel at more than 700,000km/h, about 0.067% the speed of light.

So Marin and Beluffi use this as the speed achievable with state-of-the-art space technology today. “At this speed, an interstellar journey would still take about 6,300 years to reach Proxima Centauri b,” they say.

Selecting a crew for such a multigenerational space journey would be no easy feat. Important parameters include the initial number of men and women in the crew, their age and life expectancy, infertility rates, the maximum capacity of the ship, and so on. It also requires rules about the age at which procreation is permitted, how closely related parents can be, how many children they can have, and so on.

Once these parameters are determined, they can be plugged into an algorithm called Heritage, which simulates a multigenerational mission. First, the algorithm creates a crew with the selected qualities. It then runs through the mission, allowing for natural and accidental deaths each year and checking to see which crew members are within the allowed procreational window.

Next, it randomly associates two crew members of different sexes and evaluates whether they can have a child based on infertility rates, pregnancy chances, and inbreeding limitations. If the pregnancy is deemed viable, the algorithm creates a new crew member and then repeats this loop until the crew either dies out or reaches Proxima Centauri after 6,300 years.

«

This is the setup of so many sci-fi films, where of course it all goes wrong. The surprising (to me) conclusion is you’d only need 25 “breeding pairs” for it all to go swimmingly. Though you’d have a civilisation, in effect, which would arrive somewhere after 6,300 years spent just travelling.

As a reminder, 6,300 years ago we were just seeing the discovery of copper, and the plough in Europe. Would a space civilisation keep evolving?
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Young Trumpies hit D.C.…and D.C. hits them right back • POLITICO Magazine

Daniel Lippman on how young members of the Trump administration struggle to find their way in Washington:

»

One beleaguered 31-year-old female administration official described at length her “very, very frequent” scraps with her matches on dating apps. “You do the small talk thing, and you have a very good conversation, and then they might say, ‘You didn’t vote for Trump, right?’” she says. “As soon as I say, ‘Of course I did,’ it just devolves into all-caps ‘HOW COULD YOU BE SUCH A RACIST AND A BIGOT?’ And ‘You’re going to take away your own birth control.’” In one recent star-crossed exchange, the official told a match she worked for the federal government. When he pushed, she revealed she was in the administration. He asked her, “Do you rip babies from their mothers and then send them to Mexico?”

Evasive answers will get you only so far, though, since many dating apps provide enough information for inquisitive users to sleuth out their matches’ identities. “I literally got the other day, ‘Thanks but no thanks. Just Googled you and it said you were a mouthpiece for the Trump administration. Go fuck yourself,’” says the official. It’s all enough to drive her and some of her colleagues away from at least some of the apps. “I’m no longer on Bumble,” she says.

Young staffers have had to develop a keen sense of just when to have “The Talk” with romantic partners. “I’ve still been able to hook up with women,” says a male former White House staffer. “But I know that I need to be careful about broaching the Trump stuff.

«

link to this extract

Nike hit back at Quest in court case • The ITAM Review

“Rich” on a row between Quest Software, which says Nike owes $15.6m for use of its software since 2001, and Nike, which says it owes $0.34m. It’s only a 98% difference:

»

Nike state they have: “…not agreed, under the SLSA or otherwise, to pay for licenses for Quest Software for persons or systems who could theoretically access the Quest Software, but who do not actually use the software”

And go on to point out that “People legitimately need to access these servers, but have no need to run Quest software – for example “NIKE’s cyber security and forensics professionals.” A situation that will be common to many organisations worldwide.

Looking at section 12 of the SLSA, the audit clause between Nike & Quest states: “In the event that an audit conducted as set forth herein discloses that Licensee has caused or permitted access to or use of the System by persons or entities that are not authorized under the terms of this Agreement to such use or access, Licensee shall pay Quest the underpayment, in the amount of the negotiated fee applicable to the particular Software Product or Product to which unauthorized access was permitted, for all such unauthorized users”

It seems Quest are relying on the language that states: “permitted access to…the System by person…not authorized…to such use or access” to make their claim that Nike are liable for all potential users based on system access.

Nike, however, are arguing that the clause simply states they must pay for: “All unauthorized users”

«

On that (and some more) turns $15m, one way or another.
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An invisible rating system at your favorite chain restaurant is costing your server • Buzzfeed

Caroline O’Donovan (where “server” means “waiter/waitress”):

»

Ziosk tablets sit atop dining tables at more than 4,500 restaurants across the United States — including most Chili’s and Olive Gardens, and many TGI Friday’s and Red Robins. Competitor E La Carte’s PrestoPrime tablets are in more than 1,800 restaurants, including most Applebee’s. Tens of thousands of servers are being evaluated based on a tech-driven, data-oriented customer feedback system many say is both inaccurate and unfair. And few of the customers holding the reins are even aware their responses have any impact on how much servers earn.

Ziosk and Presto sit at the nexus of two major consumer trends: the idea that every product, service, piece of content, and interaction, whether encountered online or in real life, should be rated on a scale of one to five, and that these ratings in aggregate become an invaluable dataset, helping managers achieve growth and make money.

“It makes very literal the idea that the customer is always right, to the complete disregard of the worker,” Ifeoma Ajunwa, an assistant professor at Cornell’s Industrial and Labor Relations School, told BuzzFeed News.

Technologies like Ziosk are attractive to the restaurant industry, which faces a rising minimum wage, because the tablets promise to make workers more efficient, and in turn, lower labor costs. But in interviews with BuzzFeed News, more than two dozen current and former servers described Ziosk as a source of financial and emotional anxiety, a vector of discrimination and harassment in the workplace, and an added layer to the economic and psychological precariousness that already defines restaurant work.

“When they introduced them, it seemed like a good deal for the customer. But as a server, it’s just the worst thing ever,” said Sam Ellis, who worked as a server at a Chili’s in Texas. “That’s all your job depends on, is those survey scores.”

«

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CryptoKitties sales plummet in popularity months after raising $12m • Business Insider

Zoë Bernard:

»

Like Beanie Babies, CryptoKitties are considered collectibles. Their novelty lies in the fact that owners can prove that they possess sole ownership of the Crypto Kitty they’ve purchased. In December, it was reported that one particular Crypto Kitty sold for around $155,000.

