How much energy is bitcoin mining using? Let’s have a geothermally heated debate! Photo by Nathan11466 on Flickr.

A selection of 11 links for you. Yes, it will get fixed soon. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Drawing invisible boundaries in conversational interfaces • Remains of the Day

Eugene Wei on how text chatbots keep disappointing us, where voice ones (usually) don’t:

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none of the voice assistants to date sounds close to replicating the natural way a human speaks. These voice assistants may have more human timbre, but the stiff elocution, the mispronunciations, the frequent mistakes in comprehension, all quickly inform the user that what they are dealing with is something of quite limited intelligence. The affordances draw palpable, if invisible, boundaries in the user’s mind, and they quickly realize the low ROI on trying anything other than what is likely to be in the hard-coded response tree. In fact, I’d argue that the small jokes that these UI’s insert, like answering random questions like “what is the meaning of life?” may actually set these assistants up to disappoint people even more by encouraging more such questions the assistant isn’t ready to answer (I found it amusing when Alexa answered my question, “Is Jon Snow dead?” two seasons ago, but then was disappointed when it still had the same abandoned answer a season later, after the question had already been answered by the program months ago).

The same invisible boundaries work immediately when speaking to one of those automated voice customer service menus. You immediately know to speak to these as if you’re addressing an idiot who is also hard of hearing, and the goal is to complete the interaction as quickly as possible, or to divert to a human customer service rep at the earliest possible moment.

[I read on Twitter that one shortcut to get to a human when speaking to an automated voice response system is to curse, that the use of profanity is often a built-in trigger to turn you over to an operator. This is both an amusing and clever design but also feels like some odd admission of guilt on the part of the system designer.]

It is not easy, given the simplicity of textual UIs, to lower the user’s expectations. However, given where the technology is for now, it may be necessary to erect such guardrails. Perhaps the font for the assistant should be some fixed-width typeface, to distinguish it from a human. Maybe some mechanical sound effects could convey the robotic nature of the machine writing the words, and perhaps the syntax should be less human in some ways, to lower expectations.

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Israeli device banishes finger-pricking for sugar levels in diabetes patients • The Times of Israel

Shoshana Solomon:

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Caesarea-based startup Cnoga Medical Ltd. says it has come up with a way to track blood glucose levels without pricking or pain. Its glucose meter, already approved for use in numerous countries worldwide, uses a camera to provide a diagnosis of blood glucose levels by observing the changing colors of the user’s finger.

During a short training period, the device learns to correlate the user’s skin tone with previous glucose level readings.

The technology got the green light on Monday from one of the world’s leading diabetes specialists, Prof. Andreas Pfützner, MD, PhD, who came to Israel to present the company with his findings after having tested the technology in two clinical studies in Germany.

“The results were surprising,” he told The Times of Israel in a phone interview.  Pfützner held two clinical trials at his institute to validate the performance of the technology, and in both studies he found that the medical device performed “with a surprising level of accuracy,” the same as that of needle sensors.

“Cnoga achieved the same level of monitoring as the invasive devices,” he said.

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It’s quite big – about the size of a 9V battery pack – but non-invasive is a big plus.
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Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin • Group Announcements :: Steam Blog

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As of today [December 6], Steam will no longer support Bitcoin as a payment method on our platform due to high fees and volatility in the value of Bitcoin.

In the past few months we’ve seen an increase in the volatility in the value of Bitcoin and a significant increase in the fees to process transactions on the Bitcoin network. For example, transaction fees that are charged to the customer by the Bitcoin network have skyrocketed this year, topping out at close to $20 a transaction last week (compared to roughly $0.20 when we initially enabled Bitcoin). Unfortunately, Valve has no control over the amount of the fee. These fees result in unreasonably high costs for purchasing games when paying with Bitcoin. The high transaction fees cause even greater problems when the value of Bitcoin itself drops dramatically.

Historically, the value of Bitcoin has been volatile, but the degree of volatility has become extreme in the last few months, losing as much as 25% in value over a period of days. This creates a problem for customers trying to purchase games with Bitcoin.

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Store of value and/or medium of exchange or just speculative instrument?
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Serious faults in Digiconomist’s Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index • Zorinaq

Marc Bevand:

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The author of the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index makes fundamentally flawed assumptions, causing it to demonstrably overestimate the electricity consumption of Bitcoin miners by 1.5× to 3.6×, and likely by 2.0× to 2.5×.

His main error, amongst others, is making the wrong assumption that a fixed “60%” of mining revenues are spent on electricity. “60%” is pulled out of thin air and miscalculated due to a misunderstanding from the author. As of 22 November 2017 he still has not fixed this incorrect assumption.

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The BECI is the thing which makes one think that bitcoin mining is going to be a serious challenge for the electricity grid in a few years. Here, Becand takes it to task. In detail.

But, but, but! That’s not the end of the story. “Digiconomist” arrives in the comments to make defend his (I assume) case. Bevand fights back. Digiconomist responds.

This has been going since February 2017, and they keep updating it. (Latest update: 22 November.) It reminds me of this Star Trek episode.
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Native Mobile Apps Part 1 • David Bressler

Bressler has hit the age everyone eventually hits: he needs glasses for reading, but not for other stuff. But it’s hard to read text on his phone:

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I remem ber when Apple first had a sys tem font pref er ence that worked across apps. Before then, using a Black ber ry or Win dows Mobile, I remem ber hav ing to change the font set ting for each app indi vid u al ly (if the app sup port ed one). It was awk ward at best. Font sizes between apps were incon sis tent dri ving the OCD (fig u ra tive, not diag nos ti cal ly lit er al) part of me insane.

I remem ber the relief that I could go to one set ting on the iPhone and nev er have to think about it again.

Here’s the thing.

I now have the sys tem font set to the high est size. It works great, most ly. How ev er…

Respon sive apps either can’t, can’t eas i ly, or have devel op ers that don’t care to imple ment the sys tem font set ting in their apps. I could call out banks, hos pi tals, and even Coin Mar ket Cap (where I track my cryp to port fo lio dai ly) and Telegram (where I learn more about Cryp to) that don’t sup port the sys tem font.

It dri ves me insane when peo ple don’t accept that their crap py respon sive apps are crap py. I under stand why they have to be some times done (some apps just aren’t that impor tant)… but that’s not the case with the ones I’m most ly using.

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Inside Oracle’s cloak-and-dagger political war with Google • Recode

Tony Romm:

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Oracle’s aggressive legal maneuvering has evolved into a political campaign against Google, sources say.

Take the fight over online privacy, which consumed the U.S. Congress this spring. At the time, lawmakers had just rolled back rules that would have required companies like AT&T, Charter, Comcast* and Verizon to obtain permission before selling their customers’ web-browsing histories to advertisers. Some Republicans said the rules targeting ISPs were heavy-handed and unfair because they didn’t apply to tech giants like Facebook and Google in equal measure. To that end, one GOP lawmaker, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, introduced a bill that aimed to subject both industries to tougher privacy regulations.

Naturally, Google opposed that idea — and speaking through one of its trade associations, the search giant pledged to fight. Days after Blackburn introduced the bill, however, Oracle publicly praised the lawmaker for her work product. Many in tech saw it as an odd move for a company with no search or advertising business.

Then, Oracle purchased mobile billboards in Blackburn’s home state, Tennessee, in an apparent bid to rile locals about the power and reach of Silicon Valley, two sources told Recode. “Internet companies betrayed you,” the ad began. It didn’t mention Google by name, but it still charged that the industry had “sold your most sensitive and personal information for $125bn in advertising revenue last year.”

“Paid for by Oracle,” it read in fine print at the bottom.

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Mecklenburg computer servers held for ransom by hacker • Charlotte Observer

Steve Harrison:

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Mecklenburg County government has been paralyzed by an unknown computer hacker after a county employee unknowingly opened an email attachment Monday that unleashed spyware and a worm into the county’s computer system.

County manager Dena Diorio said Tuesday night that the hacker has essentially frozen the county’s electronic files. The hacker is seeking $23,000 for an encryption key that would release the files.

The hacker’s deadline: 1 p.m. Wednesday.

“The files on the servers are being held for ransom,” she said before a commissioners meeting Wednesday.

Diorio said the county is working with a third-party technology company to decide what to do. She said she is open to paying the ransom, which would be paid in bitcoin.

But Diorio said that paying the ransom would present a number of other potential problems, not including rewarding the hackers.

“If you pay the bitcoin, there is always a risk they won’t give you the encryption key,” she said. “And they could go back for more (money).”…

…Diorio said the hackers don’t have access to people’s health records, Social Security numbers or credit card information.

“Social Security numbers are protected and health information is protected,” she said.

She said an example of the problem is the county’s code enforcement office, where much of the work is done electronically. Employees no longer have access to their records. But she said they are switching to paper records for work on Wednesday.

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Well, you could always consider how much you spend on having airgapped backups. Also: “unknown hacker”? Is that different from “known hacker”? They probably just put the ransomware together like Lego. (Thanks JC for the link.)
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Analysis: Facebook performance declined for news published in 2017 • Medium

Matt McAlister:

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we may be witnessing a decline in Facebook’s influence on news. The new numbers are hiding it in plain sight.

The median average engagements number, the 50th percentile or half of all articles, has been declining most of the year. In Spring the median engagements figure was 36. And now in December that number is down to 23.

Total month-to-month engagements may look encouraging, but the highest performers are the only ones to benefit. The bottom 90% of articles are all in a steady decline.
While it may appear as if the company is obscuring an overall decline by introducing a topline increase, we don’t know what Facebook’s intentions are with this change. It’s conceivable this pattern started well before the change and that we are only now seeing truth with more accurate figures than what we had access to before.

Sampling would surely skew toward flatter growth in a viral system, and now that they report ‘real’ engagements, as they claim, we might be seeing patterns that have been there for years.

Regardless, the larger trend is not good news for news. If most of the news is getting shared less and less on Facebook then publishers will likely also see a reduction in an important source of customer visits, both new customers and loyal customers.

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That is absolutely tiny amounts of sharing, and implies huge numbers of articles are thrown into a void as deep as the Marianas Trench.
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Ziff-Davis has bought Mashable at a fire-sale price and plans to lay off 50 people • Recode

Peter Kafka on the sale, priced at about $50m (after a recent funding round valued it at $250m:

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Mashable’s new owners plan on keeping the site running but want to refocus the company on tech and tech-lifestyle content. That will mean laying off about 50 of the site’s employees and offering other Mashable employees jobs at other Ziff Davis publications, according to a source familiar with the company’s plans, who says founder Pete Cashmore will stay with the company.

Ziff Davis specializes in running low-cost publishers that generate a significant amount of their revenue from “affiliate commerce” — usually executed via in-text links which pay the publisher when a reader clicks on the link, or buys something after clicking on the link. Last year, the company made a bid for the Gawker Media sites when those properties were in a bankruptcy auction.

Mashable’s collapse comes amid increasing skepticism about online publishers that depend on digital advertising, as Google and Facebook eat up increasing amounts of that market. Last week, BuzzFeed said it was laying off about 100 people — around 6% of its workforce — as it looked for new revenue streams to augment its core “native” ads business.

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Mashable started in Cashmore’s bedroom, and at this rate it’s going to end up there too. Its recent “pivot to video”, when it laid off a ton of people who just wrote words, clearly didn’t do the trick.
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Pivot to subscriptions • Medium

Nick Hagar on TheStreet moving to a subscription model:

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Companies across digital media are reaching a moment of truth, one that’s been coming for the 10 years they’ve failed to turn a profit. But while other publications are now pivoting to video, TheStreet’s already been there, done that, and it didn’t work. According to Digiday, “while video views have grown substantially, according to former employees, boosted by the liberal use of autoplay, consumer advertising revenue grew just 2% during the most recent quarter, per the company filing.”
Instead, it’s banking on the value it provides to readers, focusing on events and subscriptions. I think this is a smart move for a niche publication with a dedicated audience, and it’s the approach places like Digiday and The Information rely on.

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TheStreet (and sister publication The Deal) now have fewer than 40 editorial people, having cut about 10 recently. The noose tightens…
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Zeta Global acquires commenting service Disqus • TechCrunch

Frederic Lardinois:

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Marketing tech company Zeta Global is making good use of its recent $140m Series F funding round. After acquiring Boomtrain earlier this year, the company today announced it has acquired Disqus, a service you’re probably familiar with thanks to its ubiquitous online commenting service that powers the commenting sections of sites that range from TMZ to The Atlantic and Entertainment Weekly.

A source close to the two companies tells us that the acquisition price was close to $90m. This marks Zeta’s eleventh acquisition since it was founded in 2007.

Zeta Global’s acquisitions have typically focused on more fundamental technologies like AI and machine learning, customer lifecycle management and other adtech related services. At first glance, Disqus doesn’t quite seem to fit into this list, but Disqus sits on a huge data set that goes beyond your favorite troll’s political comments.

“Marketers typically have to make trade-offs between reaching engaged audiences on social platforms with massive reach and using tools that give them control and access to granular targeting capabilities,” said Zeta Global CEO, chairman and co-founder David A. Steinberg. “Disqus strengthens Zeta’s ability to offer the best of both worlds with the scale, visibility and performance marketers have been asking for.”

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“Granular targeting capabilities”. In other words, ads (and other profiling, to be sold on to who knows which company and used for who knows what) based on what you comment on. The case for not commenting on anything – or trying to delete your Disqus profile – just grew sizably.
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You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

We don’t have a picture of data leaking from a database, so here’s the aquatic equivalent. Photo by THomas Good on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. No, target=_blank to open the links in new windows/tabs isn’t implemented yet. Give it a day or so. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How the Kremlin tried to pose as American news sites on Twitter • Bloomberg

Selina Wang:

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The Kremlin-backed Russian Internet Research Agency operated dozens of Twitter accounts masquerading as local American news sources that collectively garnered more than half-a-million followers. More than 100 news outlets also published stories containing those handles in the run-up to the election, and some of them were even tweeted by a top presidential aide. These news imposter accounts, which are part of the 2,752 now-suspended accounts that Twitter Inc. has publicly disclosed to be tied to the IRA, show how the Russian group sought to build local communities of followers to disseminate messages.

Many of the news imposter accounts amassed their following by tweeting headlines from real news sites, while others sought to represent certain communities. They targeted a diverse set of regions across the political spectrum, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and Boston. Several of the accounts were impersonating local news outlets in swing states, like @TodayPittsburgh, @TodayMiami and @TodayCincinnati.

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How soon before the US rules that Twitter is an agent of a foreign power?
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A popular virtual keyboard app leaks 31 million users’ personal data • ZDNet

Zack Whittaker:

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Personal data belonging to over 31 million customers of a popular virtual keyboard app has leaked online, after the app’s developer failed to secure the database’s server.

The server is owned by Eitan Fitusi, co-founder of AI.type, a customizable and personalizable on-screen keyboard, which boasts more than 40 million users across the world.

But the server wasn’t protected with a password, allowing anyone to access the company’s database of user records, totaling more than 577 gigabytes of sensitive data.

The database appears to only contain records on the app’s Android users.

The discovery was found by security researchers at the Kromtech Security Center, which posted details of the exposure alongside ZDNet…

…The company also promises to “never share your data or learn from password fields,” but we saw one table containing more than 8.6 million entries of text that had been entered using the keyboard, which included private and sensitive information, like phone numbers, web search terms, and in some cases concatenated email addresses and corresponding passwords.

…”It raises the question once again if it is really worth it for consumers to submit their data in exchange for free or discounted products or services that gain full access to their devices,” [Kromtech head of communications Bob Diachenko] added.

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It’s like Dirty Harry. “This is a multi-gigabyte server which could blow your passwords and typing all over the net. In all this excitement, I can’t remember whether I set a password on the server or not. Do you feel lucky, punk? Well, DO YA?”
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Facebook ‘Messenger Kids’ lets under-13s chat with whom parents approve • TechCrunch

Josh Constine:

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It’s important to understand that kids under 13 still can’t sign up for a Facebook account. Instead, parents download the Messenger Kids app to a child’s iPhone or iPad (Android coming soon). Once the parent has authenticated it with their own account, they set up a mini-profile with their kid’s name and photo. Then, using the Messenger Kids bookmark in the main Facebook app, parents can approve anyone who is friends with them as a contact for their kid, like aunts and uncles or godparents. Messenger Kids is interoperable with the main Messenger app, so adults don’t actually have to download the Kids app.

