Another Donkey Kong record is gone – but not broken. Photo by D Begley on Flickr.

»You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email (arriving at about 0800GMT each weekday). You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.«

A selection of 11 links for you. Super blood blue moon bowl. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How Twitter bots and Trump fans made #releasethememo go viral • Politico

Renuka Rayasam:

»

Computational propaganda—defined as “the use of information and communication technologies to manipulate perceptions, affect cognition, and influence behavior”—has been used, successfully, to manipulate the perceptions of the American public and the actions of elected officials.

The analysis below, conducted by our team from the social media intelligence group New Media Frontier, shows that the #releasethememo campaign was fueled by, and likely originated from, computational propaganda. It is critical that we understand how this was done and what it means for the future of American democracy.

In the space of a few hours on January 18, #releasethememo exploded on Twitter, evolving over the next few days from being a marker for discussion on Nunes’ memo through multiple iterations of an expanding conspiracy theory about missing FBI text messages and imaginary secret societies plotting internal coups against the president. #releasethememo provided an organizational framework for this comprehensive conspiracy theory, which, in its underpinnings, is meant to minimize and muddle concerns about Russian interference in American politics.

The rapid appearance and amplification of this messaging campaign, flagged by the German Marshall Fund’s Hamilton68 dashboard as being promoted by accounts previously linked to Russian disinformation efforts, sparked the leading Democrats on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to write a letter to Twitter and Facebook asking for information on whether or not this campaign was driven by Russian accounts. Another report, sourced to analysis said to be from Twitter itself, identified the hashtag as an “organic” “American” campaign linked to “Republican” accounts. Promoters of #releasethememo rapidly began mocking the idea that they are Russian bots. (There are even entirely new accounts set up to tweet that they are not Russian bots promoting #releasethememo, even though their only content is about releasing the supposed memo.)

But this back and forth masks the real point. Whether it is Republican or Russian or “Macedonian teenagers”—it doesn’t really matter. It is computational propaganda—meaning artificially amplified and targeted for a specific purpose—and it dominated political discussions in the United States for days.

«

link to this extract

Dell says it will explore IPO or merger with VMWare • Reuters

Liana Baker and Sonam Rai:

»

Dell, the world’s largest privately held technology company, is under pressure to boost profitability after its debt-laden acquisition of data storage provider EMC Corp for $67bn in 2016 failed to meet financial targets, hurt by intensifying price competition.

Combining with VMware would provide access to VMWare’s $11.6bn in cash, helping Dell trim its $52.5bn debt pile. Last month’s US tax reform made servicing that debt more expensive due to caps on deducting interest expense.

The combination would also make Dell a publicly listed company, offering a path for private equity firm Silver Lake to begin selling down its 18% stake if it chooses to. Silver Lake helped bankroll Dell CEO Michael Dell in taking the company private in 2013 in a $24.9bn leveraged buyout.

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link to this extract

‘King of Kong’ star Billy Mitchell lied, claims Donkey Kong world-record analysis • Venturebeat

Jeff Grubb:

»

MAME’s INP recording capability enables players to rewind their mistakes, continue playing, and then stitch together a final recording that looks like one, unbroken playthrough. Scorekeepers like Young often do accept results performed on MAME, but they typically require independent, in-person verification or live video on a service like Twitch that shows the game and the player all at the same time.

Mitchell has not verified his score in any of those alternative ways with the exception of a witness by the name of Todd Rogers. If that name is familiar, it’s probably because Rogers just made headlines for a high-score scandal of his own. The scorekeeping website Twin Galaxies revealed this week that it is removing all of Rogers records after an analysis revealed his submitted score of 5.51 seconds in the Atari game Dragster is technically impossible.

Beyond that, Mitchell doesn’t have a lot of proof to back up his claims.

“While many people have seen Billy play in public, there are no known independent, impartial, objective witnesses to any of the The Big 3 WR games,” reads Young’s post. “He has never scored over 1,000,000 in a live venue. Billy claimed the 1.047M was done in front of scores of people, but that he had no access to the inside of the machine…so how did he set up the direct feed? The 1.05 was supposedly done at an actual convention, but Billy was conveniently playing in another room. The 1.062 was done in arcade in Florida, but the only live footage from that day was staged (the Boomer board swap) and shows no evidence of a direct feed setup.”

«

If you haven’t seen King of Kong, you’re missing a treat (which won’t age). If you have, this is an amazing coda.
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‘Bitcoin is my potential pension’: what’s driving people in Kentucky to join the craze • Washington Post

Chico Harlan:

»

He had invested in bitcoin almost two years earlier, so now Jacob Melin had a new house, a new truck, a new consulting business and a line of people coming into his office, trying to become wealthy as quickly as he had. One person said he expected to use a modest investment to “retire in 12 to 18 months.” Another said he wanted to use the proceeds to start a business. And a father of two talked about paying off his own student loans and buying several acres of land — all the things he did not see a chance to do with his income as a software salesman.

“Us little guys working our butts off, we can’t get ahead,” Cedric Knight, 35, told Melin. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change my life.”

Knight and others visiting Melin were pinning their hopes on a new form of currency whose potential value the world was only beginning to recognize. Millions of people around the world are chasing after fortune by investing in bitcoin — which has soared by more than 2,500% in value in the past two years — and other digital instruments known as cryptocurrencies.

«

Melin is 22. He dropped out of his economics course three years ago and invested his college fund of $20k in bitcoin. Which rocketed to $16,000.

On Sunday evening it headed below $8,000. He might need the car.
link to this extract

South Korea’s crypto craze explained by Seoul’s largest investor • Crypto Ambit

Mr Crypto Ambit:

»

I asked Simon [Seojoon Kim, CEO of Hashed] if he thought there was any possibility that the government would move forward with a ban in the future. He thinks that in the future, the government will be stewards of the crypto-economy as opposed to adversaries of it; his logic seems solid.

Whether the government likes it or not, Korea is already heavily invested in cryptocurrencies and there’s nothing anyone can do to change that. It’s also impossible to ignore the fact that Koreans have prospered more from the cryptocurrency boom than any other nation in the world. At the same time, given their level of exposure, they would be disproportionately affected by a major market downturn. Basically, the only thing the government can do is support the growth of the cryptocurrency market because a healthy market is good for South Koreans.

If America or China banned trading, only a small percentage of their populations would be affected. A Korean ban would create widespread panic and could cause systemic damage to the Korean economy. Not to mention that South Korea is a democracy, so any politician that takes an anti-cryptocurrency stance is likely to find themselves without a job come election time.

«

South Korea’s government long ago banned gambling – so it found an outlet in buying cryptocurrency (especially bitcoin), and now about 30% of South Koreans own some, compared to perhaps 1% in the US or China. That makes them, and the economy, very vulnerable to shifts in value. If I were a North Korean leader I’d be looking to hammer bitcoin’s price at the appropriate time with a giant selloff.
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ChromeOS is almost ready to replace Android on tablets • The Verge

Nick Statt:

»

Google has played with the idea for years without ever seeming to decide that one platform should supersede the other. In essence, however, Android remains Google’s dominant mobile OS, while Chrome OS has been taking on more responsibility as Chromebooks have steadily become more capable and tablet-like.

But this wondrous future of a perfect blend of mobile, tablet, and PC operating systems in a hardware package that converts on the fly is still frustratingly out of reach. Features like split-screen in tablet mode are great, and the absence of that feature was one of the main criticisms we had of Google’s flashy and expensive new Pixelbook 2-in-1, which arrived back in October. But Android apps on Chrome aren’t as flexible as they could be across all computing formats, as they still lack adequate stylus support.

Still, it’s clear the vision Google has here is for tablets, 2-in-1s, and standard Chromebook laptops to become one unified device category powered by Chrome OS. Yet another clue suggesting the strategy arrived last week with a now-deleted image of an Acer tablet running Chrome OS, which would make it the first standalone tablet device to do so. The image, snapped at the technology and education expo in London, means we may get a Google or even Pixel-branded Chrome OS tablet in the near future, perhaps unveiled at Google I/O in May.

«

Putting ChromeOS onto tablets makes perfect sense – Android tablets are in a downward spiral.
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Apple Music on track to overtake Spotify in US subscribers • WSJ

Anne Steele:

»

Apple’s subscriber-account base in the US has been growing about 5% monthly, versus Spotify’s 2% clip, according to the people familiar with the numbers. Assuming those growth rates continue, Apple will overtake Spotify in accounts this summer.

Apple’s popular devices have helped add subscribers to its music service, which is preloaded on all iPhones, Apple Watches and other hardware the company sells.

One question lingering in the industry is what metrics Spotify will have to disclose once it becomes a publicly traded company. The service has periodically released global subscriber totals and just last month touted a new high of 70 million.

Apple Music told The Wall Street Journal it now has 36 million, up from the 30 million it last reported in September.

But both companies’ numbers are increased by counting individual users who are part of family plans and people with discounted subscriptions bundled with other services. In some countries, mobile-phone plans can include an Apple Music subscription; Spotify offers students in the U.S. a subscription plan that includes video-service Hulu. Neither company publicly breaks out figures for the US or any other single market…

…By one standard, Apple Music has already passed Spotify. Including people who are still in free or deeply discounted trial periods leading up to paid subscription, Apple Music has a slight edge on Spotify in the US, according to one of the people familiar with the figures.

Apple Music has three to four times the number of such trial users as Spotify, according to this person, in part because it doesn’t offer a free tier. Also, all Apple Music subscribers are entered automatically into a free initial three-month period. Excluding those trial users, Spotify is ahead, but by a small amount—and that gap is closing.

«

Two things: this shows the power of the default, especially in a country where the iPhone has about 40% share of the installed base; and the many free rivals in the US, which means Spotify’s free tier isn’t quite as attractive. Some of those rivals are going to fold soon though (Pandora? IHeartMusic?), which might give Spotify some new breathing space.
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Smart homes and vegetable peelers • Benedict Evans

Benedict Evans has been thinking about what needs to be smart in the home:

»

Should everything ‘smart’ in my home talk to everything else, and perhaps be controlled through one unified UI? The obvious answer is ‘of course it will all be one system’ but really, it depends what they are, and on what the right way to interact with that device itself might be. Some things would ideally need no interaction at all, some need to be interacted with directly, some can be controlled remotely, and some might get some value from talking to other devices but others might not. And many might fit into several of these.

Hence, the front door locks by itself, after all, so it should perhaps unlock by itself as I walk up the path, and there should really be no UI at all to that. A lot of smart home stuff should be invisible – you should never see it or talk to it. But then, the door might tell the alarm that you’re home so you don’t need to disarm it yourself. If you do need to interact deliberately, is voice or a screen the right model – and does that mean a screen on the device itself or just your phone? An oven that lets you tell it what you’re cooking might want a screen on the device, but also be accessed from your phone to check progress, and also talk to Alexa: ‘pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees please, and turn it off 30 minutes after I put the dish in’. Conversely, a connected camera clearly doesn’t need a screen on the device itself, but also doesn’t work well with an Echo unless the Echo has a screen, in which case why not use a phone (or use the Google Assistant app on your phone)? Then, there are also lots of use cases where talking might be less friction than anything else – it might be nice to say  ‘Alexa, turn on the lights’ or, again, ‘Alexa, pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees’. But is it better to say ‘turn on the bathroom light’ or to walk into the bathroom and have a dumb IR sensor turn it on automatically? To have a phone that senses movement and location and tells the garage door to open, or to say ‘open the door’ – and would it be Siri or Google in the car and Alexa in the kitchen? Will there be lots of Venn diagrams, or one unified system, or many disconnected appliances?

«

Another point he makes is that there aren’t necessarily network effects from smart home devices – ie, just because you have an Echo it doesn’t mean your neighbour’s or friend’s home will benefit by also having an Echo (or similar). Which means it’s not a winner(s)-take-all market like smartphones.
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How and why to write a Rude Q&A • Scott Berkun

Berkun learnt this trick (to be done before you have a big presentation, as a defence against aggressive inquisition) at Microsoft:

»

How to create a RQA

1. Ask friends who you know love to give tough feedback for their input. Some people are naturals at this task and enjoy coming up with the rudest, most confrontational questions the world has ever seen. You might be offended or hurt by what they come up with, but that’s okay – better to be offended/surprised now, in an RQA than in a demo, pitch meeting or public setting.

2. Make sure to include questions that are unfair or based on erroneous, but popular, assumptions. Reporters, clients, and the public all have their share of unfair questions and erroneous information, and you want to be ready for them.

3. Spend more time on the answers than the questions. The answers take more time because the responses need to be more polite and mature than the questions themselves. They also need to carefully refute assumptions in the questions without being dismissive.

«

This is terrific advice.
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SEC Consult SA-20180201-0 :: multiple critical vulnerabilities in whole Vibratissimo smart sex toy product range • SEC Full Disclosure mailing list

»

Vulnerability overview/description:
———————————–
1) Customer Database Credential Disclosure: The credentials for the whole Vibratissimo database environment were exposed on the internet. Due to the fact, that the PHPMyAdmin interface was exposed as well, an attacker could have been able to connect to the database and dump the whole data set. The dataset contains for example the following data:

– Usernames
– Session Tokens
– Cleartext passwords
– chat histories
– explicit image galleries, which are created by the users themselves

2) Exposed administrative interfaces on the internet: An administrative interface for databases was available without any filtering to the whole internet. In combination with other vulnerabilities an attacker could have been able to get access to the whole database data and even take over the server.

3) Cleartext Storage of Passwords: The user passwords were stored unhashed in cleartext in the database. If an attacker gained access to the database (e.g. via credential disclosure), he could have been able to retrieve the plaintext passwords of users and abuse their privileges in the system.

4) Unauthenticated Bluetooth LE Connections: The sex toys are connected without prior authentication to the app, which is the standard use case. For example one of the identified Bluetooth services allows [it] to read the current device temperature. Other services, which can be accessed without prior authentication are:

-) Setting the “intensity” of the current vibration pattern
-) Reading various values (Temperature, etc)

5) Insufficient Authentication Mechanism: The Android application is using a type of authentication, which is against known best practice. The username and password are sent with every request to the server to authenticate and authorise the request. There is no session management implemented. However, the authentication credentials are transmitted via an encrypted SSL/TLS connection.

«

Yes, these really are some (not all) of the flaws in an internet-connected vibrator. Still, at least the credentials go over SSL/TLS, eh?
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Here’s why Alexa won’t light up during Amazon’s Super Bowl ad • Bloomberg

Brad Stone:

»

A September 2014 Amazon patent titled “Audible command filtering” describes techniques to prevent Alexa from waking up “as part of a broadcast watched by a large population (such as during a popular sporting event),” annoying customers and overloading Amazon’s servers with millions of simultaneous requests.

The patent broadly describes two techniques. The first calls for transmitting a snippet of a commercial to Echo devices before it airs. Then the Echo can compare live commands to the acoustic fingerprint of the snippet to determine whether the commands are authentic. The second tactic describes how a commercial itself could transmit an inaudible acoustic signal to tell Alexa to ignore its wake word.

About a year ago, a Reddit user calling himself Asphyhackr did a little more legwork and concluded that Amazon was creatively employing this second technique. By running Alexa commercials through digital audio editing software, Asphyhackr discovered that Alexa ads transmit weakened levels of sound in an upper portion of the audio spectrum, between 3,000 and 6,000 hertz, outside the most sensitive range of human hearing.

Asphyhackr speculated that Amazon could be tipping Alexa off to ignore certain commands if it detects artificial gaps or bumps in the spectrum. To test his theory, he recorded someone saying “Alexa” and used a so-called band-stop filter that reduced frequencies just in this high region of the spectrum. When he played back the recording, “My echo would not wake, even sitting right next to the speakers!” he wrote.

«

This is smart by Amazon; it also points to ways to disable Echo devices remotely, if you can pipe such a noise in to a house. The hacks of the future are always in plain sight.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Guess what pirates have found is really in demand in currency-challenged Venezuela. Photo by Paul Keller on Flickr.

»You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email (arriving at about 0800GMT each weekday). You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.«

A selection of 11 links for you. Picked by hands. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google parent Alphabet’s revenue rises, but profit comes up short • WSJ

Jack Nicas:

»

Excluding the impact of the [$9bn] tax charge, Alphabet reported a 28% increase in profit to $6.84bn compared with the year before. Without the tax charge, its profit of $9.70 a share missed estimates of $9.98 a share, according to analysts polled by FactSet. Shares were down 2% after hours.

RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahaney attributed the earnings miss to higher expenses related to so-called traffic acquisition costs, or fees Alphabet pays to such partners as Apple Inc. to put its services front and center on their devices. Those fees rose 33% to $6.45bn from a year ago.

“The negative is expenses came in heavier than expected,” he said. “That raises a question: How much revenue is this company having to give away to maintain these growth rates?”

Still, the three months marked the 32nd consecutive quarter of revenue growth of 20% or more, he said.

Alphabet has been able to sustain such growth because its core Google unit handles nearly 92% of internet searches, according to tech data firm StatCounter. Google also owns the world’s dominant video site, YouTube, which the company said has helped drive growth in recent years.

«

The big question is where the TAC (traffic acquisition cost) is going. It’s getting really hefty.
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Spectre and Meltdown flaws being exploited by more than 100 strains of malware • Tech Republic

Nick Heath:

»

Security researchers are discovering a growing amount of malware that exploits the Spectre and Meltdown CPU flaws.

Spectre and Meltdown are vulnerabilities in modern chip design that could allow attackers to bypass system protections on nearly every recent PC, server and smartphone—allowing hackers to read sensitive information, such as passwords, from memory.

Researchers have gathered more than 130 samples of malware that try to exploit Meltdown and Spectre, although most appear to be proof-of-concept code rather than being used in attacks.

Security firm Fortinet says all of the publicly available samples of malware it analyzed appeared to be test code, although it was unable to analyze some Spectre/Meltdown-exploiting malware, due to it not being released into the public domain.

«

If you’re not updating your systems, hackers will find you out.
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Apple hits record revenues but misses on iPhone sales • FT

Tim Bradshaw:

»

Apple’s iPhone unit sales dropped by 1% in its key holiday quarter, missing Wall Street’s forecasts, as it pointed to lower total revenues than investors had been expecting for the current March quarter.

The report will compound some Apple bears’ fears that the tenth anniversary iPhone X has failed to reignite a growth “super cycle” as many bulls had hoped.

Its report of 77.3m iPhones for the three months to December was below most analysts’ estimates but was counterbalanced by the higher price of the iPhone X, resulting in what was still a record-breaking quarter of $88.3bn revenues and $20.1bn in net profits for the world’s most valuable company.

Luca Maestri, Apple’s finance chief, said in an interview that the quarter ending in December 2017 was a week shorter than the same period a year earlier. Adjusting for that comparison, iPhone revenues would have been 21% higher, instead of the 13% revenue growth Apple reported.

For the current quarter ending in March, Apple said revenues would be between $60bn and $62bn, representing growth of between 13% to 17% but below investors’ expectations of closer to $68bn. Mr Maestri said that the disparity was due to a build-up of iPhone stock in its retail channel during the December quarter and that on a “sell-through” basis the March period would actually see an “acceleration” in sales.

«

iPad sales flat, Mac sales flat. Watch and AirPod sales way up. Tech needs a new paradigm.
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Twitter has been ignoring its fake account problem for years • Columbia Journalism Review

Mathew Ingram:

»

In March of 2017, investor Chris Sacca, an early backer of Twitter, said the bot and fake account problem was one of the biggest challenges facing the company. “Tackling the bot epidemic would hurt Twitter short term because it would depress user numbers,” he said on Twitter. “But it has to get fixed. It’s embarrassing.”

Meanwhile, Twitter has done its best to downplay the size of the problem. For years, the company maintained that only about 5% of its users were fake, the same number that Twitter executives provided when they testified before Congress last fall about Russian interference in the election. A number of researchers, however, believe the real figure could be as high as 15% (at the time of the study, about 48m accounts).

When it first told Congress about Russian troll activity on the platform, Twitter said that just over 35,000 accounts were involved, but then in later testimony it admitted that more than 50,000 accounts were involved.

But independent reports show as many as 400,000 bots posted political messages during the 2016 US presidential election on Twitter, according to research by Emilio Ferrara of the University of Southern California. He told Bloomberg the same group of 1,600 bots that tweeted extremist right-wing posts in the US elections also posted during the French and German elections. And up to 45% of Donald Trump’s follower base could be fake or spam accounts, according to some estimates.

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link to this extract

Venezuelan pirates rule the most lawless market on earth • Bloomberg

Jonathan Franklin, who surely has cojones of neutronium:

»

On the Cedros waterfront, next to the pier, I found a group of men lounging under palm trees. I asked them about the smuggling business. “I’m Mr. Flour, and this is Mr. Rice,” said Carlos, a burly truck driver, by way of introducing himself and a friend. Within minutes he was unlocking a cargo van to show off sacks of flour ready to be shipped to Venezuela. Five dollars’ worth of flour in Trinidad, Carlos said, was worth $20 across the gulf.

I spent that first morning interviewing Venezuelan fishermen who had just made the two-hour journey across the flat waters to Trinidad. They were bringing in contraband cigarettes, cocaine, even a small zoo of wild animals including agouti—a rodent whose meat appears on local menus—and coiled anacondas. But animals are complicated. They bite, have to be fed, and might die. Thus many smugglers prefer guns, vodka, and especially gasoline. The Venezuelan government so deeply subsidizes gas that even after a 1,300% price hike last year, a gallon costs less than 40¢—about a sixth of the price at the pump in Trinidad.

Once they sell their contraband in Trinidad, these former fishermen bring a new commodity back to their country: diapers. Dozens of smugglers are dealing in boxes of Huggies and piles of Pampers. They say that back home they’ll get three times what they pay in Trinidad, and demand is so high they maintain waiting lists. “I can trade the diapers for medicine,” Karen Cubillan, a Venezuelan woman who shuttles between Trinidad and Venezuela while working the diaper arbitrage via online sales, told me by phone. “Diapers are like bars of gold. People stash food and diapers as if they were money.”

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link to this extract

The dawn of solar windows • IEEE Spectrum

Andy Extance:

»

By 2020, 8.3 billion square meters of flat glass will be installed annually in new buildings worldwide, according to the Freedonia Group. That area, covered in standard solar panels in the ideal orientation, could produce more than a terawatt at peak output, and over one year it could generate some 2,190 terawatt-hours. That’s 9% of what the world’s annual electricity consumption was in 2016. Substituting this source of energy for coal in 2017 would have saved about 1.6% of carbon emissions from fossil fuels, industry, and changes in forestry and land use.

And powerful regulatory forces are now dragging solar windows and their environmental benefits into reality. A European Union directive requires all new buildings to meet a “nearly zero-energy” standard by the end of 2020. Japan, following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, has gone further by requiring all new public buildings to be zero energy by 2020.

Solar windows will never be as efficient as conventional solar panels, because windows must of course remain at least partially transparent. But they can create an enormous network of small photovoltaic sources. And developers maintain that the money that the windows save on energy will repay the cost of installing them.

Already, the cost difference is pretty small, says Thomas Brown from the University of Rome, in Italy, who used to develop solar windows. Adding power-generating components to window materials could pay for itself in less than a decade, he says.

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link to this extract

Say ‘hello’ to voice-activated printing • HP

»

Voice activation also cropped up in unexpected places, such as car dashboards, toilets and mirrors—but there’s one place it’s still largely MIA: the home printer.

HP believes the consumer printer market is ripe for voice integration, making it the first print hardware company to roll out voice support for its web-enabled printers via a skill for and

“Integrating voice into the home printer is an undeniably useful application of the technology,” says Anneliese Olson, general manager and global head of home printing at HP. “For busy families, the virtual assistant ecosystem makes a lot of sense and connecting a printer to it is a natural extension within the smart home.”

«

Er, no it isn’t. What do you tell it to print? “That thing on my computer”? Also, will the printer keep saying “I’m low on ink”, which is all my HP one seems to do? I think most people when they talk to their printer aren’t doing it in a way that Alexa et al would appreciate.
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The iPhone X is Apple’s underrated masterpiece • The Verge

Vlad Savov:

»

If you take a cynical view and believe Apple’s business is to peddle extremely high-margin goods to a captive audience of ecosystem-locked suckers, you’re going to have to explain how and why Apple was able to gain market share against Android with this phone. Because the iterative iPhone 8 update — with its big bezels and persistent absence of a headphone jack — hasn’t been any more attractive to Android users than the preceding model. No, the thing that’s attracted outsiders is the iPhone X’s radical new look, capabilities, and, in no small part, the cachet of expensive exclusivity.

But no matter where the iPhone X’s first adopters have come from, the universal thing about them is that they’re all pleased with their purchase. This is the thing that’s different about Apple relative to its competitors in consumer electronics: Apple products consistently receive ridiculously high scores of customer satisfaction, ranking in the high 90s for everything, with the Air Pods setting a new high recently. The data isn’t out yet on the iPhone X, but everything I’ve seen and heard about the experience of owning one has been glowingly positive…

…Everyone I have asked that has purchased an iPhone X has expressed happiness with that decision. No one has been stoked about the price, but after that minor qualifier, all I hear about are the fluid and intuitive gestures to navigate the UI, the gorgeous display, the improved battery life, the futuristic ease of Face ID, and a bunch of other small things that make the user experience a happy one. There’s no getting around this basic fact: the iPhone X is an excellent phone, as judged by the people who use it.

«

Once you’ve bought it, the price is a sunk cost (obviously). Then it’s down to the experience. And the iPhone X is a terrific experience – night and day better than its forebears.
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The fate of the Yo app is up to you • Mashable

Kerry Flynn:

»

I Yo’ed, for a few months [in 2014]. But the app is long gone from my phone, and soon that purple app icon may disappear from every device. This week the Yo app alerted the world to its potential future by tweeting not simply “yo” but a link to a Patreon account. A Medium post published on Tuesday reads, 

»If you want to help keep Yo running, 

head over to: https://www.patreon.com/yoapp. 

Love,

Yo«

It’s true. The fate of Yo is up to the people via a crowdfunding campaign on Patreon. When I downloaded Yo four years ago, I thought it was “dumb.” It’s still rather dumb. But at a time when other tech giants are manipulating our elections or spying on our private data and new startups are lying and cheating their way to success, Yo’s simplicity and honesty is something to appreciate, and I say should be kept alive. 

When asked why people should want to save Yo, cofounder Or Arbel told Mashable, “They shouldn’t. Unless they use it and want to keep using it, then they should.”

So the question is, Do people still use Yo? And, do people want to keep using Yo?

«

No. (It got millions in VC funding. Say goodbye.)
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The publisher of Newsweek and the International Business Times has been buying traffic and engaging in ad fraud • Buzzfeed

Craig Silverman:

»

When it comes to IBT’s fraudulent traffic practices, Social Puncher’s findings align with reporting from BuzzFeed News on IBT India, and with separate data gathered by Pixalate, an ad fraud detection company, and DoubleVerify, a digital media measurement company. (Social Puncher and BuzzFeed News previously collaborated on ad fraud investigations, but worked separately in this case.)

Based on what it described as a detailed investigation, DoubleVerify this week classified IBT’s US, UK, India, and Singapore sites as “as having fraud or sophisticated invalid traffic,” according COO Matt McLaughlin. DoubleVerify is now blocking all ad impressions on these sites on behalf of customers.

In response to questions from BuzzFeed News, Newsweek Media Group, the parent company of IBT, acknowledged it purchases audiences from ad networks that sell pop-up and pop-under traffic. It said this traffic represents a “small percentage of traffic on our sites” and denied any fraudulent activity.

“We use third-party platforms to verify and filter this traffic to ensure it is of the highest quality. This verification process prevents poor-quality traffic being redirected to our sites and we consistently score highly on various third-party ad verification platforms,” the company said. It declined to name the third-party verification partners it works with.

«

Newsweek’s owner issued a very non-denial denial. This sort of thing is probably happening on a huge scale, but it’s impossible to know.
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The next 25 years of Wired start today • Wired

Wired Editors:

»

By subscribing to WIRED, you can help us continue our legacy of fresh insights, deep reporting, stunning design, and beautiful writing. The details are here, but in a nutshell: If you read four articles in a month, you will be invited to subscribe to read further. If you subscribe, you not only get unlimited access to WIRED.com and a print subscription, you’ll also receive a free Yubikey—a crucial tool for protecting yourself online. You’ll get access to a digital edition of our magazine, delivered fresh to your tablet every month. And when you visit us online, we’ll take out the ads.

But the real benefit of your subscription is that you’ll ensure that we can continue producing great stories and content.

«

Note that point about removing the ads for subscribers. Being shown advertising now marks you out as coming from the low-rent side of the net, the kind who has to put up with occasionally having their machine hijacked to mine cryptocoins or ransomwared or exploited. It’s taken 25 years and here we are. Though the US price – $20 for a year – is very tolerable. It doesn’t though seem to apply to the UK site, which often reuses US content. How will that work?
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: I left off the sort-of rebuttal by the man who claimed the world record time (5.51 seconds) on Dragster. It’s here on Pastebin.

The Atari 2600 video game Dragster had a world record of 5.51 seconds for completion – until the end of January. (Yes, this is Lego.) Photo by Aaron on Flickr.

»You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email (arriving at about 0800GMT each weekday). You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.«

A selection of 10 links for you. Still no Mac, now also using Apple Pencil. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The leaked Brexit analysis shows how cutting EU immigration will hit the UK economy • Buzzfeed

Alberto Nardelli:

»

BuzzFeed News revealed on Monday that the [secret] assessment, compiled by officials across Whitehall for the Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU), said UK economic growth would be lower under all three main Brexit scenarios that were modelled.

The analysis also includes several potential immigration policies to illustrate the impact falling EU migration after Brexit would have on the economy.

It shows that the negative impact of a stricter immigration policy – replacing free movement with arrangements in line with those for non-EU citizens – would be far bigger than the 0.2% boost to economic growth that a US trade deal is calculated to bring.

Even a more flexible immigration policy, which would lead to a smaller drop in migration from the EU, would still be enough by itself to cancel out the benefits of a US deal, the document shows.

The findings starkly illustrate the difficulties Theresa May faces as she attempts to shape a Brexit deal that minimises the long term hit on the economy while satisfying the demands of Leave voters.

«

The obvious, and severe, impact will be on the NHS, where recruitment will be much more difficult because of the costs involved in moving to the UK compared to the free movement regime now.

What’s odd is how roundabout Buzzfeed’s reporting is. There’s no detail in the story – possibly to protect the person who leaked it to them.
link to this extract

Twitter followers vanish amid inquiries into fake accounts • NY Times

Nicholas Confessore, Gabriel Dance and Rich Harris:

»

More than a million followers have disappeared from the accounts of dozens of prominent Twitter users in recent days as the company faces growing criticism over the proliferation of fake accounts and scrutiny from federal and state inquiries into the shadowy firms that sell fake followers.

The people losing followers include an array of entertainers, entrepreneurs, athletes and media figures, many of whom bought Twitter followers or artificial engagement from a company called Devumi. Its business practices were detailed in a New York Times article on Saturday describing a vast trade in fake followers and fraudulent engagement on Twitter and other social media sites, often using personal information taken from real users. Twitter said on Saturday that it would take action against Devumi’s practices. A Twitter spokeswoman on Tuesday declined to comment about whether the company was purging fake accounts.

The singer Clay Aiken, the actor John Leguizamo and the reality TV star Lisa Rinna have each lost a substantial number of followers, according to a review of their accounts. So has Martha Lane Fox, a British businesswoman and Twitter board member. Other well-known users have taken to Twitter in recent days to complain of lost followers, suggesting that a broad swath of people may be affected, not just Devumi customers.

«

Only a million?
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All followers are fake followers • The Atlantic

Ian Bogost:

»

The investor Mark Cuban called for a real-name policy on services like Twitter, arguing that “there needs to be a single human behind every individual account.” That’s a terrible idea: As the entrepreneur Anil Dash has argued, it would endanger marginalized people without improving trust. But Cuban’s reform does square with the Times’ take on virtue and wickedness at Twitter. Just shine light upon the shadows of the black market to put an end to the corruption. Then ordinary folk can be freed from the lust for fame that would rob them of their true selves.

But this is a fairy-tale story about the internet. Fraud is not the ultimate problem with fake social-media activity. The hustle itself is the blight. It produces the racket that sucks so many into its orbit. Salle Ingle is stuck in the same rat race as Kathy Ireland, and you and me, too. We just encounter it at different scales.