People had already spent millions buying and trading CryptoKitties by the time top-tier investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures decided to give the company $12 million. Before the deal went through, one investor in the company told Business Insider that the product embodied one of the most important and applicable use-cases of the blockchain: The ability to safely store digital collectibles online.

But it looks like CryptoKitties itself could be in danger of becoming a short-lived novelty.

According to data from blockchain analytics sites Bloxy and Diar, the number of CryptoKitties transactions has fallen drastically in the last 3 months.

The number of CryptoKitties transactions decreased in June by 98.4% compared to its peak of 80,500 transactions back in December 2017, according to data from Bloxy. The game is still among the most popular options for ethereum-related gaming, but public interest in buying and selling them seems to have waned significantly in recent months.

CryptoKitties cofounder Bryce Bladon told Business Insider in an email that the decrease in CryptoKitties transactions was to be expected, and there were a few factors, one of which was the skyrocketing costs of processing a transaction based on ethereum. 

«

Ah yes, transaction costs. That almost-always-overlooked factor in blockchain “currency” things.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A member of Congress is suggesting DNA matching could reunite children and parents separated at the US border. Photo by Shaury Nash on Flickr.

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A selection of 8 links for you. I really like these. Do you? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How computers could make your customer-service calls more human • WSJ

Daniela Hernandez and Jennifer Strong:

»

Cogito is one of several companies developing analytics tools that give agents feedback about how conversations with customers are going. Its software measures in real time the tone of an agent’s voice, their speech rate, and how much each person is talking, according to Dr. Place. “We measure the conversational dance,” he says.

That dance is sometimes out of sync, such as when an agent speaks too quickly or too much, cuts a customer off, has extended periods of silence or sounds tired.

When the software detects these mistakes, a notification pops up on a window on an agent’s screen to coax them to change their strategy. The alerts are useful not just for the agents, but also for their supervisors, Cogito says.

When insurer MetLife Inc. started testing the software about nine months ago, Emily Baker, a 39-year-old supervisor at a call center in Warwick, R.I., thought: “Why do I need this artificial intelligence to allow me to be more human? How much more human can I be?”

But the program has come in handy when coaching new agents, she says, especially those with little experience. One of her 14 agents said the software noticed he wasn’t speaking with enough energy, so it prompted him with a message to pep up plus a coffee-cup icon, she says.

Tiredness can come off as lack of confidence, Ms. Baker says, and it’s important for clients to “feel confident about the service we’re providing” because callers are often going through potentially life-changing events. The call center where Ms. Baker works is focused on disability insurance.

«

Machines to watch over us, and correct us when we aren’t good enough with each other.
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A Congresswoman is asking 23andMe to help reunite kids and parents at the border • Buzzfeed

Lissandra Villa:

»

California Rep. Jackie Speier is asking 23andMe, a popular DNA-testing company, to help reunite children separated from their parents under President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy.

Speier, a Democrat, said she spoke with executives at 23andMe on Thursday to see if the company could play a role in bringing families back together. The congresswoman’s suggestion comes in the midst of a scramble to figure out what the next steps are for some of these families, given that there’s a lack of a plan on how to bring them back together.

“I was just trying to think, how are we going to connect these two? How can we guarantee that the parents are going to get their own child back?” Speier told BuzzFeed News. “I’m thinking, how else are we going to do that? So I was encouraging them to look at whether or not they could provide some kind of assistance here.”

Asked what she was told by the company, Speier said: “They were going to think about it.”

«

That’s inspired thinking. Could even work, and wouldn’t be that difficult. Objections have been raised that this creates a DNA database of would-be illegal immigrants and/or legitimate asylum seekers. Given that the US requires my fingerprints for perfectly legitimate visits, I’m not sure why that’s a big worry compared to the large good that could be achieved.
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Atari accuses El Reg of professional trolling and making stuff up. Welp, here’s the interview tape for you to decide… • The Register

Kieren McCarthy interviewed an Atari exec earlier this year, and wrote about it. Atari was unhappy:

»

a potential buyer of a Atari VCS posted a link to the article on the company’s Facebook page, and asked the biz to explain it. Atari responded:

»

We honestly can’t explain that article either. Our executives sat with that reporter for half an hour and he wrote what he wanted instead of what was discussed with him. Sadly there are even irresponsible trolls in ‘professional’ positions i guess.

«

We clearly said that we were bringing engineering design models to GDC and lots of people clearly don’t understand what that means. Hunks of plastic? Well, yeah, that’s how you finalize the designs and confirm that you can get the look and feel you want for the finished products. Sad.

While we at The Register often take a light-hearted and critical perspective on the news of the day, we take our professional obligations as reporters very seriously.

In that capacity, we would like to formally apologize to both Atari and Michael Arzt for digging out a recording of the interview – and for the following article in which we highlight that Atari is so full of crap that it should be designated a hazardous waste zone.

You can find the entire 30-minute interview at the bottom, but here are a few short clips covering the most salient parts.

«

Going to need a salve for that burn, Atari. I’ve been an editor of Kieren’s work, and he is really thorough and painstaking and accurate.
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60,000 Android devices hit by battery-saving app attack • Tripwire

Graham Cluley on a scam that “warns” you that your (Android) device – which it names, by some HTML-grabbing functionality – has a problem and recommends the app (and the only way to stop it is to kill the web page):

»

So what happens if you do go to the Google Play store and install the battery-saving app being touted by the fake warning?

The first thing that should ring alarm bells in you is that the app demands access to a disturbing array of permissions including:

• Read sensitive log data
• Receive text messages (SMS)
• Receive data from Internet
• Pair with Bluetooth devices
• Full network access
• Modify system settings
I can’t think of any legitimate reason why a genuine battery-saving app would ever need such invasive abilities, which in combination with the app’s other functionality allows it to steal a user’s phone number, location, and details about their device including its IMEI number.