Kids still can’t be found through Facebook search, which protects their privacy. So if a child wants to be able to chat with one of their classmates, their parent must first friend that kid’s parent, and then will see the option to approve that adult’s child as a contact for their own kid. This is by far the most clumsy part of Messenger Kids, and something Facebook might be able to improve with a way for Messenger Kids to let children perhaps photograph a QR code on their playmate’s app to request that their parents connect…

…One thing that might surprise some people is that there’s no way for parents to secretly spy on what their kids are saying in their chats. Instead, parents have to ask to look at their kids’ screen, which Chung says is a more common behavior pattern. The exception is that if kids report a piece of objectionable content, their parents will be notified but still not shown the content in their own app.

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Facebook did a ton of research with parents (including those in the military) to find out the best approach here. It found that kids already had access to hardware: 93% of 6-12 years olds in the US had access to a tablet or smartphone, 66% had their own device, and 60% of parents surveyed said kids under 13 used messaging apps, social media or both.

But at its core, it’s about getting people – even those under age – to use Facebook more. In the end, that’s not working out well for adults already. Why should it be any better for children? If they want to call the grandparents, there’s Skype or Facetime.
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iOS 11 leaves iOS devices more vulnerable to edge-case attacks, says phone-cracking company ElcomSoft • 9to5Mac

Ben Lovejoy:

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Anyone wanting to access private data from an iPhone used to face two challenges, says the company in a blog post (which was experiencing loading problems at the time of writing). First, they had to access the device itself, which usually requires knowing or cracking the passcode. Second, even with the passcode, you could not access all the data on the device unless you could also crack the password used for the encrypted backup of the device.

It is the encrypted backup that contains Keychain data, allowing you to easily access any account used by the phone’s owner, as well as application data and more. Indeed, in many cases, authorities and other attackers focus their efforts on cracking the backup rather than the device itself, as it provides easier access to more data.

Prior to iOS 11, if you made an encrypted backup to iTunes, the password protecting that backup was used every time in future, even if you switched Mac…

…Apple documents this process, so it’s clearly a deliberate decision rather than a bug.

It seems likely that Apple is balancing convenience against security here, taking the view that anyone who has the device passcode usually has legitimate access to the device. The new behavior would be helpful to anyone who forgot their encrypted backup password, as well as families of anyone who passed away but had shared their passcode with family members.

My personal view is that the change makes sense. The risk created by it is real edge-case stuff: someone has physical access to my device and knows my passcode. The benefit is that there’s an escape plan for the many people who forget rarely-used passwords – like, in this case, an encrypted backup password that is typically only needed when upgrading devices.

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Elcomsoft has a point. Question is, how many people give up their passcode to those they shouldn’t?

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Fun with Facebook ads? • ZGP

Don Marti:

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Most of the ads that I was getting to start with were for free-to-play NSFW games, so I changed my profile to “female”. Jackpot! All of a sudden I started getting much more professional ads, including IT products and services for big companies, and training classes for online marketing skills (yes, including a Facebook ad for a class on how to advertise on Facebook). What I guess happened is that the more business-focused advertisers put in gender-neutral bids, and while I was “male” on the site, they got outbid by the game companies specifically targeting male users.

(Dudes, I highly recommend going “female” on Facebook if you haven’t already, especially if you might be embarrased about people seeing too much décolletage in the ads when they walk by. So there’s your personal infotainment tip for today.)

But what did I do? I had fixed a problem, so I broke it some more. I went ahead and stayed female, but increased my age to 88. Big mistake.

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It’s quite remarkable what you then get.
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Bitcoin could cost us our clean-energy future • Grist

Eric Holthaus:

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As bitcoin grows, the math problems computers must solve to make more bitcoin (a process called “mining”) get more and more difficult — a wrinkle designed to control the currency’s supply.

Today, each bitcoin transaction requires the same amount of energy used to power nine homes in the U.S. for one day. And miners are constantly installing more and faster computers. Already, the aggregate computing power of the bitcoin network is nearly 100,000 times larger than the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers combined.

The total energy use of this web of hardware is huge — an estimated 31 terawatt-hours per year. More than 150 individual countries in the world consume less energy annually. And that power-hungry network is currently increasing its energy use every day by about 450 gigawatt-hours, roughly the same amount of electricity the entire country of Haiti uses in a year.

That sort of electricity use is pulling energy from grids all over the world, where it could be charging electric vehicles and powering homes, to bitcoin-mining farms. In Venezuela, where rampant hyperinflation and subsidized electricity has led to a boom in bitcoin mining, rogue operations are now occasionally causing blackouts across the country. The world’s largest bitcoin mines are in China, where they siphon energy from huge hydroelectric dams, some of the cheapest sources of carbon-free energy in the world. One enterprising Tesla owner even attempted to rig up a mining operation in his car, to make use of free electricity at a public charging station.

In just a few months from now, at bitcoin’s current growth rate, the electricity demanded by the cryptocurrency network will start to outstrip what’s available, requiring new energy-generating plants.

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Though I linked to the data about bitcoin mining using so much energy, the fact of its exponential increase in demand had passed me by. Only if fewer people mine will the difficulty come down, and then the demand. But that’s only going to happen if the price drops precipitously.
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YouTube is gone from Amazon Fire TV and Echo Show again, as Google vs Amazon heats up • BGR

Yoni Heisler:

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In a bold strike against Amazon, Google earlier today pulled support for its YouTube app from both the Amazon Echo Show and the Fire TV. If this all sounds familiar, it’s because we previously went down a similar road this past September. Back then, Google explained that the Echo Show’s implementation of YouTube lacked integral features and created a broken experience for users. YouTube ultimately returned to the Echo Show in late November, though sources familiar with the matter tell TechCrunch that Amazon at the time implemented a workaround that wasn’t authorized by Google.

So now we’re back to square one, with Echo Show users left unable to access any YouTube content. Fire TV users, meanwhile, will lose access on January 1. In a statement on the matter, Google accused Amazon of refusing to sell certain Google branded products.

“We’ve been trying to reach agreement with Amazon to give consumers access to each other’s products and services,” Google said. “But Amazon doesn’t carry Google products like Chromecast and Google Home, doesn’t make Prime Video available for Google Cast users, and last month stopped selling some of Nest’s latest products. Given this lack of reciprocity, we are no longer supporting YouTube on Echo Show and FireTV. We hope we can reach an agreement to resolve these issues soon.”

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It’s telling that Google’s (only available) reprisal for not having its hardware sold on a store is to make its services unavailable on that store’s hardware. Who do we think loses more here?
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How brands secretly buy their way into Forbes, Fast Company, and HuffPost stories • The Outline

Jon Christian:

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Interviews with more than two dozen marketers, journalists, and others familiar with similar pay-for-play offers revealed a dubious corner of online publishing in which publicists, ranging from individuals like Satyam to medium-sized “digital marketing firms” that blur traditional lines between advertising and public relations, quietly pay off journalists to promote their clients in articles that make no mention of the financial arrangement.

People involved with the payoffs are extremely reluctant to discuss them, but four contributing writers to prominent publications including Mashable, Inc, Business Insider, and Entrepreneur told me they have personally accepted payments in exchange for weaving promotional references to brands into their work on those sites. Two of the writers acknowledged they have taken part in the scheme for years, on behalf of many brands.

One of them, a contributor to Fast Company and other outlets who asked not to be identified by name, described how he had inserted references to a well-known startup that offers email marketing software into multiple online articles, in Fast Company and elsewhere, on behalf of a marketing agency he declined to name. To make the references seem natural, he said, he often links to case studies and how-to guides published by the startup on its own site.

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I’ve heard about variants of this for a while, specifically around the Forbes “contributors” (who aren’t staff; in effect they’re outside bloggers). After I’d left the Guardian, I saw claims that there were similar paid links at The Guardian. I investigated them via those who claimed to have paid for links: they didn’t check out. (I think the middlemen selling links claimed it so they could charge more for the places where they could sell links.)

It’s an unsurprising wrinkle. Good journalism by Christian to pin it down.
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Apple’s HomePod isn’t about Siri, but rather the future of home audio • Apple Insider

Daniel Eran Dilger:

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Apple’s intent for HomePod isn’t just being a copy of Echo. Despite a dubious “tell-all” report for Bloomberg by Mark Gurman (the same person who likes to announce on camera how far ahead Amazon is over Apple in its Alexa voice app partnerships) that portrayed Apple’s HomePod as a disjointed, incompetently run skunkworks project, the reality is that HomePod is doing something very different than Amazon.

It does not appear that anyone at Bloomberg understands anything about Apple’s strategy, but rather only views the company through a distorted lens of other companies’ marketing nonsense. That explains why Gurman earlier insisted in 2015 that his sources had confirmed that the second generation of Apple Watch would get a low-quality camera just like Samsung’s failed Gear smartwatch. This made no sense at all for many reasons but was received and propagated by other outlets as reliable news, before being forgotten. Years later, there’s no camera on Apple Watch.

Like the original Mac, NeXT, iPhone and iPad, HomePod isn’t an attempt to merely clone the status quo, but rather an effort to take very expensive new technology and make it affordable to the mass market. HomePod is the pinnacle of Apple’s resurgent efforts to push advanced audio technology since its acquisition of Beats. It’s not just a wireless speaker with Siri.

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HomePod is miles from “mass market”. Echo, Dot, Google Home: those are priced for the mass market. Trying to drive mass market purchasing of high-quality audio because it’s high-quality audio is doomed to failure. (CDs offered higher-quality audio, but it was their convenience that made them sell.)

There’s a legitimate question about how big and how useful the “smart speaker” market can be, but Apple’s definitely playing in it. Coming so late to the game, it doesn’t have the luxury of redefining the market.
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HP, Asus announce first Windows 10 ARM PCs: 20 hour battery life, gigabit LTE • Ars Technica

Peter Bright:

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Just shy of a year after announcing that Windows was once again going to be available on ARM systems, the first two systems were announced today: the Asus NovaGo 2-in-1 laptop, and the HP Envy x2 tablet.

Branded as Always Connected PCs, the new Windows on ARM systems are positioned as bringing together the best of PCs and smartphones. They have PC form factors, with the productivity enabled by a real keyboard, touchpad, and general purpose operating system capable of running regular Windows software, but they bring with them the seamless switching between LTE and Wi-Fi, instant on, multiple working day battery life, and slimline, lightweight packaging that we’re accustomed to on our phones.

The Asus laptop boasts 22 hours of battery life or 30 days of standby, along with LTE that can run at gigabit speeds. HP’s tablet offers a 12.3 inch, 1920×1280 screen, 20 hours battery life or 29 days of standby, and a removable keyboard-cover and stylus. Both systems use the Snapdragon 835 processor and X16 LTE modem, with HP offering up to 8GB RAM and 256GB storage to go with it…

…The emulator runs in a just-in-time basis, converting blocks of x86 code to equivalent blocks of ARM code. This conversion is cached both in memory (so each given part of a program only has to be translated once per run) and on disk (so subsequent uses of the program should be faster, as they can skip the translation). Moreover, system libraries—the various DLLs that applications load to make use of operating system features—are all native ARM code, including the libraries loaded by x86 programs. Calling them “Compiled Hybrid Portable Executables” (or “chippie” for short), these libraries are ARM native code, compiled in such a way as to let them respond to x86 function calls.

While processor-intensive applications are liable to suffer a significant performance hit from this emulation—Photoshop will work in the emulator, but it won’t be very fast—applications that spend a substantial amount of time waiting around for the user—such as Word—should perform with adequate performance.

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Seems like a better approach than the first time round with ARM. That’s quite some battery life, too.
link to this extract

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Is the BBC approaching the end of the line? Photo by l-b-p-2011 on Flickr.

A selection of 12 links for you. None co-written by Paul Manafort. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

A simple theory of Moore’s Law and social media • Marginal REVOLUTION

Tyler Cowen, here in part:

»

6. Consider a second distinction, namely between people who are too sensitive to social information, and people who are relatively insensitive to social information.  A quick test of this one is to ask how often a person’s tweets (and thoughts) refer to the motivations, intentions, or status hierarchies held by others.  Get the picture?  (Here is an A+ example.)

7. People who are overly sensitive to social information will be driven to distraction by Twitter.  They will find the world to be intolerably bad.  The status distinctions they value will be violated so, so many times, and in a manner which becomes common knowledge.  And they will perceive what are at times the questionable motives held by others.  Twitter is like negative catnip for them.  In fact, they will find it more and more necessary to focus on negative social information, thereby exacerbating their own tendencies toward oversensitivity.

8. People who are not so sensitive to social information will pursue social media with greater equanimity, and they may find those media productivity-enhancing.  Nevertheless they will become rather visibly introduced to a relatively new category of people for them — those who are overly sensitive to social information.  This group will become so transparent, so in their face, and also somewhat annoying.  Even those extremely insensitive to social information will not be able to help perceiving this alternate approach, and also the sometimes bad motivations that lie behind it.  The overly sensitive ones in turn will notice that another group is under-sensitive to the social considerations they value.  These two groups will think less and less of each other.  The insensitive will have been made sensitive.  It’s like playing “overrated vs. underrated” almost 24/7 on issues you really care about, and which affect your own personal status.

9. The philosophy of Stoicism will return to Silicon Valley.  It will gain adherents but fail, because the rest of the system is stacked against it.

10. The socially sensitive, very smart people will become the most despairing, the most manipulated, and the most angry.  The socially insensitive will either jump ship into the camp of the socially sensitive, or they will cultivate new methods of detachment, with or without Stoicism.  Straussianism will compete with Stoicism.

«

An excellent analysis. (There are 13 points in all.) Though I think it’s Metcalfe’s law, relating to networks, that’s more relevant than Moore’s.
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Android Oreo review: an iOS user’s review (Introduction) • BirchTree

Matt Birchler:

»

I have been using the Google Pixel 2, which is the latest and greatest Android phone out there. I chose this phone for my experiment because I wanted to leave no room for my conclusions to be colored by a bad OEM skin on top of Android or by a lower quality phone as my comparisons to iOS should be as fair as possible. Since I wanted to review Oreo, a Pixel was my only option in October, and thankfully that Pixel has top of the like specs and the best Android camera out there. This is Android how Google intended it.

The very, very TLDR version of my review is as follows:

Android has grown up considerably over the last decade. It’s no longer a complete disaster of a user experience, and some elements have actually surpassed what Apple is doing with iOS. Notifications are much better than they are on iOS and Google Assistant is more accurate and more helpful than Siri. that said, there are a million little (and not so little) things that truly make Android a sub-par experience for me. Your milage may vary, but the abysmal third party software available for the platform, poor inter-app communication, and countless stability issues make Android a place I only want to visit for a month or two per year, not something I can see myself using full time.

«

Everyone praises Android’s handling of notifications. Birchler’s points about inter-app communication (in the second part of this series) may surprise those who think it’s an Android strength.
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Brexit options: interactive diagram • Brexitoptions

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Click on the buttons above to explore some Brexit scenarios — relevant sections will turn purple

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This is a terrific illustration of where the UK would (will?) sit under various outcomes. Most of them look worrying to me. (Guess which one puts the UK on the same side of the fence as Turkey. Some irony there.)

Beautiful graphics, too.
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TV channels have ‘up to 10 years’ to meet tech threat • FT

Matthew Garrahan:

»

concerns are growing across Europe that the central role of public service broadcasters, or PSBs, will diminish.

“The growth and dominance of these companies is a threat to our entire media ecosystem,” said Noel Curran, director-general of the European Broadcasting Union, which represents PSBs. “Everybody in European media needs to ask: where are we going to be in five to 10 years?”

In Britain, programming delivered via broadband and made available on-demand has shaken television’s hierarchy, under which PSBs were the first ports of call on a television’s remote control and were easily regulated.

“What we have taken for granted as critical to the health of UK television is coming under serious threat,” said Jonathan Thompson, chief executive of Digital UK, which is owned by the BBC, ITV and Arqiva, the company that owns and operates the national transmitter network.

Under UK broadcasting regulations, public service channels must be prominently displayed in the electronic programme guides of cable and satellite providers.

But no such regulations exist for programming viewed on-demand: global digital subscription services such as Netflix “with deep pockets and big ambitions . . . are quickly muscling their way into prime position,” Mr Thompson said.

«

link to this extract

F-35 stealth fighter caught spying on its owners • News Australia

Jamie Seidel:

»

While privacy is a concern when it comes to personal internet and smartphone use, it’s becomes a whole different matter when applied to the military.

“Due to national considerations, there is a need for a filter where the user nations can exclude sensitive data from the data stream that is shared by the system with the manufacturer Lockheed Martin,” Gjemble told ABC Nyheter.

An unidentified participant walks past a poster advertising US defence equipment manufacturer Lockheed Martin’s F-35 stealth multirole fighter at the 2017 Berlin Security Conference in Berlin.