The culprit is the numbers themselves, not the lies that augment them, nor the profits made in doing so. The only reason there can be a market, let alone a black market, for social-media engagement is because these services are marketplaces of attention, not of ideas, products, or services. That’s why Twitter counts followers, likes, retweets, and all the rest so prominently. If the numbers were less visible, or entirely hidden, everyone might live more meaningful, more productive lives online, using posts as means to ends rather than as circulations within the system. It’s hard to imagine such a change taking place while companies like Twitter rely on the aspiration of visible metrics as a compulsion to use their services. That compulsion produces the attention necessary to sell advertisers and satisfy investors.

«

It can be hard to ignore the numbers – ooh look they’re only a tab away! – but they mean so little, in general, that they’re better ignored.
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Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook changes reduced time spent on site by 50 million hours a day in Q4 • CNBC

John Shinal:

»

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday that the changes the company made to its service last year reduced time spent on the site by 50 million hours per day.

“Already last quarter, we made changes to show fewer viral videos to make sure people’s time is well spent. In total, we made changes that reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours every day. By focusing on meaningful connections, our community and business will be stronger over the long term,” Zuckerberg wrote.

The company has also begun to make changes to its content-recommendation software amid criticism that Facebook has been used to spread misinformation, hate speech and other violent content.

Last April, a Facebook user recorded and uploaded a video of himself killing an elderly man.

On the company’s previous earnings call in November, Zuckerberg had said: “I want to be clear about what our priority is. Protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits.”

«

50 million hours per day! Divided by, umm, 2.13 billion monthly active users. So that’s 1.5 billion hours per month, or less than an hour per user per month, or less than a couple of minutes per day.
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Smartphone addiction made me restless, anxious and muddled • The Pool

Sali Hughes realised she was addicted.. to her phone:

»

We spend train journeys not looking out of the window or reading a book, but staring at a screen, cycling aimlessly through apps, chasing another hit. Instead of experiencing boredom, clarity and calm, we’re in a constant state of stimulation, where there’s simply not enough room for new memories, ideas, fantasies or plans (according to the experts, multitasking is a myth. Every time you move from an IM chat to your work, you unavoidably lose concentration and damage productivity). Meanwhile, apps and smartphones are painstakingly designed to keep us on them for as long as possible, in order to gather our data and expose us to targeted advertising, while heavy users are becoming more depressed.

Having spent a whole day shouting, “OH, MY GOD!” and reading passages of the book [How To Break Up With Your Phone, out on 9 February] aloud, I enthusiastically began adopting How To Break Up With Your Phone’s plan to restore sanity to my phone use. Like a smoker throwing their fags in a skip, I deleted my most-used social apps (Facebook and Twitter) so, whenever tempted to use them, I’d have to decide if I could be bothered to log in on the websites (usually not). I disabled notifications on WhatsApp and Messenger, and reorganised these and my dozens of other apps, tiling my home screen with neat folders, like Travel, Work Essentials and Games, so the myriad colourful icons weren’t constantly staring, pleading at me.

«

It’s a topic that keeps coming up, but there are many ways to discover it. (The Amazon affiliate link is The Pool’s, not mine, so support them. Don’t buy the Kindle version, for I hope obvious reasons.)
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Lenovo heads for a goodwill iceberg • Bloomberg Gadfly

Tim Culpan:

»

There’s absolutely no doubt, based on management’s previous public statements, that those units [Motorola’s mobile business and IBM’s server business] bought at a cost of $5bn are performing worse than expected. What’s extraordinary is that after four years Lenovo hasn’t recognized such impairment and allows the goodwill to sit on the balance sheet.

Reporting standards only require a test of goodwill to be done annually, so it’s reasonable not to see anything announced in the past few quarters. But the company’s financial year is coming to an end March 31, so the clock is ticking.

You can understand management’s reticence. After a slew of deals in the late 2000s, Acer, a Taiwanese PC maker, clung to inflated goodwill figures despite clear signs that the acquisitions weren’t bearing fruit. In the end, it had to conduct an IAS36 impairment test and recognized a NT$9.4bn ($335m) writedown, enough to plunge Acer into a record annual loss and spur the ousting of its chairman and CEO.

That impairment was equivalent to about 24% of Acer’s total intangible assets at the time.

For Lenovo, I calculate it would take a mere 10.3% writedown to push it into a loss for the current fiscal year – and that’s only for an impairment on goodwill, and only at the mobile and server divisions. A deeper, 20% impairment on those units would bring about a record annual loss.

«

This is a terrific insight. Lenovo was clearly suffering from hubris when it took on Motorola and the IBM server division. The PC division is the only thing keeping it afloat.
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US probes Apple over updates that slow older iPhones • Bloomberg

Tom Schoenberg, Matt Robinson and Mark Gurman:

»

The US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating whether Apple violated securities laws concerning its disclosures about a software update that slowed some handsets, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg News on Tuesday. The US government has requested information from the company, according to the people, who asked not to be named because the probe is private.

The inquiry is in early stages, they cautioned, and it’s too soon to conclude any enforcement will follow. Investigators are looking into public statements made by Apple on the situation, they added. While the slowdown has frustrated consumers, investigators are concerned the company may have misled investors about the performance of older phones. 

“We have received questions from some government agencies and we are responding to them,” an Apple spokeswoman said. She reiterated an earlier statement that the company “never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades.”

«

Prediction: this is going to go nowhere.
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Scoop: Apple delays iOS features to focus on reliability, performance • Axios

Ina Fried:

»

Software head Craig Federighi announced the revised plan to employees at a meeting earlier this month, shortly before he and some top lieutenants headed to a company offsite.

On the cutting board: Pushed into 2019 are a number of features including a refresh of the home screen and in-car user interfaces, improvements to core apps like mail and updates to the picture-taking, photo editing and sharing experiences.

What made it: There will be some new features, of course, including improvements in augmented reality, digital health and parental controls. In addition, Apple is prioritizing work to make iPhones more responsive and less prone to cause customer support issues.

But, but but: While a renewed focus on quality and performance might ease some outside criticism, some inside the team question whether the approach will actual lead to higher quality. Plus, customers tend to pay for features more than security and reliability, which are tough to assess at the time of purchase.

«

I don’t think customers pay for software features on phones. They pay for the phones, and the software comes along for the ride; its quality decides whether they pony up when it comes time to replace it, though. (A friend told me today how his Moto G died on him in France. Annoyed, he has replaced it with an iPhone 6S, which he’s delighted with.)

The offsite meeting might be the “top 100” group which sees what it coming up for the rest of the year. New Mac Pro, iPhones.. what else?
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South Korea says no plans to ban cryptocurrency exchanges, uncovers $600m of illegal trades • Reuters

Dahee Kim and Cynthia Kim:

»

South Korea has been at the forefront of pushing for broad regulatory oversight of cryptocurrency trading as many locals, including students and housewives, jumped into a frenzied market despite warnings from policy makers around the world of a bubble.

Seoul previously said that it is considering shutting down local cryptocurrency exchanges, which threw the market into turmoil and hammered bitcoin prices. Officials later clarified that an outright ban is only one of the steps being considered, and a final decision was yet to be made.

Customs said about 637.5bn won ($596.02m) worth of foreign exchange crimes were detected.

Illegal foreign currency trading of 472.3bn won formed the bulk of the cryptocurrency crimes, it said in a statement, but gave no details on what action authorities were taking against the rule breaches.

In one case, an illegal FX agency collected a total of 1.7bn won ($1.59m) from local residents in a form of “electric wallet” coins to transfer it to a partner agent abroad. The partner agent then cashed them out and distributed the settlement to clients based in that country, according to the statement.

«

South Korea is going to get hurt when this goes south, as it inevitably must – it’s still on a par with trading cowrie shells, which is fine as long as nobody asks “why are we trading cowrie shells, especially as we keep getting ripped off?”
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A man accused of cheating at video games may lose his Guinness World Record • Washington Post

Amy B Wang:

»

In 1982, a player named Todd Rogers supposedly recorded a time of 5.51 seconds on Dragster, a driving simulation — in the most rudimentary, early-’80s sense, anyhow — that requires shifting gears at just the right time to maximize the “car’s” speed across the screen.

To prove his feat, as his story goes, Rogers said he took a Polaroid picture of his 5.51-second time and sent it to Activision, the game’s publisher, which confirmed the score.

In 2000, Rogers’s score, as recorded by Activision, would eventually be formally imported into the databases of Twin Galaxies, a group that keeps track of video game records around the world. Through the ensuing years, other game records would rise and fall on the Twin Galaxies scoreboards, but the closest anyone could come to beating Rogers in Dragster was 5.57 seconds.

In 2001, Guinness World Records recognized Rogers as having the longest-standing video game record in the world. His 1982 Dragster time, it seemed, was ironclad.

Until Monday.

Faced with a growing number of complaints that Rogers had falsified his time, as well as an increasing pile of evidence suggesting that a 5.51-second run on Dragster was technically impossible, Twin Galaxies announced Monday that it had thrown out all of Rogers’s records — not simply his 1982 Dragster time — and banned him for life from its scoreboards.

«

This is an amazing story – reminiscent of the fantastic documentary King Of Kong (which if you haven’t seen, you really should). Read more at the Twin Galaxies site; it’s as though an Olympic winner had been found to be cheating decades later. And there’s also Rogers’s response – which is a long way short of a rebuttal – on Pastebin.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: yes, OK, yesterday’s post (and hence email) didn’t have a subject line. Oops.

After the EU ruling, Google is buying almost all the shopping ads on its site. Is that how it’s meant to work? Photo by Herry Lawford on Flickr.

»You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email (arriving at about 0800GMT each weekday). You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.«

A selection of 9 links for you. Written on an iPad Pro, as my Mac wouldn’t boot. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google rivals ask EU to toughen measures in antitrust case • WSJ

Natalia Drozdiak on how that “Google Shopping” compliance is going:

»

New third-party data show that Google’s product ads appear in almost all of the product-ad spots it displays as part of the EU remedy. In a report published Monday, search analytics firm Searchmetrics said that only 2% of product-ad spots in Germany show competitors’ ads. In the U.K. the proportion is 0.4%. The researchers tested by recording product-ad results on Google for 2,500 popular keywords in each country.

The new system [introduced by Google, where it bids alongside other shopping sites for shopping ad slots on search results pages] is “nothing game-changing,” nor is it “meaningful enough to be considered a fair and even playing field,” says Harald Schiffauer, managing director of Nextag Inc.’s Guenstiger.de, a German site that bids actively in the Google system.

“It’s really hard to compete,” said Philipp Peitsch, managing director of Idealo, a price-comparison engine owned by Axel Springer SE. “I don’t think it’s a fair proposal.”

Google declined to comment on rivals’ individual allegations, but previously said that its remedy gives rivals the same opportunity as Google to show shopping ads to users.

«

Google says it has set up the Shopping business as if it were a stand-alone, must-make-profit company. It would be great to see how that company is formed. Does it buy its own computers? Hire its own people? Rent its own offices? Or does it have a very cheap room inside Google staffed with Googlers?

I seem to recall that Foundem, which has done many piercing analyses of the proposals, forecast this outcome.
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Google is using 46 billion data points to predict the medical outcomes of hospital patients • Quartz

Dave Gershgorn:

»

Some of Google’s top AI researchers are trying to predict your medical outcome as soon as you’re admitted to the hospital.

A new research paper, published Jan. 24 with 34 co-authors and not peer-reviewed, claims better accuracy than existing software at predicting outcomes like whether a patient will die in the hospital, be discharged and readmitted, and their final diagnosis. To conduct the study, Google obtained de-identified data of 216,221 adults, with more than 46 billion data points between them. The data span 11 combined years at two hospitals, University of California San Francisco Medical Center (from 2012-2016) and University of Chicago Medicine (2009-2016).

While the results have not been independently validated, Google claims vast improvements over traditional models used today for predicting medical outcomes. Its biggest claim is the ability to predict patient deaths 24-48 hours before current methods, which could allow time for doctors to administer life-saving procedures.

«

You’d hope that the findings would be freely shared with the hospitals and medical profession. In a situation like this, how should the benefits be shared out? Everyone – Google, the patients, the doctors, the hospitals – contributed to the creation of the data, and thus the benefit. Is it right that only those who process it in a specific way get to monetise it?
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Things are getting ‘heated’ on Strava… • Battenhall

Joe Cant:

»

It’s easy to look at the recent stories and call Strava the bad egg, but does publicly displaying data that’s readily available mean the app is to blame for stories like this week’s where soliders inadvertently exposed military bases?  

It’s easy to forget this data is useful and important to some of the greatest athletes, scientists and coaches in the world. It’s this tracking that also enables Strava’s beacon feature to keep track of people in vulnerable places at vulnerable times (or help find a lost phone).

Since the heatmap news broke, Strava’s CEO James Quaries has released a statement explaining that the company is taking the matter seriously, that it understands the responsibility related to the data shared (as well as outlining steps to respond), and how people can use the app’s privacy settings.

There have long been stories and concerns involving Strava users, in particular cyclists, having their bikes stolen due to thieves targeting their home (logged at the end and beginning of their activity), as well as reading equipment information or photos the user has stored on their phone. Of course, anyone who shares information about their whereabouts online could, in theory, allow thieves to know when to target people’s houses.

«

Seems to me the thing where thieves could target your house is a clue this wasn’t well set up.
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The latest data privacy debacle • NY Times

Zeynep Tufekci:

»

the Strava debacle underscores a crucial misconception at the heart of the system of privacy protection in the United States. The privacy of data cannot be managed person-by-person through a system of individualized informed consent.

Data privacy is not like a consumer good, where you click “I accept” and all is well. Data privacy is more like air quality or safe drinking water, a public good that cannot be effectively regulated by trusting in the wisdom of millions of individual choices. A more collective response is needed.

Part of the problem with the ideal of individualized informed consent is that it assumes companies have the ability to inform us about the risks we are consenting to. They don’t. Strava surely did not intend to reveal the GPS coordinates of a possible Central Intelligence Agency annex in Mogadishu, Somalia — but it may have done just that. Even if all technology companies meant well and acted in good faith, they would not be in a position to let you know what exactly you were signing up for.

«

This is, as always, a smart take: you need data privacy to apply everywhere.
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US military reviewing its rules after fitness trackers exposed sensitive data • Washington Post

Dan Lamothe:

»

The US military said Monday that it is reviewing its guidelines for the use of wireless devices at military facilities after revelations that popular fitness apps can be used to expose the locations and identities of individuals working in sensitive areas.

The review came after reports by The Washington Post and other outlets that a “heat map” had been posted online by the fitness-tracking company Strava showing where users jog, bike and exercise — and in the process inadvertently highlighting the locations of U.S. military facilities in some of the most dangerous spots in the world.

The concerns raised by the online map went beyond sensitive military sites, with evidence that Strava could help reveal the movements of international aid workers, intelligence operatives and millions of other people in many countries.

In the latest discoveries Monday, Internet sleuths found ways of using the publicly available Strava data to identify individual users of the tracking service by name, along with the jogging routes they use in war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

On one of the Strava sites, it is possible to click on a frequently used jogging route and see who runs the route and at what times.

One Strava user demonstrated how to use the map and Google to identify by name a US Army major and his running route at a base in Afghanistan.

«

Suspect the guidelines will go from “sure, use the things” to “do not use the things under any circumstances”.
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‘Jackpotting’ hackers steal over $1m from atms across US, says Secret Service • Reuters

Dustin Volz:

»

The heists, which involve hacking ATMs to rapidly shoot out torrents of cash, have been observed across the United States spanning from the Gulf Coast in the southern part of the country to the New England region in the northeast, Matthew O‘Neill, a special agent in the criminal investigations division, told Reuters in an interview.

The spate of attacks represented the first widespread jackpotting activity in the United States, O‘Neill said. Previous campaigns have been spotted in parts of Europe and Latin America in recent years.

“It was just a matter of time until it hit our shores,” O‘Neill said.

Diebold Nixdorf and NCR, two of the world’s largest ATM makers, warned last week that cyber criminals are targeting ATMs with tools needed to carry out jackpotting schemes.