And so it comes as something of a surprise to discover that the Advanced Battery Saver app actually does live up to its advertising – monitoring a device’s battery status, killing unwanted background processes that consume significant resources, and making other attempts to keep batteries running for longer.

And it’s this strange dichotomy – the good and the bad behavior – which leads the researchers to speculate that the battery-saving app was perhaps originally designed to perform its intended advertised function (and to fulfill only that purpose) before being extended by its creators into underhand methods of income generation.

«

There’s no money in standard apps at that level now, if there ever was.

Chief among those is the app’s request for access to a user’s SMS text messages. One installed, the battery-saving app recruits devices into an ad-clicking scam, with the app “clicking” on advertising links it is sent via SMS to earn more income for the fraudsters behind the scheme.
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Former CIA employee charged with leaking hacking tools to WikiLeaks • Buzzfeed

Kevin Collier:

»

Joshua Schulte, 29, believed to be behind the WIkiLeaks “Vault 7” disclosures of 2017, in which the site spent months slowly leaking CIA hacking tools, had previously been charged with possession of child pornography.

WikiLeaks published the Vault 7 disclosures in 25 increments from March through November 2017. The disclosures themselves didn’t reveal shocking spy powers, but they were a major embarrassment for the agency. In one release, WikiLeaks claimed that the CIA had developed a means to “bypass” the encrypted chat app Signal. The agency hadn’t actually compromised Signal itself but had noted in internal documents that hacking such an app wasn’t necessary if the agency could hack a phone itself — a technique commonly deployed among the world’s elite hackers.

If convicted of all charges, Schulte could face a maximum of 135 years in prison.

Among the charges are 10 counts of willfully distributing copyrighted materials — the same charge generally leveled against someone who posts movies, TV shows, or music files.

WikiLeaks, which has a formal policy of not naming its sources, responded to the news by retweeting last year’s biggest Vault 7 leaks.

Schulte online claimed to be a libertarian, took a photo of himself with a glass with the text “fuck Obama” on it, and repeatedly used racist slurs in chats.

He was a member of the CIA’s Engineering Development Group, which built hacking tools deployed overseas. A former CIA coworker of Schulte’s, who requested be unnamed because he wasn’t authorized to speak about agency matters, told BuzzFeed News that Schulte had had problems getting along with his coworkers.

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link to this extract

Supreme Court clears way for sales taxes on internet merchants • The New York Times

Adam Liptak:

»

Internet retailers can be required to collect sales taxes in states where they have no physical presence, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday.

Brick-and-mortar businesses have long complained that they are disadvantaged by having to charge sales taxes while many of their online competitors do not. States have said that they are missing out on tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue under a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that helped spur the rise of internet shopping.

On Thursday, the court overruled that ruling, Quill Corporation v. North Dakota, which had said that the Constitution bars states from requiring businesses to collect sales taxes unless they have a substantial connection to the state.

Shares in Amazon were down just 1% in morning trading after the ruling, at $1,731.59. But other e-commerce companies suffered far tougher blows: Shares in Etsy, the marketplace for artisanal crafts, fell 4.5%, to $42.21, while those in Wayfair, a popular home goods seller, were down 3.2%, at $112.42.

Writing for the majority in the 5-to-4 ruling, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the Quill decision had distorted the nation’s economy and had caused states to lose annual tax revenues between $8bn and $33bn.

“Quill puts both local businesses and many interstate businesses with physical presence at a competitive disadvantage relative to remote sellers,” he wrote. “Remote sellers can avoid the regulatory burdens of tax collection and can offer de facto lower prices caused by the widespread failure of consumers to pay the tax on their own.”

«

This has long looked anomalous: if you buy things on the internet, why not pay sales tax? European countries levy VAT on online sales, including software, wherever the “purchase” is made. The tax benefit for some states could be substantial – though South Dakota has an annual budget of about $4bn, and reckons this will bring in $50m. A side point: South Dakota doesn’t have income tax; instead it applies sales and “use” taxes. A touch regressive there, people.
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Are ‘sensory videos’ vulgar and pornographic? China says so • CNET

Bonnie Burton:

»

The autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR, can happen after hearing certain sounds. Entire YouTube channels are dedicated to ASMR videos of whispering, fingers tapping on surfaces or even the crushing of eggshells.

While ASMR videos are so popular they regularly trend on YouTube, China’s anti-pornography office released a statement this month saying that it would crack down on inappropriate ASMR videos appearing on the country’s popular streaming sites such as Youku and Bilibili. 

The China office says many ASMR videos stimulate sexual sensations, but ASMR fans say they use them more as sleeping aids.

In a 2015 study, UK researchers looked at ASMR media people were accessing in the US and Western Europe. Eighty-two% of study participants said they used ASMR videos as a sleep aid and 70% used them to de-stress. 

Only 5% of people who enjoy ASMR media use it for sexual stimulation, according to the study. 

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If I say this has passed me by, I sound old, right?
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Why Apple’s AirPower wireless charger is taking so long to make • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

»

Unlike wireless chargers on the market today, the AirPower is designed to charge three devices simultaneously: an iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods with a still-to-be-released wireless charging case.

Apple also wants users to be able to place any of their devices anywhere on the charging mat to begin a charge. That ambitious goal requires the company to pack the AirPower with multiple charging sensors, a process that has proven difficult, the people said. The charger is based on custom charging technology, which it intends to integrate with the Qi charging standard, the company said last year.

An executive at an Apple partner that manufactures third-party wireless chargers for iPhones, who asked not to be identified, said that the multi-device charging mechanism is challenging to build because it likely requires different sized charging components for the three types of devices, which would all overlap across the mat.

The AirPower charger is also more advanced than the current competition because it includes a custom Apple chip running a stripped down version of the iOS mobile operating system to conduct on-device power management and pairing with devices. Apple engineers have also been working to squash bugs related to the on-board firmware, according to the people familiar.

«

A stripped-down version of iOS? So now Apple is going to have five OSs to update – MacOS, iOS, WatchOS, tvOS and AirPowerOS (maybe AirOS).