At the heart of the problem is the F-35’s artificial intelligence dubbed ALIS: it is responsible for logging performance data, as well as monitoring and optimising the aircraft’s sophisticated equipment. To do so it ‘phones home’ to Texas.

Norway says it has become impatient with continued delays in the promised provision of a data “filter” by Lockheed Martin. So it’s started its own project to find ways to block its new F-35s from reporting back to their former US masters.

It’s also worried that it won’t be able to optimise — or protect — the extremely sensitive Mission Data Files. These data packs optimise aircraft performance under different conditions, as well as provide a database of regional challenges and conditions.

Again, Norway wants Lockheed Martin out of the loop.

«

link to this extract

Apple agrees to deal with Ireland over $15bn unpaid tax issue • WSJ

Natalia Drozdiak:

»

Ireland will begin collecting €13 billion ($15.46 billion) in back taxes from Apple Inc. as soon as early next year after both sides agreed to the terms of an escrow fund for the money, Ireland’s finance chief said Monday.

The European Union in 2016 ordered Dublin to retrieve the billions of euros from Apple in uncollected taxes, which the EU said Apple avoided paying with the help of sweetheart tax deals from Ireland.

A year after that decision, however, Ireland still hadn’t recouped the money, leading the EU in October to refer Dublin to the bloc’s highest court, the European Court of Justice, for failing to implement the decision.

Ireland has said the money collection was held up by negotiations over the escrow account, which will hold the company’s dues while both Apple and Ireland appeal the EU’s 2016 decision in court.

Irish Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe Monday said he expected the flow of money from Apple to begin in the first quarter of 2018 once they complete the tendering processes to determine who would operate the account and who would then manage the fund.

«

Apple’s still disputing it, but this gets the money a little closer to Ireland’s exchequer.
link to this extract

I tried emailing like a CEO and quite frankly, it made my life better • Buzzfeed

Katie Notopoulos:

»

On a Monday morning, I began my experiment. I opened my email, deleted a few purely mailing list items, and got to work. For all the PR pitches I wasn’t interested in, I fired off a quick, “Thanks, but this is a pass for me.” It felt empowering.

The week before the experiment, I sent 21 emails total.

The week I started the experiment, I sent 84. (To be fair, about 25 of those were replies to people who emailed me specifically after I tweeted out that I was doing this experiment. I got a bunch of jokey emails, which I dutifully replied to.)

The other key part of boss-style email is doing a lot of email on the phone. This meant goodbye to my old crutch of “I’ll reply when I get to a computer.” I would fire off emails from my phone on the subway, walking around at lunch, on the toilet at the office. For the first time, I actually started using the suggested Gmail replies, which are actually pretty useful in the sense of purely transmitting information.

That first Monday, as I fired off a bunch of not-super-important emails, something strange happened. I felt…extremely good. I was high on the fumes of efficiency. No longer did a little cloud hang over me, the nagging feeling you get when you know you’re supposed to do something and can’t remember what.

The high didn’t wear off after that first day. It lasted all week. I applied the method to my personal email as well, and although I don’t get as many personal emails, I found it worked even better there.

«

FINALLY.
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No, I don’t want to configure your app! • Quils in Space

“Quil”:

»

There seems to be a very interesting trend re-emerging in software development lately, influenced by Node’s philosophy, perhaps, where to use anything at all you first need to install a dozen of “dependencies,” spend the next 10 hours configuring it, pray to whatever gods (or beings) you believe in—even if you don’t. And then, if you’re very lucky and the stars are properly aligned in the sky, you’ll be able to see “Hello, world” output on the screen.

Apparently, more configuration always means more good, as evidenced by new, popular tools such as WebPack and Babel.js’s 6th version. Perhaps this also explains why Java was such a popular platform back in the days.

HYPOTHESIS: The popularity of a tool is proportional to the amount of time it makes their users waste.

«

Though this post is from January 2016, it’s still true. I did try an app called Focos, which shows the output from the depth-mapping systems on the iPhone, and it has a different approach to making you configure the app: it doesn’t even begin explaining how to use it until you press some element. (Then it shows you in detail.) Much better than forcing you to sit through an intro.
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Spam is back • The Outline

Jon Christian:

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an individual who posted on a blackhat hacker forum that he could sell a database of tens of millions of US phone numbers, complete with associated email and postal addresses, told me that though he himself is annoyed by robocalls, he does what he needs to in order to earn a living. He obtains phone numbers from data sellers and lead generation sites that offer users free stuff in exchange for giving up their contact information, he said, and insisted that though he’s been slapped with fines in the past, he now complies with laws governing the sale of phone numbers.

“I mean I see it as a tool to help marketers find the right person,” said that man, who identified himself as Brian Masin during a Skype chat interview.

Masin, who said he’s based in the DC metro area and made as much as $160,000 per year in the internet marketing business, though not all from selling phone numbers, also mused that “if you buy homesec[u]rity online then you deserve” to get “duped.”

In addition to the FTC, a number of app developers and people like telecom consultant Roger Anderson, who created a posse of phone bots designed to waste robocallers’ time by pretending to be human, have all taken up the fight — but today, the calls still persist.

The second coming of spam isn’t just robocalls, of course. It’s rampant on Twitter, for example, where vast botnets boost follower counts for money and push political propaganda. It crops up on Tinder and OkCupid, where bots with voluptuous profile pictures stumble through flirty banter — “I am totally a sex addict” — and inevitably send links to websites that demand credit card numbers. Ashley Madison, a hookup site for extramarital affairs that gained notoriety when its user data was stolen in 2015, harbored millions of “sexbot” accounts intended to sucker users into paying for premium membership.

The volume of spam email has leveled off overall, and Google says it can detect 99.9% of spam and phishing attempts in Gmail. But what email spam is left has become more sophisticated and criminal.

«

Spam never went away, it just mutated. It’s like E.coli – its presence is an indicator of a sort of health.
link to this extract

Video: Seoul taps citizens for ambitious solar power goal • Tech in Asia

Here’s the transcript (via Steven Millward):

»

South Korea is building a “solar city.” In Seoul, mini solar panels are installed on apartment balconies. One can produce enough energy to run a fridge, which means lower electricity bills.

Goal: 1 million households with mini solar panels.

Target: Seoul’s citizens will produce 1 gigawatt of power by 2022. That’s about the same as one nuclear reactor

«

It doesn’t look particularly pretty, but you have to admire the determination.
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Apple plans new inexpensive 9.7in iPad for 2018, says sources • Digitimes

Monica Chen and Joseph Tsai:

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Apple is considering a new inexpensive 9.7in iPad priced at around US$259 for 2018, according to sources from related upstream suppliers, which added that the device should be able to attract more demand from price-oriented consumers, allowing Apple to maintain its present 10 million-unit tablet shipments a quarter.

With the new device, the sources expect the tablet market to witness a new wave of price competition among first-tier players including Samsung Electronics, Amazon, Huawei and Lenovo.

With the tablet market already becoming mature, Apple has been seeing weakening sales for its iPad series, while Android-based tablet shipments have also been declining. Most second- and third-tier brand vendors had already stepped out of the market, while China-based white-box tablet players had also shifted their focuses to other product lines after Intel stopped providing subsidies for using its CPUs.

«

To be precise, the non-iPad market has shrunk for the past two quarters (per IDC) while iPad sales have grown for two quarters, but it’s too soon to call a trend – though total tablet sales, including Windows tablets (by IDC’s definition, ie “slates”) have been falling for 12 successive quarters. Given that, any sort of growth is good. If Apple is going after the cheaper players, that could drive some out. Lenovo has no business selling tablets: it’s too small and doesn’t make money on them.
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Australia to probe Facebook, Google over media disruption • Reuters

Jonathan Barrett and Tom Westbrook:

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Like their rivals globally, Australia’s traditional media companies have been squeezed by online rivals, as advertising dollars have followed eyeballs to digital distributors such as Google, Facebook and Netflix Inc.

The government ordered the probe as part of wider media reforms, amid growing concern for the future of journalism and the quality of news following years of declining profits and newsroom job cuts and the rise of fake news.

“We will examine whether platforms are exercising market power in commercial dealings to the detriment of consumers, media content creators and advertisers,” Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) Chairman Rod Sims said in a statement.

The inquiry also would study how Facebook and Google operated to “fully understand their influence in Australia”, he added.

A Google spokesman said, “We look forward to engaging with this process as relevant.” Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The idea for an ACCC investigation was hatched during media reform negotiations in parliament earlier this year, which resulted in a relaxation of ownership laws to allow the country’s big players to boost their market share to better compete against online disruptors.

Independent media analyst Peter Cox told Reuters it was unclear what measures the competition regulator could recommend to the government even if it found the country’s media sector was increasingly anti-competitive.

“You could see this as a stepping stone towards another type of reform, such as tax,” said Cox.

«

So some means of getting them to pay taxes? Still not sure how that would work. And it’s completely obvious what they’ve been doing. (Thanks Oh Aye for the link.)
link to this extract

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

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: apologies for the malformed page yesterday, caused by a long long long Reddit link.

What do MPs get up to when it comes to sharing passwords? Photo by Stuck In Customs 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.

So! You didn’t receive your email last Friday, but instead it arrived Sunday? (Yes, it did. Go look.) That’s because you, personally,, tripped the volume of emails this account sends over into Mailchimp’s paid tier, but I didn’t notice until Saturday. Duh. Now it’s paid up, and the emails will continue.

This email will continue to be free. Please though make a donation to a deserving charity now we’re nearing Christmas. I’ll have suggestions in a week or so if you’re struggling.

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

‘Way too little, way too late’: Facebook’s factcheckers say effort is failing • The Guardian

Sam Levin:

»

“I don’t feel like it’s working at all. The fake information is still going viral and spreading rapidly,” said one journalist who does fact-checks for Facebook and, like others interviewed for this piece, was not authorized to speak publicly due to the continuing partnership with the company. “It’s really difficult to hold [Facebook] accountable. They think of us as doing their work for them. They have a big problem, and they are leaning on other organizations to clean up after them.”

Facebook announced to much hype last December [2016] that it was partnering with third-party factcheckers – including the Associated Press, Snopes, ABC News, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org – to publicly flag fake news so that a “disputed” tag would warn users about sharing debunked content. A Guardian review this year found that the fact-checks seemed to be mostly ineffective and that “disputed” tags weren’t working as intended.

Now, some of the factcheckers are raising concerns, saying the lack of internal statistics on their work has hindered the project and that it is unclear if the corporation is taking the spread of propaganda seriously.

Another fact-checking source said it was rare to see the fact-checks actually lead to a “disputed” tag on Facebook, raising questions about how the tool was functioning. Factcheckers said they had queries about how often the tags were placed on articles, what effect they had on the content and what sites were most often targeted – but said that Facebook had not provided information.

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Related: NYMag’s take on this piece: Facebook’s fact-checking effort was always going to fail
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Lenses are being reinvented, and cameras will never be the same • MIT Technology Review

These are UV-etched silicon with sub-light wavelength features on their surfaces:

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Metalenses have a wide range of applications. The most obvious is imaging. Flat lenses will make imaging systems thinner and simpler. But crucially, since metalenses can be fabricated in the same process as the electronic components for sensing light, they will be cheaper.

So cameras for smartphones, laptops, and augmented-reality imaging systems will suddenly become smaller and less expensive to make. They could even be printed onto the end of optical fibers to acts as endoscopes.

Astronomers could have some fun too. These lenses are significantly lighter and thinner than the behemoths they have launched into orbit in observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope. A new generation of space-based astronomy and Earth observing beckons.

But it is within chips themselves that this technology could have the biggest impact. The technique makes it possible to build complex optical bench-type systems into chips for optical processing.

«

More detail at ArXiv. The article has much more explanation of what metalenses are.
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Google reckoning with history of interoffice romance by top execs • The Information

Reed Albergotti:

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The romantic relationships within the walls of Google made ideal fodder for gossip columns and magazine profiles.

Co-founder Larry Page dated Google lieutenant Marissa Mayer in the company’s early days, and co-founder Sergey Brin later drew attention for dating Amanda Rosenberg, a younger colleague. CEO Eric Schmidt dated publicist Marcy Simon when she did work for Google. The stories had sex, money and power against a backdrop of one of the world’s largest tech empires. It was like something out of a rebooted soap opera—Dynasty 2.0.

But an examination by The Information found that those interoffice relationships, and others featuring some of the company’s top leaders, have for years been a flashpoint of frustration and anger among Google’s employees. The relationships often violated at least the spirit of a company policy that prohibits superiors from secretly dating subordinates. But employees noted that there had been no apparent repercussions for the powerful, mostly male, leaders who had such relationships.

As a result, many Google employees expressed the opinion that the company’s culture appears to tolerate, or even endorse, such workplace relationships. In interviews with nearly 40 current and former Google employees, many said the issue had tainted the perception of women who earn promotions, created uncomfortable encounters at off-site events and had raised concerns over whether human resources would address inappropriate conduct. Some described their own experiences with sexual harassment at the company.

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Wow. The story goes on to name a senior married (male) Google figure who it says had a relationship with a junior colleague – and a child by her. She left the company. Ooooof.
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How Peter Thiel and the Stanford Review built a Silicon Valley Empire • Stanford Politics

Andrew Granato on Thiel, who founded the Stanford Review magazine when he was there in 1987:

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Thiel was asked [in January 2017] how he knew that Trump was going to win. After all, wasn’t it extremely risky to go all-in for Trump when he was down in the polls and Silicon Valley strongly supported Clinton? Thiel replied that, two weeks before the election, some of his closest advisors and confidants wondered to him if they had backed the wrong horse and if it was too late to back off supporting Trump. Thiel, according to his own retelling, responded, “Are we allowed any knowledge other than social scientific knowledge?” And he argued that while the polls did seem to indicate that Trump would lose, he was more confident in his personal assessment of how the world works than the polls. Thiel’s confidence, of course, was vindicated when Trump won.

A former editor described Thiel’s response as “very much in character” for him: “On every major platform he’s built in his life, whether fighting a government authority or an upstart competitor, he tends to come up with ideas and dig in deep to them, and he doesn’t walk away.”

In Oct. 2016, shortly after Thiel donated $1.25 million to Trump, Thiel publicly apologized for passages in his 1995 book The Diversity Myth, such as claiming that some alleged date rapes were “seductions that are later regretted,” saying in a statement, “More than two decades ago, I co-wrote a book with several insensitive, crudely argued statements. As I’ve said before, I wish I’d never written those things. I’m sorry for it. Rape in all forms is a crime. I regret writing passages that have been taken to suggest otherwise.” But three months later, during the after party of the 30-year anniversary event at Thiel’s home, according to a former editor, Thiel stated that his apology was just for the media, and that “sometimes you have to tell them what they want to hear.”

«

Thiel isn’t immune from post-justification, then; Trump’s win was an accident of a tiny proportion of votes – less than 1% of those cast – in three states. An interesting article about a submarine in the seas of influence. (Thanks John N for the link.)

link to this extract

Apple is sharing your face with apps. That’s a new privacy worry • The Washington Post

Geoffrey Fowler:

»

Apple’s face tech sets some good precedents—and some bad ones. It won praise for storing the face data it uses to unlock the iPhone X securely on the phone, instead of sending it to its servers over the Internet.

Less noticed was how the iPhone lets other apps now tap into two eerie views from the so-called TrueDepth camera. There’s a wireframe representation of your face and a live read-out of 52 unique micro-movements in your eyelids, mouth and other features. Apps can store that data on their own computers.

To see for yourself, use an iPhone X to download an app called MeasureKit. It exposes the face data Apple makes available. The app’s maker, Rinat Khanov, tells me he’s already planning to add a feature that lets you export a model of your face so you can 3D print a mini-me.

“Holy cow, why is this data available to any developer that just agrees to a bunch of contracts?” said Fatemeh Khatibloo, an analyst at Forrester Research…

…It’s not clear how Apple’s TrueDepth data might change the kinds of conclusions software can draw about people. But from years of covering tech, I’ve learned this much: Given the opportunity to be creepy, someone will take it.

Using artificial intelligence, face data “may tell an app developer an awful lot more than the human eye can see,” said Forrester’s Khatibloo. For example, she notes researchers recently used AI to more-accurately determine people’s sexuality just from regular photographs. That study had limitations, but still “the tech is going to leapfrog way faster than consumers and regulators are going to realize,” said Khatibloo.

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Fowler’s point about the creep of creepiness is well made. (Though note it’s not detailed enough to hack your phone.)
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Hacking the House: do MPs care about cyber-security? • BBC News

Rory Cellan-Jones on the row over Nadine Dorries MP sharing her login details with her staff:

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does the House of Commons have a cyber-security policy? And if so, what does it say about logins? After all, this summer Parliament was hit by what was described as a “sustained and serious” cyber attack by hackers trying to access MPs’ email accounts.