The Diebold Nixdorf alert described steps that criminals had used to compromise ATMs. They include gaining physical access, replacing the hard drive and using an industrial endoscope to depress an internal button required to reset the device.

A confidential U.S. Secret Service alert seen by Reuters and sent to banks on Friday said machines running XP were more vulnerable and encouraged ATM operators to update to Windows 7 to protect against the attack, which appeared to be targeting ATMs typically located in pharmacies, big box retailers and drive-thrus.

«

As I first read this story I wondered to myself whether Windows XP would turn up.
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Why Apple sells just 2.5% of India’s smartphones • CNBC

Manish Singh:

»

iPhones have remained beyond the budget for most Indians. The least expensive iPhone X model, for instance, is priced at 92,430 rupees ($1,450) in India, while the least costly iPhone 8 unit ships at Rs 66,120 ($1,040). The devices are so much more expensive in India because the local government imposes a heavy charge on imported electronics items.

The iPhone-maker, for its part, is trying to circumvent the customs duty by manufacturing the iPhone SE model locally in India through a partnership with Taiwanese contract manufacturer Wistron. That’s made the iPhone SE the least costly iPhone model from the recent generations in the country.

But the company ought to do more, analysts told CNBC.

Samsung, and Chinese smartphone makers including Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo, many of which entered the Indian market in the last five years, are increasingly claiming dominance in the nation. Xiaomi and Samsung ship more handsets in India in under two months than Apple does in a year.

Samsung and the Chinese companies now control 80% of the smartphone market in India, while Apple settles for a meager 2.2%, Counterpoint and IDC said, citing data for the quarter that ended in September last year.

As of the quarter ending in December, Apple had 2.5% of India’s overall smartphone market, according to Counterpoint.

«

This shows Apple’s problem in trying to bring “affordable luxury” to everyone; it aims at the US market initially, but India is just different in so many ways. As a global company, it’s going to find itself in places where its strategy doesn’t give it a huge share.
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Opinion: smartphone market challenges raise major questions • Techspot

Bob O’Donnell:

»

As dynamic and exciting as the smartphone market has been for many years, it’s hard to imagine a time when it just won’t matter that much to most people. Kind of like how many people now feel about the PC market.

Don’t get me wrong, the smartphone market will still be very large and extremely important to some people for quite a while (just as the PC market still is for many—myself included). But the truth is, we’re rapidly approaching the era of smartphone market maturation, and quite possibly, the end of smartphone market growth.

Along with those changes are likely to come a shift in attention and focus away from smartphones, and towards other more “interesting” product categories—in the press, on people’s minds, and, most importantly, in critical industry technologies and developments.

The signs of this impending change are all around. In fact, you could argue that this is already starting to occur. While total 2017 worldwide smartphone shipment data may end up showing a modest increase over 2016 (final numbers have yet to be released), the fact that China—the world’s largest smartphone market—showed a 4% decline in Q4 2017 is a very telling and concerning indication of where the market is headed.

Essentially, what that data point tells us is that even in rapidly-growing markets, we’ve started to hit saturation. In other words, pretty much everyone who wants a smartphone now has one.

«

Africa hasn’t really taken part in this explosion in smartphone use, but the hot growth is over. O’Donnell suggests that talk of cuts in iPhone X production just emphasise this – but the smarter view of those “cuts” is that Apple was surprised by the number of iPhone X handsets it was able to make and ship in the just-gone quarter, and so can dial back against its larger expectations (which were built on anticipated low supply).

But saturation is here. I’m a little surprised that news sites still review smartphones. When did they stop for PCs? We’re at the same place now.
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After building new African Union headquarters, China spies on Addis Ababa facility • Morocco News

Amira El Masaiti:

»

In Addis Ababa, ministers and heads of states meet twice a year to discuss major continental issues. While strict security measures give the impression that that building is closely monitored and secured, an unseen security threat was present from 2012 until 2017. The threat was from none other than those who built the headquarters: the Chinese. An investigation conducted by “Le Monde Afrique” exposed Chinese espionage efforts.

According to the report, for five years, between midnight and 2 a.m., computer servers were reaching a peak in data transfer activity. A computer scientist noticed the oddity of the situation. The organization’s technical staff later discovered that the AU servers were all connected to servers located in Shanghai.

Every night, the secrets of the AU were being stored more than 8,000 km away by what was thought to be a diplomatic ally of Africa.

The $200m glass tower complex was gifted to the African Union in 2012. The computer systems were fully equipped by the Chinese, allowing them to open an undocumented portal that gives Chinese administrators access to the AU’s computing system. This “backdoor” is an intentional fault put into code to allow hackers and intelligence agencies to gain illicit access to information.

“Following this discovery, we have taken some steps to strengthen our cybersecurity,” a AU official told Le Monde.

«

Something something Greeks bearing gifts.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Apologies: the superscript on the post about Graham’s Number in yesterday’s post didn’t come through. (But if you clicked through to the link, it was there.)

Traffic jams are a longstanding feature of London’s streets – but Uber and the like won’t solve it, because it’s about geometry. Photo by Leonard Bentley 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 8 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Our next update on our 2018 focus to make sure Facebook isn’t just fun • Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg:

»

We’re making a series of updates to show more high quality, trusted news. Last week we made an update to show more news from sources that are broadly trusted across our community. Today our next update is to promote news from local sources.

People consistently tell us they want to see more local news on Facebook. Local news helps us understand the issues that matter in our communities and affect our lives. Research suggests that reading local news is directly correlated with civic engagement. People who know what’s happening around them are more likely to get involved and help make a difference.

When I traveled around the country last year, one theme people kept telling me is how much we all have in common if we can get past some of the most divisive national issues. Many people told me they thought that if we could turn down the temperature on the more divisive issues and instead focus on concrete local issues, then we’d all make more progress together.

Starting today, we’re going to show more stories from news sources in your local town or city.

«

Um, Mark? You and Google have sucked up all the money for ads for local news. They’ve been shedding reporters at an amazing rate. People might want to see local stuff (though they’re probably lying to you) but there isn’t going to be much chance to see it if nobody writes it.
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The UK government’s own Brexit analysis says the UK will be worse off in every scenario outside the EU • Buzzfeed

Alberto Nardelli has a big scoop:

»

The government’s new analysis of the impact of Brexit says the UK would be worse off outside the European Union under every scenario modelled, BuzzFeed News can reveal.

The assessment, which is titled “EU Exit Analysis – Cross Whitehall Briefing” and dated January 2018, looked at three of the most plausible Brexit scenarios based on existing EU arrangements.

Under a comprehensive free trade agreement with the EU, UK growth would be 5% lower over the next 15 years compared to current forecasts, according to the analysis.

The “no deal” scenario, which would see the UK revert to World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, would reduce growth by 8% over that period. The softest Brexit option of continued single-market access through membership of the European Economic Area would, in the longer term, still lower growth by 2%.

These calculations do not take into account any short-term hits to the economy from Brexit, such as the cost of adjusting the economy to new customs arrangements.

«

The government didn’t deny this:

»

A government spokesperson told BuzzFeed News: “We have already set out that the government is undertaking a wide range of ongoing analysis in support of our EU exit negotiations and preparations.

“We have been clear that we are not prepared to provide a running commentary on any aspect of this ongoing internal work and that ministers have a duty not to publish anything that could risk exposing our negotiation position.”

«

link to this extract

A conversation about how public transport really works • FT Alphaville

Jarrett Walker spoke to Izabella Kaminska of the FT’s Alphaville; he blogs at HumanTransit.org, where he continues the campaign to inform the world about the physical constraints of urban geometry:

»

transport is fundamentally a physical, spatial problem. It is not fundamentally a communications problem or to the extent that it was a communications problem, we’ve gone most of the way, I think, in taking that friction out of the system. And what Uber is discovering, I think, what a lot of these tech firms are discovering is that taking that friction out of the system did not transform the fundamental reality of space and the math of labour and so on, which have really been the facts that have determined what’s possible in passenger transport and will continue to determine those things.

No, of course, the driverless car people will say, no, cars will fit closer together and they’ll be smaller and so we’ll fit more of them over the bridge but that’s a linear solution to an exponential problem. The other dimension of this problem that you must keep in mind is the problem of what we, in the business, call induced demand. And induced demand is the very simply idea that when you make something easier, people are more likely to do it and this is why, for example, when you widen a motorway, the traffic gets worse or it fills up to the same level of congestion that you had before…

…I don’t want to deny the fact that being in the city, being on public transport, having the richness of interacting with a great diversity of people is not always fun; it means you get to interact with some crazy people and some difficult people but more importantly, it is simply the deal that life in a city is. There is no other way for everyone to live in a city. There is a way for elites to live in a city without having to interact with people; you can come and go in limousines; you can come and go to your penthouse by helicopter.

And this is where we get to the problem of elite projection, which is the danger of very fortunate people, whose taste and experience is, therefore, extremely unusual, using their own tastes to determine how a city should be designed; that’s a fundamental problem but, I think, I want to acknowledge the fact that life in the city has its own difficulties, that you don’t always want to deal with the company of strangers. But even more fundamentally, that is simply the deal you signed onto when you decided to live in a city, rather than in a suburb where you can drive your car everywhere and only see people you intend to see.

There’s a tremendous risk and when you think about this idea, this fantasy that at some point, Uber will scale to the point that they can bring their prices down to the point that everyone can afford them.

«

The whole interview is terrific (and not behind the usual FT paywall). Highly recommended.
link to this extract

Internet giants try to soften antitrust rules in credit card case • Bloomberg

Joshua Brustein:

»

A trade group representing Amazon.com Inc., Facebook Inc., Google, and Uber Technologies Inc. has taken sides in a Supreme Court battle over credit card fees because the internet giants want to shape the future of antitrust rules in their favor.

The top U.S. court is set to hear oral arguments on the lawsuit—Ohio vs. American Express—next month. The dispute started in 2010, when states and the federal government sued American Express Co. for forbidding merchants from steering customers to credit cards that charge lower fees.

The government said this discouraged competition and led to artificially high card fees. American Express argued its business was a two-sided marketplace that must balance the desires of merchants against the need to attract cardholders. The extra fees American Express charged went in part to offer airline miles and other perks to shoppers, the company argued. What looked like bullying merchants was actually just enthusiastic competition against Mastercard Inc. and Visa Inc. for users. 
 
The dispute has no direct connection to Silicon Valley. But it could heavily influence any future antitrust action against tech firms, many of which run two-sided digital marketplaces. In a friend-of-the-court brief filed this week, the Computer and Communications Industry Association said a ruling against American Express would threaten innovation by hampering marketplaces that have to please multiple groups with differing priorities. 

«

Because the big platforms now are about two-sided markets – chokepoints, in simpler language – they’d want something that reassures them.
link to this extract

Trump team idea to nationalize 5G network to counter China is rejected • Reuters

David Shepardson:

»

The option of a nationalized 5G network was being discussed by Trump’s national security team, an administration official said on Sunday.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said on Monday that discussions were at “the very earliest stages” to ensure a “secure network,” and “absolutely no decisions” have been made.

The government has blocked a string of Chinese acquisitions over national security concerns and the 5G network concept is aimed at addressing what officials see as China’s threat to U.S. cyber security and economic security.

But the option was rejected by several of those who would have a say.

“Any federal effort to construct a nationalized 5G network would be a costly and counterproductive distraction from the policies we need to help the United States win the 5G future,” Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai, a Republican appointed by Trump, said in a statement on Monday.

CTIA, the trade group that represents AT&T Inc (T.N), Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N), Apple Inc (AAPL.O), Sprint Corp (S.N) and others, said in a statement on Monday that the “government should pursue the free market policies that enabled the U.S. wireless industry to win the race to 4G.”

Carriers have already spent billions of dollars acquiring spectrum and beginning to develop and test 5G networks, which are expected to be at least 100 times faster than current 4G networks and cut latency to less than one thousandth of a second from one one hundredth of a second in 4G, the FCC said.

«

That’s going to be inconvenient for those who thought Pai is Trump’s poodle. In reality he’s pretty fiercely free-marketeer, with all that implies.
link to this extract

From 1,000,000 to Graham’s Number • Wait But Why

We join Tim Urban just after he has introduced readers to the idea of a million. Now he’s going to take you into outer space:

»

When we went from 1 to 1,000,000, we didn’t need powers—we could just use a short string of digits to represent the numbers we were talking about. If we wanted to multiply a number by 10, we just added a zero.

But as you advance past a million, zeros start to become plentiful and you need a different notation. That’s why we use powers. When people talk about exponential growth, they’re referring to the craziness that can happen when you start using powers. For example:

If you multiply 9,845,625,675,438 by 8,372,745,993,275, the result is still smaller than 829.

As we get bigger and bigger today, we’ll stick with powers of 10, because when you start talking about really big numbers, what becomes relevant is the number of digits, not the digits themselves—i.e. every 70-digit number is somewhere between 1069 and 1070, which is really all you need to know. So for at least the first part of this post, the powers of 10 can serve nicely as orders-of-magnitude “checkpoints”.

«

The maths isn’t particularly hard, but it is mindblowing. Here’s how the post ends:

»

Weirdly, thinking about Graham’s number has actually made me feel a little bit calmer about death, because it’s a reminder that I don’t actually want to live forever—I do want to die at some point, because remaining conscious for eternity is even scarier. Yes, death comes way, way too quickly, but the thought “I do want to die at some point” is a very novel concept to me and actually makes me more relaxed than usual about our mortality.

«

I’d never come across Graham’s Number before, but having read the article I see what Urban means. Use maths to embrace your mortality!
link to this extract

What I wish the iPad would gain from the Mac • MacStories

Ryan Christoffel has a list, most of which seem a bit “ehh” to me (multiple instances of an app, more diverse hardware – when there are three different sizes of iPad Pro? – persistent background app privileges [for when the device is plugged into power], more pro first-party apps) and then finally: multi-user support:

»

This one’s a no-brainer. Not only is it a feature that traditional computers have had for ages, but it also fits with the way many iPads are used today. Despite their lack of proper multi-user support, iPads are often shared devices in a household. If that isn’t reason enough, how about this: multi-user support already exists on the iPad, but it’s exclusive to education customers. Just bring it to everyone, Apple.

The only potential wrench in this idea is that Face ID will likely arrive on iPad in the near future, and, assuming the technology replaces Touch ID altogether, Face ID’s current limitation to one saved face, and issues distinguishing between family members, would make multi-user support challenging. Apple could always resort to using only passcodes for user login on Face ID-equipped iPads, while letting older iPads with Touch ID use fingerprint authentication, but that seems unlikely – it would behoove Apple to make sure the best multi-user experience is found on the newest, most advanced devices.

«

Multi-user support would be great (for parents especially) – but we’re now at seven years after the iPad’s introduction. Apple has had plenty of time to introduce this. It isn’t going to.
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Strava privacy concerns: Here is how to safely use the app • Quartz

Rosie Spinks:

»

Last summer, I noticed that male strangers were liking my workouts on the app, despite the fact that I’d enabled what’s called Enhanced Privacy. Because I tend to run the same few routes close to my house regularly—and because, as an urban female who also works on the internet, I am used to all manner of privacy invasion—I grew both concerned and curious. I reached out to Strava and wrote a story for Quartz on the implications of the app’s confusing privacy settings.

While my piece did not focus on Strava’s Heatmap feature hitting the headlines now, it was based on the same concerns. In essence: If you use the app in the default way it’s designed to be used—a social network meets a fitness tracker—you could unknowingly be broadcasting an alarming amount of habitual, location-specific information. That fact, one can assume, is how so many users ended up broadcasting their location from military bases or sensitive locations without realizing it.
This morning, when I created a brand new account with a different email than the account I normally use, I was automatically opted into Heatmaps (see blue tick box below), rather than being asked to consent first. This was via the browser and was not an option in the app, but more this later.

On July 28 last year—one day after I interviewed Strava communications lead Andrew Vontz for my story, and four days before my piece on Quartz was published, on August 1—Strava published this blog post clarifying how to use their privacy policy. Since then, it appears they have also updated the language in the app explaining their privacy settings (Quartz has reached out to find out when they did this and will update the post accordingly). While this may be a positive step, the onus is still very much on you, the user, to make sure you know how your location-based activity is being used.

«

For “woman finding her trails being liked by male strangers” substitute “soldier in hostile territory finding his trails being like by unknown sources”. Equally worrying.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

“Yeah, opsec is really important. That’s what it says on my Fitbit when it uploads to the cloud.” Photo by the US Army on Flickr.