And when is it coming? From Gurman’s piece: “engineers hoped to launch the charger by June. The aim now is to put it on sale before or in September, according to one of the people.” At least that gives us a sort-of deadline. Though “before or in” is basically “by”. The subediting on American journalism is dire.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: “who” was used instead of “whom” in a sentence in yesterday’s post. Doctors are optimistic that the person affected will make a full recovery.

What if you came to work and found the computer had fired you? It happened. Photo by Joe Loong on Flickr.

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A selection of 11 links for you. Midsummer’s day! (in the north). I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Tesla lawsuit highlights risks of inside threat • CNBC

Kate Fazzini:

»

The incidents described in CEO Elon Musk’s email to employees and the company’s lawsuit against the former employee are jarring because they show how much access insiders have to critical systems of these vehicles, and how difficult it might be to determine whether they are altering code on machines that test the cars.

Cybersecurity professionals have demonstrated how to hack into the infotainment systems of several vehicle brands over the years. These demonstrations have shown that, while it’s fairly easy to break into the computer systems that control dashboard computers, getting deeper into the systems that actually run a vehicle – and control its steering, acceleration and braking — is much harder. It is often difficult to get to these computers physically, and they typically aren’t connected to the internet or remotely available, making it necessary for an attacker to have physical access to the device.

It’s even less likely outside attackers could get access to computers used in vehicle testing.

But insiders have far greater access. Employees may not only have physical access to the critical systems that run manufacturing or program car components, but they may know important information that allows them to write code that can cause meaningful damage to the vehicle.

«

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How everyone started talking about family separations • The Atlantic

Alexis Madrigal with a clever timeline of how an overlooked story became The Story Everyone Was Talking About:

»

despite the reporting that children were being separated from their parents and kept in detention centers, no one had seen any photographs of what was happening. The world was desperate for some images to make sense of the story: What did this look really look like? NowThis Politics rolled out the old Kamala Harris footage and it took off.

In fact, the controversy became even more prominent because of that desire for visual evidence. A variety of well-known liberals including Congressman Joaquin Castro, the actress Mia Farrow, the former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and the former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau tweeted photographs of a now-defunct detection center from 2014.

Then something really important happened. President Trump stepped in to fire back at the Democrats. “Democrats mistakenly tweet 2014 pictures from Obama’s term showing children from the Border in steel cages,” Trump tweeted. “They thought it was recent pictures in order to make us look bad, but backfires. Dems must agree to Wall and new Border Protection for good of country … Bipartisan Bill!” It got nearly 30,000 retweets and 100,000 likes, planting the topic at the very top of the week’s news cycle.

Strangely, but also very 2010-ishly, it was the bad information—these old photographs tweeted as new—that touched the crisis to the Trump third rail. News organizations began to throw everything they had at the story.

The reporting about what was happening at the border, which had been sparse, flowed in.

«

Note how it’s all about reporting and social media. Trump has sort-of relented and signed an Executive Order that sort-of rescinds part of the policy, but only in order to create a new legal fight. So this isn’t done yet. What it really shows is the power of Trump to put himself into a corner through a foolish tweet.
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Tech CEOs criticize separating families at the US border • Mashable

Rachel Kraus:

»

The tech industry isn’t staying silent. In addition to Apple’s Tim Cook, CEOs Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Dara Khosrowshahi (Uber), Susan Wojcicki (YouTube), and others have taken to social media to speak out. Many have also pledged donations, with Zuckerberg leading a fundraising effort that has so far raised over $25,000.

In a Tuesday memo to Uber employees, Uber execs said the company’s legal team is looking into connecting families with lawyers and already donated $100,000 to a nonprofit helping separated children, according to Business Insider.

Other tech industry leaders that have called for change include representatives from Airbnb, Box, eBay, Cisco, and others. 

Microsoft also issued a statement saying that it is “dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border.” That comes after reports of employee anger over Microsoft’s cloud computing deal with Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE). Microsoft managed to overcome its dismay long enough to reassure the public that “Microsoft is not working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or U.S. Customs and Border Protection on any projects related to separating children from their families at the border.”

Tesla’s Elon Musk also expressed his support with a puzzling series of tweets.

«

In the morning when I linked to this, I wrote: “I’m surprised this policy survived the weekend, but increasingly it feels as though it cannot survive the indignation – and funding – being aimed at it. The stain on the US administration’s character is spreading.” By the evening in the UK, it had been sort-of revoked – at least the separation part.
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Twitter is locking accounts for tweeting Stephen Miller’s phone number • Buzzfeed

Charlie Warzel:

»

Another day, another test of the limits of Twitter’s harassment rules.

This time, Twitter’s challenge came from Gizmodo Media Group and its news and politics site Splinter, which, on Wednesday afternoon, tweeted out what it reported is White House adviser Stephen Miller’s phone number alongside a piece titled, “Here’s Stephen Miller’s Cell Phone Number, If You Need It.” Miller is the reported architect of the Trump administration’s zero tolerance immigration policy, which has resulted in the forceful separation of children from their families at the border.

Countless others followed Splinter’s lead, starting with Gizmodo Media Group reporters and editors followed by other users who posted screenshots of their texts to Miller. As of this writing, a Twitter search of Miller’s number yielded hundreds of tweets containing the number, as well as users who’ve changed their Twitter display name to his number.

Twitter rules forbid users to publish any private information for public and private figures alike, which includes phone numbers. Typically, this is something you might see from individuals or groups of users as a form of targeted harassment. It’s less common, however, for such information to be published by a major media outlet.

A spokesperson for Twitter told BuzzFeed News that publishing Miller’s number was a violation of the company’s rules. “We are aware of this and are taking appropriate action on content that violates our Terms of Service,” the spokesperson said.

«

Wellll.. as someone who has had their phone number tweeted (thanks Jake), I can say that Twitter acted pretty fast then to remove it. And putting Miller’s number online isn’t journalism – it doesn’t belong on a mainstream news site. Sure, Miller is a jerk. But this is harassment, not journalism. So I’m with Twitter on this one, for both reasons.
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These parents hoped to raise $1,500 for separated migrant families. They’ve brought in $9m • Washington Post

Darlena Cunha:

»

Bonds for detained migrants typically range from hundreds to many thousands of dollars — amounts that might as well be in the billions for families that arrive here with next to nothing, and have whatever they brought with them confiscated by Border Patrol.