It turns out there is a chapter in the House of Commons staff handbook which is very clear on this matter, and on the care needed to be taken with sensitive information stored on computers. Among a list of things it says “You MUST NOT” do is “share your password”.

Pretty clear then? Ah, but that applies to staff, not their bosses.

I consulted a couple of MPs – one Conservative, one Labour – about their attitudes to cyber-security. Both said that they would not dream of sharing their computer login – but admitted that most of their colleagues were far more lax. One told me that in general House of Commons cyber-security had been “really really bad”, although had improved since the July attack.

The MP went on: “Most MPs have that fatal combination of arrogance, entitlement and ignorance, which mean they don’t think codes of practice are for them.”

The other member – who had by the way come under attack from Russian hackers – said that it would be hard to enforce any code: “Ultimately this is a result of each MP and their office functioning as entirely independent small businesses. If one person wants to make daft decisions there is no way of forcing them not to.”

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The importance of the Dorries tweet is that it could explain how pornography got onto Damian Green’s computer, and yet he didn’t view it. Someone else on his staff was using his login.
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Computational Propaganda in Poland: false amplifiers and the digital public sphere • The Computational Propaganda Project

Robert Goraw at the Oxford Internet Institute:

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This report provides the first overview of political bots, fake accounts, and other false amplifiers in Poland. Based on extensive interviews with political campaign managers, journalists, activists, employees of social media marketing firms, and civil society groups, the report outlines the emergence of Polish digital politics, covering the energetic and hyper-partisan “troll wars”, the interaction of hate speech with modern platform algorithms, and the recent effects of “fake news” and various sources of apparent Russian disinformation.

The report then explores the production and management of artificial identities on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks— an industry confirmed to be active in Poland—and assesses how they can be deployed for both political and commercial purposes. The quantitative portion of the report features an analysis of Polish Twitter data, and demonstrates that a very small number of suspected bot accounts are responsible for a disproportionally large proportion of activity on the sampled political hashtags.

«

It’s getting slightly exhausting how full social networks are with lying crap.
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#KateSteinle hashtag visualizations • Medium

Erin Gallagher:

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Hashtags associated with the #KateSteinle verdict were megaphoned by at least 37 cyborgs that are tweeting between 47 to 739 tweets per day, including a brand new account that changed its “identity” mid-campaign. These supercharged accounts amplified hashtags that began as an angry public reaction to the Kate Steinle verdict but turned into a digital campaign of ethnic intimidation against immigrants.

#KateSteinle user-to-hashtag network 25,241 tweets November 30 — December 2

I started capturing tweets for hashtags associated with the #KateSteinle verdict on November 30 at 9:30pm est. From November 30 to December 2 at 11am est, I documented 37 accounts that are tweeting more than humanly possible and amplifying hashtags. There are more than 37 and they may not be intentionally coordinating together, however the effect of these cyborgs tweeting the same hashtags in the same time frame is like an engine running in the background, driving up the quantities of tweets and magnifying the reach of the trends.

The first account I looked at in this hashtag — Annon86368030 — was one of the top users for several hashtags and it appeared abnormal in gephi graphs. This is a brand new account that was created on November 30. Below you can see the account’s profile as it appeared when I found it on Friday morning December 1 and the after screenshot from December 2 when it changed to a plain black avatar and header image and changed its location from Kekistan to United States.

Despite being a brand new account, Annon86368030 managed to tweet 696 tweets in about one day.

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(For non-Americans, the Steinle verdict came from a murder/manslaughter trial of a Mexican national, deported multiple times from the US, who shot dead a woman in San Francisco in 2015. He didn’t deny the shooting but claimed it was an accident. He faces a prison sentence for handgun possession, but was acquitted of murder and manslaughter. As you’d expect, his immigration record was not part of the trial evidence.)

What’s surprising about this analysis is that accounts created on a day can tweet so much. I thought they’d be rate-limited. (Thanks Jim C for the link.)
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This robot aced an exam without understanding a thing • CNBC

Ruth Umoh:

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The Todai Robot, for example, was able to write a 600-word essay on maritime trade in the 17th century better than most students. Noriko Arai, AI expert and member of the team that built the robot, explains in her TED Talk “Can a Robot Pass a University Entrance Exam?” that this wasn’t because it possesses intelligence, but rather because it can recognize key words.

“Our robot took the sentences from the textbooks and Wikipedia, combined them together, and optimized it to produce an essay without understanding a thing,” Arai says.

“We humans can understand the meaning,” she says. “That is something which is very, very lacking in AI.”
Over the last year, there has been increasing concern over how smart robots are becoming and the eventual eradication of certain industries. However, most of the focus has been on the loss of blue collar jobs. But according to David Lee, vice president of innovation at UPS, it’s not just jobs like factory worker and truck driver at risk.

In his TED Talk titled, “Why Jobs of the Future Won’t Feel Like Work,” Lee says that even the smartest, highest-paid people will be affected by the “tremendous gains in the quality of analysis and decision-making because of machine learning.”

«

Its essay was marked in the top 20% of students on an entrance exam to the University of Tokyo. I’m not sure this matters. Better questions are: can it act on what it reports? Can it decide whether the content is correct or not? Synthesizing human writing is, as this demonstrates, something lots of students learn to do. What’s more important is learning what to do next.
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Google Home Mini crash/reboot if volume is too high • Google Product Forums

»

Not sure that this is the EXACT problem but it is the symptoms.

If I’m playing a song on Play music, then it will reboot after a few seconds.
After reboot, if I say “Set volume to 6” it will play the song ok.

Happens with multiple songs and extremely often.

«

Confirmed by multiple people. (And at Reddit.) Hardware, or possibly software, is hard.
link to this extract

If your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch unexpectedly restarts • Apple Support

»

If your device with iOS 11 unexpectedly restarts repeatedly on or after December 2, 2017, learn what to do. 

Try to update your device to iOS 11.2. After you tap Download and Install, the download will continue even if your device restarts. Wait for the update to complete.
If you can’t update, turn off notifications for all the apps on your device, then update your device to iOS 11.2:
• Tap Settings > Notifications.
• Tap an app, then turn off Allow Notifications. Repeat this step for each app.
• Update your device to iOS 11.2.

«

Software is hard.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Best estimates suggest this is the best-selling “stationary smart speaker”. But how big is the upside? Photo by MarkGregory007 on Flickr.

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

UK class action accuses Google of unlawfully harvesting personal data • The Guardian

Graham Ruddick:

»

More than 5 million people in the UK could be entitled to compensation from Google if a class action against the internet giant for allegedly harvesting personal data is successful.

A group led by the former executive director of consumer body Which?, Richard Lloyd, and advised by City law firm Mischon de Reya claims Google unlawfully collected personal information by bypassing the default privacy settings on the iPhone between June 2011 and February 2012.

They have launched a legal action with the aim of securing compensation for those affected. The group, called Google You Owe Us, says that approximately 5.4 million people in Britain used the iPhone during this period and could be entitled to compensation.

Google is accused of breaching principles in the UK’s data protection laws in a “violation of trust” against iPhone users.

«

Odd. This case was litigated back in 2014, where it was established that there is a tort in law of misuse of private data. That case dribbled away before it could reach the Supreme Court – Google is believed to have settled out of court – but now it’s back again with a new cast. It’s like a musical that never closes. (The establishment of the tort as a precedent means this case is very likely to succeed.)
link to this extract

Why did ProtonMail vanish from Google search results for months? • TechCrunch

Natasha Lomas:

»

In 2015, ProtonMail had passed half a million users. Earlier this year it exited beta, and added iOS and Android apps. It now has around two million users, according to founder Andy Yen. Back in March he told TechCrunch that ProtonMail was approaching break even — through donations and paid accounts.

However, in a blog post published on 26 October titled “Search Risk”, the company claims Google nearly killed its product and seriously dented its profitability by disappearing “ProtonMail” from relevant search results.

In November 2015, Yen writes that the company noticed it was no longer appearing in Google search results for related search queries — despite roughly doubling its user base by that fall — whereas all other major search engines were still returning ProtonMail prominently in their results:

ProtonMail tracked this situation through Spring 2016, trying to get in touch with Google to query why it had vanished from search results — and initially having no luck getting a response. It only eventually got an acknowledgment of the complaint in August after it had tweeted at Google staff.

After that public exchange, ProtonMail was apparently informed within a few days that Google had “fixed something” — and after that it was able to see immediately positive results:

A quick test confirms that a search for “secure email” or “encrypted email” in Google now returns ProtonMail as the top or second result.

«

They say they haven’t heard of other cases like it. Haven’t they heard of Foundem, which was suppressed for ages by Google? They probably will soon – Yelp has asked them to join an antitrust coalition against Google.
link to this extract

A stationary smart speaker mirage • Above Avalon

Neil Cybart on the Amazon Echo/Dot/etc and Google Home and Sonos One:

»

The major takeaway from customer surveys regarding smart speakers usage is that there isn’t any clear trend. If anything, smart speakers are being used for rudimentary tasks that can just as easily be done with digital voice assistants found on smartwatches or smartphones. This environment paints a very different picture of the current health of the smart speaker market. The narrative in the press is simply too rosy and optimistic.

Ultimately, smart speakers end up competing with a seemingly unlikely product category: wearables. In fact, stationary smart speakers and wrist wearables share a surprising amount of similarities. Each is ultimately based on handling tasks formerly given to smartphones and tablets. Two examples are delivering both digital voice assistants and sound. If the goal is to rely on a digital voice assistant, an Apple Watch wearer has access to Siri at pretty much every waking  moment. When simply wearing an Apple Watch, Siri is instantly available everywhere in the home. The same kind of access to Alexa would require five, ten, or maybe even 15 Echo speakers spaced strategically throughout the home (another reason why Echo sales are becoming increasingly misleading – some consumers may be buying a handful of $20 speakers at one time). With a cellular Apple Watch, Siri is now available outside the home even when users are away from their iPhones. Meanwhile, Alexa is stuck within four walls – at least until Amazon unveils its Alexa smartwatch. 

Wearables contain a much more attractive long-term value proposition than stationary smart speakers that have to be connected to a wall outlet. In addition, the presence of a screen provides even more value as it has become very clear that voice-first or voice-only interfaces just aren’t that efficient.

The writing is on the wall. The stationary speaker market is a stopgap measure taking advantage of relatively low wearables adoption. My estimate is that Apple Watch adoption stands at 3% of the iPhone user base (10% to 15% of iPhone users in the U.S.). As that percentage increases, my suspicion is we will start to see the stationary smart speaker market begin to experience usage and retention troubles.

«

I think he’s right that most people buy the cheapest one – ie the Dot – so there’s a race to the bottom. But what if wearables don’t quite take off?
link to this extract

Arkansas prosecutors drop murder case that hinged on evidence from Amazon Echo • NPR

Colin Dwyer:

»

Arkansas prosecutors have dropped their case against James Bates, whom they had charged with first-degree murder partly with the help of evidence collected by an Amazon Echo smart speaker. On Wednesday, a circuit court judge granted their request to have the charges of murder and tampering with evidence dismissed.

The prosecutors declared nolle prosequi, stating that the evidence could support more than one reasonable explanation.

The move marks a curious end to a still more curious case, which had revolved around the role played by a personal assistant device that’s supposed to begin recording as soon as someone says its wake word — “Alexa,” in this case — in its presence.

«

I guess *drum roll* they couldn’t get Alexa to talk.

I’ll get me coat.

link to this extract

Apple Heart Study launches to identify irregular heart rhythms • Apple

»

Apple today launched the Apple Heart Study app, a first-of-its-kind research study using Apple Watch’s heart rate sensor to collect data on irregular heart rhythms and notify users who may be experiencing atrial fibrillation (AFib).

AFib, the leading cause of stroke, is responsible for approximately 130,000 deaths and 750,000 hospitalizations in the US every year. Many people don’t experience symptoms, so AFib often goes undiagnosed.

To calculate heart rate and rhythm, Apple Watch’s sensor uses green LED lights flashing hundreds of times per second and light-sensitive photodiodes to detect the amount of blood flowing through the wrist. The sensor’s unique optical design gathers signals from four distinct points on the wrist, and when combined with powerful software algorithms, Apple Watch isolates heart rhythms from other noise. The Apple Heart Study app uses this technology to identify an irregular heart rhythm.

«

(You have to be over 17 to download the free app: “Infrequent/mild alcohol, tobacco or drug use or references.” Huh?)

Or you can get a $199 Watch band and a $99 annual subscription to a new offering from KardiaBand, which acts as an EKG with a thumb pulse reader attached to the band.
link to this extract

Google’s new Android app stops other apps from wasting your data • The Verge

Jacob Kastrenakes:

»

there’s a big button at the top of the app that lets you stop all background data usage, so only the app that’s actively onscreen can use mobile data. A chat-head style bubble will also pop up to let you know how much data your currently running app is using up. And if you don’t want to block every single app from using background data, Datally will let you go in and control data usage on an app by app basis, too.

If you’re a longtime Android user, Datally might not sound all that exciting. Nearly all of the app’s functions are already built into Android directly. But those features are hidden inside the settings menu, and they aren’t spelled out quite as neatly as they appear to be inside Datally. As a standalone app, it’ll also be much easier for people to find and remember to use.

Datally is being released as part of Google’s Next Billion Users initiative, which is focused on making Google products more usable in countries that have limited mobile connections and where lower-end hardware remains widespread.

«

Um.. wouldn’t it be better just to improve the settings layout? Or make it a marquee feature when people are setting up or updating their phone?

“Background App Refresh” (which this sounds like) is part of, yes, Settings on iOS; so is whether apps can use mobile data. This seems like a strange landgrab.
link to this extract

Meet the man who deactivated Trump’s Twitter account • TechCrunch

Ingrid Lunden:

»

His last day at Twitter [working on customer service at the Trust and Safety team] was mostly uneventful, he says. There were many goodbyes, and he worked up until the last hour before his computer access was to be shut off. Near the end of his shift, the fateful alert came in.

This is where Trump’s behavior intersects with Duysak’s work life. Someone reported Trump’s account on Duysak’s last day; as a final, throwaway gesture, he put the wheels in motion to deactivate it. Then he closed his computer and left the building.

Several hours later, the panic began. Duysak tells us that it started when he was approached by a woman whom he didn’t know very well. According to Duysak, the woman said that she had been contacted by someone asking about Duysak in connection with Trump’s Twitter account. After a moment of disbelief, he said he then looked at the news and realized what had happened.

«

Bahtiyar Duysak. He’s never going to have to buy himself a drunk again in his life.
link to this extract

Goodbye, Twitter • Rambling Space

Can Duruk likes Twitter; it’s the only social network he’s on. And he’s giving up Twitter. Why?

»

Would [a Nazi who appeared in his mentions] try to gang up on me? I have been bullied on Twitter before, people have tried to steal my account many times. But here was a Nazi. And then it hit me. Why am I engaging with Nazis? Why is this on me? Because Twitter wants me to.

There’s a perverse belief in American society that corporations exist on a different plane of reality. It’s not just Main Street vs Wall Street. But that corporations do business, and there are people, and sometimes they interact via #brands or whatever, but largely they are separate. But that’s just dumb. Corporations exist in a society. They are made up of people, operate via people. They have people on their boards, their employees are people. Software might be eating the world, but it hasn’t yet.

Corporations have voices. Here in the western world, they largely operate in democratic societies with a strong rule of law. They trust some people cannot come and take their property away. And more importantly, these people that make up these companies trust that their lives won’t be in danger for just being themselves, for being who they are. Yet, here we have people who want to throw it all out, and the strongest reaction from most social networks is “meh”. The profits Twitter (tries to) make are predicated on a set of values that these want to overthrow. Twitter is fine with it.

«

Read too his thought experiment on what Trump would have to do to be kicked off the service. (Permanently, I mean.)
link to this extract

We’re all part of Trump’s show • The New York Times

Bret Stephens:

»

The Trump news is scarier, funnier, more salacious and more relevant than anything else on TV. It’s why the apolitical Jimmy Fallon has floundered in the age of Trump while the hyperpolitical Stephen Colbert has thrived. For a president who cares more about ratings than he does about polls, this is the ultimate vindication. He minds less if you hate him so long as he knows that you’re thinking about him.

The truth about Trump is not that he’s crazy. He’s a narcissist and a neurotic with a feral talent for attracting the attention he craves. In Russia, Putin can compel attention thanks to his complete control over most media and many other aspects of ordinary life. In the United States, citizens can deprive Trump of his political oxygen simply by turning off and tuning out.