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

A selection of 12 links for you. It’s all done by magic, which sometimes doesn’t work. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The follower factory • The New York Times

Nicholas Confessore, Gabriel J.X. Dance, Richard Harris and Mark Hansen with an amazing, in-depth piece about the people who buy fake followers and one of the (many) companies, Devumi, that sells them:

»

Over two years, the Democratic public relations consultant and CNN contributor Hilary Rosen bought more than a half-million fake followers from Devumi. Ms. Rosen previously spent more than a decade as head of the Recording Industry Association of America. In an interview, she described the purchases as “an experiment I did several years ago to see how it worked.” She made more than a dozen purchases of followers from 2015 to 2017, according to company records.

Other buyers said they had faced pressure from employers to generate social media followers. Marcus Holmlund, a young freelance writer, was at first thrilled when Wilhelmina, the international modeling agency, hired him to manage its social media efforts. But when Wilhelmina’s Twitter following didn’t grow fast enough, Mr. Holmlund said, a supervisor told him to buy followers or find another job. In 2015, despite misgivings, he began making monthly Devumi purchases out of his own pocket.

“I felt stuck with the threat of being fired, or worse, never working in fashion again,” said Mr. Holmlund, who left in late 2015. “Since then, I tell anyone and everyone who ever asks that it’s a total scam — it won’t boost their engagement.” (A Wilhelmina spokeswoman declined to comment.)

Several Devumi customers acknowledged that they bought bots because their careers had come to depend, in part, on the appearance of social media influence. “No one will take you seriously if you don’t have a noteworthy presence,” said Jason Schenker, an economist who specializes in economic forecasting and has purchased at least 260,000 followers.

Not surprisingly, Devumi has sold millions of followers and retweets to entertainers on the lower and middle rungs of Hollywood, such as the actor Ryan Hurst, a star of the television series “Sons of Anarchy.” In 2016 and 2017, he bought a total of 750,000 followers, about three-quarters of his current count. It cost less than $4,000, according to company records. Mr. Hurst did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

«

It’s worth viewing this in a desktop browser to get the full effect, which is amazing. (Devumi denied it sold fake followers. Uh-huh.) There’s a great deal of “did not respond to requests for comment”. And it prompted Paul Hollywood to delete his account, it seems. Martha Lane Fox, a Twitter board member, is also caught in the net. And one Breitbart bureau chief’s followers are almost all bots, each priced about 2 cents each.

Makes it clear that Twitter really doesn’t have a handle on what’s going on. But it would also be hard as hell.
link to this extract

No, OnePlus is still not sending your clipboard data to China • Android Police

Ryan Whitwam:

»

The apparent misunderstanding comes down to a file in the OxygenOS beta called badwords.txt. You can get a rundown of what it contains in this tweet. In the resulting Reddit thread, most everyone was happy to hop on the bandwagon and blame OnePlus.

This time, the company is wasting no time issuing a clear explanation of the situation. Here’s the official statement.

»

There’s been a false claim that the Clipboard app has been sending user data to a server. The code is entirely inactive in the open beta for OxygenOS , our global operating system. No user data is being sent to any server without consent in OxygenOS.

In the open beta for HydrogenOS, our operating system for the China market, the identified folder exists in order to filter out what data to not upload. Local data in this folder is skipped over and not sent to any server.

«

The allegation is that OP uses this file to identify data to upload to a Chinese server. According to OnePlus, badwords.txt is actually a blacklist file—it tells the OS not to monitor matching data for its smart clipboard service. You’re probably not familiar with that feature because it’s only used in China as part of HydrogenOS. It was originally developed as a way to get around blocking of competitor links in Chinese messaging services like WeChat, and there’s no reason to do that in the US. So, the code is inactive in OxygenOS.

So, it sounds like OnePlus’ only mistake here was including files from HydrogenOS in the OxygenOS beta. The code is inactive, but it’s bound to confuse people. Everyone is watching OP closely right now and ready to believe the worst, but the company didn’t do anything shady with your clipboard data. It’s also important to remember this is beta software.

«

link to this extract

Map showing where today’s countries would be located on Pangea • Open Culture

»

The map’s creator is Massimo Pietrobon, someone who playfully describes himself as “a famous explorer and cartographer of Atlantis,” and who has taken on other experiments with maps in the past. When someone claimed that the scale of certain countries wasn’t exactly right, Massimo was quick to confess on his blog, “Yes, it’s just a trial, it can be better.” But it’s a creative start.

«

I don’t think the US would like those neighbouring countries. Then again, flights to Europe would be cheap.
link to this extract

U.S. soldiers are revealing sensitive and dangerous information by jogging • The Washington Post

Liz Sly:

»

An interactive map posted on the Internet that shows the whereabouts of people who use fitness devices such as Fitbit also reveals highly sensitive information about the location and activities of soldiers at U.S. military bases, in what appears to be a major security oversight.

The Global Heat Map, published by the GPS tracking company Strava, uses satellite information to map the location and movements of subscribers to the company’s fitness service over a two-year period, by illuminating areas of activity. 

Strava says it has 27 million users around the world, including people who own widely available fitness devices such as Fitbit, Jawbone and Vitofit, as well as people who directly subscribe to its mobile app. The map is not live — rather, it shows a pattern of accumulated activity between 2015 and September 2017.

Most parts of the United States and Europe, where millions of people use some type of fitness tracker, show up on the map as a blaze of light, because there is so much activity. 

In war zones and deserts in such countries as Iraq and Syria, the heat map becomes almost entirely dark — except for scattered pinpricks of activity. Zooming in on those areas brings into focus the locations and outlines of known U.S. military bases, as well as of other unknown and potentially sensitive sites — presumably because American soldiers and other personnel are using fitness trackers as they move around.

«

So many people are going to be in such trouble. But once your opsec is breached, it’s gone.
link to this extract

Your sloppy bitcoin drug deals will haunt you for years • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

»

Researchers at Qatar University and the country’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University earlier this week published findings that show just how easy it may be to dredge up evidence of years-old bitcoin transactions when spenders didn’t carefully launder their payments. In well over 100 cases, they could connect someone’s bitcoin payment on a dark web site to that person’s public account. In more than 20 instances, they say, they could easily link those public accounts to transactions specifically on the Silk Road, finding even some purchasers’ specific names and locations.

“The retroactive operational security of bitcoin is low,” says Qatar University researcher Husam Al Jawaheri. “When things are recorded in the blockchain, you can go back in history and reveal this information, to break the anonymity of users.”

Bitcoin’s privacy paradox has long been understood by its savvier users: Because the cryptocurrency isn’t controlled by any bank or government, it can be very difficult to link anyone’s real-world identity with their bitcoin stash. But the public ledger of bitcoin transactions known as the blockchain also serves as a record of every bitcoin transaction from one address to another. Find out someone’s address, and discovering who they’re sending money to or receiving it from becomes trivial, unless the spender takes pains to route those transactions through intermediary addresses, or laundering services that obscure the payment’s origin and destination.

«

link to this extract

Is this the society we really want? • NewCo Shift

John Battelle:

»

Do we really want to buy our food at automated, faceless Amazon stores? Do we really want to cleanse all human contact from what is now one of our most human and most social activities — the gathering of our sustenance? When did society collectively decide that we no longer value the produce guy, the butcher, or the cashier who knows our kids and asks how our mother in law is faring?

My first take on Amazon Go is this: F*cking A, do we really want eggplants and cuts of meat reduced to parameterized choices spit onto algorithmized shelves? Ick. I like the human confidence I get when a butcher considers a particular rib eye, then explains the best way to cook that one cut of meat. Sure, technology could probably deliver me a defensibly “better” steak, perhaps even one tailored to my preferences as expressed through reams of data collected through means I’ll probably never understand.

But come on.

Sometimes you just want to look a guy in the eye and sense, at that moment, that THIS rib eye is perfect for ME, because I trust that butcher across the counter. We don’t need meat informed by data and butchered by bloodless algorithms. We want our steak with a side of humanity. We lose that, we lose our own narrative.

«

It is the trend in cities – but Battelle is right: human interaction is essential. Else you’re in some vaguely dystopian Black Mirror episode.
link to this extract

Now even YouTube serves ads with CPU-draining cryptocurrency miners • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

On Friday, researchers with antivirus provider Trend Micro said the ads helped drive a more than three-fold spike in Web miner detections. They said the attackers behind the ads were abusing Google’s DoubleClick ad platform to display them to YouTube visitors in select countries, including Japan, France, Taiwan, Italy, and Spain.

The ads contain JavaScript that mines the digital coin known as Monero. In nine out of 10 cases, the ads will use publicly available JavaScript provided by Coinhive, a cryptocurrency-mining service that’s controversial because it allows subscribers to profit by surreptitiously using other people’s computers. The remaining 10% of the time, the YouTube ads use private mining JavaScript that saves the attackers the 30% cut Coinhive takes. Both scripts are programmed to consume 80% of a visitor’s CPU, leaving just barely enough resources for it to function.

“YouTube was likely targeted because users are typically on the site for an extended period of time,” independent security researcher Troy Mursch told Ars. “This is a prime target for cryptojacking malware, because the longer the users are mining for cryptocurrency the more money is made.” Mursch said a campaign from September that used the Showtime website to deliver cryptocurrency-mining ads is another example of attackers targeting a video site.

«

link to this extract

Using self-organizing maps to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem •

Diego Vicente:

»

To evaluate the implementation, we will use some instances provided by the aforementioned National Traveling Salesman Problem library. These instances are inspired in real countries and also include the optimal route for most of them, which is a key part of our evaluation. The evaluation strategy consists in running several instances of the problem and study some metrics:

• Execution time invested by the technique to find a solution.
• Quality of the solution, measured in function of the optimal route: a route that we say is “10% longer that the optimal route” is exactly 1.1 times the length of the optimal one.

The parameters used in the evaluation are the ones found by parametrization of the technique, by using the ones provided in previous works 2 as a starting point. These parameters are:

• A population size of 8 times the cities in the problem.
• An initial learning rate of 0.8, with a discount rate of 0.99997.
• An initial neighbourhood of the number of cities, decayed by 0.9997.

These parameters were applied to the following instances:

Qatar, containing 194 cities with an optimal tour of 9352.
• Uruguay, containing 734 cities with an optimal tour of 79114.
• Finland, containing 10639 cities with an optimal tour of 520527.
• Italy, containing 16862 cities with an optimal tour of 557315.

«

It gets pretty close to the ideal – within 10% on a couple. (Worse on others.) The GIF above is for Uruguay, where it hit 7.5% of the ideal.
link to this extract

Why open matters • Sonos Blog

It’s possible this is authored by Patrick Spence, CEO of Sonos:

»

With Sonos, we promise you’ll never hit a dead end. That’s because our smart speaker system is designed to tap into just about any piece of sonic culture you can imagine. Since our early days, we’ve been agnostic about the sources of music and audio you can hear on Sonos, preferring to stay open-minded and let you make the choices. If it’s not available on big tech music subscription services, try Spotify, TuneIn or some of the other music services on Sonos.

And if your current itch is too obscure for any of our more than 80 streaming partners to scratch, you can always hook up your turntable or stereo directly to Sonos using a Connect. Whether it’s music, movies, podcasts, or any other sliver of sonic culture, you can use Sonos to pipe it through any room in your home in clear, superior quality.

This spirit of openness is as crucial to us and our products as it is to the free flow of creativity and culture in general. Just like the open, neutral architecture of the Web helps fuel a new creative, musical renaissance, the same principles will help Sonos and its customers explore the true depth of the sonic internet for years to come.

It’s not just about having dozens of music streaming options, either. We’re busy extending the Sonos platform to other partners and integrations as well.

«

Sonos has stuck to this philosophy since its inception – it’s all about making it possible for any service to stream through its devices. But of course, the reason for pointing this out now is because of Apple’s HomePod, which is about to go on sale and takes Sonos on at the “audio quality” end of its capabilities.

Very reminiscent also of Google’s “open systems win” memo from 2009, when it was about to launch Android:

»

“At Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses.”

«

link to this extract

Dell considers return to stock market • FT

Richard Waters and James Fontanella-Khan:

»

Michael Dell is considering a return to the stock market, a little over four years after he took his PC company private in a highly contentious $25bn buyout, followed by the $67bn purchase of storage company EMC in the tech industry’s biggest deal.

The company’s board is set to consider the idea of an initial public offering for Dell Technologies, now one of the world’s largest IT companies, along with other potential transactions, according to two people familiar with the company’s deliberations.

According to one of the people, if Dell opts to go public it is likely to pursue a direct listing or a full merger with VMware, the publicly traded data centre technology company that it already controls.

News of the deliberations pushed shares of VMware up by nearly 9% on Friday, lifting its value to $60bn. However, a separate class of “tracking” shares that Dell issued and which are theoretically tied to VMware’s performance slumped by nearly 5%.

The divergence in price appeared to reflect a belief that even if Dell bought out VMware’s ordinary shares, the tracker would continue to trade — and that Dell might even issue more of those shares to help pay for the deal.

«

Basically, needs some money to help pay down the debt. Michael Dell probably doesn’t want to come back to the market except for that requirement.
link to this extract

You can now watch Nicolas Cage play James Bond • The Outline

Jon Christian:

»

It was only a matter of time. Users on Deepfakes, a subreddit where people use deep learning technology to face swap celebrities’ likenesses onto footage of porn performers, are turning their skills to a new purpose: inserting the much-memed actor Nicolas Cage into roles he never played.

Back in December, Motherboard discovered a Reddit user who was using a neural network to swap the faces of celebrities including Gal Godot and Taylor Swift onto the bodies of porn performers. Just weeks later, another Redditor used the same algorithm to create a user-friendly program called FakeApp which streamlines the process, letting users plug in a database of images to create new videos without much technical know-how about deep learning technologies. In the wake of FakeApp, Motherboard reported, the phenomenon exploded — the Deepfakes subreddit, for instance, now has more than 30,000 followers.

And now, in what seems to be the natural progression of things on the internet, the subreddit is turnings attention to Cage, an actor known for leading roles in “Raising Arizona,” “Lord of War” and “Face/Off.” In spite of — or perhaps because of — Cage’s uneven critical reception, he’s also become a timeless internet meme. Internet humorists have long remixed his strange performance in the 2006 remake of “The Wicker Man,” photoshopped him into surreal situations, and, most of all, plastered his face onto other people.

«

THIS HAS GONE TO FAR. WE NEED LAWS NOW.
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The dirty war over diversity inside Google • Wired

Nitasha Tiku:

»

In interviews with WIRED, 15 current Google employees accuse coworkers of inciting outsiders to harass rank-and-file employees who are minority advocates, including queer and transgender employees. Since August, screenshots from Google’s internal discussion forums, including personal information, have been displayed on sites including Breitbart and Vox Popoli, a blog run by alt-right author Theodore Beale, who goes by the name Vox Day. Other screenshots were included in a 161-page lawsuit that Damore filed in January, alleging that Google discriminates against whites, males, and conservatives.

What followed, the employees say, was a wave of harassment. On forums like 4chan, members linked advocates’ names with their social-media accounts. At least three employees had their phone numbers, addresses, and deadnames (a transgender person’s name prior to transitioning) exposed. Google site reliability engineer Liz Fong-Jones, a trans woman, says she was the target of harassment, including violent threats and degrading slurs based on gender identity, race, and sexual orientation. More than a dozen pages of personal information about another employee were posted to Kiwi Farms, which New York has called “the web’s biggest community of stalkers.”

Meanwhile, inside Google, the diversity advocates say some employees have “weaponized human resources,” by goading them into inflammatory statements, which are then captured and reported to HR for violating Google’s mores around civility or for offending white men.

Engineer Colin McMillen says the tactics have unnerved diversity advocates and chilled internal discussion. “Now it’s like basically anything you say about yourself may end up getting leaked to score political points in a lawsuit,” he says. “I have to be very careful about choosing my words because of the low-grade threat of doxing. But let’s face it, I’m not visibly queer or trans or non-white and a lot of these people are keying off their own white supremacy.”