So the Willners created a Facebook fundraiser over the weekend to raise $1,500 — enough to free a single migrant parent with a relatively low bond.

“It was the closest thing we could do to hugging that [2-year-old] kid,” Dave Willner told the Mercury News.

Five days later, the Willners have raised more than $8m and climbing — overflowing all previous optimism.

“We can confirm this is one of the largest fundraisers we’ve ever seen on Facebook,” Roya Winner, a spokeswoman for the social media giant, told The Washington Post, back when the amount was less than $4m.

Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is among the nearly 200,000 people who had contributed by Wednesday morning.

Private donors have matched more than $250,000 of the total, but the Willners said the average donation is just $40.

The money has come from Americans disaffected with their government, immigrants who remember their own journeys, and sympathizers from Canada to Switzerland and beyond.

“That clear moral commonality is what will sustain us,” Charlotte Willner wrote on Facebook on the first night of the campaign. “It transcends almost everything. It is an enduring sense of what America ought to be about.”

«

This is one of those occasions when any gloom about the effects of the internet is lifted, like the sun breaking through clouds. Hundreds of thousands of people contributing to make a difference, rather than tweeting about it. And even after the Executive Order about this, the benefits of the gift continue – it funds lawyers and help for people for at least a year.
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The blockchain solution to our DeepFake problems • Wired

Antonio García Martínez on the problem (and solution?) for all those “DeepFake” videos:

»

What then would be the ideal architecture of a video “truth” infrastructure, one that could send someone to prison for years, or exonerate someone from the same fate? Well, it would be decentralized (no single arbiter of truth) and public (we can all check it), which is precisely what Bitcoin’s blockchain provides for payments.

Can the greedy bubble of Bitcoin be repurposed toward a less monetary goal?

A three-year-old Austin, Texas-based company named Factom thinks so. Building on top of the existing Bitcoin infrastructure almost as if it were the network layer of a new truth web, Factom provides a streamlined way to assert the existence of a piece of data or document at a certain time. Since the blockchain isn’t designed to store reams of streaming data (e.g. a 24/7 security camera), Factom’s hashes and organizes incoming data to establish proof that some specific information exists. In practice, this would mean that, say, 10-minute blocks of video from a given camera would live inside the Factom data structure, and “truth” could be assured for that window of time, with one such assertion for a long chain of such windows stretching for however long the camera’s been recording. Factom assures what’s known as “data integrity” in both senses of the word integrity: whole and trustingly honorable. By combining that with a hardware solution that digitally signs and hashes the data instantly, right as the pixels are pulled off the camera, one can confidently claim that a video is “real” and was really taken by the camera that digitally signed the data.

The Department of Homeland Security, which maintains an array of cameras and sensors along our country’s southern border, is now testing Factom’s newfangled truth recorder. The fear is that those border cameras will be hacked by sophisticated smugglers (of the drug or human variety) who buy their own cameras, wire them to show whatever false scene, and then plug them back into the DHS network. The smugglers carry on while the border’s overseers stare at a contrived scene of false tranquility. Border videos can also be used as evidence in immigration trials—another legal showcase where the juridical definition of truth is key.

«

I think he – and they – may have hit on the first sensible use for blockchain that we need. Though you can bet this won’t stop people denying things they see is real. (Could you fake the blockchain?)
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Fortnite earns $100m in its first 90 days on mobile • Sensor Tower

Randy Nelson:

»

Having brought in more than $25m during its first month on mobile, Fortnite increased its revenue generating momentum to surpass $50m by its 45 day mark. Now, three months since its March 15 launch, Sensor Tower Store Intelligence data reveals that the game—which debuted on Nintendo’s Switch console last week—has reached $100m in worldwide player spending on Apple’s mobile platform.

In reaching this milestone, Epic Games has managed to surpass some of most successful multiplayer mobile titles of the past two years, despite the fact that Fortnite initially launched in invite-only form for two of the 12 weeks it has been available. As the chart below shows, it earned more than 3x as much as Tencent’s massively successful Honor of Kings—known as Arena of Valor in Western markets—did in China during its first 90 days on iOS, despite not being available there itself. (It will be launching in China at an undetermined future date courtesy of none other than Tencent.)

The mobile version of Fortnite has also earned about 4.3x more than its closest revenue rival among the new breed of battle royale titles on mobile, Knives Out from NetEase. What’s more, it managed to earn approximately 65% as much as Supercell’s Clash Royale did in its first 90 days, a title that had the most successful launch in mobile gaming history next to Niantic’s Pokémon GO in terms of revenue.

«

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The machine fired me • Idiallo

Ibrahim Diallo found himself fired – but nobody could explain why or by who:

»

Once the order for employee termination is put in, the system takes over. All the necessary orders are sent automatically and each order completion triggers another order. For example, when the order for disabling my key card is sent, there is no way of it to be re-enabled. Once it is disabled, an email is sent to security about recently dismissed employees. Scanning the key card is a red flag. The order to disable my Windows account is also sent. There is also one for my JIRA account. And on and on. There is no way to stop the multi-day long process. I had to be rehired as a new employee. Meaning I had to fill up paperwork, set up direct deposit, wait for Fedex to ship a new key card.

But at the end of the day the question is still, why was I terminated in the first place?

I was on a three-year contract and had only worked for eight months. Just before I was hired, this company was acquired by a much larger company and I joined during the transition. My manager at the time was from the previous administration. One morning I came to work to see that his desk had been wiped clean, as if he was disappeared. As a full time employee, he had been laid off. He was to work from home as a contractor for the duration of a transition. I imagine due to the shock and frustration, he decided not to do much work after that. Some of that work included renewing my contract in the new system.

I was very comfortable at the job. I had learned the in-and-out of all the systems I worked on. I had made friends at work. I had created a routine around the job. I became the go-to guy. I was comfortable.

When my contract expired, the machine took over and fired me.