«

It would be terrific if politicians – and the media – would ignore the junk in the tweets and focus on the politics. Trump has actually accomplished very little. But the US TV networks are like cats and his tweets a laser pointer.
link to this extract

$99/month is a steal for CloudApp for iMobile • bylr.net

Dan Byler was browsing for an iOS-native cloud service and came across a thing called “CloudApp”:

»

The Setup Instructions info link goes to Apple’s own iCloud support site. And in case it’s hard to read, the app basically lists iCloud’s services as its list of features.1

But hey, it’s cheap! Only $99/month!

I nearly fell prey to the scam myself: while screenshotting the app, I accidentally subscribed (because of the way TouchID is integrated into the home button – and the home button is part of taking screenshots):

Fortunately, I know how to cancel iTunes subscriptions, but I’m sure a lot of the app’s users don’t.

I reported the app to Apple on November 26, but as of writing this (three days later) the app is still live in the App Store. Perhaps this helpful review of the App Store Review Guidelines will help inform whether this app is legitimate, according to the current rules:

1.1.6 False information and features, including inaccurate device data or trick/joke functionality, such as fake location trackers.

«

Not available in the UK. Unclear whether it’s still available in the US.

link to this extract

November 2016: American Airlines pilots upset with holiday bid schedule • Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Andrea Ahles, in November 2016:

»

American Airlines pilots are upset about their December flight schedules, saying that the carrier’s computer software unfairly assigned high-seniority pilots to fly on Christmas.

In a hotline sent to 15,000 pilots on Thursday evening, the Allied Pilots Association said the problems occurred with the version of preferential bidding system software used to create the December schedules.

“It has been botched,” said Dan Carey, the union’s president, at a news briefing on Wednesday. “We have senior pilots who will be working over the holidays in December and junior pilots who will be off.”

According to the union, a newer version of the software that American received in November could have been used to avoid some of the seniority issues. However, American’s information technology team said the software had not been fully tested and senior management chose to use the older version.

«

Something tells me that the problems that American announced this week weren’t down to a “computer glitch”. (Via Wendy Grossman.)
link to this extract

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

American Airlines has a ticklish problem with its pilots this Christmas. Photo by Nick Chill Photograph on Flickr.

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

AWS launches DeepLens artificial intelligence camera • CNBC

Jordan Novet:

»

The high-definition DeepLens camera, which AWS is revealing Wednesday at its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, ships with pretrained models that will make it easier for developers to start doing things like recognizing text characters that appear in a video stream. Alternatively, developers will be able to train their own image recognition models with the help of AWS’ new SageMaker AI service and then run those models on the camera.

DeepLens is coming out two months after Google — one of Amazon’s top cloud competitors — unveiled the Clips AI-powered camera, which captures photos and videos when interesting things happen in front of it.

But while Clips is intended for consumers and therefore could one day contribute meaningful revenue to Google parent company Alphabet, DeepLens is aimed at a more technical audience.

“It’s really designed to allow everyday developers to get experience doing machine learning and deep learning,” Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, told CNBC’s Jon Fortt in an interview this week.

In that sense, DeepLens bears a resemblance to Dash Buttons that AWS has previously sold to developers. A Dash Button is a dead-simple gadget with a single large button. Using AWS services, developers could control what happened when people pushed the button.

«

link to this extract

BuzzFeed is laying off 100 employees after missing its revenue goals • Recode

Peter Kafka:

»

BuzzFeed is laying off about 100 employees — about 6% of its workforce — after it failed to hit its 2017 revenue targets.

And Greg Coleman, the longtime digital advertising executive who joined the company as its president in 2014, is moving out as well. BuzzFeed is looking for a chief operating officer to take on some of his duties.

The cuts come as digital publishers worry that most of the money online advertisers are spending is going to two companies: Google and Facebook.

In a memo to his staff, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti described 2017 as a “transformational year” and said the company “dramatically grew.” But as the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, the company’s 2017 revenue fell short of its target by 15% to 20 percent, and investors and managers are worried about its spending.

Peretti says the cuts will affect the company’s business staff in the U.S. and both business and editorial staff in the U.K. He says the company will restructure its business team to help it diversify its revenue streams away from its dependence on “native” advertising.

«

link to this extract

Despite pockets of growth the personal computing device market is expected to decline at a -2% CAGR through 2021 • IDC

»

Traditional PC shipments are expected to drop from 260.2m units in 2016 to 248.1m in 2021 units, resulting in a five-year CAGR [compound annual growth rate] of -0.9%. However, when detachable tablets such as the Microsoft Surface Pro are added in, the five-year CAGR improves to +0.3%. Out of the five major product categories in the PCD market, desktops and slates will continue to decline over the duration of the forecast, while detachable tablets, workstations, and notebook PCs will show signs of volume improvement.

Although the 0.3% CAGR is positive news, examining the market along geographic lines shows the PCD market will continue to face challenges in growing both volume as well as margins. With over 69% of shipments in emerging markets going toward traditional notebooks and slate tablets in 2021, price points remain very sensitive in countries once pegged as ripe for growth. Conversely, while convertibles and ultraslim notebooks have found increased favor in developed markets, China will be the only developing market among the top 10 markets for these devices in 2021.

“Detachable tablets are expected to see double-digit growth from 2018 through 2021,” said Ryan Reith, program vice president with IDC’s Quarterly Mobile Device Trackers. “Windows-based detachables already count for close to 50% of the volume in this category and this isn’t expected to change much over the duration of the forecast. Apple’s iPad Pro lineup will remain at 30-35% of the category with the remainder going to Google-based devices. It is clear this is a category that has the interest and now investments from both PC and smartphone OEMs, but when looking at the overall PCD market it accounts for just 5% of volume in 2017, growing to 9.4% in 2021.”

«

link to this extract

Union says over 15,000 American Air flights in December have no pilots assigned • Reuters

Alana Wise:

»

Thousands of December flights on American Airlines (AAL.O) do not yet have pilots scheduled to work because of a system scheduling error, the carrier’s pilots union said as it gears up for one of the busiest travel periods of the year.

A glitch in the system that bids for pilots’ time off based on seniority is behind the shortage, the Allied Pilots Association union said. The group estimated that more than 15,000 flights from Dec. 17-31 – a critical holiday travel period – were affected.

“Basically there’s a crisis at American for manning the cockpits,” said Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association.

The system error was disclosed to pilots on Friday, the union said.

“We are working through this to make sure we take care of our pilots and get our customers where they need to go over the holiday,” American Airlines spokesman Matt Miller said on Wednesday.

In an email sent to employees, American had offered pilots extra pay to work certain flights in the busy holiday period, but a grievance filed by the union against management said that the restrictions on overtime pay were a violation of the group’s contract.

As of early on Wednesday, the union said management had still not reached out to discuss how best to resolve the shortage.

«

It’s not a “glitch in the system”. The computer worked fine. The programmers screwed up. Maybe they were at Ryanair before or something.
link to this extract

Apple releases macOS High Sierra security fix for critical root vulnerability • 9to5Mac

Zac Hall:

»

While the security vulnerability was a rather serious one, Apple has promptly responded with a fix less than 24 hours after it became public. The issue did not affect older versions of macOS, although there doesn’t appear to be a fix available for macOS 10.13.2 beta yet as the fix (downloadable here) only appears to apply to macOS 10.13.1 for now.

Apple issued this statement to 9to5Mac following the software fix:

»

Security is a top priority for every Apple product, and regrettably we stumbled with this release of macOS.

When our security engineers became aware of the issue Tuesday afternoon, we immediately began working on an update that closes the security hole. This morning, as of 8 a.m., the update is available for download, and starting later today it will be automatically installed on all systems running the latest version (10.13.1) of macOS High Sierra.

We greatly regret this error and we apologize to all Mac users, both for releasing with this vulnerability and for the concern it has caused. Our customers deserve better. We are auditing our development processes to help prevent this from happening again.

«

«

That’s about 24 hours (though it’s a huge blot on Apple’s copybook). Installation doesn’t require a restart. I didn’t get hacked. How about you?
link to this extract

Why [blank] gets you root • Objective See

Patrick Wardle:

»

I was intrigued by this bug [which lets you log in remotely or via the Terminal as the superuser “root” even when that is disabled], so decided to track down its root cause! That is to say, what is underlying reason for the bug?

First, let’s look what’s happening at a high level. When a user (or attacker) attempts to log into an account that is not currently enabled (i.e. root), the system will create that account with whatever password the user specifies…even if that password is blank. This is why to perform this attack via the UI, you have to click on ‘Unlock’ twice…

…Apple has now patched the bug! Kudos to them for the quick turn around. They assigned it CVE-2017-13872, and state in the security release notes that the bug was “a logic error existed in the validation of credentials.” Their patch “improved credential validation.” Diffing the PlistFile binary, we can see they expanded error checking to detect invalid credentials (i.e. when an non-authenticated attacker tries to set the root password).

«

Wardle goes into a lot of detail about what happened: it seems to be a non-zero output from a subroutine that ought to return a zero. It now checks for authentication. Would love to know the diff against the previous OS version, and why this arose. (I think Apple is drilling into this, possibly with real drills, right now.)
link to this extract

Paywall will be Wired’s ‘hedge against the future’ • WSJ

Benjamin Mullin:

»

Wired has not yet set a price for its paywall, [editor-in-chief Nick] Thompson said, but he expects it will cost less than a Spotify Premium subscription, which runs $9.99 a month. The paywall will be metered, but the magazine, which is owned by Condé Nast, has not yet finalized how many articles visitors will be able to read for free each month.

“The simple reason that we’re going to a paywall model is that I think it’s going to make money, and I’d like us to make more money,” Mr. Thompson said. “The deeper reason we’re going to a paywall model is because you need to hedge against the future.”

Encouraging readers to pay for quality journalism is something of a passion project for Mr. Thompson, 42, who said his plan has been to install a paywall at Wired since he started as editor in January. When he was editor of NewYorker.com, the site—also owned by closely held parent company Condé Nast—launched a successful paywall in 2014.

Condé Nast executives say the online subscription models at the New Yorker and Wired may be followed by paywalls at its other properties as the magazine industry undergoes profound changes, with ongoing declines in print revenue and heightened competition for digital advertising. The upheaval has led other publishers to look for the exits this year, including Rolling Stone pursuing a sale, Time Inc. getting acquired by Meredith Corp., and Rodale Inc. selling to Hearst.

«

Going to be chasing an ever-dwindling pool of people willing to pay yet another subscription, I think.
link to this extract

Zipline’s drones are delivering blood to hospitals in Rwanda • Time

Aryn Baker:

»

by the time mother and child arrived at the district hospital in Kabgayi, Ghislane had stopped moving. “We arrived too late,” Hamwe says. “There was no sign of life. I thought she was dead.” The nurses offered a blood transfusion as a last resort. Hamwe, numb and distracted, agreed. She was already on her phone, messaging the bad news to family back in the village.

Meanwhile, a lab technician at the hospital laboratory was typing out his own message, a request for two units of pediatric red blood cells, O+. Normally he would have dispatched a car and driver to the central blood bank in the capital, Kigali, a 3-hour round trip. But this time he was trying something new. His phone flashed a confirmation message: the blood was on its way, with an estimated delivery time of just six minutes.

Before long the high-pitched whine of a drone could be heard circling the hospital grounds. As it passed over the lab’s parking lot, it released a red cardboard box, attached to a paper parachute. Inside were two packets of blood, wrapped in insulating paper and still cold from refrigeration. A nurse rushed the blood over to the emergency wing, and within minutes, it was pumping into Ghislane’s small, limp body through an IV. The child opened her large brown eyes. It was Dec. 21, 2016, and Ghislane had just become the first person in the world who owes her life to a drone delivery.

«

The road network is often impassable; no such problem for a drone. Hospitals often don’t have the budget or electricity to refrigerate blood stocks. Range of 150km. (Do they recharge at the other end?)
link to this extract

Earthworms can reproduce in Mars soil simulant • Phys.Org

»

Two young worms are the first offspring in a Mars soil experiment at Wageningen University & Research. Biologist Wieger Wamelink found them in a Mars soil simulant that he obtained from NASA. At the start he only added adult worms. The experiments are crucial in the study that aims to determine whether people can keep themselves alive at the red planet by growing their own crops on Mars soils.

To feed future humans on Mars a sustainable closed agricultural ecosystem is a necessity. Worms will play a crucial role in this system as they break down and recycle dead organic matter. The poop and pee of the (human) Martian will also have to be used to fertilise the soil, but for practical and safety reasons we are presently using pig slurry. We have since been observing the growth of rucola (rocket) in Mars soil simulant provided by NASA to which worms and slurry have been added. “Clearly, the manure stimulated growth, especially in the Mars soil simulant, and we saw that the worms were active. However, the best surprise came at the end of the experiment when we found two young worms in the Mars soil simulant,” said Wieger Wamelink of Wageningen University & Research.

«

Hope Matt Damon has his flight booked. Though I don’t recall worms being mentioned in the film (or book).
link to this extract

A fake Bruce Willis story is being monetized by Google AdSense and prominently featured on YouTube • Media Matters

Alex Kaplan:

»

Google, through its advertising network Google AdSense, is monetizing multiple fake news websites spreading a bogus story that actor Bruce Willis wants critics of President Donald Trump to move out of the United States. Additionally, the made-up story is featured prominently on YouTube, which is owned by Google. This is just the latest example of Google floundering in its supposed efforts to fight fake news.

On November 27, Snopes.com flagged a “made-up news story” that circulated on fake news websites alleging that actor Bruce Willis said Trump was “doing great. In fact, he just might be the best US President ever.” The fake news articles additionally claimed that Willis said Trump’s critics should “go to Canada or something.” As Snopes noted, the fake story was based off of an October 2015 appearance by Willis on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon where he dressed up as Trump.

The fake story has gone viral, spreading to multiple fake news websites. Combined, the posts have received well over 100,000 Facebook engagements, according to social media analytics website BuzzSumo. Several of the websites running the story are using Google AdSense – identifiable by the blue triangle in the top right corner – to make money off of the fake story. (A previous Media Matters report found that Google AdSense was one of the most widely used advertising networks by fake news websites.) At least one of these posts with AdSense advertisements is on a website registered in Denmark.

«

Not surprising that AdSense is used; it’s gigantic and easy to get into. But how do you root out stuff like this? They can pretend that they’re “satire” sites.
link to this extract

Android’s Andy Rubin left Google after inquiry found inappropriate relationship • The Information

Reed Albergotti:

»

Andy Rubin, the creator of Android and a key executive at Google Inc. for nine years, left the company in 2014 shortly after an internal investigation determined that he had carried on an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate, The Information has learned.

Google initiated its investigation after an employee complained to the company’s Human Resources division about her relationship with Mr. Rubin, according to three people familiar with the matter. The people declined to elaborate on the specific nature of the woman’s complaint against Mr. Rubin.

Like many companies, Google has a policy that prohibits supervisors from having a relationship with a subordinate. Any manager entering into such a relationship has to report it to the company, which will move one of the two to a different department. The woman who made the complaint worked in Google’s Android division while Mr. Rubin ran it, The Information has confirmed… Two people familiar with the investigation said the conclusions were also discussed with Mr. Rubin.

These people, who did not want to be named because the matter was confidential, said the internal investigation concluded that Mr. Rubin’s behavior was improper and showed bad judgement.Two people familiar with the investigation said the conclusions were also discussed with Mr. Rubin.

These people, who did not want to be named because the matter was confidential, said the internal investigation concluded that Mr. Rubin’s behavior was improper and showed bad judgement…

Mike Sitrick, a spokesman for Mr. Rubin, denied that Mr. Rubin had done anything wrong or that his departure from Google was related to the complaint and investigation.

«

Rubin is now taking a leave of absence from Essential “for personal reasons” after The Information contacted his spokesman. Unclear whether the two events are linked.
link to this extract

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

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Apple’s got a problem with High Sierra’s root password: there isn’t one. Photo by autowitch on Flickr.

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

A selection of 13 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Judge stalls Uber trade-secret theft trial after discovering biz ran a trade-secret stealing op • The Register

Kieren McCarthy:

»

A judge today delayed the start of a trade-secret theft case against Uber – after evidence that the upstart operated a secret trade-secret-stealing unit was revealed at the last minute.

US district judge William Alsup said it would be a “huge injustice” for the trial to start as scheduled next week, after he was sent a letter by the US Attorney for Northern California last week that shed light on Uber’s secretive Strategic Services Group.

“If even half of what’s in that letter is true it would be a huge injustice to force Waymo to go to trial and not be able to prove the things that are said in that letter,” Alsup said during a hearing Tuesday morning in Uber’s home city, San Francisco.