«

Alt-right folk are in general stupid, but they’re good at playing the angles to others’ disbenefit.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: if you’re signed up for the daily email, you won’t have received it on Friday. This turns out to be because my appalling home broadband lost a crucial bit during the upload on Thursday night, and so the RSS feed (used to generate the email) was empty. So no email. I hope this is now fixed; you might have received two emails. I’m sorry about that too, but that’s how machines are.

The NotPetya ransomware came from Russia and had truly dramatic effects on the Maersk shipping business. Photo by portalgda on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Quickly, Friday! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

YouTube tries to think of the children • Bloomberg

Mark Bergen and Lucas Shaw:

»

Months of outrage had followed reports that YouTube had let terrorist leaders continue to post recruiting videos and aired the juvenile blunders of young stars PewDiePie (who cracked anti-Semitic jokes) and Logan Paul (who filmed the corpse of an apparent suicide). The bigger problem for advertisers: bewildering, sometimes grotesque videos appearing on YouTube’s dedicated channel for children. Think young kids being force-fed or a knockoff of a popular cartoon pig being tortured in a dentist’s chair.

Google’s solution was to safeguard a tiny slice of YouTube, one sanitized for marketers, with every video vetted by human moderators. The rest of the familiar YouTube free-for-all would have far fewer channels running ads. Advertisers would have less reason to worry that their pitches might run ahead of Nazi humor or child exploitation. “The human review is fantastic,” says Jon Anselmo, chief digital officer with ad giant Omnicom Media Group. “The devil will be in the details.”

YouTube has pledged to hire 10,000 people to root out inappropriate clips and train computers to do the same, and it will beef up the rating system for advertisers paying for its Google Preferred premium package. A second tier of YouTube creators will still be allowed to run ads and get a piece of that revenue, but newbies will have to prove themselves. Other details remain elusive. YouTube said in a statement that it aims to “curb bad actors, stabilize creator revenue, and provide greater assurances to advertisers.”

The creation of this walled garden marks a big change for YouTube, which has always presented itself as a playground where any video creator can become popular enough to make a living.

«

Interesting. Back in 2014 I criticised YouTube for its lack of age striation; it seems that now there’s actual money (or the absence of it) involved, YouTube is properly interested. Could still do better, though.
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The Hawaii missile alert culprit: poorly chosen file names Medium

Jared Spool:

»

Saturday morning, January 13, 2018 at 8:09am Hawaii time, a staff member of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency’s (HIEMA) State Warning Point office was going through their routine shift change checklist. They went through the same checklist every time they started their shift. It was routine. It wasn’t interesting.

At one point, they opened up their IPAWS alert software, retrieved a list of saved “templates” and picked one from a list of 9. What they picked was named PACOM (CDW) — STATE ONLY.

Only, this wasn’t the template file they meant to open. The template they meant to open was named DRILL — PACOM (CDW) — STATE ONLY. Other than the word DRILL in the file name, the two files were nearly identical. I say nearly, because there was one other difference: The drill version sent a message only to test devices, while the non-drill version sent the exact same message to every mobile phone in Hawaii.

The message was ominous. BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

…Sending a message to millions of phones about an incoming ballistic missile should, one would think, have a confirmation message. It did. But so did the test message. It also required the user type in a special password to ensure they intended to send the message to every recipient, but so did the test message.

«

But then in the event of a real missile alert it would be all “who knows the password? WHO KNOWS THE DAMN PASSWORD??” Wouldn’t it?
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LG’s Q4 profits jump 84%, still misses expectations (Update: Full 2017 earnings report) • AndroidAuthority

Matt Adams:

»

LG has released a full breakdown of its 2017 financial results including figures for Q4. As expected, LG’s mobile division posted operating losses for an eleventh straight quarter. The total loss came in at 213.2bn won ($192m), which is slightly higher than analyst estimates, but also far lower than losses in Q3 2017. LG cited strong sales of the LG V30, other premium phones, and “business structure” changes for the improvement.

While LG’s mobile division continues to struggle, the wider company is booming. Not only did LG acheive a record full-year revenue of 61.4trn won ($55.4bn), its profits soared to 2.47trn won ($2.24bn) – a massive 85% increase compared to 2016.

«

In the broader scheme of things, the losses on phones make little difference to LG; closing the division would be expensive and there might be some synergies with other divisions. It has now reached the stage where it’s, well, comfortably numb about the ongoing deficits.
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How anti-globalisation switched from a left to a right-wing issue – and where it will go next • The Conversation

Rory Horner, Daniel Haberly, Seth Schindler and Yuko Aoyama (from the universities of Manchester, Sussex, Sheffield and Clark):

»

Significant proportions of the US and other countries in the Global North have experienced limited, if any, income gains in the most recent era of globalisation. Leading global inequality expert Branko Milanovic has explored changes in real incomes between 1988 and 2008 to show who particularly lost out on relative gains in income. He found two groups lost most: the global upper middle class – those between the 75th and 90th percentiles on the global income distribution, of whom 86% were from advanced economies – and the poorest 5% of the world population.

A different picture emerges in the Global South. People living in Asia accounted for the vast majority of those who experienced relative income gains from 1988 to 2008. In comparison with the 1990s, the Global South now earns a much larger share of world GDP, has more middle-income countries, more middle-class people, less dependency on foreign aid, considerably greater life expectancy, and lower child and maternal mortality.

«

link to this extract

Samsung refutes report of Xiaomi overtake, says still top Indian manufacturer ‘by a distance’ • SamMobile

“Adnan F”:

»

A spokesperson for Samsung has said that “As per the German research firm GfK, which tracks sales to end consumers, in the last (November) quarter, Samsung had a 45% value market share and 40% volume market share.”

This is an important distinction that the company is making here. It’s not going by reports of units shipped by market research firms and instead relying on numbers that indicate just how many handsets were actually sold to the end user. A unit can be shipped and stay on retailers’ shelves for months but that still doesn’t count as a sale for the company.

“Samsung is a full range player and leads the smartphone business across every segment of the India market in 2017. More importantly, Samsung is India’s ‘Most Trusted’ brand. We owe our undisputed leadership to the love and trust of millions of our consumers in India,” the spokesperson added.

Samsung India’s global vice president Asim Warsi also pointed out this distinction in a recent interview. “German research firm GfK reports final consumption which is the most important measure of market share,” adding that while shipment numbers are important, they don’t tell the final market share.

«

So the suggestion is that Xiaomi is “stuffing the channel” – pushing handsets in which just sit on shelves waiting to be sold. Also, strictly, Samsung *rebutted* the reports; it isn’t a refutation to say there are different ways to measure this stuff. Clearly its pride is wounded though.
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Soros forecasts end for Facebook and Google • FT

Peter Wells and Katie Martin:

»

More than just the survival of open society, Mr Soros said that “the survival of our entire civilisation is at stake”, and pointed to the rise of leaders such as Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un as having much to do with this, particularly for their brinkmanship around a possible nuclear war.

Having got that off his chest, Mr Soros turned his ire toward giant, monopolistic IT platforms, saying the likes of Google and Facebook had become “obstacles to innovation” whose quest to increase their share of users’ attention was inducing people to give up their autonomy. At the quickening pace Facebook had added its first and then second billion users, it would run out of people to convert within three years, he said.

That could all lead to a more alarming prospect, Mr Soros warned, in the form of alliances between authoritarian states and these giant, data-rich IT monopolies that would combine systems of corporate surveillance, in their infancy, with an already developed system of state-sponsored surveillance.

“The owners of the platform giants consider themselves the masters of the universe, but in fact they are slaves to preserving their dominant position. It is only a matter of time before the global dominance of the US IT monopolies is broken. Davos is a good place to announce that their days are numbered. Regulation and taxation will be their undoing and EU Competition Commissioner Vestager will be their nemesis.”

«

link to this extract

Maersk reinstalled 45,000 PCs and 4,000 servers to recover from NotPetya attack • Bleeping Computer

Catalin Cimpanu:

»

These new details came to light yesterday, while Jim Hagemann Snabe, Chairman of [shipping company] A.P. Møller-Maersk, participated in a panel on securing the future of cyberspace at the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland.

The incident Snabe was referencing is the NotPetya ransomware outbreak that hit companies around the world.

“I’ll never forget, It was the 27 of June when I was woken up at 4 o’clock in the morning. A call came from the office that we had suffered a cyberattack,” Snabe said.

“The impact of that is that we basically found that we had to reinstall an entire infrastructure,” Snabe continued. “We had to install 4,000 new servers, 45,000 new PCs, 2,500 applications.”

“And that was done in a heroic effort over ten days. Normally —I come from the IT industry— I would say it’s gonna take six months. It took ten days,” Snabe added, referring to his previous position as SAP’s CEO.

«

The CIA has concluded that Russia was behind NotPetya. Maersk did OK – it handled 80% of normal volume manually.
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“This is serious”: Facebook begins its downward spiral • Vanity Fair

Nick Bilton:

»

There’s another theory floating around as to why Facebook cares so much about the way it’s impacting the world, and it’s one that I happen to agree with. When Zuckerberg looks into his big-data crystal ball, he can see a troublesome trend occurring. A few years ago, for example, there wasn’t a single person I knew who didn’t have Facebook on their smartphone. These days, it’s the opposite. This is largely anecdotal, but almost everyone I know has deleted at least one social app from their devices. And Facebook is almost always the first to go. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other sneaky privacy-piercing applications are being removed by people who simply feel icky about what these platforms are doing to them, and to society.

Some people are terrified that these services are listening in to their private conversations. (The company’s anti-privacy tentacles go so far as to track the dust on your phone to see who you might be spending time with.) Others are sick of getting into an argument with a long-lost cousin, or that guy from high school who still works in the same coffee shop, over something that Trump said, or a “news” article that is full of more bias and false facts. And then there’s the main reason I think people are abandoning these platforms: Facebook knows us better than we know ourselves, with its algorithms that can predict if we’re going to cheat on our spouse, start looking for a new job, or buy a new water bottle on Amazon in a few weeks. It knows how to send us the exact right number of pop-ups to get our endorphins going, or not show us how many Likes we really have to set off our insecurities. As a society, we feel like we’re at war with a computer algorithm, and the only winning move is not to play.

«

It’s true; I deleted the Facebook app from my phone literally years ago. (If I go there on mobile, it’s via the website.) Instagram annoys the hell out of me because of its algorithmic feed; I’d like to see what people have posted just now, not what an algorithm thinks I’d like. I realised the other day that if Twitter moved to an algorithmic feed I’d feel like giving it up.

Bilton thinks there’s even a vague possibility Facebook could be extinct – or split from Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp – in five years.
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Apple HomePod: tell Me where You come from, I will tell You who You are • Tech.pinions

Carolina Milanesi:

»

It will be interesting to see how Apple deals with the shared music experience with HomePod. Will we be able to train Siri to recognize different voices and therefore set up different profiles? Or will HomePod be linked to one phone and one profile but everybody could ask Siri anything music related? What about HomeKit? Will I be the lady of the house or will the whole family be able to turn the lights on and off?

Building a relationship with a personal assistant takes time and trust but should be more straightforward to set up from a technology perspective. When shared, the complexity that an assistant will have to deal with grows. No one has done that elegantly thus far other than for very top level actions, so Apple is not alone in having to figure this out. That is, of course, if Apple is interested in a communal Siri. Historically, Apple has been more focused on personal experiences than shared ones, mostly because those experiences were starting from a personal device.

If I am right and HomePod will be a music-first kind of device, I also start to wonder whether or not Apple believes in ambient computing. I certainly think, Apple believes in giving people options when it comes to how they interact with Siri, but they might not believe that smart home interactions and the value of an assistant can only be channeled through voice. This might explain why Siri’s skills and HomeKit’s support are not added at the same pace as we have seen with Amazon and Google.

We are still at the very beginning of this smart home, voice first and ambient computing roll out and I think it is hard to believe we know what consumers will eventually settle on. Right now, it is natural to think that because you can do more with a specific assistant that assistant is more advanced. Over time, however, we might not appreciate an assistant that is the Jack of all trades, and we might even be less trusting of an assistant that cracks a joke over one that is more focused and gets the job done.

«

Lots of people are puzzling over how other people are going to see the HomePod, and how it’s going to function. Not that Google Home has that nailed down either. Amazon has a lot of this space – though how *big* is it? How much do we want to talk to the walls?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Stuff like this is clogging up the internet. Let Google’s engineers explain. Photo by Sunciti Sundaram’s Images and Messages on Flickr. (That’s kind of a clue.)

A selection of 11 links for you. Have whatever sort of morning you damn well like. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google engineer Steve Yege calls company ‘100% competitor-focused’

Jillian D’Onfro:

»

A Google engineer who just left the company after nearly 13 years criticized it Wednesday for becoming “100% competitor-focused” and said the company “can no longer innovate.”

Steve Yegge, who joined Google from Amazon in 2005, wrote a blog post about his decision to quit the company, saying it has become too focused on competitors instead of customers. He said product launches such as its smart speaker, Home, its chat app Allo and its Android Instant Apps copy Amazon Echo, Facebook-owned WhatsApp and WeChat, respectively.

“Google has become 100% competitor-focused rather than customer focused,” he wrote. “They’ve made a weak attempt to pivot from this, with their new internal slogan ‘Focus on the user and all else will follow.’ But unfortunately it’s just lip service.”

He said employees don’t set aside enough time to regularly interact with customers, instead relying on competitor activity to guide decisions about what people want.

«

Yegge wrote the blogpost in 2011 criticising Google Plus which went viral too.

Then again, the world is full of people who used to work at X company who think it’s all gone to pot. (For the Apple version, see Bob Burrough, who worked on the iPod, iPhone and iPad; he detests the post-Jobs Apple.)
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Everyone is making AI-generated fake porn now • Motherboard

Samantha Cole:

»

In December, Motherboard discovered a redditor named ‘deepfakes’ quietly enjoying his hobby: Face-swapping celebrity faces onto porn performers’ bodies. He made several convincing porn videos of celebrities—including Gal Gadot, Maisie Williams, and Taylor Swift—using a machine learning algorithm, his home computer, publicly available videos, and some spare time.

Since we first wrote about deepfakes, the practice of producing AI-assisted fake porn has exploded. More people are creating fake celebrity porn using machine learning, and the results have become increasingly convincing. Another redditor even created an app specifically designed to allow users without a computer science background to create AI-assisted fake porn. All the tools one needs to make these videos are free, readily available, and accompanied with instructions that walk novices through the process.

These are developments we and the experts we spoke to warned about in our original article. They have arrived with terrifying speed.

«

So there are now fakes of celebrities – female celebrities so far I think? – taking showers, etc. (Perhaps someone could do a Windowlicker-style video to stem this. And if you’re wondering whether attitudes like this are just for the youth crowd…
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Men Only: Inside the charity fundraiser where hostesses are put on show • FT

Madison Marriage:

»

It is for men only. A black tie evening, Thursday’s event was attended by 360 figures from British business, politics and finance and the entertainment included 130 specially hired hostesses.

All of the women were told to wear skimpy black outfits with matching underwear and high heels. At an after-party many hostesses — some of them students earning extra cash — were groped, sexually harassed and propositioned.

The event has been a mainstay of London’s social calendar for 33 years, yet the activities have remained largely unreported — unusual, perhaps, for a fundraiser of its scale.

The questions raised about the event have been thrown into sharp relief by the current business climate, when bastions of sexual harassment and the institutionalised objectification of women are being torn down.

The Financial Times last week sent two people undercover to work as hostesses on the night. Reporters also gained access to the dining hall and surrounding bars.

Over the course of six hours, many of the hostesses were subjected to groping, lewd comments and repeated requests to join diners in bedrooms elsewhere in the Dorchester…

…It was unclear why men, seated at their tables with hostesses standing close by, felt the need to hold the hands of the women, but numerous hostesses discussed instances of it through the night. For some, this was a prelude to pulling the women into their laps. Meanwhile champagne, whisky and vodka were served.

On stage, entertainers came and went. It was soon after a troupe of burlesque dancers — dressed like furry-hatted Coldstream Guards, but with star-shaped stickers hiding nipples — that one 19-year-old hostess, recounted a conversation with a guest nearing his seventies: who had asked her, directly, whether she was a prostitute. She was not. “I’ve never done this before, and I’m never doing it again,” she said later. “It’s f***ing scary.”