A simple automation mistake(feature) caused everything to collapse. I was escorted out of the building like a thief, I had to explain to people why I am not at work, my coworkers became distant (except my manager who was exceptionally supportive). Despite the great opportunity it was for me to work at such a big company, I decided to take the next opportunity that presented itself.

What I called job security was only an illusion. I couldn’t help but imagine what would have happened if I had actually made a mistake in this company. Automation can be an asset to a company, but there needs to be a way for humans to take over if the machine makes a mistake. I missed three weeks of pay because no one could stop the machine.

«

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Unilever takes stand against digital media’s fake followers • Reuters

Martinne Geller:

»

The practice of buying followers risks eroding trust and therefore damaging one of the fastest-growing areas of advertising – the billion-dollar-a-year market now known as “influencer marketing” – and Unilever says it wants it to stop.

Its chief marketing officer, Keith Weed, will pledge on Monday that the maker of Dove soap and Hellmann’s mayonnaise will never buy followers or work with influencers who buy followers. It will also prioritize social media platforms that take action to stamp out fraud and increase transparency.

“Trust comes on foot and leaves on horseback, and we could very quickly see the whole influencer space be undermined,” Weed told Reuters. “There are lots of great influencers out there, but there are a few bad apples spoiling the barrel and the trouble is, everyone goes down once the trust is undermined.”

The announcement comes four months after Weed made waves by threatening to pull investment from digital platforms such as Facebook and Google if they did not take steps to improve consumer trust and eradicate “toxic” online content.

It also comes as Unilever and rival Procter & Gamble audit their advertising spending and agency relationships in efforts to operate more efficiently as sales growth of consumer packaged goods slows. They are working with fewer agencies, creating fewer ads and bringing some marketing work in-house.

«

The amounts that brands are willing to pay is amazing: £75,000 for a celebrity’s Facebook post; as much as £1,500 for a “micro-influencer” with fewer than 10,000 followers. One hopes those are the right followers. It’s probably cheaper than making an ad which will be ignored by all sorts; instead you make an ad that’s ignored by bots. (I’ve been offered money to do “influencer” posts and turned them down before getting to the question of money. Trust indeed leaves on horseback, if not faster.)
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Mysterious IceCube event may be caused by a tau neutrino • Eureakalert

Ranjan Laha is a postdoc at the Mainz-based team working at the PRISMA Cluster of Excellence:

»

It was just eight years ago that the IceCube detector, a research center located at the South Pole to detect neutrinos emanating from the cosmos, was commissioned. Three years later, it began to register the first momentous results. The detection of high-energy neutrinos by IceCube made viable completely new options for explaining how our universe works. “These neutrinos with their considerable energy are cosmic messengers we have never encountered before and it is extremely important that we understand exactly what they are telling us,” explained Dr. Ranjan Laha of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). Working in collaboration with a colleague at Stanford University in the USA, the Mainz-based physicist has put forward a new hypothesis on what this interstellar message carrier might be. The two physicists have calculated that what has been detected could be the track of a high-energy tau particle that transited the IceCube detector.

«

A tau neutrino – if that’s what it has found – would have far higher energy than any neutrino previously observed, and means something important about the universe, though it doesn’t quite enable dilithium crystals and photon torpedoes just yet. Noted in passing, rather like a neutrino in the night. (Also, “Cluster of Excellence” would be a good name for a band.)
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In China trade war, Apple worries it will be collateral damage • The New York Times

Jack Nicas and Paul Mozur:

»

[Tim] Cook still sees an opening to engage on the trade issue because of disagreement inside the White House, and he doubts that a trade war — or Chinese retaliation against Apple — ultimately will happen, this person said.

“He’s willing to put a brave face on and work with the Trump administration because they probably have more at stake than any other tech company when it comes to China and the tariffs,” said Gene Munster, a longtime Apple analyst and partner at the investment firm Loup Ventures.

The specter of Chinese retaliation against Apple has increased since the administration targeted the Chinese tech company ZTE for breaking American sanctions against Iran and North Korea…

…The company has reason to fear retaliation. In 2014, the Obama administration indicted five Chinese military hackers, stoking tensions already high from leaks about American surveillance from the former government contractor Edward J. Snowden.

Months later, Chinese regulators delayed approvals of the iPhone 6 for additional security reviews. Apple executives perceived the moves as retaliation, said people familiar with the matter, which has not been previously reported.

Apple’s primary leverage with the Chinese government is Chinese consumers’ love for Apple products, said Dean Garfield, head of the Information Technology Industry Council, a trade group that represents Apple and other tech companies.

However, Mr. Garfield added, Chinese consumers would also love Facebook and Google, two products blocked in China. “There are limits,” he said. “Xi and the national party will do what’s in their interest.”

«

This appeared on Monday; the next day, Trump said he would put tariffs on more Chinese products, and China said it would retaliate. Apple is such an obvious target for China that it would almost be surprising if the government there didn’t create problems for the iPhone as a means of creating problems for Trump.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Superglue! Sticks human tissue! Why not in surgery too? Photo by Bill Keaggy on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Why the caged bird sings. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How to stealthily poison neural network chips in the supply chain • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

“Hardware Trojans can be inserted into a device during manufacturing by an untrusted semiconductor foundry or through the integration of an untrusted third-party IP,” [Clemson University researchers Joseph Clements and Yingjie Lao] explain in their paper. “Furthermore, a foundry or even a designer may possibly be pressured by the government to maliciously manipulate the design for overseas products, which can then be weaponized.”

The purpose of such deception, the researchers explain, would be to introduce hidden functionality – a Trojan – in chip circuitry. The malicious code would direct a neural network to classify a selected input trigger in a specific way while remaining undetectable in test data.

“For example, an adversary in a position to profit from excessive or improper sale of specific pharmaceutics could inject hardware Trojans on a device for diagnosing patients using neural network models,” they suggest. “The attacker could cause the device to misdiagnose selected patients to gain additional profit.”

They claim they were able to prototype their scheme by altering only 0.03% of the neurons in one layer of a seven-layer convolutional neural network.

Clements and Lao say they believe adversarial training combined with hardware Trojan detection represent a promising approach to defending against their threat scenario. The adversarial training would increase the number of network network neurons that would have to be altered to inject malicious behavior, thereby making the Trojan large enough potentially to detect.

«

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Only 6% of smart speaker owners using them to control smart home devices • 9to5Mac

Ben Lovejoy:

»

A new survey of smart speaker owners found that only 6% of them are currently using the device to control smart home devices like lighting and heating.

Interestingly, even for HomePod – which is a very music-focused device – playing music was only the third most common use …

The IHS Markit study found that answering a question and checking the news or weather led the way, with discovering and controlling music in third place. Controlling other smart home devices is currently the least common use of a smart speaker.

However, the company told us this is expected to change rapidly.

“Controlling smart home devices by voice currently represents only a small fraction of total smart-speaker interactions,” said Blake Kozak, principal analyst, smart home, IHS Markit. “However, this category will continue to trend upward as more video-streaming devices come to rely on voice control, as security alarm systems adopt voice control to arm and disarm, and as more builders embed smart devices throughout new homes.”

«

Survey of 937 owners, so that’s 56 people doing this, across US, UK, Japan, Germany and Brazil. But yes, you’d expect this number to pitch up as the systems they’re linked to get smarter.
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Russian trolls weigh in on Roseanne Barr and Donald Trump Jr • WSJ

Georgia Wells, Rob Barry and Shelby Holliday:

»

Newly identified Russian trolls posted politically divisive messages on Twitter as recently as last month, hitting on a wide array of hot-button issues, according to a Journal analysis of recently revealed investigative documents and Twitter data.

The new tranche of about 1,100 account names, released Monday by Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, brings the total number of publicly known Russian troll farm-operated accounts to more than 3,800. Last month, the Journal reported that the identities of many of the Russian accounts had not been publicly revealed.

The newly identified users posted more than 2.9 million tweets and retweets, bringing the total amount of Russian troll farm content on the platform to more than 8 million tweets and retweets, the Journal’s analysis found.

«

EIGHT MILLION. Is that a lot? I mean, there are lots of tweets every day. Twitter says it has 330 million monthly active users. And a lot of these accounts are pretty small beer – though they have had a couple of viral tweets. There’s influence, and then there’s “influence”. I wonder if the writers looked at each other when they got the 8m number and went “eh, sounds big enough for the newsdesk if we look outraged – say EIGHT MILLION in a loud voice.”
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On June 20, an EU committee will vote to crown Google and Facebook permanent lords of internet censorship • Boing Boing

Cory Doctorow:

»

On June 20, the EU’s legislative committee will vote on the new Copyright directive, and decide whether it will include the controversial “Article 13” (automated censorship of anything an algorithm identifies as a copyright violation) and “Article 11” (no linking to news stories without paid permission from the site).

These proposals will make starting new internet companies effectively impossible — Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and the other US giants will be able to negotiate favourable rates and build out the infrastructure to comply with these proposals, but no one else will. The EU’s regional tech success stories — say Seznam.cz, a successful Czech search competitor to Google — don’t have $60-100,000,000 lying around to build out their filters, and lack the leverage to extract favorable linking licenses from news sites.

If Articles 11 and 13 pass, American companies will be in charge of Europe’s conversations, deciding which photos and tweets and videos can be seen by the public, and who may speak.

The MEP Julia Reda has written up the state of play on the vote, and it’s very bad. Both left- and right-wing parties have backed this proposal, including (incredibly) the French Front National, whose Youtube channel was just deleted by a copyright filter of the sort they’re about to vote to universalise.

«

Wired says that “the EU’s bizarre war on memes is totally unwinnable“, and that sums it up. Copyright allows for “fair dealing” (aka “fair use”) in the UK, and other elements of this will fail because the EU supports “freedom of expression” as part of its human rights law.
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Superglue built planes, nukes and saved soldiers’ lives • War Is Boring

James Simpson:

»

Throughout the late 1930s and ’40s, aircraft switched from heavy glass canopies to acrylic. By virtue of being readily formed and having increased strength, acyrlic gave pilots better visibility than glass, which had to be mounted into opaque frames.

New jet airplanes also needed new canopies. Flying at higher speeds than propeller-driven planes, the jets’ cockpits needed to be stronger, tougher and more heat-resistant.

Still at Eastman Kodack and now based in Tennessee, Coover was once more on the case. The chemist headed a team that experimented with acylate polymers in the hope of finding an optically-clear plastic that could survive the stresses of jet flight.

Fred Joyner, one of Coover’s teammates, prepared a sample from the long list of compounds, and the team planned to measure its refractive index — the degree to which the material bends light. Joyner put ethyl cyanoacrylate between two $700 prisms called refractometers, noted down the result and then found that he couldn’t pull them apart.

The cyanoacrylate had bonded the two expensive glass prisms together and neither Joyner nor his superiors could figure out how to separate them. Coover then realized the importance of his discovery nine years prior. “I didn’t recognize, at first, that this was not a casting material we were working with but a unique new adhesive,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1986.

His eyes now open, Coover took a sample of Joyner’s monomers and tried sticking together everything he could find in the lab. The glue was instant and strong — stronger than anything available at the time.

«

A reprint of a 2015 story, and it’s a great one. (Question: what are reprints in the web age?) Plus the struggle to get it used medically must have been exhausting.
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ZTE, US suppliers shares tank after Senate puts Trump reprieve in doubt • Reuters

Sijia Jiang:

»

The 85-10 bipartisan vote marked one of the few times the Republican-led Senate has veered from White House policy and came on the same day that US President Donald Trump threatened to impose a 10% tariff on $200bn of Chinese goods, escalating tensions between the world’s two biggest economies.

Trump is expected to lobby hard against the amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and before it can become law the bill must be reconciled with one passed by the US House of Representatives that does not include the amendment.

Any compromise measure must then be passed by both chambers and signed into law by Trump, a series of hurdles that has Asia-based analysts predicting ZTE will get eventually get its reprieve.

“The NDAA is not really a reversal of the ZTE deal, but will in all probability prolong the ban-lifting process for ZTE,” said Nikhil Batra, a senior research manager with industry consultancy IDC.