Further intrigue followed the testimony of Uber’s former security analyst Richard Jacobs who Judge Alsup threatened to subpoena to give testimony and appears to have been the source of the information about the secretive unit…

…According to the security analyst, Uber actively sought to steal trade secrets from its rivals and set up the unit to do so.

The unit worked in parallel to Uber, and used “anonymous servers” that were separate from the main company to carry out its work. The unit also ran its own Wickr messaging service that was “invisible… not part of the regular server system,” and which automatically deleted messages, covering its trails.

The judge and Waymo’s lawyer quizzed Jacobs at the hearings, asking about specific allegations including that Uber had acquired the code base of rival operators as well as details of their drivers and business metrics.

«

Ooof. That’s a black op.
link to this extract

Don’t lock yourself out of your smart home: always carry a key • iMore

Serenity Caldwell:

»

Philips Hue is an example of a smart home system that degrades well: When the company’s lighting products are on and connected to their Internet-enabled bridge, they can be controlled from an app, Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. If the internet goes down, they can still be controlled by the switch of their parent light.

Same with Nest’s thermostat: Even if the internet goes down, Nest is still hard-wired into your wall so that you can adjust the temperature manually.

In theory, the same goes for smart locks: Most of them attach to the rear of a deadbolt, so your original key stays intact; should the lock’s smarts fail for any reason, you’ll still have the key.

But bringing automation and intelligent sensors to the smart home game has changed our habits. If you have a door that automatically locks behind you and knows when you return, you’re less likely to think about bringing its key when you go empty the garbage.

Unfortunately, that trust can quickly evaporate.

«

The obvious question: if you need a key to get into your smart lock, why not just use an old-fashioned lock?
link to this extract

macOS High Sierra ‘root’ security bug: Stop and do this NOW • iMore

Rene Ritchie:

»

This is a zero-day exploit. Lemi Orhan Ergin tweeted to Apple’s support account that he had discovered a way to log into a Mac running High Sierra by using the superuser “root” and then clicking the login button repeatedly. (Mac’s running Sierra or earlier versions of the OS are not affected.)

Ergin should absolutely have disclosed this to Apple and given the company a chance to patch it before it went public, and Apple should never have allowed the bug to shop, but none of that matters right now.

Here’s what’s important: The “root” account allows super-user access to your system. It’s supposed to be disabled by default on macOS. For whatever reason, it’s not on High Sierra. Instead, “root” is enabled and currently allows access to anyone without a password.

So, anybody who has physical access to your Mac or can get through via screen sharing, VNC, or remote desktop, and enters “root” and hits login repeatedly, can gain complete access to the machine.

Setting “root” password “fixes” the problem.

«

Apple is working on a fix. You can fix it in three steps in the Terminal. Personally? Not going to bother. You can’t get into it from the login window; you need to have access (via those methods mentioned) to the machine. Those are off, and screen lock keeps intruders away. Yeah, come at me.

Crappy of Ergin, though.
link to this extract

Lost: four million bitcoins gone forever study says • Fortune

Jeff John Roberts and Nicolas Rapp:

»

Just as gold bars are lost at sea or $100 bills can burn, bitcoins can disappear from the Internet forever. When all 21 million bitcoins are mined by the year 2040, the actual amount available to trade or spend will be significantly lower.

According to new research from Chainalysis, a digital forensics firm that studies the bitcoin blockchain, 3.79 million bitcoins are already gone for good based on a high estimate—and 2.78 million based on a low one. Those numbers imply 17% to 23% of existing bitcoins, which are today worth around $8,500 each, are lost.

While others have speculated about the number of lost bitcoins, the Chainalysis findings are significant because they rely on a detailed empirical analysis of the blockchain, where all bitcoin transactions are recorded.

«

That’s a lot of value. 7,500 are lost on a hard drive in a Welsh landfill. (That’s $75m at present prices.)
link to this extract

June 2016: how Yahoo derailed Tumblr • Mashable

Seth Fiegerman, in June 2016:

»

several Tumblr staffers we spoke with are quietly fantasizing about the social network getting spun off if Yahoo is sold as expected [to Verizon – a sale which has since gone through], however unlikely that spinoff scenario may be. The most popular rumor is that Karp would buy back Tumblr – though no one knows if he can afford it – to save his company from the grips of Yahoo, or whichever new owner comes along next.

Tumblr’s stumbles under Yahoo may go down as a cautionary tale, both for the perils of a large corporation buying a hot startup and for Silicon Valley’s belief that any social network reaching hundreds of millions of people will inevitably generate boatloads of cash one day. Tumblr was slow to monetize before it was acquired, struggled to grow revenue enough to meet its new parent company’s expectations in the first year and struggled even more to keep up with ambitious goals when Yahoo began to meddle.

The massive Tumblr acquisition may also come to highlight Mayer’s broader management missteps in making flashy bets, trusting deputies with limited knowledge of a product to oversee it and some mix of arrogance or denial in failing to quickly right those wrongs when necessary.

“It’s such a black eye,” says one former Yahoo executive. “It didn’t have to be this way.”

«

This doesn’t quite explain why Tumblr is seeing falling engagement. Stopped being the hot thing? Wasn’t mobile enough? Perhaps the latter, given how bad Yahoo has been at mobile.
link to this extract

Tesla truck will need energy of 4,000 homes to recharge, says study • FT

Peter Campbell and Nathalie Thomas:

»

One of Europe’s leading energy consultancies has estimated that Tesla’s electric haulage truck will require the same energy as up to 4,000 homes to recharge, calculations that raise questions over the project’s viability. 

The US electric carmaker unveiled a battery-powered truck earlier this month, promising haulage drivers they could add 400 miles of charge in as little as 30 minutes using a new “megacharger” to be made by the company. 

John Feddersen, chief executive of Aurora Energy Research, a consultancy set up in 2013 by a group of Oxford university professors, said the power required for the megacharger to fill a battery in that amount of time would be 1,600 kilowatts.

That is the equivalent of providing power for 3,000-4,000 “average” houses, he told a London conference last week, and is 10 times as powerful as Tesla’s current network of “superchargers” for its electric cars. 

Tesla declined to comment on the calculations.

«

Either a super-slow recharge, or you’ll have to deliver stuff to power stations a lot.
link to this extract

It’s OK to hate your spreadsheet – The Fieldbook Blog • Medium

Jason Crawford:

»

You’ve been thinking about moving to a “real” client tracking system (or CRM, or inventory). But nothing out there tracks your process as closely as the custom spreadsheet you made for yourself.

We understand, and we created Fieldbook just for you. Fieldbook is an online database that’s as easy to use as a spreadsheet, and lots of people like you have switched to it from Excel or Google Sheets, solving their spreadsheet headaches without giving up their customizations.
But we’ve learned from talking to our customers that it’s not always obvious how to move from a spreadsheet to a database system like Fieldbook, or how to reorganize your sheets to take full advantage of the features it offers.

That’s why we’re launching a new campaign called “I Hate My Spreadsheet”: We’ll take anyone’s ugly, frustrating spreadsheet and turn it into a tidy, delightful Fieldbook database—for free.

Our data experts will split up complex sheets into smaller ones, collect scattered info in one place for searchability, and eliminate data duplication. We do all the work, you don’t pay a cent until you’ve had a chance to try it and decide you want to keep it.

«

If you’ve got one of those spreadsheets…
link to this extract

Brands heed social media. They’re advised not to forget word of mouth • The New York Times

Janet Morrissey:

»

On average, 19% of a brand’s sales — or between $7trn and $10trn in annual consumer spending in the United States — are driven by social conversations, both online and offline, according to a new study conducted by Engagement Labs, a Canadian company that analyzes conversations around brands.

The study, which looked at 170 brands, found that companies often wrongly saw social media as an accurate and sufficient guide for tracking consumer sentiment. Often, though, that social conversation might be much different from what people are saying in private conversations with friends and family, the study said.

“The danger is you can make some pretty big mistakes if you assume the conversations happening online are also happening offline,” said Brad Fay, chief research officer at Engagement Labs and a co-author of the study. “Very often, they’re heading in different directions.”

The most negative and most outrageous comments often get the most traction on social media. And sometimes, people post comments about a topic just to get a reaction or to reflect an “image” or appear “cool” to their social media followers, when their actual views may be the opposite.

«

Terrible headline. Social media is word of mouth, but not representative. I like Jesse Singal’s take on this study and article:

»

people don’t know what to make of certain online conversations simply because so many standard conversational norms and rules and guardrails have been upended (20 years ago, it was much harder to bombard someone with death threats knowing that there was almost zero chance of being held accountable for it). So sometimes they respond similarly to how they would were the conversation in question taking place offline — traditionally, if a company got what felt like a flood of complaints, it probably meant something meaningful, because the cost of communicating with a company was higher. Today, I could send 100 angry tweets to a 100 companies in the next hour if I wanted.

«

link to this extract

Huawei says it can do better than Apple’s Face ID • Engadget

Jon Fingas:

»

Huawei has a history of trying to beat Apple at its own game (it unveiled a “Force Touch” phone days before the iPhone 6s launch), and that’s truer than ever now that the iPhone X is in town. At the end of a presentation for the Honor V10, the company teased a depth-sensing camera system that’s clearly meant to take on Apple’s TrueDepth face detection technology. It too uses a combination of infrared and a projector to create a 3D map of your face, but it can capture 300,000 points in 10 seconds — that’s 10 times as many as the iPhone X captures.

It’s secure enough to be used for payments (unlike the OnePlus 5T), and almost as quick to sign you in as the company’s fingerprint readers at 400 milliseconds. Even the silly applications of the tech promise to be better. The company showed off a not-so-subtle Animoji clone that could tell when you were sticking out your tongue in addition to tracking the usual facial expressions.

«

Wow!

»

There’s one major catch to this system: it’s not actually part of a product yet. Huawei’s Honor team showed the system without mentioning what phones would use it, let alone when they would ship.

«

Ah. Remember Huawei’s Force Touch implementation which it demonstrated before Apple? Still isn’t shipping in volume. Don’t hold your breath on this one.
link to this extract

Inside Airbnb’s Russian money-laundering problem • Daily Beast

Joseph Cox:

»

Scammers are leveraging Airbnb to launder dirty cash from stolen credit cards, according to posts on underground forums and cybersecurity researchers consulted by The Daily Beast.

The news shows how fraudsters will seize any opportunity they can, especially when there is an opening for pushing cash through online services, which sometimes require relatively little effort, a computer, and just a bit of creativity.

“People [have] been doing it forever,” one current and experienced credit-card scammer told The Daily Beast.

The Daily Beast found a number of recent posts on several Russian-language crime forums, in which users were looking for people to collaborate with to abuse Airbnb’s service. According to Rick Holland, VP of strategy from cybersecurity firm Digital Shadows, these operations rely on an individual or group using legitimate or stolen Airbnb accounts to request bookings and make payments to their collaborating Airbnb host. The host then sends back a percentage of the profits, despite no one staying in the property. 

In essence, it’s a way to extract value out of stolen credit cards. In another case, fraudsters might buy electronic goods such as iPhones with stolen cards to then resell at a profit. This is the same idea of laundering funds, just with Airbnb.

«

link to this extract

How often do consumers intentionally click mobile ads? • eMarketer

»

A new survey found that most consumers say they rarely or never mean to click on ads served up on their phones.

Button, a mobile partnership platform that facilitates discovery and transactions for brands, and App Annie, a mobile app data and insights provider, surveyed 1,106 US smartphone users ages 18 to 73. The study found that for the most part, consumers aren’t too keen on mobile ads.

Take millennials, for example. More than four in 10 said they rarely click on a mobile ad, and another 17% said they never did.

While there were some (31%) who said they sometimes click on a mobile ad, very few (10%) did so regularly.

This was the case for older consumers as well. In fact, baby boomers were the least likely to engage with mobile ads. Nearly a quarter said they never did, while another 49% said they rarely did so. Just 4% said they clicked on a mobile ad at least somewhat often.

Meanwhile, ads promoting mobile apps tell a somewhat different story. The study found that when it comes to those types of ads, consumers are more engaged than with ads in general. But even that engagement rate is declining.

«

Frankly, I’m surprised it’s that high. Given these are self-reported, these may be on the low side – people hit ads all the time because they’re under their fingers.
link to this extract

Google says a fix has been identified for Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL random reboots • Android Police

Richard Gao:

»

Quite a few people have been experiencing random reboots on their Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL smartphones, and they’ve all been left to helplessly wait for the problem to be resolved. However, Google is saying that it’s now identified a fix, though specifics weren’t discussed.

Orrin, a community manager in Google Product Forums’ Pixel User Community, relayed the above message to a number of threads that had been created about random reboots. Aside from the facts that a fix has been discovered and that a fix will be rolling out in a couple of weeks, we still don’t have any information about why this was occurring and what the fix does.

«

Given the tiny number of phones that Google has sold, this laundry list of problems is just amazing.
link to this extract

The impossibility of intelligence explosion • Medium

François Chollet:

»

What would happen if we were to put a freshly-created human brain in the body of an octopus, and let in live at the bottom of the ocean? Would it even learn to use its eight-legged body? Would it survive past a few days? We cannot perform this experiment, but given the extent to which our most fundamental behaviors and early learning patterns are hard-coded, chances are this human brain would not display any intelligent behavior, and would quickly die off. Not so smart now, Mr. Brain.

What would happen if we were to put a human — brain and body — into an environment that does not feature human culture as we know it? Would Mowgli the man-cub, raised by a pack of wolves, grow up to outsmart his canine siblings? To be smart like us? And if we swapped baby Mowgli with baby Einstein, would he eventually educate himself into developing grand theories of the universe? Empirical evidence is relatively scarce, but from what we know, children that grow up outside of the nurturing environment of human culture don’t develop any intelligence beyond basic animal-like survival behaviors. As adults, they cannot even acquire language.

If intelligence is fundamentally linked to specific sensorimotor modalities, a specific environment, a specific upbringing, and a specific problem to solve, then you cannot hope to arbitrarily increase the intelligence of an agent merely by tuning its brain — no more than you can increase the throughput of a factory line by speeding up the conveyor belt.

«

link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Tumblr activity is declining. How long has it got? Photo by Scott Beale on Flickr.

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

How a Radio Shack robbery could spur a new era in digital privacy • The New York Times

There’s a Supreme Court case with a decision expected in June which could have a huge effect on privacy law in the US:

»

The case concerns Timothy Ivory Carpenter, who witnesses said had planned the robberies, supplied guns and served as lookout, typically waiting in a stolen car across the street. “At his signal, the robbers entered the store, brandished their guns, herded customers and employees to the back, and ordered the employees to fill the robbers’ bags with new smartphones,” a court decision said, summarizing the evidence against him.

In addition to presenting testimony, prosecutors relied on months of records obtained from cellphone companies to prove their case. The records showed that Mr. Carpenter’s phone had been nearby when several of the robberies happened. He was convicted and sentenced to 116 years in prison.

Mr. Carpenter’s lawyers said cellphone companies had turned over 127 days of records that placed his phone at 12,898 locations, based on information from cellphone towers. Prosecutors could tell whether he had slept at home on given nights and whether he attended his usual church on Sunday mornings.

“Never before in the history of policing has the government had the time machine it has here,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents Mr. Carpenter. Mr. Wessler said prosecutors should be required to obtain a warrant when they seek more than 24 hours’ worth of location data.

«

link to this extract

Death by Pokémon GO • SSRN

Mara Faccio and John McConnell, both of Purdue University:

»

Based on detailed police accident reports for Tippecanoe County, Indiana, and using the introduction of the virtual reality game Pokémon GO as a natural experiment, we document a disproportionate increase in vehicular crashes and associated vehicular damage, personal injuries, and fatalities in the vicinity of locations, called PokéStops, where users can play the game while driving.

The results are robust to using points of play, called Gyms, that cannot be used to play the game while driving as a placebo.

We estimate the total incremental county-wide cost of users playing Pokémon GO while driving, including the value of the two incremental human lives lost, to be in the range of $5.2m to $25.5m over only the 148 days following the introduction of the game. Extrapolation of these estimates to nation-wide levels yields a total ranging from $2bn to $7.3bn for the same period.

«

That’s quite a cost. And don’t forget there are confirmed reports of people dying in crashes while texting, tweeting, etc.
link to this extract

Samsung hails ‘graphene ball’ battery success • FT

Song Jung-a:

»

Samsung said the graphene-based battery would take just 12 minutes to be fully charged; current lithium-ion batteries take about an hour. The new battery could also be used for electric vehicles, as it can maintain stability at up to 60 degrees Celsius. 

The company has stepped up its research into battery technology in the wake of last year’s Galaxy Note 7 smartphone safety debacle. The recall and subsequent withdrawal of the fire-prone model cost the company more than $5bn, and some of the phones caught fire due to faulty lithium-ion batteries, according to Samsung.