«

Ms Marriage (such a wonderfully appropriate name) is usually the FT’s accounting and tax correspondent, but she got onto this story after a tipoff. It has been going for 33 years. The counterargument – “but it’s for charity!” – fails; notorious paedophile Jimmy Savile raised lots of money for charity too. And the President’s Club dinner apparently brought in £694k – but cost £673k to organise. A number of charities said they would return funds raised by the dinner.

On Wednesday evening UK time, the President’s Club said it would be closing after distributing its remaining funds.
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Xiaomi beats Samsung to become top smartphone vendor in India • Canalys

»

India’s smartphone market has finally seen a change at the top, with Xiaomi now leading with shipments close to 8.2m units in Q4 2017. Despite annual growth of 17%, Samsung failed to maintain its lead, shipping just over 7.3m smartphones to take second place. The smartphone market in India grew by a modest 6% overall, in line with Canalys forecasts, following the seasonal dip as vendors and channel partners take stock after a busy Q3. Vivo, Oppo and Lenovo rounded out the top five, while total smartphone shipments were just shy of 30m units.

«

This seems like a worrying development for Samsung. Look how Xiaomi has grown there, too.
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Global smartphone average sales price sees record year-on-year growth in 4Q17 • GfK Global

»

Global smartphone sales reached 397m units in the fourth quarter of 2017 (4Q17), a 1% increase year-on-year. Demand was primarily driven by Middle East and Africa, which experienced 8% growth, and Central & Eastern Europe, where demand grew 7%. Global smartphone average sales price (ASP) increased by 10% year-on-year to USD 363, its fastest quarterly growth rate to date. 

«

There’s a fascinating table to go with it, showing sales and sales value by region. Given a little time you could figure out a regional ASP, but the most important point is that ASPs are going up fast in China, by 17%.
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The internet is filling up because Indians are sending millions of ‘good morning!’ texts • WSJ

Newley Purnell:

»

Millions of Indians are getting online for the first time—and they are filling up the internet. Many like nothing better than to begin the day by sending greetings from their phones. Starting before sunrise and reaching a crescendo before 8 a.m., internet newbies post millions of good-morning images to friends, family and strangers.

All that good cheer is driving a 10-fold increase in the number of Google searches for “Good Morning images” over the past five years. Pinterest, the San Francisco visual-search platform, added a new section to display images with quotes. It saw a ninefold increase over the past year in the number of people in India downloading such pictures.

Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp messaging service—which has 200 million monthly active users in India, making the country its biggest market—added a status message last year so users could say good morning to all of their contacts at once.

Desh Raj Sharma, 71 years old, recently started using a smartphone. At around 6 a.m. every day he searches for and sends good-morning images to more than 50 friends and family using WhatsApp…

…When Google researchers peeked into Indian consumers’ phones, they found thousands of “good morning” images gumming up their storage. One in three smartphone users in India run out of space daily, according to a survey by data-storage firm Western Digital Corp. , compared with one in 10 in the U.S.

Google’s solution: a new app called Files Go that highlights files for possible deletion—with a special feature to search out and delete all good-morning messages at once.

«

To be clear – the “peeking” was done by asking people in person to see what was on their phones. But I love the idea of the internet being filled up.

The obvious thing is to cater to the India market by offering phones with LOADS of storage.
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Should we believe the hype about blockchains? • Spectator Coffee House

Jamie Bartlett:

»

I worry that a lot of organisations will rush toward blockchain solutions, and grow disillusioned two years later when they realise it wasn’t quite as easy as our dear thought-leaders made out. The current volume of investment, conferences, talks, meet-up groups, consultancies and Twitter experts far exceed what it’s actually achieved. Even bitcoin, the undisputed and highly-priced blockchain prince isn’t getting picked up all that quickly as an actual functioning currency. This sort of thing happened twice already in the field of AI research.

In the early 1970s, and then again in the late 1980s, periods of irrational excitement about the prospects for artificial intelligence led to companies founded, money invested, and promises made about how everything was about to change. When expectations for major advance were not met, there were dramatic cuts in research funding and corporate investment. These become known as the ‘AI winters’ – and set the whole field back several years. A blockchain winter would do the same, and the potential of this new technology would be lost to a sad collection of wild hype, windy promise, overpaid consultants and utopian dreams. 

«

link to this extract

Facebook to roll out new tools in response to EU privacy laws • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

»

Facebook will roll out a new set of tools aimed at making it easier for users to make informed choices about their privacy in response to sweeping new European privacy laws, according to the company’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg.

“We’re rolling out a new privacy centre globally that will put the core privacy settings for Facebook in one place and make it much easier for people to manage their data,” Sandberg said at a Facebook event in Brussels on Tuesday.

She said that the creation of a “privacy centre” was prompted by the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), an EU regulation that seeks to give Europeans more control over their information and how companies use it.

“Our apps have long been focused on giving people transparency and control and this gives us a very good foundation to meet all the requirements of the GDPR and to spur us on to continue investing in products and in educational tools to protect privacy,” Sandberg said.

«

OK, but will it apply outside the EU? Will it apply in the US?
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6,000 gamers just risked $1M in a massive space fight • VICE News

David Gilbert:

»

More than 6,000 gamers logged on to play Eve Online Tuesday for a “million-dollar battle” in which gamers risked real-world money for the chance to gain virtual mastery within the in-game universe.

The interstellar-fighting game, which pitted spaceships worth an estimated $1 million on each side of the two main alliances, ended in victory for the Moneybadger Coalition, who defended their Keepstar space station, defeating for the Imperium alliance, also known as the Clusterfuck Corporation.

The previous sentence might not make much sense to you, so here’s some context.

Eve Online is not Mario Kart. It’s not a game you can pick up and play for an hour or two. It requires a huge amount of time to master. Icelandic developer CCP Games has built a loyal subscriber base that not only spend hundreds of hours playing the game but also spend a lot of money building their fleets.

«

Turns out that the cost was way less. By the way, if you’ve seen the “Callister” episode of Series 4 of Black Mirror, this will look totally familiar.
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The ‘Frequent Flier’ program that grounded a hospital’s soaring costs • POLITICO Magazine

Arthur Allen:

»

Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation (or PCCI) was a joint effort with community partners such as homeless shelters and food pantries to build a network of what was hoped would eventually be hundreds of community-based social services around Dallas County, with Parkland Memorial at the center of it. A sophisticated software platform would enable the hospital to easily refer homeless people discharged from its emergency room to shelters and pantries, and to let social workers at those places see what their clients were doing: whether they were filling their prescriptions, or getting healthy food, or had a place to sleep, or money for the bus. It would be so much cheaper to meet those needs outside the medical system than to pay for the consequences inside it. Two years into the program, evidence is mounting that PCCI is working.

Callies cites the case of a man with hypertension and a stressful situation at home whose hospital bills dropped from $108,500 in December 2016 to zero by April as his health stabilized. Callies says on average hospital visits for some of the highest utilizers have been cut by two-thirds or more, saving an estimated $12 million.

“I had a ‘Wow!’ moment when I saw these charts,” says Callies.

Less than two years after its launch, the PCCI portal contains 150,000-plus names and had been accessed nearly a million times by 98 community groups, including some, like the local community college, that officials never anticipated would participate. And the list is growing.

«

That’s the nub of it, but there’s much more to how they implemented it. It’s well-known that a few people tend to generate huge costs; and that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
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Here’s the first Animoji Karaoke with Apple’s newest characters • Fast Company

Harry McCracken:

»

With iOS 11.3–which Apple is seeding as a beta to developers today and expects to ship in final form this spring–the company is upping the Animoji ante with four additional characters: a bear, a lion, a skull, and a particularly fine dragon. Apple gave me early access to the newcomers, which are as uncannily polished and emotive as their predecessors. Naturally, I made them break out in song.

The more Animoji the merrier as far as I’m concerned, but if Apple is serious about giving these beasties their due, there’s an obvious next step: Rather than making Animoji available only in Messages, it should build them into its nifty Clips movie-making app. That could end the need to use iOS 11 screen recording to capture more than 10 seconds at a time, and would give Animoji impresarios the ability to create real extravaganzas entirely on the iPhone X.

«

Any bets this happens in iOS 12?
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

If your name’s Mohamed, this might cost you more than if it’s John. Photo by David Farrell on Flickr.

A selection of 11 links for you. If only you’d waited. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Apple iPhone X sales near 30 million in Q4: Canalys • Fortune

Don Reisinger:

»

Apple hasn’t revealed how many iPhone X units it sold in the fourth quarter, but a new study from researcher Canalys has put a number on it.

The tech giant sold 29 million iPhone units in the fourth quarter, including 7 million in the U.S., Canalys said in a statement on Tuesday. That was enough to make the iPhone X the most popular iPhone Apple sold during the period, topping the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus…

…Canalys found in its analysis of the worldwide market that many customers traded in their older iPhones to defray the cost of the iPhone X.

Still, Canalys cautioned that the iPhone X might have performed “slightly below industry expectations” and early iPhone X shipments “were not the fastest ever for an iPhone.” The researcher didn’t say which Apple handset tallied the fastest sales.

Apple has been silent about iPhone X sales, despite widespread speculation over exactly how many units it has sold. The company will announce earnings next week for the fiscal period that includes the fourth quarter. It’s unknown whether it will break down iPhone sales by unit.

«

Guess what? Apple isn’t going to give a per-product breakdown. Never has. It would be painting a huge target on its financials for rivals. Not sure what these industry expectations were, but if the Canalys figure is right then that’s $29bn in revenues right there. Counterpoint Research reckons the iPhone X was the best-selling phone worldwide in November, and that Apple had five of the top 10 best-selling phones that month. Thus:

The surprising thing to me is how low Samsung’s representation seems to be. But it spreads it widely.
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‘WHAT THE F*CK IS GOING ON?’ Linus Torvalds explodes at Intel spinning Spectre fix as a security feature • The Register

Thomas Claburn and Kat Hall:

»

Intel’s fix for Spectre variant 2 – the branch target injection design flaw affecting most of its processor chips – is not to fix it.

Rather than preventing abuse of processor branch prediction by disabling the capability and incurring a performance hit, Chipzilla’s future chips – at least for a few years until microarchitecture changes can be implemented – will ship vulnerable by default but will include a protection flag that can be set by software.

Intel explained its approach in its technical note about Spectre mitigation, titled Speculative Execution Side Channel Mitigations. Instead of treating Spectre as a bug, the chip maker is offering Spectre protection as a feature.

The decision to address the flaw with an opt-in flag rather than activating defenses by default has left Linux kernel steward Linus Torvalds apoplectic.

Known for incendiary tirades, Torvalds does not disappoint. In a message posted to the Linux kernel mailing list on Sunday, he wrote, “As it is, the patches are COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE.”

“All of this is pure garbage. Is Intel really planning on making this shit architectural?” he asked. “Has anybody talked to them and told them they are f*cking insane? Please, any Intel engineers here – talk to your managers.”

«

The full Torvalds rant is worth reading. Never one to hold back, ol’ Linus. (Thanks John Naughton for the link.)
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Motorists fork out £1,000 more to insure their cars if their name is Mohammed • The Sun

Ben Leo:

»

Motorists are being stung for almost £1,000 more to insure cars if their name is Mohammed.

Top firms Admiral, Marks & Spencer, Bell, Elephant and Diamond all give far lower quotes when the driver has the English name John, a Sun investigation reveals.

The most shocking example we found was an Admiral quote via GoCompare. We put in identical details apart from the name. When it was “John Smith” wanting fully comprehensive insurance for a 2007 Ford Focus in Leicester the quote was £1,333. But for “Mohammed Ali” it was £2,252 — a huge £919 more.

One victim of the scandal — Mohammed Butt — raged: “It’s racism, pure and simple. They cannot say Mohammeds are worse drivers than Johns.”

We got 60 quotes via GoCompare, plus others using rival comparison sites. The sites do not calculate figures themselves but simply show results from insurers. Admiral and its sister companies Diamond, Bell and Elephant always quoted more if the driver was called Mohammed.

The difference was often hundreds of pounds. The story was similar when we went to the firm direct. Quotes we sought ranged across ten cities.

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My only thought of the way that this might just – just – make sense is if Asian names were associated with the many “fake whiplash crash” claims that stung insurers so badly in the past. Those were reckoned to add about £100 to every household’s car insurance. (Thanks Richard for the link. First time we’ve had The Sun here.)
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Five obvious questions about Apple’s HomePod speaker – The Verge

Dieter Bohn wonders if HomePod (available for pre-order this Friday, on sale February 9) is like iPod, which was initially dismissed for not being or looking like existing devices in that specific space:

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I’m not eager put myself out on a limb and say that the HomePod is or is not going to replicate the iPod’s success. But I can’t stop from feeling like the smart speaker market is further along in its evolution now than the MP3 player market was when the iPod was announced. I also can’t stop thinking that consumers are smarter and more demanding about gadgets now than they were then.

Here is a simple list of the things that are troubling about the HomePod vis-à-vis its competition, Alexa and Google Assistant speakers:

• Price. The HomePod is $349. You can buy into either the Alexa or Google ecosystem for 50 bucks (often for way less).
• Diversity of products. There is one HomePod, and it costs 350 bucks. There are dozens of different speakers that support Alexa; Amazon itself offers at least four current models. There are soon to be dozens of Google Assistant speakers; Google itself offers three models. Both of those ecosystems will have speakers with full displays (if that’s what you want).
• Software compatibility. Alexa and Google have a significant lead with their intelligent assistants compared to Siri. That’s a strange circumstance, given that Apple was first to market with Siri and sells millions of devices with Siri on them. But both Amazon and Google have been building out compatible voice-only capabilities with third parties to work with their speakers, while Apple has taken a slower, more deliberate approach. Apple’s description of Siri on the HomePod is a “musicologist” and only mentions its broader capabilities as a side note.
• Software compatibility, part 2. The HomePod only works with Apple Music. Alexa and Google not only work with Spotify, Pandora, and TuneIn (and more!), but they’ll even let you set a competing music service as the default playback option. Also, Apple Music has no free option: to make a HomePod work, you’ll have to pay a monthly subscription fee.
• Features incomplete. The HomePod is launching without key features for a home speaker. AirPlay 2 is apparently necessary for multiroom audio and even stereo pairing of two speakers, and it won’t be on the HomePod at launch. It’s “coming this year in a free software update.” (Also can we take another moment to ask what the heck is up with AirPlay 2? It still feels very mysterious.) Meanwhile, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Sonos are all offering these features.

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All good points; I think that the “price” question will be answered by the audio quality. For diversity, it’s easy to build down from the top of the market; harder to build upwards. The software compatibility and features remain to be seen. I think that – like the Apple Watch – it will be a deep hit, beloved by those who really like it. It’s not the next iPhone, but then what is?
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Privacy, simplified • Spread Privacy

Gabriel Weinberg (CEO of DuckDuckGo):

»

Today we’re taking a major step to simplify online privacy with the launch of fully revamped versions of our browser extension and mobile app, now with built-in tracker network blocking, smarter encryption, and, of course, private search – all designed to operate seamlessly together while you search and browse the web. Our updated app and extension are now available across all major platforms – Firefox, Safari, Chrome, iOS, and Android – so that you can easily get all the privacy essentials you need on any device with just one download.

The DuckDuckGo browser extension and mobile app will also now show you a Privacy Grade rating (A-F) when you visit a website. This rating lets you see at a glance how protected you are, dig into the details to see who we caught trying to track you, and learn how we enhanced the underlying website’s privacy measures. The Privacy Grade is scored automatically based on the prevalence of hidden tracker networks, encryption availability, and website privacy practices.

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Currently doing 22m direct searches per day. Tiny compared to Google, but personally I like it.
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Economist Barry Eichengreen on the dollar losing its status as a dominant reserve currency and the future of bitcoin • Quartz

Eshe Nelson:

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Using new evidence on central bank reserves from the 1910s to early 1970s, with particularly focus on the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s, Eichengreen and his co-authors find that reserve currencies can and do coexist. For example, in the period between the wars, it seems the British pound and the US dollar shared reserve currency status more or less equally, depending on the year. Before the First World War, even though sterling was the most important currency, the French franc and German mark were internationally significant, too.

“From this vantage point, it is the second half of the 20th century that is the anomaly, when an absence of alternatives allowed the dollar to come closer to monopolizing this international currency role,” they write.