ZTE’s Hong Kong-listed shares tumbled as much as 27% to HK$9.56, their lowest level in nearly two years, before ending the day down 25%.

«

Trump is going to be made to sweat for his promise to lift ZTE out of the grave. Plenty of road left in this tale.
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Apple chief Tim Cook condemns ‘inhumane’ US detention of children • Irish Times

Ciara O’Brien:

»

Speaking in Dublin on Tuesday, Mr Cook described the situation as “inhumane” and said Apple would be working with people in the US government to try to be a “constructive voice” on the issue.

“It’s heartbreaking to see the images and hear the sounds of the kids. Kids are the most vulnerable people in any society. I think that what’s happening is inhumane, it needs to stop,” Mr Cook told The Irish Times.

We’ve always felt everyone should be treated with dignity and respect. In this case, that’s not happening.”

The Apple chief executive said he had previously spoken with Mr Trump on a number of issues.

“I have spoken with him several times on several issues, and I have found him to listen,” he said. “I haven’t found that he will agree on all things.”

Among the issues Mr Cook has disagreed with the president on are the US decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord, and the ongoing issue of the status of so-called Dreamers, who are undocumented people living in the US.

He said Apple would would take a constructive approach to try to deal with the current situation.

“I’m personally a big believer in the way to be a good citizen is to participate, is to try to advocate your point of view, not to just sit on the sideline and yell or complain,” he said.

«

He may have spoken to Trump several times, but if he thinks Trump is listening beyond the point where he walks out of the room, I think he’s wrong. Trump’s moves in tariffs against China demonstrate that.
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Augmented reality and virtual reality are on the VRge of growth • IDC

»

Worldwide shipments of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) headsets were down 30.5% year over year, totaling 1.2m units in the first quarter of 2018 (1Q18), according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Augmented and Virtual Reality Headset Tracker. Much of the decline occurred due to the unbundling of screenless VR headsets during the quarter. For much of 2017, vendors bundled these headsets free with the purchase of a high-end smartphone, but that practice largely came to an end by the start of 2018. Despite a poor start to 2018, IDC anticipates the overall market will return to growth over the remainder of the year as more vendors target the commercial AR and VR markets and low-cost standalone VR headsets such as the Oculus Go make their way into stores. IDC forecasts the overall AR and VR headset market to grow to 8.9 million units in 2018, up 6% from the prior year. That growth will continue throughout the forecast period, reaching 65.9 million units by 2022.

“On the VR front, devices such as the Oculus Go seem promising not because Facebook has solved all the issues surrounding VR, but rather because they are helping to set customer expectations for VR headsets in the future,” said Jitesh Ubrani senior research analyst for IDC Mobile Device Trackers. “Looking ahead, consumers can expect easier-to-use devices at lower price points. Combine that with a growing lineup of content from game makers, Hollywood studios, and even vocational training institutions, and we see a brighter future for the adoption of virtual reality.”

When it comes to augmented reality headsets, many consumers have already had a taste of the technology through screenless viewers such as the Star Wars: Jedi Challenges product from Lenovo. IDC anticipates these types of headsets will lead the market in shipment volumes in the near term.

«

So they’re saying the fall is really down to a different way of counting. I’m not so sure. VR either needs more computing power than people are willing to put into it, or better applications.
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China’s social media app WeChat demands more info from users • Radio Free Asia

Qiao Long:

»

China’s massively popular social media platform WeChat appears to have further tightened requirements for user registration, demanding access to all files and media content, and potentially giving the authorities access to everything on a user’s smartphone, RFA has learned.

A newly registered WeChat account resulted in a pop-up request on Thursday, calling for permission to access the device’s “photos, media library, and file content.”

Pressing “Deny” resulted in a further pop-up asking to turn on “storage space permissions.” Denying such permission resulted in the registration being aborted.

An internet service user in Guangzhou who has technical knowledge of WeChat’s functions told RFA that the app has evolved from a simple chat client to a form of spyware that monitors users’ behavior.

“If you use WeChat, there will be nothing private left on your phone,” Hu said. “Anything on your phone can be read by the app, which can even take control of the phone’s camera and microphone.”

“If the government wants to see what you are doing, or wants to hear what you are talking about, it can monitor you through WeChat, so it’s a very powerful tool,” he said.

Hu said users would be better off keeping at least one phone that didn’t have the app installed.

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Tech giants are starting to line up for a David-versus-Goliath privacy fight in California • AdWeek

Marty Swant:

»

The initiative is being headed up by a core group of three people, none of whom come from the engineering or venture-capital circles of Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the very area that would be most affected by the passage of the proposal.

Rick Arney, a financial executive and one of the organizers, said the idea started two years ago after he and fellow organizers Alastair Mactaggart and Mary Ross couldn’t get traction in the state’s legislature. (Mactaggart comes from the real estate industry, while Ross spent her career in the CIA.)  

“It is not hard to find someone on a subway train that has been a victim of identity theft,” Arney said. “And when you tell people this will help stop that, they say, ‘Where do I sign up?’”  

The act targets larger businesses, those with annual gross revenue of $50m selling personal information of more than 100,000 consumers or devices, or having at least half of its annual revenue from selling personal information.

“We’ve tried to craft something that’s really common sense. This bill is something that moves the ball forward,” Arney said. “But I’m a businessperson. We’re not here to tear down companies.”

Some of the largest tech companies in the US—and the advertising trade groups that represent them—say the proposal goes much further than existing laws in the US or Europe. 

For example, while the EU allows people to opt out of exchanging data for offers, the California proposal would ban companies from giving preferential economic treatment—discounts or other promotions—to people who willingly provide their data. Some experts say the sweeping measure would also prevent companies like Facebook from having a paid model for those who don’t want their data collected if there’s still a free version for those who don’t mind targeted ads.

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As you can imagine, there’s a ton of lobbying against this from the big companies.
link to this extract

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: ref yesterday’s post, it is New Zealand, not France, that is the fifth member of the “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing group. Thanks to Jonathan Beeston for the correction.