SAIT has developed a way to use silica to synthesise graphene like three-dimensional popcorn, and use the graphene “balls” as material for advanced lithium-ion batteries, the company said. Samsung has applied for patents for the technology in South Korea and the US. 

According to experts, graphene is more energy efficient so it allows room for other cathode materials. As a result, smartphones with graphene-based batteries can be slimmer and lighter but with a greater capacity.

«

link to this extract

A sense of units and scale for electrical energy production and consumption • Our World in Data

Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser:

»

To make our full data entry on Energy Production & Changing Energy Sources as useful and clear as possible, we have standardized all of our energy data into a single energy unit: the watt-hour (Wh). The only variation on the watt-hour which we have used is in scaling large numbers into kilowatt, megawatt or gigawatt-hours (which are one thousand, million, and billion watt-hours, respectively). The base unit of the watt-hour, however, remains consistent. This should help to reduce confusion for the first of the three reasons [described earlier in the blogpost].

To address the latter two challenges we have produced the chart shown below, which aims to provide a sense of scale for both electricity production and consumption [clicking on this chart offers a pop-out version, for which some finer aspects can be more easily read]. It is comprised of two scales: electricity production and electricity consumption. On the left-hand side we have a chart which extends from zero up to 100,000 MWh. The individual arrows represent the daily electrical outputs of different plant types; as we see, there is a large range of outputs depending on the size and conditions of the specific facility. The average daily output of specific power plants (some of which you may recognize) are shown and labelled as individual stars.

«

This is useful.
link to this extract

A Thanksgiving carol: how those smart engineers at Twitter screwed me • Errata Security

Rob Graham, at his parents for Thanksgiving, is helping to stop his mum being bothered by Twitter email notifications:

»

It’s now obvious my mom accidentally clicked on the [Confirm] button. I don’t have any proof she did, but it’s the only reasonable explanation. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have gotten the “Moments” messages. My mom disputed this, emphatically insisting she never clicked on the emails.

It’s at this point that I made a great mistake, saying:

“This sort of thing just doesn’t happen. Twitter has very smart engineers. What’s the chance they made the mistake here, or…”.

I recognized condescension of words as they came out of my mouth, but dug myself deeper with:

“…or that the user made the error?”

This was wrong to say even if I were right. I have no excuse. I mean, maybe I could argue that it’s really her fault, for not raising me right, but no, this is only on me.

Regardless of what caused the Twitter emails, the problem needs to be fixed. The solution is to take control of the Twitter account by using the password reset feature. I went to the Twitter login page, clicked on “Lost Password”, got the password reset message, and reset the password. I then reconfigured the account to never send anything to my mom again.

But when I logged in I got an error saying the account had not yet been confirmed. I paused. The family dog eyed me in wise silence. My mom hadn’t clicked on the [Confirm] button – the proof was right there.

«

So how the hell is she getting the emails? All will be explained.
link to this extract

Hundreds of iPhone users complain about the word ‘It’ autocorrecting to ‘I.T’ on iOS 11 • Mac Rumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

Many users claim the apparent autocorrect bug persists even after rebooting the device and performing other basic troubleshooting.

A temporary workaround is to tap Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement and enter “it” as both the phrase and shortcut, but some users insist this solution does not solve the problem.

A less ideal workaround is to toggle off auto-correction and/or predictive suggestions completely under Settings > General > Keyboard.

The issue is notable given Apple just recently addressed a similar bug that caused the letter “i” to autocorrect to “A[?]” on iOS 11 and later. The fix was included in iOS 11.1.1, publicly released in early November.

This similar “it” to “I.T” issue does not appear to be fixed in iOS 11.1.1 and later. It’s unclear if a future software update will be required to address the problem…

«

Seems as though Apple is being too aggressive with the machine learning applied to typing.
link to this extract

Tumblr is tumbling • Medium

Álex Barredo:

»

Less than a year after the deal was closed, Tumblr peaked in activity. By February of 2014, there were more than 106m new posts each day on the platform. Today that figure has been slashed by two thirds to around 35m.

Tumblr peak of activity was between Dec 2013 and February 2014 (Álex Barredo)

These figures are derived by tracking the incremental unique identification of every new post on Tumblr. By comparing it with the date of the posts themselves, we can know a very close to exact number of posts made a day. The figures are backed up by Tumblr’s public stats (which isn’t updated constantly, so it’s not easy to get exact data) as archived on the Internet Wayback Machine for different times in history.

The number of new blogs created every day has also decreased. Every day, more than 130,000 blogs are created, according to Tumblr public stats. That metric is half of what it was at its peak, also in early 2014, when more than 240,000 new blogs were opened on the platform every day, a 45% decrease.

With new blogs and new posts going down every month, it’s hard to see how many actual users are left on the platform. Tumblr has never publicly disclosed active accounts figures, a semi-standard way of measuring engagement in social platforms.

«

There might be some sort of floor for use, but there’s no sign it has been hit yet. Separately, founder David Karp announced on Monday that he’s leaving. Funny thing: in August 2013 it was revealed that if he stayed for at least four years, he’d get a $110m earn-out from the $1bn purchase.
link to this extract

The many faces of “Distracted Boyfriend” • I/O – Medium

Leigh Alexander:

»

We are reconsidering and rediscovering what “truth” means in a world where plentiful, malleable, manipulable digital society looms larger and larger. On one hand, the word “empathy” comes up frequently in tech industry conversation around how to help users feel a sense of human relationship toward others when they are not present or “real” in the familiar sense, or when some kind of interface is involved. On the other hand, many people say they struggle with overwhelm, suddenly hyperconnected to the real, daily stories of people suffering from natural disasters, state violence, racism, or abuse.

Under these circumstances, stock photos are the ideal medium for public cartooning. They are the only thing left on the internet that is “anonymous,” in a sense — the people in the photos are often white actors pretending to be people in generic or inane situations, and thus are some of the few uncomplicated targets left. They are pictures of what we used to believe the world looked like, before the internet made us real to each other, for better or worse.

«

This is a wonderful essay. There are two others, previous to it. One about “the slimy Technicolor world of satisfying YouTube videos” takes you to quite a strange place.
link to this extract

Linux champion Munich will switch to Windows 10 in €50m rollout • ZDNet

Nick Heath:

»

Munich mayor Dieter Reiter said the move to Windows 10 [on 29,000 PCs, beginning in 2020 for two years] is necessary to simplify the management of the city’s desktops. By switching the Windows 10, he says the council will no longer have to run two desktop operating systems side-by-side. Reiter was referring to a longstanding practice at Munich of running both LiMux and a minority of Windows machines, which are kept for applications not compatible with Linux and where virtualization is not an option.

“We always had mixed systems and what we have here is the possibility of going over to a single system. Having two operating systems is completely uneconomic,” he said, speaking at the full council meeting yesterday where the move to Windows was approved.

There is disagreement over what proportion of machines run Windows, with critics of the current setup saying it is as high as 40% PCs, while others argue it stands at about 20%. That said, the council has been running both systems side-by-side for more than 10 years, but has only recently highlighted managing twin systems as a problem.

Beyond simplifying the city’s desktop estate, Mayor Reiter said a return to Windows was needed to resolve unhappiness with the performance of Munich’s IT.

“I’ve never said I’m an expert in IT procurement. But I’m backed by 6,000 co-workers who also aren’t satisfied with the performance of the existing systems,” he said.

«

Didn’t want to try Chromebooks?
link to this extract

Google’s CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American • Terence Eden’s Blog

Terence Eden:

»

A few days ago, I had to complete a CAPTCHA. One of those irritating little web tests which is supposed to prove that you are a human. Here’s what I got:

Guess what, Google? Taxis in my country are generally black. I’ve watched enough movies to know that all of the ones in America are yellow. But in every other country I’ve visited, taxis have been a mish-mash of different hues.

This annoys me. Will Google’s self driving cars simply not recognise London’s Black Cabs? Will any yellow car in the UK be classified as a taxi by the infallible algorithm? Will Google refuse to believe I’m human simply because I don’t know what a Twinkie is?

Before sticking a comment below, riddle me this – if something costs a half-a-crown, and you pay with a florin, how many tanners will you get in your change?

«

Add this to the “British children saying ‘call 911′”.
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.

Yup, you just need to learn how to merge in traffic. Photo by wiccked on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you, Man (Person) Of The Year. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Staggering variety of clandestine trackers found in popular Android apps • The Intercept

Yael Grauer:

»

Researchers at Yale Privacy Lab and French nonprofit Exodus Privacy have documented the proliferation of tracking software on smartphones, finding that weather, flashlight, rideshare, and dating apps, among others, are infested with dozens of different types of trackers collecting vast amounts of information to better target advertising.

Exodus security researchers identified 44 trackers in more than 300 apps for Google’s Android smartphone operating system. The apps, collectively, have been downloaded billions of times. Yale Privacy Lab, within the university’s law school, is working to replicate the Exodus findings and has already released reports on 25 of the trackers.

Yale Privacy Lab researchers have only been able to analyze Android apps, but believe many of the trackers also exist on iOS, since companies often distribute for both platforms. To find trackers, the Exodus researchers built a custom auditing platform for Android apps, which searched through the apps for digital “signatures” distilled from known trackers. A signature might be a tell-tale set of keywords or string of bytes found in an app file, or a mathematically-derived “hash” summary of the file itself.

The findings underscore the pervasiveness of tracking despite a permissions system on Android that supposedly puts users in control of their own data. They also highlight how a large and varied set of firms are working to enable tracking…

…Among the Android apps identified by the researchers were, with six or seven trackers each, dating apps Tinder and OkCupid, the Weather Channel app, and Superbright LED Flashlight; the app for digital music service Spotify, which embedded four trackers, including two from Google; ridesharing service Uber, with three trackers; and Skype, Lyft, Accuweather, and Microsoft Outlook.

«

BoingBoing is not pleased about the lack of availability for iOS:

»

As Exodus and Yale note, these trackers are almost certainly also present in iOS: the companies that make them advertise their iOS compatibility, for one thing. But iOS is DRM-locked and it’s a felony – punishable by a 5-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense in the USA under DMCA 1201, and similar provisions of Article 6 of the EUCD in France where Exodus is located – to distribute tools that bypass this DRM, even for the essential work of discovering whether billions of people are at risk due to covert spying from the platform.

«

Would be good to get some info about the Android apps, and then make some suppositions about the iOS ones. (Though I think many more Android apps are ad-supported than iOS ones: people pay for the latter.) Also, “digital signatures for known trackers” is a bit weak. The Exodus page suggests it analyses network traffic on a simulated device.
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More than a million pro-repeal net neutrality comments were likely faked • Hackernoon

Jeff Kao:

»

NY Attorney General Schneiderman estimated that hundreds of thousands of Americans’ identities were stolen and used in spam campaigns that support repealing net neutrality. My research found at least 1.3 million fake pro-repeal comments, with suspicions about many more. In fact, the sum of fake pro-repeal comments in the proceeding may number in the millions. In this post, I will point out one particularly egregious spambot submission, make the case that there are likely many more pro-repeal spambots yet to be confirmed, and estimate the public position on net neutrality in the “organic” public submissions.¹

Key Findings:
• One pro-repeal spam campaign used mail-merge to disguise 1.3 million comments as unique grassroots submissions.
• There were likely multiple other campaigns aimed at injecting what may total several million pro-repeal comments into the system.
• It’s highly likely that more than 99% of the truly unique comments³ were in favor of keeping net neutrality.

«

Less than 800,000 of the 22m comments (ie about 3%) estimated to be unique. Out of 1,000 sampled, only three were pro-repeal.
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Drivers who merge at the last minute may be annoying … but they’re right • HowStuffWorks

Jesslyn Shields:

»

If you’re old enough to drive, you’re old enough to have some thoughts about the best way to merge into highway traffic when your lane is ending or closing due to a wreck or road work. When you see the big, orange “LANE CLOSED IN 1000 FT” sign, you’ve got a couple of options:

• Immediately turn on your blinker and wait until somebody in the next lane lets you in.
• Just stay in your lane and wait for all the polite people to get out of your way before zooming to the front of the line and merging when the lane closes. Watch as people who merged early rage in your general direction.

To most people, the first option seems more courteous and patient — less selfish. But study upon study proves the upstanding early-mergers among us are just creating a single long, slow line of traffic that’s not only frustrating for drivers, it’s inefficient because it minimizes the amount of usable road — and it even causes accidents.

What we all should be doing is called the “zipper merge,” or Reißverschlusssystem, as the Germans call it. In this system, every car in the lane that’s ending drives all the way up to the front of the line and takes turns merging with the other lane of traffic. (From above, it looks a bit like teeth on a zipper coming together.) Because the system uses all the available road space for as long as possible, it cuts congestion by 40%.

«

Just putting this aside to read out to my wife for the next time we’re on a motorway. That 40% figure is quite something. Given how bad tailbacks can be from this, why aren’t there signs about it at such merge points?
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FBI gave heads-up to fraction of Russian hackers’ US targets • Associated Press

Raphael Satter, Jeff Donn and Desmond Butler:

»

In the absence of any official warning, some of those contacted by AP brushed off the idea that they were taken in by a foreign power’s intelligence service.

“I don’t open anything I don’t recognize,” said Joseph Barnard, who headed the personnel recovery branch of the Air Force’s Air Combat Command.

That may well be true of Barnard; Secureworks’ data suggests he never clicked the malicious link sent to him in June 2015. But it isn’t true of everyone.

An AP analysis of the data suggests that out of 312 U.S. military and government figures targeted by Fancy Bear, 131 clicked the links sent to them. That could mean that as many as 2 in 5 came perilously close to handing over their passwords.

It’s not clear how many gave up their credentials in the end or what the hackers may have acquired.

Some of those accounts hold emails that go back years, when even many of the retired officials still occupied sensitive posts.

Overwhelmingly, interviewees told AP they kept classified material out of their Gmail inboxes, but intelligence experts said Russian spies could use personal correspondence as a springboard for further hacking, recruitment or even blackmail.

«

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Inside the X moonshot factory: Where Google’s ideas fly high (or fizzle) • GeekWire

Alan Boyle:

»

“We’re very bullish about Loon, and they have significant work still to do — call it two or three minor miracles that they still need in order to be a thriving business,” [Google X chief Astro] Teller said. “But unlike some projects, they have about 10 different levers that they can pull, so they can spread that need for two or three small miracles across a lot of different things. … We have great confidence that they’re going to do it.”

Teller voiced great confidence in X’s future as well. More than a year ago, there were rumblings that the moonshot factory was getting bogged down in organizational inertia, but the emergence of Waymo and other graduates seems to have turned the tide.

Idea factories are turning into a growth industry — thanks in part to new entrants in the Seattle area such as BlueDot, Intellectual Ventures’ ISF Incubator and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence’s startup incubator. The way Teller sees it, all that interest validates the approach that he’s been pioneering for years.

“I feel like we’re in competition with the problems, not in competition with other people trying to solve problems,” he told GeekWire. “I’m so happy to see other groups trying to solve some of humanity’s problems.”

«

Because there’s nothing new to say about Google X (it’s been written up scores of times), whenever you see a profile of it and/or Astro Teller, the question to ask is “what perceived problem does Google PR want this article to solve?” The answer’s in that “organisational inertia” quote: make it seem zippy again.
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Australian coalition could allow firms to buy access to facial recognition data • The Guardian

Elise Thomas:

»

The Australian federal government is considering allowing private companies to use its national facial recognition database for a fee, documents released under Freedom of Information laws reveal.

The partially redacted documents show that the Attorney General’s Department is in discussions with major telecommunications companies about pilot programs for private sector use of the Facial Verification Service in 2018. The documents also indicate strong interest from financial institutions in using the database.

The government has argued that the use of facial recognition is necessary for national security and to cut down on crimes such as identity fraud. The Attorney General’s Department says private companies could only use the service with the person’s consent.

But experts and civil society advocates have expressed concerns over lack of transparency and oversight of facial recognition programs.

Monique Mann, a director of the Australian Privacy Foundation and a lecturer at the faculty of law at the Queensland University of Technology, said that requiring companies to ask for consent may not be enough to protect consumers’ rights or mitigate the risks involved with biometric data, and would encourage firms to store more data.

«

Where have Australians voted for this?
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ZTE Axon M review: double trouble – The Verge

Chaim Gartenberg on ZTE’s phone which gives you two side-by-side portrait screens, so basically a small Android tablet with a fold (or you can run two phone apps side-by-side):

»

The Axon M isn’t the first attempt at a dual-screen Android phone. The benefit of time and more powerful hardware means that the Axon M can actually follow through on some of the promises, like running multiple apps and full-screen integration, that precursors like the Kyocera Echo simply weren’t able to do.

But if the Axon M is the first dual-screen phone that can actually execute the idea of a two-screened device, using it in practice has me doubting whether the idea actually has practical merit. It is cool, on a purely technical level, to be able to unfold your phone and run a giant version of Alto’s Adventure or two apps side by side. But between the hacked-together software execution and the overall lack of productive application for it, it’s hard to look at the Axon M as anything more than a fun gimmick. And with the hefty $725 price tag and a plethora of more powerful, better-designed, and cheaper Android flagships out there, it’s probably worth sticking to one screen for now.

«

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Security advice for Congressional campaigns • Tech Solidarity

Maciej Ceglowski (who runs Pinboard) is advising Congressional teams on how to avoid being hacked, or leaving private information where it will become public:

»

Thank you for attending a training session! We covered a lot of ground, so these notes are meant to serve as a reference and reminder of the advice we gave you.

Remember that as a Congressional campaign, you are at exceptionally high risk. The guidelines below are intended to protect you against the kind of threats we saw in 2016. They are ranked in rough descending order of priority.

The good news is, if you follow these guidelines, you will have a high level of protection against being ‘Podesta-ed’. The easiest way to get this protection is to form good security habits before you need them.

«

The main thrust: trust Google for the content and software, iPhones and iPads for the hardware, two-factor everything. “The least safe way to open an attachment is to double-click it on your laptop. Never do this.” Advice for the ages.
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Fixing the MacBook Pro • Marco.org

Marco Arment:

»

Despite my love for the previous Retina MacBook Pro, I won’t be able to use it forever. The best laptop to ever exist should be in the future, not the past.

There’s a lot to like about the new MacBook Pros, but they need some changes to be truly great and up to Apple’s standards.

Here’s what I’m hoping to see in the next MacBook Pro that I believe is technically possible, reasonable, widely agreeable, and likely for Apple to actually do, in descending order of importance:

1) Magic Keyboard

Butterfly keyswitches are a design failure that should be abandoned. They’ve been controversial, fatally unreliable, and expensive to repair since their introduction on the first 12” MacBook in early 2015. Their flaws were evident immediately, yet Apple brought them to the entire MacBook Pro lineup in late 2016.

After three significant revisions, Apple’s butterfly keyswitches remain as controversial and unreliable as ever. At best, they’re a compromise acceptable only on the ultra-thin 12” MacBook, and only if nothing else fits. They have no place in Apple’s mainstream or pro computers.

The MacBook Pro must return to scissor keyswitches. If Apple only changes one thing about the next MacBook Pro, it should be this. It’s far more important than anything else on this list.

«

And it’s quite a long list. I really like the butterfly keys when they’re covered in fabric, on the iPad Pro keyboard – it’s one of the nicest keyboards I’ve ever used: pretty quiet, lovely feel.

But on a MacBook pro, they’re really noisy, as in spouse-pointed-remark noisy, and that is never good.
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Unfriendly skies • American Prospect

David Dayen on how deregulating airlines in the US after 1978 (they used to be guaranteed 12% profit on a flight that was 55% full) has had unintended consequences, for flyers and airlines:

»

After deregulation, the system of delivering air travel also changed, from nonstop point-to-point service to a hub-and-spoke setup, with more connections from airports dominated by a single carrier. “It’s an efficient way to market their product because it allowed a larger array of destinations,” said Dempsey. “But it’s an inefficient way to provide the product.” Centralizing activity in hubs maximized pricing power and added airport congestion. The environment suffered from extra takeoffs and landings and out-of-the-way detours to hub cities. Startup airlines gradually found open slots at hub airports hard to come by. Even the hub cities did not benefit greatly from becoming hubs; passengers just changed planes at the airport rather than experiencing the city.

As the old CAB guarantee of a national network ended, airlines dropped unprofitable routes and smaller cities became virtually frozen out of air service. A hundred cities fell off the commercial aviation map in just the first two years of deregulation. By the 1980s, the only way to fly into state capitals like Dover, Delaware, or Salem, Oregon, was by private plane. Inaccessibility made these outposts less attractive to business, with jarring effects to local economies.

Before long, the burst of competition led to a washout. Just in the 1980s, 200 airlines went bankrupt, including majors like Eastern and Braniff. Competition turned destructive, as price wars quickly crippled businesses with large fixed costs like airplanes. CAB had denied additional city routes; critics liked to bring up the horror story of Continental waiting eight years to get approval to fly from Denver to San Diego. But CAB based its determinations on customer demand. Without bureaucrats holding the reins, competitors rushed into unprofitable routes and imploded…

…Today we’re down to three legacy carriers: United, American, and Delta. Southwest maintains its reputation as a “low-cost” disruptor but has begun to control certain airports as well. “When they dominate, they don’t leave money on the table either,” says economics professor John Kwoka. Four out of every five passengers in America flies with one of these four companies. And in 93 of the top 100 airports, either one or two airlines control a majority of all seats.

«

This is before we get to the effects on airline staff, repair crews, and pensions. Guess how that went.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Make you think of a song? Now read about its genesis. Photo by jnthorp on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. To American readers: Happy Antacid day! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Uber breach and response draw global government scrutiny • WSJ

Stu Woo:

»

Government officials world-wide said they would look at Uber Technologies Inc.’s handling of a major data breach last year.

Uber said Tuesday that it paid hackers $100,000 in an effort to conceal a data breach that affected 57 million accounts. In addition to the names, emails and phone numbers of riders, about 600,000 U.S. drivers’ license numbers were accessed, Uber said.

A Federal Trade Commission spokesman said the agency is “closely evaluating the serious issues raised,” while Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn) said on Twitter that the Senate Commerce Committee should hold a hearing to “demand Uber explain their outrageous breach—and inexplicable delay in informing its consumers and drivers.”

San Francisco-based Uber said it would notify owners of the affected accounts in coming days. It fired its chief security officer and a deputy for their role in the breach and covering it up, and Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi apologized.

At least three European government agencies are looking into Uber’s handling of the breach, and the New York State Attorney General’s office has opened an investigation.

«

So screwed. But just as with privacy infringements by big companies, the convenience of just ordering a cheap taxi means people will overlook it.
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Further thoughts on why the end of [US] net neutrality will be fine • Marginal REVOLUTION

Tyler Cowen:

»

In the current debate, there is a common presumption that paying for slots hurts “the little guy.” During the payola debates for radio, it turned out that payola favored the independent labels over the majors; see my book In Praise of Commercial Culture. It doesn’t have to work out that way, but refusing to price scarce resources often helps the big established players, who can invest $$ to get what they want through bigger brand names or other means. Note:

»

Pai says that one of the major mistakes of Net Neutrality is its pre-emptive nature. Rather than allowing different practices to develop and then having regulators intervene when problems or harms to customer arise, Net Neutrality is prescriptive and thus likely to serve the interests of existing companies in maintaining a status quo that’s good for them.

«

Furthermore, are there external benefits from small web upstarts? Or are the external benefits from the big superstar internet companies? If you are a Progressive who loves stable jobs and decent wages, you might think the more significant externalities are from the superstar companies. Yet when it comes to net neutrality, all of a sudden the smaller companies are glorified and we need an ecosystem to foster them. Overall, I don’t trust the regulators to make these decisions well, so I would rather take my chances with the market, even with some monopoly power at the cable end.

As Megan McArdle points out, over the last ten years consumers have opted overwhelmingly for the non-neutral private garden of Facebook. That’s the real “threat” to net neutrality. Personally, both as internet writer and user, I much preferred the older, semi-open, more neutral architecture of RSS and related systems. The masses have spoken, however, and quite decisively in favor of less open systems and apps.

«

Cowen’s argument seems hopeful more than pragmatic. It’s the small companies – Google was one once – which change the landscape and unseat monopolies. (Meanwhile, the UK does have net neutrality enshrined in law – EU law.)
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FCC ignored your net neutrality comment, unless you made a ‘serious’ legal argument • The Verge

Jacob Kastrenakes:

»

The FCC received a record-breaking 22 million comments chiming in on the net neutrality debate, but from the sound of it, it’s ignoring the vast majority of them. In a call with reporters yesterday discussing its plan to end net neutrality, a senior FCC official said that 7.5 million of those comments were the exact same letter, which was submitted using 45,000 fake email addresses.

But even ignoring the potential spam, the commission said it didn’t really care about the public’s opinion on net neutrality unless it was phrased in unique legal terms. The vast majority of the 22 million comments were form letters, the official said, and unless those letters introduced new facts into the record or made serious legal arguments, they didn’t have much bearing on the decision. The commission didn’t care about comments that were only stating opinion.

The FCC has been clear all year that it’s focused on “quality” over “quantity” when it comes to comments on net neutrality. In fairness to the commission, this isn’t an open vote. It’s a deliberative process that weighs a lot of different factors to create policy that balances the interests of many stakeholders. But it still feels brazen hearing the commission staff repeatedly discount Americans’ preference for consumer protections, simply because they aren’t phrased in legal terms.

«

I think I’m with the FCC, at least in terms of weighing up the submissions. What’s the use of counting a ton of spam saying “YAY NET NEUTRALITY”? And equally, lots of people saying “I don’t like it” isn’t much use. It’s a legal argument, so you need legal arguments.

That said, the competitive failure of internet provision in the US (due, as Benedict Evans points out, to failing to unbundle the local loop) means that things are likely to get worse before they get better – if that happens at all. The number of ways in which the US has skewed uncompetitive markets – health provision, mobile service, internet service, banks – is remarkable for a place built on capitalism.
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Sugar industry long downplayed potential harms • The New York Times

Anahad O’Connor:

»

The sugar industry funded animal research in the 1960s that looked into the effects of sugar consumption on cardiovascular health — and then buried the data when it suggested that sugar could be harmful, according to newly released historical documents.

The internal industry documents were uncovered by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, and described in a new report in the journal PLOS Biology on Tuesday. The report’s authors say it builds on evidence that the sugar industry has long tried to mislead the public and protect its economic interests by suppressing worrisome research, a tactic used by the tobacco industry.

The documents show that in 1968 a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, known today as the Sugar Association, funded a research project on animals to shed light on the connection between sugar and heart health. But when the research pointed to a mechanism by which sugar might promote not only heart disease but also bladder cancer, the industry group ended the study and never published the results.

The sugar industry has long insisted that sugar has no unique role in promoting obesity, diabetes or heart disease, though numerous studies by independent researchers have concluded otherwise.

«

I wonder if in 30 years’ time we’ll look at sugar added to food in the way that we look at tobacco smoking now.
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Founder of Chinese bike sharing firm Bluegogo fled, millions of user deposits at risk • China Money Network

Nina Xiang:

»

A year after its foundation and having raised RMB400m (US$58m) in venture funding at a RMB1bn (US$140m) valuation, Chinese bike sharing start-up Bluegogo has collapsed, with its founder nowhere to be found and perhaps up to RMB1bn worth of user deposits unaccounted for.

After months of reports that the Beijing-based start-up was having liquidity problems and unable to repay user deposits, new pictures and reports surfaced today showing an empty Bluegogo office and personal accounts of overdue payment to vendors. Bluegogo’s founder Li Gang has reportedly been in a unspecified foreign country for “some time”, according to local media reports.

The episode highlights the risks of investing in Chinese start-ups, as well as the massive social impact of a deposit-taking “sharing economy” business. Bluegogo claims to have 20 million cumulative users. If only 10 million users paid a RMB99 deposit, it would mean the company has collected around RMB990m in deposits.

«

He missed a trick not doing it with an ICO. That way people might have thought it was OK.
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No end in sight to the Brexit madness • The New Yorker

John Cassidy, getting non-British readers up to speed:

»

May and Hammond are still trying to pursue a so-called soft Brexit, which would preserve as much market access as possible. But, at every turn, they and their allies are being undermined and vilified by the Little Englanders and the conservative Fleet Street newspapers. Last week, the Daily Telegraph published photographs on its front page of fifteen Conservative M.P.s who have had the temerity to suggest that the parliament should have the right to sign off on the final Brexit deal. The paper labelled them “The Brexit mutineers.” Some of these M.P.s subsequently received threats.

“How can this be happening in a country known for its pragmatism?” the Oxford economist Simon Wren-Lewis asked in a blog post. How indeed? With opinion polls suggesting that most Britons, if given a chance, would now vote to remain in the E.U., a second referendum seems like a good idea. But the opposition Labour Party, for reasons of its own, has already committed to accepting the first Brexit vote. About the only people calling for a do-over are the Liberal Democrats, who have just twelve seats in the Commons, and a few figures who are even less popular, such as Tony Blair and Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman.

«

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‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ genealogy: what you don’t know • Rolling Stone

Rian Malan:

»

Navajo Indians sing it at powwows. Japanese teenagers know it as ライオンは寝ている. The French have a version sung in Congolese. Phish perform it live. It has been recorded by artists as diverse as R.E.M. and Glen Campbell, Brian Eno and Chet Atkins, the Nylons and Muzak schlockmeister Bert Kaempfert. The New Zealand army band turned it into a march. England’s 1986 World Cup soccer squad turned it into a joke. Hollywood put it in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. It has logged nearly three decades of continuous radio airplay in the U.S. alone. It is the most famous melody ever to emerge from Africa, a tune that has penetrated so deep into the human consciousness over so many generations that one can truly say, here is a song the whole world knows.

Its epic transcultural saga is also, in a way, the story of popular music, which limped pale-skinned and anemic into the twentieth century but danced out the other side vastly invigorated by transfusions of ragtime and rap, jazz, blues and soul, all of whose bloodlines run back to Africa via slave ships and plantations and ghettos. It was in the nature of this transaction that black men gave more than they got and often ended up with nothing. This one’s for Solomon Linda, then, a Zulu who wrote a melody that earned untold millions for white men but died so poor that his widow couldn’t afford a stone for his grave. Let’s take it from the top, as they say in the trade.

«

This article is 17 years old. Who cares – it’s a great story. Your long read for today.
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Is Mic’s pivot to video spinning out of control? • Splinter News 

David Uberti:

»

Mic.com’s traffic slipped further in September, to just 4.6 million unique visitors, according to comScore, down from a peak of more than 21 million in December 2015. The more specific traffic targets instituted in response to the recent dip seemed to contradict management’s defiant stance: They reached as high as a few million visitors per month for the largest of Mic’s nine topically themed verticals, staffers said. After the October editorial meeting, it also remained unclear whether such “goals” were in fact quotas that would be used on employees’ performance reviews. Lauerman could not be reached this week. A Mic spokesperson declined to comment.

“It was stressed that this was not a panic move,” one current staffer told Splinter. “So why would you issue these insane traffic goals and make the newsroom feel the pressure?”

Such tension was perhaps inevitable after the social justice-oriented news outlet unveiled its new plan in August, becoming the latest publisher to pursue video as means for survival. Interviews with eight current and former staffers, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional repercussions, suggest the newsroom was ill-prepared to execute the proverbial pivot. The shift in direction has been slowed by steady staff turnover—including on the video team—and confusion among rank-and-file employees as seen in the October editorial meeting.

As another staffer summed it up bluntly to Splinter last week: “I truly don’t know what we are supposed to be doing.”

«

Giving journalists crazy pageview targets is a guarantee that quality will collapse; big stories that make your reputation don’t come from hurrying. (Well, they can, but in a bad way.)
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Facebook still lets landlords discriminate by race and disability in apartment ads • Gizmodo

Matt Novak:

»

ProPublica purchased a number of different housing ads last week, but asked that they be unavailable to certain segments of the population. Ads that would exclude Jews, black people, and Americans originally from Argentina were reportedly all approved within minutes. Facebook’s targeting also allows advertisers to exclude other groups, such as people interested in wheelchair access and parents with high school-aged kids. These ads were approved quickly thanks to Facebook’s algorithmic approval process.

According to ProPublica, just one type of ad took longer than mere minutes for approval and that was a test ad excluding people who were interested in Islam. That ad was ultimately approved in just 22 minutes.

Obviously, all of these ads are in direct violation of US Fair Housing laws. But Facebook appears to have done nothing to ensure that it’s in compliance, despite swearing that it would set up safeguards. ProPublica asked Facebook about the ads and the company blamed it on a “technical failure,” rather than a systematic and inexcusable disinterest in adhering to US law.

«

OK, and now wait for Facebook’s response. What do you think it will be?

»

“This was a failure in our enforcement and we’re disappointed that we fell short of our commitments,” a Facebook spokesperson told Gizmodo. “…The rental housing ads purchased by ProPublica should have but did not trigger the extra review and certifications we put in place due to a technical failure,” the spokesperson said.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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