This implies that the dollar’s days as the dominant reserve currency will end “sooner rather than later.” The book suggests we’re heading for a return to the time when currencies coexisted on more equal footing in international markets. In the future, the dollar will be forced to share prominence with the yuan and the euro, in particular. The speed of the shift might depend on the actions of Donald Trump, Eichengreen says.

«

There’s an interview with Eichengreen in the article. I’ll point out that the US ceasing to be the world’s reserve currency is the opening pivot of Lionel Shriver’s “The Mandibles” – about a future US. (Don’t say “bitcoin!”)
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Ending Bitcoin support • Stripe

»

At Stripe, we’ve long been excited about the possibilities of cryptocurrencies and the experimentation and innovation that’s come with them. In 2014, we became the first major payments company to support Bitcoin payments.

Our hope was that Bitcoin could become a universal, decentralized substrate for online transactions and help our customers enable buyers in places that had less credit card penetration or use cases where credit card fees were prohibitive.

Over the past year or two, as block size limits have been reached, Bitcoin has evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange. Given the overall success that the Bitcoin community has achieved, it’s hard to quibble with the decisions that have been made along the way. (And we’re certainly happy to see any novel, ambitious project do so well.)

This has led to Bitcoin becoming less useful for payments, however. Transaction confirmation times have risen substantially; this, in turn, has led to an increase in the failure rate of transactions denominated in fiat currencies. (By the time the transaction is confirmed, fluctuations in Bitcoin price mean that it’s for the “wrong” amount.) Furthermore, fees have risen a great deal. For a regular Bitcoin transaction, a fee of tens of U.S. dollars is common, making Bitcoin transactions about as expensive as bank wires… of the businesses that are accepting Bitcoin on Stripe, we’ve seen their revenues from Bitcoin decline substantially. Empirically, there are fewer and fewer use cases for which accepting or paying with Bitcoin makes sense.

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Bitcoin! So much winning!
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Bitcoin broker Coinbase booked $1bn in revenue last year • Recode

Theodore Schleifer:

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Coinbase, the bitcoin trading broker that has exploded in popularity as cryptocurrencies surge and nose dive, has encountered an unusual problem for a Silicon Valley startup: Too many investors are trying to get in.

The six-year-old company crossed $1bn in revenue last year, Recode has learned from industry sources, a tremendous rise fueled by layman interest in both bitcoin and competing virtual currencies that users can buy and sell through the app…

…Bitcoin is altogether only worth about $175bn in market value as of today’s trading price of about $10,500 — a 50% drop from just a month ago. And so Coinbase’s $1bn in revenue suggests it has become the most-used broker for bitcoin transactions.

Coinbase makes money not on bitcoin’s price but on the volume of trades — charging both the buyer and seller usually a fee between 0.25% and 1% of the total transaction size through the site. The company serves as both an exchange and a broker of deals, though it does not serve as a market maker that holds bitcoin.

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If accurate, that’s really remarkable. Suggests a lot of trading has gone on – but is that people exiting and reentering, or new people coming in?
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Trump slaps steep tariffs on foreign washing machines and solar products • NY Times

Ana Swanson and Brad Plumer:

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Whirlpool Inc. appealed to the White House for help in curbing washing machine imports from its Korean competitors, while two solar companies, Suniva Inc. and SolarWorld Americas, said imports of cheap solar cells and modules were similarly putting their companies at risk.

While the tariffs [of up to 30%] were welcomed by the companies that sought them, economists warned the levies could drive up prices for consumers and hurt some American businesses. The solar industry has been split over the tariffs; companies that develop large-scale solar farms, as well as purchasers of solar power such as retailers and tech companies, opposed the tariffs over concerns that they would cost them more money and make solar power less competitive with other energy sources, at least in the short term.

Abigail Ross Hopper, the president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, which opposed the measures, said the decision “will create a crisis in a part of our economy that has been thriving, which will ultimately cost tens of thousands of hard-working, blue-collar Americans their jobs.”

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The solar association estimates that 84,000 jobs will go – about 34% of the 260,000 Americans who worked in solar in 2017 (more than coal and oil combined): 6,300 in Texas (Ted Cruz’s state), 4,700 in North Carolina, 7,000 in South Carolina.

That’s going to play through this year, with elections to come in November. Also, there’s no chance the US will challenge China in making solar panels; that’s a race it would have had to enter with commitment 20 years ago.

So the price will put off homeowners buying solar panels for their homes, installers are out of work. Tariffs only help if you have a dominant product or a less developed economy, where you need the time to develop your own specialisation. The US is long past that point on solar.
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Wall Street, not American solar, stands to gain from Trump tariffs • Bloomberg

Brian Eckhouse:

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The biggest winners of President Donald Trump’s decision to slap tariffs on imported solar equipment may not be American manufacturers but a group of investment houses around the globe.

The firms – from Centerbridge Partners LP to JPMorgan Chase & Co. – all are creditors to the two struggling solar companies that brought the trade complaint. The value of their investments, mostly in the form of distressed bonds, is likely to get a boost as the new tariffs help American manufacturers. While much of the US solar industry has blasted the tariffs, warning of massive job losses, these investors show at least some on Wall Street stand to gain.

Centerbridge, a New York firm that manages $14 billion in credit and distressed assets, is among the biggest creditors to solar manufacturer SolarWorld AG, a German company that owns SolarWorld Americas. Centerbridge controls about a third of the parent company’s senior secured notes, according to people familiar with the matter. SolarWorld AG filed for bankruptcy in May. 

SolarWorld Americas, which has a plant in Hillsboro, Oregon, was a leader of the tariff campaign. 

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Another point: the US power infrastructure needs renewal, and having individuals install solar panels takes a lot of load off the generating capacity and grid – think of the times when the weather is hot and air conditioners are on. Generate power locally, or pipe it in from across the grid? If you pipe it in, you need the infrastructure and you need the power plants.
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This Hearst ranch has raised cattle since 1865. Now it also powers Apple’s headquarters • CNBC

Anita Balakrishnan:

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150 years after George Hearst bought the ranch, it took on a new, ultra-modern function: A 2,900-acre solar farm, which until now has been contracted by Apple to run the company’s Cupertino headquarters.

It wasn’t easy to get the job, Hearst said in a statement, as it was “a huge, unbelievable construction project,” but the long summer stretches of 115-degree heat helped seal the deal…

…Apple CEO Tim Cook said in 2015 that the company would contribute $850m to build the solar farm, which also aims to provide enough energy for 60,000 homes.

“We know in Apple that climate change is real. The time for talk is passed,” he said at that time, according to Reuters. “The time for action is now.”

The project is still expanding, with the second phase of the 2.5m solar panels being installed this year, to provide energy offset for California customers. According to Hearst, “cowboys of Jack Ranch have been outnumbered by construction workers as the 280-megawatt solar project heads into its final month.”

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280MW? That’s colossal. Though one suspects it also needs plenty of batteries to store excess, if Apple is really being powered directly from it. (I suspect it’s more that it feeds into the grid, and extracts that much or less.)
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CRISPR/Cas9 in neurons. Is what’s happening in China like this? Photo by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on Flickr.

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A selection of 8 links for you. Tolerable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Rupert Murdoch: Facebook, Google should pay for trusted news • CNBC

John Shinal:

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Rupert Murdoch said on Monday that Facebook and Google have made “scurrilous” news sources popular, and that the U.S. tech giants should pay publishers if they want “trusted” content.

“Facebook and Google have popularized scurrilous news sources through algorithms that are profitable for these platforms but inherently unreliable,” the News Corp. chairman said in a statement.

“If Facebook wants to recognize ‘trusted’ publishers then it should pay those publishers a carriage fee similar to the model adopted by cable companies,” Murdoch said.

The statement comes after Facebook said Friday it would survey its users about what news sources they trust, and tweak its ranking software to help promote more the credible ones.

In his own Facebook post last week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “I’ve asked our product teams to make sure we prioritize news that is trustworthy, informative, and local. And we’re starting next week with trusted sources.”

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He keeps trying to find ways to make this happen, and they keep failing.
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China, unhampered by rules, races ahead in gene-editing trials • WSJ

Preetika Rana, Amy Dockser Marcus and Wenxin Fan:

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In a hospital west of Shanghai, Wu Shixiu since March has been trying to treat cancer patients using a promising new gene-editing tool.

U.S. scientists helped devise the tool, known as Crispr-Cas9, which has captured global attention since a 2012 report said it can be used to edit DNA. Doctors haven’t been allowed to use it in human trials in America. That isn’t the case for Dr. Wu and others in China.

In a quirk of the globalized technology arena, Dr. Wu can forge ahead with the tool because he faces few regulatory hurdles to testing it on humans. His hospital’s review board took just an afternoon to sign off on his trial. He didn’t need national regulators’ approval and has few reporting requirements.

Dr. Wu’s team at Hangzhou Cancer Hospital has been drawing blood from esophageal-cancer patients, shipping it by high-speed rail to a lab that modifies disease-fighting cells using Crispr-Cas9 by deleting a gene that interferes with the immune system’s ability to fight cancer. His team then infuses the cells back into the patients, hoping the reprogrammed DNA will destroy the disease.

In contrast, what’s expected to be the first human Crispr trial outside China has yet to begin. The University of Pennsylvania has spent nearly two years addressing federal and other requirements, including numerous safety checks designed to minimize risks to patients. While Penn hasn’t received final federal clearance to proceed, “we hope to get clearance soon,” a Penn spokeswoman said…

…There is little doubt China was first out of the block testing Crispr on humans. Nine trials in China are listed in a U.S. National Library of Medicine database. The Wall Street Journal found at least two other hospital trials, including one beginning in 2015—a year earlier than previously reported. Journal reporting found at least 86 Chinese patients have had their genes edited.

The trials align with China’s industrial policy. As part of its drive to place China on the global stage in a multitude of industries, Beijing in a 2016 five-year plan highlighted gene editing. Many of the Crispr trials emerged after that call-to-arms.

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Expected. Also: please don’t let this be the opening scene of a zombie apocalypse.
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More than 10% of $3.7bn raised in ICOs has been stolen: Ernst & Young

Anna Irrera:

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More than 10% of funds raised through “initial coin offerings” are lost or stolen in hacker attacks, according to new research by Ernst & Young that delves into the risks of investing in cryptocurrency projects online.

The professional services firm analyzed more than 372 ICOs, in which new digital currencies are distributed to buyers, and found that roughly $400m of the total $3.7bn funds raised to date had been stolen, according to research published on Monday.

Phishing was the most widely used hacking technique for ICOs, with hackers stealing up to $1.5m in ICO proceeds per month, according to the report.

The research also noted that the volume of ICOs has been slowing since late 2017. Less than 25% of ICOs reached their target in November, compared with 90% in June.

The study comes amid a cryptocurrency investing craze, with young companies raising hundreds of millions of dollars online to fund their projects, with often little more than a handful of employees and a business plan outlined in a so-called “white paper”.

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Going to keep pointing this stuff out until the inevitable happens.
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Who’s using 2FA? Sweet FA. Less than 10% of Gmail users enable two-factor authentication • The Register

Iain Thomson:

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It has been nearly seven years since Google introduced two-factor authentication for Gmail accounts, but virtually no one is using it.

In a presentation at Usenix’s Enigma 2018 security conference in California, Google software engineer Grzegorz Milka today revealed that, right now, less than 10% of active Google accounts use two-step authentication to lock down their services. He also said only about 12% of Americans have a password manager to protect their accounts, according to a 2016 Pew study.

We polled El Reg readers on Twitter just before we published this piece, asking: “What percentage, rounded to nearest integer, of Gmail users do you think use two-factor authentication?” Out of 838 followers who responded within the hour, 82% correctly selected less than 10%. The rest picked more than 10%.

The Register asked Milka why Google didn’t just make two-factor mandatory across all accounts, and the response was telling. “The answer is usability,” he replied. “It’s about how many people would we drive out if we force them to use additional security.”

Please, if you haven’t already done so, just enable two-step authentication. This means when you or someone else tries to log into your account, they need not only your password but authorization from another device, such as your phone. So, simply stealing your password isn’t enough – they need your unlocked phone, or similar, to to get in.

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I consider it a mark of achievement that I got all my family onto 2FA. And recall that it was the lack of 2FA on John Podesta’s personal email account which led to it being hacked to such disastrous effect.

Meanwhile inside Google…
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BeyondCorp: how Google ditched VPNs for remote employee access • The New Stack

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Today, none of Google’s employee-facing applications are on a virtual private network. They all have public IP addresses.

The company feels this approach, which it has dubbed BeyondCorp, is the “new cloud model,” for doing cloud security, asserted Neal Mueller, head of infrastructure product marketing at Google, who gave a presentation on this approach at the O’Reilly Security conference, held recently in New York.

This model can be fall under a number of rubrics in the security community, including “zero-trust” or “perimeter-less” security. It is the opposite of the traditional approach of security, which Mueller described as “the castle” approach, in which a strong firewall is used to set off an internal network that can only be accessed by way of a virtual private network (VPN).

The problem with the “castle” approach is that once the perimeter is breached, the entire internal network, and all the associated applications, are at risk. “Do not trust your network. It is probably already owned,” added Max Saltonstall, a Google program manager for corporate engineering, who also participated in the presentation. Phishing, man-in-the-middle, SQL Injection attacks all find fertile ground on VPNs.

Plus, a VPN was cumbersome to use, and slowed performance, especially for overseas workers. And it is no walk in the park for admins either.

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Fascinating how Google is inverting this whole idea, and letting anyone – who is correctly authorised – access it. And it must be enormously confident to give a presentation like this (more slides in the full article) where hackers will target its systems.
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A powered-on ‘Xbox Watch’ emerges, shows off fitness focus • Windows Central

Jez Corden:

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Images of the so-called “Xbox Watch” have surfaced before, but this is the first time we’ve been able to see the device powered on (no chargers seem to exist for this thing.)

The pictures come via Hikari Calyx on Twitter, showing off an extremely early version of the Xbox Watch in a powered-on state. At this stage, the device only sported four apps, “Workout,” “GPS,” “Settings,” and a USB debugger for developers.

This device preceded the Microsoft Band, and might have been a response to how well Nintendo was able to position console gaming as a fitness option, back during the Wii Fit craze. We believe that the technology developed for the “Xbox Watch” eventually got rolled into the Microsoft Band, which, of course, also got cancelled.

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Wise to cancel it. This wasn’t going to be a winner, and the writing was already on the wall of Microsoft’s mobile ecosystem.
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Why ads keep redirecting you to scammy sites and what we’re doing about it • Vox

Winston Hearn, who – like you probably did at some point recently – found himself diverted to a scammy site when he’d clicked on what seemed like a safe page:

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another engineer and I became curious about what exactly was happening to cause the redirect and annoy all users served the malicious ad. We dug in and were extremely surprised that the frigging thing could not be more simple. When the ad landed on the page there were about three lines of code. That code creates a link just like you click to go to any page on the web then waits seven seconds before triggering a click on the link which causes the browser to redirect you. That’s it. Why seven seconds? Most likely to avoid security tools that actively scan sites to try and detect ads like this, although that is just speculation on my part.

Let me be extremely clear: we hate these malicious ads with the fire of a thousand suns and are working actively to keep them off of our sites. We use automated services that regularly scan our sites trying to find malicious ads. We work with ad-selling partners to try to ensure the ads that are sold and served on our sites are high quality. And Vox Media’s AdOps team is constantly monitoring social media, email and Slack for reports of anything that seems questionable (not just malicious).

Despite all this, malicious ads like this pop up every few months. After this recent round, we started investigating what else we can do to prevent these ads from harming your experience on our sites. The ideal solution would be for ads to be delivered to our sites in a safe way that prevent things like this. Google allows advertisers to treat these safer options as opt-in, which means nothing currently prevents scammers from sneaking in ads that cause App Store or gift card redirects.

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10 typography trends to look for in 2018 • Elegant Resources

B.J. Keeton:

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The internet changes so quickly and so often that web designers can barely keep up. What works for clients and converts well one month might completely falter the next. So we have to keep up with trends, specifically with typography because it is so foundational to every single project we work on.

2018 is pretty exciting, honestly, because there are some trends that we’re seeing that may just shake up what we’ve taken for granted over the past few years.

Let’s take a look at what this year has in store for us!

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Your guide to all the things you’re going to be squinting at this year saying “Why can’t it just be in clean type dammit.”
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified