Come on, that’s not really “lost”. Photo by méline.ch 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 11 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Mark Zuckerberg says he’s not running for president • BuzzFeed News

Alex Kantrowitz and Nitasha Tiku:

»

Mark Zuckerberg has no plans to run for president, the Facebook founder and CEO told BuzzFeed News Tuesday.

“No,” Zuckerberg wrote in response to a question asking if he had any plans to run for president. “I’m focused on building our community at Facebook and working on the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative,” referring to the limited-liability corporation he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, founded in 2015 to advance human potential and promote equality through major bets in education and science research.

Zuckerberg did not immediately respond to follow-up questions about whether he’d explicitly ruled out a run.

«

Give it a decade or two.
link to this extract

A trial and a twitterstorm: on live-tweeting from a federal courthouse • The New York Times

Mike Isaac went along to livetweet Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony (from the trial where Facebook is accused of taking VR technology in a $2bn lawsuit):

»

What I did not know, as a tech reporter, is how tricky it is to actually live a connected life inside a federal courtroom.

Federal courts have rather strict rules around electronics and recording devices inside courtrooms, the laws of which go back much further than some of the software and services we use to broadcast news today. In 1994, for instance, a Judicial Conference Report declined a recommendation for expanding the use of cameras in federal civil cases, citing concern for the intimidation of witnesses and jury members.

Even as far back as 1960, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas argued against broadcasting of trials. “It is not dangerous because it is new,” he wrote in a paper published in a law journal at the time. “It is dangerous because of the insidious influences which it puts to work in the administration of justice.” It is often policy for district court judges to determine their own policies around electronics and broadcasting — even with tweets.

«

Even more difficult in UK courts. Bail hearings, for example, aren’t public – there are only very limited things you can say from them.
link to this extract

iOS 10.3 beta includes new ‘Find My AirPods’ mode for locating lost AirPods • Mac Rumors

Juli Clover:

»

Apple’s AirPods are wire-free, which makes them convenient to use, but it’s also caused some concern from users who are afraid to lose their $159 earphones. In its latest beta, Apple has introduced a new feature to assuage customer fears – Find My AirPods.

Available in iOS 10.3, Find My AirPods adds your AirPods to the “Find My iPhone” app, listing them alongside all other Apple products. In the app, you can tap on the AirPods to cause them to play a little chirping sound that gradually gets louder for location purposes.

After activating the sound, you can choose to have it play solely through the left AirPod or through the right AirPod so you don’t need to listen to chirping if only one of the AirPods is missing.

«

Clever. Though I haven’t managed to lose mine yet. (The “find iPhone” function on the Apple Watch is great.) Not sure about their being located on a map. I mean, really?
link to this extract

Unexpected consequences of self driving cars • Rodney Brooks

»

There are big AI perception challenges, just in my neighborhood, to get driverless cars to interact with people as well us driverful cars do. What if level 4 and level 5 autonomy self driving cars are not able to make that leap of fitting in as equals as current cars do?

Cars will clearly have to be able to perceive people walking along the street, even and especially on a snowy day, and not hit them. That is just not debatable. What is debatable is whether the cars will need to still pass them, or whether they will slowly follow people not risking passing them as a human driver would. That slows down the traffic for both the owner of the driverless car, and for any human drivers. The human drivers may get very annoyed with being stuck behind driverless cars. Driverless cars would then be a nuisance.

In the little side streets, when at a stop sign, cars will have to judge when someone is about to cross in front of them. But sometimes people are just chatting at the corner, or it is a parent and child waiting for the school bus that pulls up right there. How long should the driverless car wait? And might someone bully such cars by teasing them that they are about to step off the curb–people don’t try that with human drivers as there will soon be repercussions, but driverless cars doing any percussioning will just not be acceptable.

Since there are no current ways that driverless cars can give social signals to people, beyond inching forward to indicate that they want to go, how will they indicate to a person that they have seen them and it safe to cross in front of the car at a stop sign? Perhaps the cars will instead need to be 100% guaranteed to let people go. Otherwise without social interactions it would be like the case of the dark country road. In that case driverless cars would have a privileged position compared to cars with human drivers and pedestrians. That is not going to endear them to the residents.

«

I don’t think we’ve even begun to consider how pedestrians and self-driving vehicles are going to interact. All the focus has been on getting the vehicles to navigate themselves, which is a tiny part of driving a car.
link to this extract

Android permissions and hypocrisy • mjg59

Matthew Garrett:

»

I wrote a piece a few days ago about how the Meitu app asked for a bunch of permissions in ways that might concern people, but which were not actually any worse than many other apps. The fact that Android makes it so easy for apps to obtain data that’s personally identifiable is of concern, but in the absence of another stable device identifier this is the sort of thing that capitalism is inherently going to end up making use of. Fundamentally, this is Google’s problem to fix.

Around the same time, Kaspersky, the Russian anti-virus company, wrote a blog post that warned people about this specific app. It was framed somewhat misleadingly – “reading, deleting and modifying the data in your phone’s memory” would probably be interpreted by most people as something other than “the ability to modify data on your phone’s external storage”, although it ends with some reasonable advice that users should ask why an app requires some permissions.

So, to that end, here are the permissions that Kaspersky requests on Android…

«

Turns out Kaspersky requests exactly as many permissions on Android as Meitu, and then some. But Garrett reckons the moral is:

»

talking about application permissions is difficult and we don’t have the language to explain to users what our apps are doing and why they’re doing it, and Google are still falling far short of where they should be in terms of making this transparent to users.

«

(And also don’t complain about app permissions when you request a ton.)
link to this extract

Trump and Wyoming fight energy’s winds of change • Bloomberg Gadfly

Liam Denning:

»

Amid the pomp, red baseball caps and star-studded roster of entertainers at President Donald Trump’s inauguration, it’s been all too easy to overlook the unpredictable interplay of politics and energy markets.

Luckily, Wyoming is here to remind us.

Two Republican state senators are sponsoring a bill that would penalize Wyoming’s utilities if they sell power generated from utility-scale wind or solar installations within the state. If passed, any utility doing so after 2019 would incur a penalty of $10 per megawatt hour, which equates to about 12% of Wyoming’s average retail electricity price.

Apart from its stunning vistas, Wyoming is known as a coal state (one of the bill’s sponsors represents a place called Carbon County, among others). Some 40% of U.S. coal is mined in Wyoming, which sits atop the Powder River Basin, and almost 90% of the state’s electricity derives from burning the stuff.

So the local economy has suffered as prices of coal and natural gas – Wyoming also produces a lot of that – have collapsed: GDP fell more than 8% between 2014 and mid-2016, with more than two-thirds of that decline related to the mining sector (which includes gas production). 

«

Utter madness. Wyoming generates about 8% of its electricity from wind, and those senators want to penalise it for doing so?
link to this extract

DCN report shows publisher revenue from Google, Facebook, Snapchat – Business Insider

Lara O’Reilly:

»

The report, from premium publisher trade body Digital Content Next (DCN), claims that the (mean) average premium publisher generated $7.7 million in revenue from distributing their content on third-party platforms in the first half of 2016 — equivalent to around 14% of their overall revenues in the period.

On average, premium publishing companies generated $773,567 in the first half of 2016 by distributing their content on YouTube. Content published to Facebook earned an average of $560,144 in the period, Twitter generated an average of $482,788, and Snapchat generated $192,819 for each publisher in the sample.

DCN commissioned Powers Media & Entertainment Consulting to collect data and survey 19 of its members — including The Financial Times, ESPN, Bloomberg, NBC, and The New York Times — about the way they use and generate revenue from third-party distribution platforms. It then conducted in-depth interviews with eight of those members. The report did not offer financial details for each publisher, but instead provided the average amount a typical premium publisher receives.

«

It’s not a great deal, and there’s equivocation around many of them.
link to this extract

China announces mass shutdown of VPNs that bypass Great Firewall • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

»

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology yesterday announced a major crackdown on VPN (virtual private network) services that encrypt Internet traffic and let residents access websites blocked by the country’s so-called Great Firewall. The ministry “said that all special cable and VPN services on the mainland needed to obtain prior government approval—a move making most VPN service providers in the country of 730 million Internet users illegal,” reported the South China Morning Post, a major newspaper in Hong Kong.

China’s announcement said the country’s Internet service market “has signs of disordered development that requires urgent regulation and governance” and that the crackdown is needed to “strengthen cyberspace information security management,” according to the Post. The government said its crackdown would begin immediately and run until March 31, 2018.

«

link to this extract

Inside the private chatrooms Trump supporters are using to manipulate French voters • BuzzFeed News

Ryan Broderick:

»

The chatroom’s admins have instructed users to make fake Facebook accounts that are “ideally young, cute girl, gay, Jew, basically anyone who isn’t supposed to be pro-[FN].” Users are then instructed to lock down these dummy accounts so no one can tell they’re fake. Once they have their fake Facebook profiles, they’re told to infiltrate the comment sections of large French Facebook pages and post pro-FN memes and jokes about François Fillon, France’s current frontrunner for the presidency.

And they’re doing something similar on Twitter, creating dozens of French-appearing sock puppet accounts. They then collect all of them on lists and organize campaigns to make things trend in French.

«

Though they might only be Trump supporters in passing – what if they just love destabilising stuff?
link to this extract

The Qualcomm ‘tax’ rebellion • Bloomberg Gadfly

Tim Culpan:

»

Qualcomm’s licensing model was simple. It charged a percentage of the total cost of all components in the phone. This approach had advantages for everyone involved. It meant licensees and Qualcomm didn’t have to scrap over which parts of the phone did or didn’t use Qualcomm technology, so they could just go ahead and focus on the more important task of developing and selling these hip new gadgets.

Qualcomm’s argument was that no matter what went in the phones, they wouldn’t work at all without its technology.Twenty years later, the industry has moved on. Qualcomm hasn’t.

Displays, cameras, memory and even metal casings have become increasingly more expensive components of a phone, yet Qualcomm still expects to collect a “tax” on all of it no matter how much it contributes.

According to iSuppli, Apple’s iPhone 7 has total component costs of $219.80 for the model with 32 gigabytes of storage. Assuming a licensing fee of 5 percent, Qualcomm receives $11 for every model Apple sells regardless of the fact that three of the most expensive items are the display (which Qualcomm doesn’t make), the Apple-designed processor and the radio chips whose suppliers include Intel Corp., Broadcom Corp. and Skyworks Solutions Inc. If Apple were to increase the storage to 128 gigabytes, Qualcomm’s revenue would increase accordingly despite the fact that it doesn’t even make storage chips. Increase the display size (and thus the cost), Qualcomm collects. A better camera: You guessed it, more money to Qualcomm.

«

The odd thing is that Apple went to war with Motorola over the same thing. I guess the difference is that Motorola didn’t make any components – it just owned the patents.

(Of course I’ll argue that Qualcomm went astray when it got rid of Eudora.)
link to this extract

Why the LG G6 won’t have Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 • Forbes

Ben Sin:

»

A couple days ago I wrote a piece about the HTC U Ultra, wondering why HTC would release a Snapdragon 821 phone in 2017 when the rumor has LG and Samsung dropping Snapdragon 835 flagships in as little as a month.

Well, I’ve spoken to some industry insiders in Asia today and I must apologize to HTC, because it would appear that the 835 is out of their reach until after April, so they couldn’t have used the 835 without drastically delaying the phone. In fact, that’s the case with almost all phones, including LG’s flagship. Yup, I have confirmed with an industry insider that the LG G6 will run on Snapdragon 821 instead of the 835 that everyone’s expecting.

The reason? Samsung has first dibs.

“The Snapdragon 835 won’t be available in large quantities until after the Galaxy S8 launches,” the source told me.

I guess this shouldn’t really be this big of a surprise, since Samsung is helping Qualcomm build the chip. Apparently, the 835 won’t be widely available until after the release of the Galaxy S8, which I’ve been told by the same source will be April 14 in South Korea.

«

Reminiscent of Apple cornering the market first in tiny hard drives for the iPod, and then for flash memory for the iPod nano.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A graphene sheet: not actual size. Render by UCL Mathematical and Physical Sciences 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 7 links for you. Others were coming, got delayed by magnetometers. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Viral WhatsApp hoaxes are India’s own fake news crisis • BuzzFeed News

Pranav Dixit:

»

At 8 p.m. on Nov. 8, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi unexpectedly banned 86% of the country’s legal tender from circulation. The goal was to wipe out “black money” — a term used in India for cash that’s stashed outside the banking system to evade taxes. Old notes of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1,000 would no longer be legal. Instead, the government would issue new, redesigned Rs. 2,000 notes.

Hours after the prime ministerial bombshell, the rumors started flying fast and thick over WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned instant messaging app used by more than 160 million Indians: The new notes would include an embedded GPS chip that would allow the government to track down hoarders.

Soon a video purporting to show one of these GPS notes being tracked on Google Maps went viral on WhatsApp, and then Facebook. And  less than 24 hours after the rumor started ,  Zee News, a leading Hindi television news channel, ran a 90-second report about the high-tech note, leading the country’s reserve bank to finally debunk it.

«

WhatsApp is gigantic in India – and provides a terrific channel for rumours to spread. Terrific piece.
link to this extract

Graphene’s superconductive power has finally been unlocked, and it’s crazier than we expected – ScienceAlert

Fiona Macdonald:

»

It’s official: graphene has been made into a superconductor in its natural state – which means electrical current can flow through it with zero resistance.

Last year, physicists managed to do this by doping graphene with calcium atoms, but this is the first time researchers have achieved superconductivity in the material without having to alter it. And the results so far show that the material achieves an incredibly rare type of superconductivity that’s even crazier and more powerful than scientists expected.

The new research is a big deal even for a material as innately impressive as graphene, seeing as superconductivity is the key to more efficient electronics, better power grids, and new medical technology.

«

This is promising, especially because graphene is quite easy to make as superconductors go. But it happens a long way from room temperature (at about 4.2K) and has to be doped with another specific superconductor.
link to this extract

Apple Inc: a pre-mortem • Medium

“Dan”:

»

Last year marked the fifth year of Tim Cook’s reign, and year three of “Tim Cook’s Apple”. With recent technological shifts, Apple is at a crossroads of sorts; therefore, I believe a pre-mortem is expedient:

»

A pre-mortem is a managerial strategy in which a manager imagines that a project or organization has failed, and then works backward to determine what potentially could lead to the failure of the project or organization. The technique breaks possible groupthinking by facilitating a positive discussion on threats, increasing the likelihood the main threats are identified.

«

«

The pre-mortem is a clever idea which I hadn’t come across before. Dan’s analysis is useful, focussing on the Apple Watch, TV, services and iOS – and also Apple the company.
link to this extract

Artificial intelligence wrecks poker pros to stack up a profit of $800,000

Mix:

»

In yet another episode of man versus machine, an artificial intelligence developed by Carnegie Melon University has been absolutely dismantling a team of professional poker players, accumulating a staggering lead of almost $800,000.

The showdown takes place as part of the “Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence” competition which pits a group of four poker pros against the crafty supercomputer Libratus in a heads-up game of No-Limit Texas Hold’em slated to continue for 120,000 hands.

Since January 11, when the contest kicked off, the players have now passed the midway point of the the race, having completed almost 65,000 hands in total.

What is more intriguing is that so far Libratus has managed to keep an impressive lead over its human opponents, stacking up a profit of $794,392.

While the seasoned players originally underestimated the AI, Jimmy Chou, who is one of the pros, told CMU that they’ve all come to regard the machine as a tremendously tough rival, noting the computer’s ability to continuously improve its game.

“The bot gets better and better every day,” he said. “It’s like a tougher version of us.”

«

And also the computer doesn’t have any tells. It needs some blinking lights.
link to this extract

Alexa and Google Assistant have a problem: people aren’t sticking with voice apps they try • Recode

Jason del Rey on a new report from VoiceLabs:

»

For starters, 69% of the 7,000-plus Alexa “Skills” — voice apps, if you will — have zero or one customer review, signaling low usage.

What’s more, when developers for Alexa and its competitor, Google Assistant, do get someone to enable a voice app, there’s only a 3% chance, on average, that the person will be an active user by Week 2, according to the report. (There are outliers that have Week 2 retention rates of more than 20 percent.) For comparison’s sake, Android and iOS apps have average retention rates of 13% and 11 percent, respectively, one week after first use.

“There are lots of [voice] apps out there, but they are zombie apps,” VoiceLabs co-founder Adam Marchick said in an interview.

Amazon and Google spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment.

The statistics underscore the difficulty Amazon and Google are having in getting Echo and Home owners to discover and use new voice apps on their platforms. Instead, many consumers are sticking to off-the-shelf actions like streaming music, reading audio versions of books and controlling lights in their home.

Those are all good use cases for the voice platforms, but not sufficient to build an ecosystem that will keep software developers engaged and lead to new transformative revenue streams.

«

Not a surprise; these devices might be more like the Apple Watch, which is basically a self-contained ecosystem. (Via Philippe Winthrop.)
link to this extract

Hugo Barra, Xiaomi’s Google star, quits • Tech In Asia

Nivedita Bhattacharjee:

»

In what seemed like a nod to China’s catastrophic air pollution problem, he said at least part of the reason for his move was his health.

“[…] what I’ve realized is that the last few years of living in such a singular environment have taken a huge toll on my life and started affecting my health. My friends, what I consider to be my home, and my life are back in Silicon Valley, which is also much closer to my family. Seeing how much I’ve left behind these past few years, it is clear to me that the time has come to return,” Barra said in a Facebook post announcing the departure.

A former vice president at Google, Barra left the tech giant in 2013 to join what was then a little known Chinese startup. He has been in charge of Xiaomi’s international expansion since. Earlier this month, Xiaomi said its India revenues had crossed US$1 billion in 2016, making it the Chinese startup’s biggest international market.

“As I thought about this late last year, I concluded that Xiaomi is in a very good place on its global expansion path, and if there was ever going to be a good time for me to come back home, that time is now — when I can confidently say our global business is no longer just an in-house startup,” Barra said in the Facebook post.

«

Bad for Xiaomi (this is going to crimp its international potential significantly) and good for wherever Barra ends up. As he left Google amid rumours of friction with Sergey Brin over a personal relationship, I’m not convinced he’ll be back at Mountain View.
link to this extract

Tidal facing claims of inflating subscriber numbers • RAIN News

Anna Washenko:

»

Tidal is facing allegations that it has inflated subscriber numbers. Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv claimed that it has obtained internal reports that show Tidal only had 350,000 subscribers in September 2015. That same month, owner Jay-Z had tweeted that Tidal was “1,000,000 people and counting.” The publication also said that in March 2016, Tidal had 1.2 million activated accounts and 850,000 subscribers, even though it announced publicly that it had 3 million subscribers. Tidal has not issued a comment yet about the claims.

The question of how many people are really using Tidal has been a frequent one over the years. After Jay-Z acquired the company from Aspiro, he talked about plans for a lawsuit on those same charges: that the owner had exaggerated the size of its audience prior to the takeover.

«

#alternativefacts
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Got trouble connecting? There’s an algorithm for that. Photo by suttonhoo 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. Now the work starts. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

350,000 Twitter bot sleeper cell betrayed by love of Star Wars and Windows Phone • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

Computer boffins Juan Echeverria and Shi Zhou at University College London have chanced across a dormant Twitter botnet made up of more than 350,000 accounts with a fondness for quoting Star Wars novels.

Twitter bots have been accused of warping the tone of the 2016 election. They also can be used for entertainment, marketing, spamming, manipulating Twitter’s trending topics list and public opinion, trolling, fake followers, malware distribution, and data set pollution, among other things.

In a recently published research paper, the two computer scientists recount how a random sampling of 1 per cent of English-speaking Twitter accounts – about 6 million accounts – led to their discovery.

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Amazing. It’s essentially the same thing as botnets on PCs, but – presumably – for propaganda.
link to this extract

Data mining solves the mystery of your slow Wi-Fi connection • Technology Review

»

The researchers say that Wi-Fi connections fail an astonishing 45% of the time. And the time they take is hugely variable, with 15% of connections taking more than five seconds.  

So what is going wrong? Changhau and co use a data-mining algorithm to crunch through the data to find out what kind of factors are associated with failed connections and long connection times.

It turns out that several factors significantly influence connection time and success. Perhaps the most important is whether the Wi-Fi network is public or private—private networks are significantly faster and have higher rates of connection success.

The mobile device’s operating system is another factor. The team says identical devices running different operating systems can have very significant differences in connection times and point the finger particularly at a heavily customized version of Android called FlyMe. The chipsets in both the mobile device and the access point can also impact connection times, with slower chips taking much longer.

Having found the factors that slow down connections, the team has created an algorithm that avoids the most obvious compromises and so speeds up connection times… The algorithm reduces connection failures to a rate of just 3.6% and reduces connection times by a factor of 10.

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Nice idea. And now it’s out there. (In the ArXiv paper.)
link to this extract

Amazon and Google fight crucial battle over voice recognition • The Guardian

I wrote on the new frontier for a new battle:

»

at January’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), also in Las Vegas, commentators were struck by how many devices incorporated Alexa. And Amazon is even stealing into Google’s territory: some phones sold in the US from China’s Huawei, which uses Android, will incorporate Alexa rather than Google’s Assistant programme.

Google’s natural reaction is to have its own voice-driven home system, in Home. But that poses a difficulty, illustrated by the problems it claims to solve. At the device’s launch, one presenter from the company explained how it could speak the answer to questions such as “how do you get wine stains out of a rug?” Most people would pose that question on a PC or mobile, and the results page would offer a series of paid-for ads. On Home, you just get the answer – without ads.

What analysts wonder is: how can Home bridge that revenue gap? So far, Google hasn’t explained. Even if it can fend off the Echo, it may not be able to defend its core business.

By contrast, the Echo’s benefit to Amazon is much clearer…

«

I considered getting an Echo the other day. But then I asked myself quite what I, and everyone else, would use it for. The feeling passed. However it still feels like a threat to Google.
link to this extract

Apple sues Qualcomm • Business Insider

»

Apple is accusing Qualcomm of withholding $1 billion in rebates under a deal they had struck to keep Qualcomm modems in Apple products, including the iPhone and iPad.

Qualcomm held the rebates after Apple worked with Korean antitrust regulators looking into Qualcomm’s licensing businesses, Apple said.

Earlier this week, the FTC accused Qualcomm of monopolistic practices directly related to its intellectual property licensing business and cited its relationship with Apple.

“Apple has intentionally mischaracterized our agreements and negotiations, as well as the enormity and value of the technology we have invented, contributed and shared with all mobile device makers through our licensing program,” Qualcomm general counsel Don Rosenberg said in a statement. 

Apple said that Qualcomm charges Apple “at least five times more in” royalty payments than all of Apple’s other patent licensors combined in a statement provided to Business Insider.

«

I haven’t read Apple’s complaint in detail (it’s very long), but BI does have a link to a Scribd version of it. The odd thing is, if Qualcomm was really overcharging, why didn’t Apple take it to court? It did with Motorola over similar FRAND complaints. (One difference: Qualcomm paid Apple to make it a monopoly supplier – hence the $1bn at dispute.)
link to this extract

How Donald Trump can really make America great again • FT

Former Economist editor Bill Emmott:

»

The third advice is to take a harder and more sober look at America’s endemic problems. Mr Trump is right when he says there is a lot to be fixed, but wrong when he implies that it is all about wrenching back jobs from Mexico and China. It is about flaws in America’s own economy, society and public policy.

A new composite statistical index shows how western countries are shaping up in the face of the long-term trends of this century, including ageing populations, technological innovation, the knowledge society and globalisation. On the Wake Up 2050 Index, the US comes a shocking 23rd out of the 35 OECD members ranked.

Why? One big reason is seemingly non-economic: health. Despite a superficially favourable demography, with higher fertility rates and slower ageing than in Europe, and despite spending 18% of gross domestic product on healthcare, the US throws away its advantage through high levels of obesity and relatively poor health-adjusted life expectancy. A hasty move to abolish Obamacare, as many Republicans favour, would just make things worse.

That inefficient health system combined with poor health contributes to the country’s recently poor record in productivity growth.

«

I hadn’t considered it in that way, but the US’s huge health spending (for poor outcomes) is actually a drag on its economy. If it could improve that, other improvements would follow naturally.

The Wake Up 2050 index is worth looking at too. Meanwhile, there’s another small matter…
link to this extract

Trump promised to resign from his companies — but there’s no record he’s done so • ProPublica

Derek Kravitz and Al Shaw:

»

At a news conference last week, now-President Donald Trump said he and his daughter, Ivanka, had signed paperwork relinquishing control of all Trump-branded companies. Next to him were stacks of papers in manila envelopes — documents he said transferred “complete and total control” of his businesses to his two sons and another longtime employee.

Sheri Dillon, the Trump attorney who presented the plan, said that Trump “has relinquished leadership and management of the Trump Organization.” Everything would be placed in a family trust by Jan. 20, she said.

That hasn’t happened.

«

Smart: they looked at whether company registration details had been updated.

The question of “where’s the proof that Donald Trump has resigned from his companies?” seems like a worthwhile one for White House press to ask. (Need to ask for proof. Anyone can lie in an answer.)
link to this extract

How Chromebooks aim to (finally) crack the consumer market in 2017 • Fast Company

Jared Newman:

»

[Lenovo’s head of Chromebooks Jeffrey] Meredith admits that the other benefits of Chromebooks have been tough to communicate. “Everybody wants simple stuff but you don’t want to be told it’s simple,” he says. “Everybody wants security, but really talking about security in enough detail that people understand how secure it is isn’t that easy.”

The likely starting point, Meredith says, will be the hardware itself, along with the behavioral changes that might make people want a Google-centric, cloud-connected, touch-enabled laptop. Later on, it might make sense to talk more about the security of Chromebooks, the auto-updates, and the size of the app ecosystem.

“You know that you don’t hit the save button anymore. Many people use Google Docs everyday,” he says. “So I think tying up into, ‘this is who you are and how you do stuff, this is the device that actually fits best for that,’ is probably where we’ll start.”

«

I keep expecting Chromebooks to make inroads into the consumer and business PC market, but they keep on not. Odd, given that many tasks (especially in business) seem as though they could be browser-based – but legacy software is too deeply embedded. I suspect the same is true for consumers: “can run iTunes” matters to a surprisingly large number of people.
link to this extract

Meitu’s photo-effects app tracks users without disclosing enough • Macworld

Glenn Fleishman:

»

When researchers went poking in the iOS version, they quickly found a host of red flags: multiple analytics packages, which is software used to track usage and users; requests for data that Apple forbids, some of the code for which was taken directly from a popular iOS programming guide, which prominently notes it shouldn’t be used in production software; and attempts to extract a unique phone identity, which is sketchy based on Apple’s rules.

iOS forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski tweeted his examination of the code, and concluded that it was likely no worse than any other free app that relied on user tracking to aggregate information and sell the results. I attempted to find Meitu’s privacy disclosure online, but its English-language sites are incomplete, and some App Store links go to Chinese-language pages.

However, in a statement sent to Macworld, Meitu said that it doesn’t sell any user data. It says it uses everything it gathers to improve the app experience, and derives all its money from in-app advertising. A spokesperson said it is also developing virtual makeup preview filters with retailers and beauty makers, which it would charge for. In China, it’s also engaged in mobile commerce, which hasn’t yet come to most of its other markets.

«

The problem with these apps (particularly on Android, where it tends to be take it or leave it) is that they inure people to just saying yes, what the hell, go ahead. At some point – or already? – something subtly malicious will exploit this, and Bad Things will follow.
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Sonos’ new CEO wants its speakers to work with Alexa, Google, and ‘all the services that matter’ • The Verge

Dieter Bohn:

»

Sonos makes home speakers — precisely the space that’s getting upended by Amazon’s Echo and (to a lesser extent so far) Google Home. It’s perhaps not entirely fair to say Sonos was blindsided by the rise of digital assistants in the home; but it is entirely fair to say that the company hasn’t reacted quickly enough to their sudden importance.

We’ve obtained a slightly redacted copy of the memo that Spence sent to his company immediately after taking over, and it reveals some of what Sonos is going to do to face those new challenges. Namely: it’s going to try to get everybody to play nice with Sonos.

“We know that life at home requires the support of a variety of services,” Spence writes. And rather than partner with a single company, he says Sonos will work with everybody just like it did with music streaming apps: “We are going to do the same with voice services, bringing all the services that matter to every home.”

Sonos is already planning on some integration with Amazon Alexa, but it seems like other services are going to follow — assuming Sonos can somehow remain independent and somehow convince all of these potential partners to share space on its speakers. Spence references this new balance and says Sonos will enter “the big leagues – partnering and competing with global leaders like Amazon, Google and (likely) Apple.”

«

Sonos speakers (I own several) are miles better than the Echo; but the company has seemed to be spinning its wheels in the past few years. There hasn’t been anything dramatic since the Play:1 in October 2013.
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Apple reportedly planning three new tablets for 2017 • Digitimes

Rebecca Kuo and Joseph Tsai:

»

Apple reportedly is planning three new tablets for 2017, a 9.7in iPad with a friendly price range, a 10.5in iPad, and an upgraded 12.9in iPad Pro. The products are still in planning, with the 9.7in model expected to enter mass production in the first quarter, and the other two in the second, according to sources from the related upstream supply chain.

However, these tablets may not be announced or even released in the market until the second half of 2017, the sources said.

The sources noted that Apple is considering having the 10.5in iPad replace the existing 9.7-inch product line and will let the new 9.7in iPad become an entry-level device, mainly targeting the education sector.

«

When I wondered here who would use the iPad mini in portrait mode, the response from iPad mini owners was overwhelming. They all do. So a 10.5in iPad that is effectively two of them stuck together in portrait might be popular.
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You’ve got mail • ROUGH TYPE

Nick Carr:

»

You’ve got mail! That old AOL audio announcement always felt perfectly anodyne — so anodyne that it almost seemed fated to become the hook for a romcom starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Yet at the same time, and this has become clearer in retrospect, it was a threat. The computerized voice, chipper, friendly, always feigning surprise and excitement at the news it delivered, carried a demanding and judgmental undertone. It was a parental voice. You’ve got mail — and you need to go to your inbox and attend to this new mail quickly. Right now, in fact. Only a churlish, sad, unsociable creep would let a new message sit unread in an inbox. You don’t want to be a churlish, sad, unsociable creep, do you?

A threat, and a prophecy. Even as AOL faded away, you’ve got mail burrowed deeper into our consciousness. It became more than a voice in our heads. It became the voice in our heads. It was never a voice of our own — it comes out of the mouth of a stranger, a stranger with an agenda — and yet it now runs through our minds as if on a continuous tape loop.

«

Happy Monday!
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Cars as featurephones • Benedict Evans

Evans says that current cars are still in the featurephone area, awaiting their smartphone moment:

»

a computer should never ask you a question that it should be able to work out for itself. These alerts and warnings, and all those buttons, are questions. And so, just as Windows doesn’t ask you what sound card you have and smartphones don’t ask you where to save a file or what your password is, what is a back-up warning but a question – do you want to stop now? Really, a car shouldn’t have a back-up warning – it should just rubber-band to a halt. And that, in turn, is a step to autonomy – to level 3 and 4, the car that will try not to let you crash, and will increasingly drive itself. 

That is, the end-point is to have no interface at all. In a fully-autonomous, ‘Level 5’ car, with no steering wheel or manual controls at all, the only human-computer interface is when you say “take me home now”. But most people in the autonomous driving field think that’s at least 5 years away and more probably 10, or more. In the mean time we have a transitional phase, as you go from lots of warnings to one and you ask what fundamentally that warning should be, and as you sit in a car where you need to be in the driving seat and steering, mostly, or ready to steer, but the car might stop you, or drive itself. Something that drives itself until it doesn’t can easily become dangerous. So, my struggle to turn off the HUD on my borrowed car might become something rather more urgent.   

This could, incidentally, be the best car opportunity for Apple. A car that you just tell to go home and forget about is Google’s sweet spot, without much scope for Apple to add any unique insight as to how the experience should work. Conversely, a car that you still need to drive, somehow, but in radically new ways, seems like a fruitful place for thinking about how interfaces work, and that’s Apple. 

«

I’d love a reversing system that stopped me reversing too far.
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Bot check-in: a year of disappointment • The Information

Sam Lessin:

»

[Facebook’s] Messenger platform ended up being too locked down and the distribution avenues too weak to generate the hoped-for opportunities for developers. This failure can either be seen as a realistic and necessary casualty of scale, or a major misfire in Facebook’s quest to monetize the Messenger platform.

Amazon clearly leaned a lot further into the Echo and the bot platform it hoped to develop on top, to make it a more valuable and defensible ecosystem. You know Amazon is pushing something hard when every box you get from them is wrapped in ads for its bot platform on the tape. The product seems to be very well-liked and selling well. (I have five at home.) But having spent time developing some things on the platform, I can tell you that Amazon to date has made it very difficult for developers to distribute software on the platform and has failed to provide the discovery mechanisms that would allow new developers to flourish.

So the Echo, while continuing to be promising, in practice remains a very good alarm clock that can tell some jokes.

Google was relatively late to the consumer-facing bot party this year, but with the announcement of its Assistant product, its “Home” Echo competitor, and Allo, it has meaningfully tossed its hat into the ring. Google has not, however, been pushing the developer or ecosystem story as much as just creating great services—at least not directly. That might turn out to be the right strategy.

«

link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Microphones: room for improvement. Photo by mag3737 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 9 links for you. Come on, it’s a Friday the like of which you’ll never see again. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Lousy ads are ruining the online experience – The Verge

Walt Mossberg didn’t like the ad on a TV sports show; but he’s beginning to realise that the model is increasingly broken online:

»

Some combination of ads and subscriptions has long supported both news and entertainment, in print and on television. But, as a young journalist coming up at The Wall Street Journal, I was always led to understand that the price and volume of ads was based on a variety of factors — not just how big your audience was, but who it was (as best as could be measured back then) and how desirable your journalism was. I was also taught that our job as journalists was to just do great work and the readers, and advertisers would follow.

But the world has changed as journalism and entertainment have been disrupted by technology. Great power has shifted to the advertisers. I learned this almost immediately after I left the Journal in 2013 and co-founded Recode on January 2nd, 2014.

About a week after our launch, I was seated at a dinner next to a major advertising executive. He complimented me on our new site’s quality and on that of a predecessor site we had created and run, AllThingsD.com. I asked him if that meant he’d be placing ads on our fledgling site. He said yes, he’d do that for a little while. And then, after the cookies he placed on Recode helped him to track our desirable audience around the web, his agency would begin removing the ads and placing them on cheaper sites our readers also happened to visit. In other words, our quality journalism was, to him, nothing more than a lead generator for target-rich readers, and would ultimately benefit sites that might care less about quality.

«

Subscriptions. Gotta be. Ads will always have the tragedy of the commons.
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Did fake news help elect Trump? Not likely, according to new research • Poynter

James Warren:

»

The study, which also downplays the political impact of social media in general, is co-authored by economists Matthew Gentzkow of Stanford University and Hunt Allcott of New York University. It will be released Wednesday afternoon on their websites and Monday as a working paper on the nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research’s website.

Their paper, “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election,” melds new web browsing data, a 1,200-person post-election online survey they conduct and the assembling of a database of election stories categorized as fake by prominent fact-checking websites, including PolitFact, in the three months leading to the election.

In sum, they conclude that the role of social media was overstated, with television remaining by far the primary vehicle for consuming political news. Just 14% of Americans deemed social media the primary source of their campaign news, according to their research.

In addition, while fake news that favored Trump far exceeded that favoring Clinton, few Americans actually recalled the specifics of the stories and fewer believed them.

«

Problem with this is that sure, the overwhelming majority of the US population didn’t take any notice of this stuff. But Trump wasn’t elected by an overwhelming majority. Most Republicans vote Republican, most Democrats vote Democrat; there’s only a small group in between. Trump got some key votes in a few states. You only need a small number to be affected to tip things.
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Six Coolpad workers detained in patent dispute with former employer Huawei • Reuters

Sijia Jiang:

»

Chinese smartphone maker Coolpad, part of the LeEco technology conglomerate, said six employees had been detained by authorities, accused of infringing the intellectual property rights of their former employer Huawei Technologies.

The official Securities Times reported on Wednesday that the former Huawei engineers and designers had been detained for leaking company secrets to LeEco and Coolpad.

The employees’ lawyers and families say none of them took technology documents or codes from Huawei, a Coolpad unit, Yulong Computer Telecommunication Scientific (Shenzhen) Co Ltd, said in a statement.

They also have not given any such documents to Coolpad and LeEco, the statement said. The unit declined to comment beyond its statement.

It added that the workers are under investigation by the Shenzhen public securities department concerning a patent application made before they joined Coolpad’s smartphone department.

«

Coolpad is a strong rival to Huawei in China. LeEco has called this “pure rumour”, which isn’t quite a denial.
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Voice Search Stats – how voice search affects SEO • Branded3

Mike Jeffs:

»

I’m not going to pretend this post is anything more than a list of statistics. Statistics on voice search that you can read and refer to in order to understand how optimising sites for users will change in 2017 as usage of voice search increase.

2017 sees the launch of Home – Google’s voice-activated speaker powered by the Google Assistant and also the integration of Google Assistant into our TVs.  December 2016 saw Amazon’s Echo products become their most popular product over the holiday period.

«

Some surprising ones, such as 40% of adults using voice search at least once a day (according to ComScore).
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The sad state of microphones is holding back Siri and Alexa • Bloomberg

Matthew Braga:

»

Apple and its rivals have challenging, albeit straightforward, demands. They want a higher signal-to-noise ratio, meaning the mic can isolate voices more clearly and from farther away, and a higher acoustic overload point, the threshold at which the mic can no longer distinguish signal from noise. And the chips have to improve in both areas without getting bigger, becoming less reliable, or using more power than before.

Those factors are becoming more important as device makers add more mics. There’s one in the first iPhone, three in 2014’s iPhone 6, and four in last year’s 6S. Motorola’s Droid Turbo smartphone has five mics, and Amazon’s smart speaker, Echo, has seven. The extra mics boost clarity for voice controls or recording when some are muffled, overwhelmed, or pointed the wrong way. The trade-off: More mics cost more money and power and, in some cases, can add their own noise, making for diminishing returns. For now, Samsung’s Galaxy phones are sticking with two.

Market leader Knowles, which shipped about 1.4 billion MEMS mics last year, has turned to software. The company is building audio-processing algorithms into the mic chips themselves, which can recognize when to activate a device’s other audio processors.

«

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Google is doing a terrible job at shipping its Pixel smartphones • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

The Google Pixel and Pixel XL launched three months ago in October to a very enthusiastic response. They’re terrific smartphones. Our review headline called them a home run. But in the weeks since, it has become incredibly difficult for consumers to actually acquire either of them in a reasonable amount of time. Google has done a poor job of shipping adequate supply of both Pixels, as it’s now January and there’s still no easy way of obtaining the model you want without resorting to eBay or Swappa. That’s not so great for customers. And it’s hurting an incredible smartphone. The Pixel is the best Android phone you can buy — if you can actually manage to do the buying part.

«

Sounds as though Google was caught out by the demand for the Pixel, which was partly driven by the failure of Samsung’s Note 7. HTC’s revenues show a huge year-on-year jump in August, when one assumes it was making Pixels, but not much since. That would fit with the apparent shortages: orders for the 128GB Pixel are showing as shipping in the second week of March.
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WhatsApp vulnerability explained, by the man who discovered it: Tobias Boelter • The Guardian

The aforesaid Tobias Boelter:

»

There was an outcry when the Guardian published my information regarding a vulnerability within WhatsApp’s implementation of end-to-end encryption, but much of the response misses the point.

Most of the arguments seem to revolve around what is and isn’t a backdoor. You can argue that we are looking at a vulnerability which would be something that is there by error, or a backdoor, which would be something that is there deliberately.

At the time I found the flaw, I didn’t think it was deliberate, but since Facebook was informed in April 2016 and it still hasn’t been fixed, now I’m not so sure. But this discussion is a smokescreen for the real problem.

«

No apologies for returning to this specific topic: I think it’s important. Boelter discovered a wrinkle in how WhatsApp implements an aspect of security in the situation that, say, you were conspiring with someone against the government. (Let’s assume you’re doing it for good reasons, say to release kittens.) He explains how the government might be able to headfake you into sending *one* message – well, maybe more, if WhatsApp’s servers are compromised – to your contact who has been picked up by the (nasty) authorities.

The weakness with this interpretation of this (real) wrinkle – because as he notes, WhatsApp has chosen to deal with it one way and Signal in another – is that it overlooks the shortcut the authorities would more probably use, which might involve pulling out fingernails and whacking you around the head with a phone directory (leaves no marks).

In other words, it’s a theoretical attack more than a practical one. It’s this which has Zeynep Tufecki up in arms because she sees articles like this as decreasing trust in something which is (a) actually really secure (b) simple to set up and use (c) targeted by governments. The danger is it leads to people using less secure stuff. And I’d agree with her. (It’s also dismaying that the headline has been changed, replacing the original “backdoor” with “vulnerability”, without acknowledging the fact in the correction panel.)

TL;DR: this XKCD cartoon.
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China Oceanwide and IDG Capital announce agreement to acquire IDG • Business Wire

»

China Oceanwide is a privately held, multi-billion dollar international conglomerate founded by Chairman Zhiqiang Lu. Headquartered in Beijing, China Oceanwide’s well-established and diversified businesses include operations in financial services, real estate assets, media, technology and strategic investment, with more than 12,000 employees globally.

IDG Capital is an independently operated investment management partnership, with IDG as one of many limited partners. Formed in 1993 as China’s first technology venture investment firm, IDG Capital was ranked China’s top VC firm for 2016 by Zero2IPO Group.

IDG will continue to be headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts and managed by its current team. Kirk Campbell will continue as President and CEO of IDC, and Michael Friedenberg will continue as CEO of IDG Communications. A new board of directors will be appointed after the close of the transaction.

«

Noted here because IDG owns IDC, the analysis company. China’s interest in buying up useful stuff is quite noticeable – subtle, but noticeable. The purchase has been approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, in pretty much the last act by the Obama administration.
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Google and the misinformed public • The Chronicle of Higher Education

Safiya Noble:

»

the convicted gunman, Dylann Roof, wrote that his radicalization on race began following the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an African-American teen, and the acquittal of his killer, George Zimmerman. Roof typed “black on White crime” in a Google search; he says the results confirmed (a patently false notion) that black violence on white Americans is a crisis. His source? The Council of Conservative Citizens, an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “unrepentantly racist.” As Roof himself writes of his race education via Google, “I have never been the same since that day.”

Roof’s Google search results did not lead him to an authoritative source of violent-crime statistics. FBI statistics show that most violence against white Americans is committed by other white Americans, and that most violence against African-Americans is committed by other African-Americans. His search did not lead him to any experts on race from the fields of African-American studies or ethnic studies at universities, nor to libraries, books, or articles about the history of race in the United States and the invention of racist myths in the service of white supremacy. Instead it delivered him misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies that bolstered his already racist outlook and violent antiblack tendencies.

Online search can oversimplify complex phenomena.

«

Said a mouthful with that last sentence. My results (on DuckDuckGo, set to “UK” region) are: top result is a site called “New Nation” (which seems to be a white race site), second is a HuffPo article on misrepresentation, third is an FBI spreadsheet. In short, the problem extends across search engines; though I doubt Dylann Roof’s racism began with the results of a Google search.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Popular – and a big money-loser so far for Amazon, estimates say. Photo by Adam Bowie 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 11 links for you. Feel their sensuality. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook looks like it’s going to stop paying publishers to make live videos • Recode

Kurt Wagner:

»

Facebook spent more than $50 million last year paying publishers and celebrities to create live video on the social network.

Now numerous publishers tell Recode that Facebook is de-emphasizing live video when it talks to them. And none of the publishers we’ve spoken with expect Facebook to renew the paid livestreaming deals it signed last spring to get live video off the ground.

Instead, Facebook is pushing publishers to create longer, premium video content as part of a larger effort led by Facebook exec Ricky Van Veen. The hope is to get more high-quality video onto the platform and into your News Feed — the kind of stuff, presumably, you might find on Netflix.

Facebook may pay publishers for that stuff, instead of paying them to make live video, a format Mark Zuckerberg was “obsessed” with last year.

«

When are publishers going to realise they can’t win this game? The problem is, their audience is over on Facebook. And they need the money badly. So when Facebook says “jump”, they can only ask how high.
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Google Contributor has been shut down • Android Police

Corbin Davenport:

»

Back in 2015, Google launched a service called Google Contributor, which allowed users to pay a small amount of money per month to see fewer AdSense ads on their favorite websites. The service never expanded outside the United States, and last month, Google announced it would shut down “mid-January 2017.”

Well, it’s now mid-January, and Google Contributor has been laid to rest. The site now shows a 404 error, and users have received refunds for their remaining account balance.

«

Except Google’s Contributor page says it’s “launching a new and improved Contributor in early 2017!” Question is, why does it have to kill the old one and resart?
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Ukraine’s power outage was a cyber attack: Ukrenergo • Reuters

Pavel Polityuk, Oleg Vukmanovic and Stephen Jewkes:

»

A power blackout in Ukraine’s capital Kiev last month was caused by a cyber attack and investigators are trying to trace other potentially infected computers and establish the source of the breach, utility Ukrenergo told Reuters on Wednesday.

When the lights went out in northern Kiev on Dec. 17-18, power supplier Ukrenergo suspected a cyber attack and hired investigators to help it determine the cause following a series of breaches across Ukraine.

Preliminary findings indicate that workstations and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, linked to the 330 kilowatt sub-station “North”, were influenced by external sources outside normal parameters, Ukrenergo said in comments emailed to Reuters.

“The analysis of the impact of symptoms on the initial data of these systems indicates a premeditated and multi-level invasion,” Ukrenergo said.

Law enforcement officials and cyber experts are still working to compile a chronology of events, draw up a list of compromised accounts, and determine the penetration point, while tracing computers potentially infected with malware in sleep mode, it said.

«

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Tim Draper keeps defending Theranos • Axios

Draper is an old family friend of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, and put $1m into it early on. Dan Primack leads the questioning, such as:

»

The first Wall Street Journal story critical of Theranos was published in October 2015. What was your initial reaction?

“I dismissed it because there are always writers who want to take down big successes. Then after the next one I realized there was some strange vendetta. Maybe it had to do with money. The guy is getting $4 million to continue this charade.”

Don’t journalists sometimes dig into something that only looks like a big success, but actually is fraudulent in some way?

“Elizabeth started an amazing company that is so disruptive to various industries, so I think there were competitors fueling this fire. She was delivering 50 blood tests for $30. Her competitors are delivering the same thing for hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars. They were hugely threatened by this. Her product allowed consumers to have a baseline and then measure all of the changes in their blood over time. That technology is going to happen and I’m hoping it happens with Theranos.

It’s like other industries that get threatened by new technology. Like Bitcoin when all of the banks lined up against it. Or Uber being attacked by the taxi companies or Tesla by the car companies or Skype by the telecom companies. In this case, the competitors got a mouthpiece. I believe Elizabeth is the victim of a witch hunt.”

You said something similar to Bloomberg TV last summer, adding that the competitors in this case included pharma and health insurers. How so?

“My argument there is a little more abstract. If you’re big pharma, you like this relationship you have with doctors. You like that you can drive what people are prescribed. Theranos allows people to take more control over their own health, which would end up creating smaller markets for drug companies and health insurance companies.”

«

Would love smaller markets for health insurance companies, but that’s not really what Theranos was aiming at. And believe me, there’s no way that John Carreyrou was getting $4m for anything.
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The Artificial Lawyer year in review: the new era of legal AI begins • artificial lawyer

Richard Tromans:

»

One can seriously doubt whether a website called Artificial Lawyer in, for example 2006, would have received the same level of interest, or had that much to write about.

In 2006, the site would have been almost entirely theoretical. It would have been sparsely populated with comments from a few talking heads, talking again and again about the same theoretical issues. In short, it would not have been of much interest. News is about actual events, not just theory. And there was no legal AI news back then.

Roll forward 10 years and everything has changed. Some might say changed too much. Others may say: ‘Yes, it’s changed, but a lot of it is hype.’

My view is that neither too much has changed (in fact, it’s only just started to change), nor is this hype. It is very real and having an impact, but it is still small for now. Hype is about the latest version of the flying car that will never go into production, or marketing spiel about smart watches changing the world, even though few people have really ever used them for more than fitness tracking.

Moreover, the many new legal tech companies that are now emerging, both those operating inside the AI spectrum and several in other areas, are transforming the way we think about the production of legal work. They are changing client relationships and the internal dynamics of law firms. And though I don’t see the end of lawyers, we will probably see a big reduction in the need for paralegals in the years to come.

This is happening because this wave of legal AI and automation companies really do provide something that works and really do make a difference to lawyers and clients.

«

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Google’s new stab at boosting Android brand in US • The Information

Amir Efrati:

»

Google is expanding its “Android One” program for low-cost smartphones to the U.S in coming months, promising phone makers major new promotional dollars if they play by its rules, say three people briefed on the plan…

…Google recently expressed its displeasure with Huawei after the China-based smartphone giant said earlier this month it would offer Amazon’s Alexa “virtual assistant” on upcoming U.S. phones, according to a person briefed about the matter. (Google developed a rival virtual assistant that will be built into Android phones besides the Pixel later this year.) It’s likely that Huawei made the decision in order to be in Amazon’s good graces, given that Amazon is an important seller of Huawei phones to U.S. customers.

A Huawei spokesman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Google already has lined up at least one phone maker to be a U.S. launch partner for Android One, said one of the people briefed on the program. The identity couldn’t be learned. But one potential partner is LG, this person said. Google isn’t accepting submissions from additional phone makers at the moment, this person said. After the first launch, Google is expected to consider including other phones on a case-by-case basis.

«

You’d have to think this is going to cause even more friction with Android OEMs. The smartphone market is slowing down (in the US as much as anywhere) which could mean some wondering whether it’s worth competing if Google isn’t making the field level (as well as playing in it the game itself).

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Google has slashed the price of Daydream View headset • VR-Zone

Thomas Oliver on the price cut (from $79 to $49):

»

This is not a permanent price slash, however, and it is only valid until 25 February. Even though Daydream is not readily available in Singapore, anyone interested should get on this deal while it lasts.

Why Google has cut the price

Google only launched the Daydream headset last November. Since then, sales figures have not been made available, but are unlikely to be really impressive. After all, it came out near the end of 2016 and was limited to Daydream-ready devices, meaning the Google Pixel phone.  Pessimists would likely see this as the driving reason behind the sale, trying to push up sales numbers to make up for a disappointing year.

However, another potential reason could be that Google has seen renewed potential in the headset. After all, Google announced a whole slew of Daydream-Ready headsets at CES this year, including the very interesting Zenfone AR from Asus. With this information, it’s very clear that Google still has plenty of interest in VR. If anything, the sale shows how much they believe in the technology.

«

So he doesn’t know why Google cut the price, and hasn’t tried to find out. Journamalism. Most likely reason: poor sales (this feels like an inventory dump), which is reinforced by this tweet from Amir Efrati: “Google told one partner that usage of #DayDream VR “disappointing,” hence G asking phone brands to give away VR head gear for free.”
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Amazon pours resources into voice assistant Alexa • FT

Leslie Hook, Richard Waters and Tim Bradshaw:

»

The company has also been pouring resources into Alexa at an ever-faster pace. Evercore estimates that Amazon lost about $330m on Alexa in 2016, including net losses on the devices as well as personnel costs, and that this figure will nearly double to exceed $600m this year. Amazon is advertising openings for more than 500 jobs in its Alexa team as it seeks to expand. (The company has also promised to add 100,000 new jobs, mostly warehouse positions, in the US by mid-2018.)

The strategic imperative for Amazon is clear: Alexa is its chance to own the operating system in this new medium, voice.

“It’s kind of like trying to become the Google for voice or the Windows for voice,” said Mark Mahaney, analyst at RBC. “I think Amazon is just running away with this market.”

He points to two places where voice interactions are most convenient: the home and the car. In the home, Amazon can strengthen its ties to customers, and of course make it easier for them to shop on Amazon and listen to Amazon Music.

This presence in the home dovetails with Amazon’s recent effort to expand its grocery business, Amazon Fresh. “It is kind of Amazon’s Trojan horse into the refrigerator,” said Mr Mahaney. He estimates as many as 10m Alexa devices were sold in the recent holiday quarter.

These direct retail opportunities are only part of the picture, however. Owning the popular voice operating system puts Amazon in a powerful position, allowing it to act as the gatekeeper for third-party applications and customer data.

«

Amazon’s position in voice is definitely interesting; it’s great they can afford to lose money on it, because they’ll make it up in volume. (Haha, volume, geddit?) When and how does it start earning back enough?
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The Line of Death • text/plain

Eric Lawrence:

»

When building applications that display untrusted content, security designers have a major problem— if an attacker has full control of a block of pixels, he can make those pixels look like anything he wants, including the UI of the application itself. He can then induce the user to undertake an unsafe action, and a user will be none the wiser.

In web browsers, the browser itself usually fully controls the top of the window, while pixels under the top are under control of the site. I’ve recently heard this called the line of death:

If a user trusts pixels above the line of death, the thinking goes, they’ll be safe, but if they can be convinced to trust the pixels below the line, they’re gonna die.

Unfortunately, this crucial demarcation isn’t explicitly pointed out to the user, and even more unfortunately, it’s not an absolute.

For instance, because the area above the LoD is so small, sometimes more space is needed to display trusted UI. Chrome attempts to resolve this by showing a little chevron that crosses the LoD:

…because untrusted markup cannot cross the LoD. Unfortunately, as you can see in the screenshot, the treatment is inconsistent; in the PageInfo flyout, the chevron points to the bottom of the lock and the PageInfo box overlaps the LoD, while in the Permission flyout the chevron points to the bottom of the omnibox and the Permission box only abuts the LoD. Sometimes, the chevron is omitted, as in the case of Authentication dialogs.

«

This is fascinating, and shows the problems that designers are up against in trying to deter hackers, phishers and spoofers.
link to this extract

Silence speaks louder than words when finding malware • Android Developers Blog

Megan Ruthven, software engineer:

»

One security solution included on all devices with Google Play is Verify apps. Verify apps checks if there are Potentially Harmful Apps (PHAs) on your device. If a PHA is found, Verify apps warns the user and enables them to uninstall the app.

But, sometimes devices stop checking up with Verify apps. This may happen for a non-security related reason, like buying a new phone, or, it could mean something more concerning is going on. When a device stops checking up with Verify apps, it is considered Dead or Insecure (DOI). An app with a high enough percentage of DOI devices downloading it is considered a DOI app. We use the DOI metric, along with the other security systems to help determine if an app is a PHA to protect Android users. Additionally, when we discover vulnerabilities, we patch Android devices with our security update system…

…A device is considered retained if it continues to perform periodic Verify apps security check ups after an app download. If it doesn’t, it’s considered potentially dead or insecure (DOI). An app’s retention rate is the percentage of all retained devices that downloaded the app in one day. Because retention is a strong indicator of device health, we work to maximize the ecosystem’s retention rate.

Therefore, we use an app DOI scorer, which assumes that all apps should have a similar device retention rate. If an app’s retention rate is a couple of standard deviations lower than average, the DOI scorer flags it…

…the DOI score flagged many apps in three well known malware families — Hummingbad, Ghost Push, and Gooligan. Although they behave differently, the DOI scorer flagged over 25,000 apps in these three families of malware because they can degrade the Android experience to such an extent that a non-negligible amount of users factory reset or abandon their devices.

«

Nice. But tell me more about this thing where “we patch Android devices with our security update system.” I don’t think you actually do that. The OEMs do, if people are lucky.
link to this extract

Google has acquired most of Twitter’s developer products, including Fabric and Crashlytics • Recode

Kurt Wagner and Tess Townsend:

»

Google is acquiring Twitter’s suite of developer products, including its developer suite Fabric which includes the crash reporting service Crashlytics. Twitter acquired Crashlytics back in 2013.

The two companies are not sharing deal terms, but every member of Twitter’s Fabric team has been offered a job at Google. One source estimated the team at around 60 employees.

Fabric is the collection of products that Twitter rolled out 18 months ago to try and encourage mobile app developers to integrate more closely with Twitter’s core app.

But when the company announced another round of layoffs back in October, it also added that it would be refocusing the company around what employees call “Bluebird,” the main Twitter app. This was less than a month after Twitter decided to forgo its annual developer conference, Flight, a flag that Twitter was trying to figure out what to do with Fabric amid all the changes.

In the fall, Twitter started exploring options to offload its fringe businesses, like Fabric and Vine, the latter of which has since been shut down. At least one other company, Microsoft, showed some interest in acquiring Fabric, according to multiple sources.

«

Twitter has been spending far too much on development – that’s part of why it’s in the red – so offloading this chunk makes financial sense. It looks bad, but it’s necessary.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Yup, it’s finally dead. Photomontage by ClaraDon 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 9 links for you. They won’t participate in your customs union. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Qualcomm charged with monopolizing key semiconductor device used in cell phones • Federal Trade Commission

»

The FTC has charged Qualcomm with violating the FTC Act. The complaint alleges that Qualcomm:

• Maintains a “no license, no chips” policy under which it will supply its baseband processors only on the condition that cell phone manufacturers agree to Qualcomm’s preferred license terms. The FTC alleges that this tactic forces cell phone manufacturers to pay elevated royalties to Qualcomm on products that use a competitor’s baseband processors. According to the Commission’s complaint, this is an anticompetitive tax on the use of rivals’ processors. “No license, no chips” is a condition that other suppliers of semiconductor devices do not impose. The risk of losing access to Qualcomm baseband processors is too great for a cell phone manufacturer to bear because it would preclude the manufacturer from selling phones for use on important cellular networks.
 
• Refuses to license standard-essential patents to competitors. Despite its commitment to license standard-essential patents on FRAND terms, Qualcomm has consistently refused to license those patents to competing suppliers of baseband processors.
 
• Extracted exclusivity from Apple in exchange for reduced patent royalties. Qualcomm precluded Apple from sourcing baseband processors from Qualcomm’s competitors from 2011 to 2016. Qualcomm recognized that any competitor that won Apple’s business would become stronger, and used exclusivity to prevent Apple from working with and improving the effectiveness of Qualcomm’s competitors.

The FTC is seeking a court order to undo and prevent Qualcomm’s unfair methods of competition in violation of the FTC Act. The FTC has asked the court to order Qualcomm to cease its anticompetitive conduct and take actions to restore competitive conditions.

«

The payments to Apple constituted billions of dollars, the FTC says; but if Apple used any other baseband in any device, all payments would cease. Perhaps the FTC investigation is what let Intel get a foot in the door in some models of the iPhone 7.
link to this extract

First Android Wear 2.0 devices revealed: Google and LG’s Watch Sport and Watch Style • VentureBeat

Evan Blass:

»

Both timepieces feature Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, and the Sport model throws in cellular connectivity (with both 3G and LTE data) as well as GPS and NFC radios. This latter component allows the watch to take advantage of Android Wear 2.0’s Android Pay capability.

Along with iOS compatibility, the two watches also share another commonality with the Apple Watch: a digital crown button that serves to facilitate navigation. The displays are touch sensitive as well, and boast handwriting recognition.

Other notable features include Google Assistant integration and water and dust resistance (IP68 and IP67 certifications for the Sport and Style, respectively). Furthermore, the Sport contains a heart rate sensor and, thanks to its cellular components, is capable of untethered telephony with the same phone number as a user’s primary handset.

«

Untethered telephony sounds neat but I’m unconvinced of its broad usefulness. Note how only one has NFC – which means the one without can’t do Android Pay. (It’s surprisingly useful on the Apple Watch, on every model; I’d rather have that than 3G.)

And digital crowns are a thing. How interesting.
link to this extract

Key rotation, user experience, and crypto reporting • Tony Arcieri

Arcieri on the Guardian’s story suggesting WhatsApp has a “backdoor” because of how it handles authentication if you get a new phone – or, if you’re very paranoid, the security services have tapped your messages:

»

Signal targets a different audience than WhatsApp: they assume out of the gate that you want a more secure, encrypted messenger. WhatsApp, on the other hand, shipped encryption-by-default that the end user doesn’t even have to be aware of. Where Signal targets an audience of millions, WhatsApp is targeting an audience of billions. The (adjustable) defaults in WhatsApp are designed so encryption can be on-by-default at no cost to the user experience, but still allow those who would like to receive security notifications to receive them by opting in.

Consider what web browsers would be like if they prompted a user to make a security decision whenever the key for a site changed:

I do not think asking users to make decisions like this would tangibly improve the security of the web. However, I do think it would scare people away from visiting sites in the first place.

Now I’d like to take a bit to talk about crypto reporting…

If there were a backdoor in a popular encrypted messaging app, that is big news, and it should be reported on.

This was not a backdoor. I think, had this story been run by a few security experts in advance, most would’ve told you that it is not a backdoor.

«

I haven’t linked to this topic before because I was waiting for it to shake out. One point for Arcieri: Samuel Gibbs (a Guardian staffer) didn’t write the original story; a freelance did. (Gibbs wrote a followup analysis, though without any visible quotes from security experts.)

But the original freelance *did* consult a number of security people about what she had found. On that basis, it seemed solid. The problem with writing infosec stories – I speak from experience – is that you consult three security experts and get four opinions, often conflicting. (Arcieri acknowledges that himself: “most would’ve told you”.) So you pick the most serious claims to write up, since those are the ones people should arguably take notice of. And of course they make good headlines.
link to this extract

Shambling corpse of 3D TV finally falls down dead • CNET

David Katzmaier:

»

CNET asked LG’s Tim Alessi, director of New Product Development, why his company’s TVs no longer have the feature. “3D capability was never really universally embraced in the industry for home use, and it’s just not a key buying factor when selecting a new TV,” he said. “Purchase process research showed it’s not a top buying consideration, and anecdotal information indicated that actual usage was not high. We decided to drop 3D support for 2017 in order to focus our efforts on new capabilities such as HDR, which has much more universal appeal.”

Sony’s reply was similar, if a bit less detailed. “Based on current market trends we decided not to support 3D for our 2017 models,” a representative told CNET.

Those market trends are clear: sales of 3D home video gear have declined every year since 2012. According to data from the NPD Group, 3D TV represents just 8% of total TV sales dollars for the full year of 2016, down from 16% in 2015 and 23% in 2012. Native 3D-capable Blu-ray players fell to just 11% of the market in 2016, compared to 25% in 2015 and 40% in 2012.

“I think [the fact that Sony and LG dropped 3D] says that consumers have moved on to other purchase motivators for TV,” says Ben Arnold, Executive Director at NPD. “Things like 4K/UHD, HDR, and even smart have become the key features along with screen size that consumers are buying on.”

«

So there are quite a few 3D-capable TVs and Blu-ray players out there, but nobody is interested in the content – as Katzmaier also explains later.
link to this extract

MacBook shipments to reach 15 million units in 2017, says paper • Digitimes

Joseph Tsai, quoting the Chinese Economic Daily News, suggesting a 10% rise in shipments for the coming year:

»

Although the new MacBook Pros with OLED Touch Bar have a high ASP, demand is still rather strong. MacBook Pros using the Kaby Lake platform are expected to be released sometime later in 2017, and the platform’s low power consumption is expected to trigger a replacement trend among existing MacBook users, the market watchers noted.

Apple is likely to reduce the price for the 13in MacBook Pro without OLED Touch Bar to increase its overall shipments and will use the device to replace the 13in MacBook Air, the market watchers claimed.

Apple is expected to unveil a new 12in MacBook in early second quarter with an additional memory option of 16GB. The Kaby Lake-based 13in and 15in MacBook Pros are expected to begin production in early third quarter. A 15in MacBook Pro with 32GB memory will not start mass production until early in the fourth quarter, the paper added.

«

The last of those might be welcomed by some pros. Notice that there’s no word on desktops.
link to this extract

Samsung Electronics probe finds battery was main cause of Note 7 fires – source • Reuters

Se Young Lee:

»

A Samsung Electronics Co Ltd investigation into what caused some Galaxy Note 7 smartphones to catch fire has concluded that the battery was the main reason, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters on Monday.

The world’s biggest smartphone maker is seeking to put behind it one of the biggest product safety failures in tech history as it prepares to launch the Galaxy S8, one of its flagship phones, sometime in the first half of this year…

…Samsung initially announced a recall of some 2.5 million Note 7 phones in September and identified the cause of the fire as a manufacturing process problem at one of its suppliers, later identified as affiliate Samsung SDI Co Ltd (006400.KS).

But new Note 7s with what Samsung said were safe batteries from a different supplier continued to catch fire, forcing the company to permanently halt sales of the device and dealing a 6.1 trillion won ($5.2 billion) blow to Samsung’s operating profit over three quarters…

…The source told Reuters on Monday that Samsung was able to replicate the fires during its investigation and that the cause for the fires could not be explained by hardware design or software-related matters.

«

Full findings won’t be released until January 23. This seems to be saying that even though they said it wasn’t the batteries, it was the batteries.
link to this extract

Fibre index • BT Openreach

»

Our fibre index will be updated quarterly and forms part of Openreach’s commitment to publish the most up-to-date information about our network.

Britain’s broadband landscape has changed beyond recognition during the last five years, with average download speeds four times faster. The number of homes and businesses able to order a fibre broadband connection from Openreach – via the service provider of their choice – has also risen to over 26 million, compared with just 4 million at the end 2010.

We use the insights like those from the index to make sure we deliver a fibre network fit for the future.

«

Average data usage per line in autumn 2016: 261GB. In winter 2015: 230GB. That’s a 13% rise in a year.
link to this extract

Scalper losing money on tickets to Trump inauguration • NY Daily News

Adam Edelman:

»

Rosenberg [who is a Democrat and occasional tout, aka scalper, aka reseller] bought the pair of tickets on Craigslist from a “Second Amendment activist” in Katonah, N.Y., last week and immediately listed them on his Facebook account, as well as back on Craigslist.

After striking out on Craigslist, Facebook and even some white supremacist message boards, Yossi Rosenberg pinned his tickets to Donald Trump’s inauguration to a community bulletin board at his office.
But after receiving no interest, he visited a handful of white supremacist websites, including the Daily Stormer, where he posted listings for the tickets on the site’s message boards.

Even then, nobody expressed interest.

It could be that Rosenberg is simply asking for too much. Other Craigslist listings for inauguration tickets appeared Monday, ranging in prices of $175 to $400 per ticket.

He nevertheless pinned them to a community bulletin board at his office, hoping a colleague might take them off his hands.

“Someone offered me $200 for the pair,” he said, well below what he was looking for. “I guess his approval ratings aren’t that high, right?”

«

As stories go, this one is pretty thinly sourced. Rosenberg is the only person quoted. The tickets don’t cost money (though the allocation method is unclear). We don’t know if scalpers did well or badly at past inaugurations. We don’t know if all the tickets have gone.

Then again,
past tickets from Obama’s inaugurations are going for $500 or so. And there are some crazy prices on Trump inauguration tickets.)
link to this extract

Visual programming with Bubble • Bubble

»

Bubble introduces a new layer of abstraction on the top of programming technologies.
It lets you design your application by dragging and dropping elements and program it with workflows.

No Coding: Bubble is designed for people with no prior programming experience. Learn the basics in 15 minutes and master it in a couple of hours.

Mobile Development: Web apps built on Bubble are responsive and look great on mobile and tablets.
Building iOS apps is in early beta. Leverage our API to connect to your app.

«

Interesting.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Find out for yourself if you know how well and badly the US fared under Obama. Picture by AK Rockefeller 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. Not to be read out for “entertainment” at inaugurations. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Top Apps of 2016: Spotify, Line, and Netflix led the year’s biggest earners • Sensor Tower

Randy Nelson:

»

Worldwide net revenue from all apps (including games) across the App Store and Google Play grew 67% over Q4 2015, from approximately $5.2bn to approximately $8.7bn. As illustrated by the chart below, this reflected growth of 60% worldwide for Apple’s App Store, from $3.4bn to $5.4bn year-over-year, and 82% growth for Google Play, which saw revenue paid to developers increase from $1.8bn to $3.3bn for the same period.

Looking at new installs of apps from both stores, downloads of all apps worldwide during Q4 2016 totaled approximately 19.2bn and there were more than 80bn app downloads during 2016 in total.

In terms of year-over-year growth, total downloads for Q4 2016 increased by about 17% compared to 2015.

«

It’s not clear whether the data includes ad revenue. From what is shown, you can see iOS App Store revenue growing slower than the market, but still by more in absolute terms than Google Play’s. We constantly hear that Google Play will catch up and pass iOS revenues; on this showing, that will happen in 2020.

What’s more likely to happen first is that app revenue growth slows down dramatically.
link to this extract

Google’s Johnny Lee excited to merge Tango and Daydream • UploadVR

Ian Hamilton:

»

The AR [augmented reality] functionality [of the Asus Zenfone AR] was shown live on stage at CES by Google’s Johnny Lee, who heads up the Tango team. Google has shown a Hot Wheels app (onstage) and Jenga (shown previously) as realistic digital representations of otherwise classic gaming experiences inserted believably into your environment. A GAP app shown at CES, however, hinted at AR technology’s enormous potential to save folks time. It overlaid clothes of varying sizes seamlessly onto a floating model in the living room, with each outfit draping realistically over different body types.

And as countless CES attendees navigated the endless casino hallways, so many of us could have saved time if we’d been given step-by-step directions. All it would take are little dots overlaid on the carpet ahead shown on the phone’s screen — something that has been shown with Google Tango in the past.

«

God forbid you should look up from your phone screen or, you know, ask somebody or read a map. What about a strap for each wrist which gives a mild electric shock to tell you which way to turn?
link to this extract

This “Genderless Nipples” account is throwing off Instagram’s algorithm • PAPERMAG

Nadya Agrawal:

»

Genderless Nipples posts up-close pictures of people’s nipples, making it unclear if they belong to men and women. This clever strategy completely bamboozles Instagram’s algorithm for n00dz detection so sometimes when it deletes pictures off Genderless Nippples’ account it ends up deleting pictures of a dude’s nipples.

This happened within a few days of the account going live–Instagram in all its wisdom deleted a picture of nipples thinking they were lady parts when in fact they belonged to a guy. The account holders responded by posting the notification they received and a caption pointing out the clear double standard that exists: “Instagram, you can’t even tell the difference between male and female nipples; who could!? So why even bother banning female nipples if they can be so similar?”

Instagram’s current policy about nudity is clear for the most part: no butts, no genitalia. When it comes to nipples, though, the policy changes based on gender–if a woman’s nipples are exposed, it’s nudity. Male nipples are always permissible.

«

link to this extract

Google reveals its servers all contain custom security silicon • The Register

Simon Sharwood:

»

Revealed last Friday, the document outlines six layers of security and reveals some interesting factoids about the Alphabet subsidiary’s operations, none more so than the disclosure that: “We also design custom chips, including a hardware security chip that is currently being deployed on both servers and peripherals. These chips allow us to securely identify and authenticate legitimate Google devices at the hardware level.”

That silicon works alongside cryptographic signatures employed “over low-level components like the BIOS, bootloader, kernel, and base operating system image.”

“These signatures can be validated during each boot or update,” the document says, adding that “the components are all Google-controlled, built, and hardened. With each new generation of hardware we strive to continually improve security: for example, depending on the generation of server design, we root the trust of the boot chain in either a lockable firmware chip, a microcontroller running Google-written security code, or the above mentioned Google-designed security chip.”

«

This is in Google’s Infrastructure Security Design Overview. Google is paranoid about people penetrating its security because it relies on peoples’ trust; without that it would be Yahoo.
link to this extract

Lenovo thought it knew how to fix tarnished brands — then it bought Motorola • WSJ

Kathy Chu and Juro Osawa:

»

Although Motorola still was among the top five U.S. phone brands with Lenovo acquired it, it was posting losses and lagged behind market leaders such as Apple and Samsung.

Many analysts thought the marriage could work, given Lenovo’s experience. The IBM success, in particular, created “a certain aura of invincibility,” says Neil Mawston, an analyst at market-research firm Strategy Analytics.

Mr. Yang initially instructed Lenovo executives to take a hands-off approach, similar to his strategy with IBM. He vowed to make Motorola profitable within six quarters and reassured Motorola employees he didn’t plan to cut U.S. positions and move them to China.

He also insisted Motorola re-enter China, a country it left after being acquired by Google, whose search and email functions have largely been blocked in China following disagreements with Beijing over censorship.

“Lenovo is a global citizen like you,” Motorola employees recall Mr. Yang telling them in U.S. town-hall meetings after the deal closed. “You have to sell things globally.”

Lenovo already had a huge phone business in China, briefly reaching No. 1 in sales in 2014.

«

The piece, though long, is oddly unfocussed. What’s the principal cause of Lenovo’s failure? Motorola being unprofitable (which it was even before Google), or Lenovo being arrogant? One suspects that Motorola’s culture, plus the extreme competitiveness of the mobile market, is the true reason.
link to this extract

Tower of Babel • Remains of the Day

Eugene Wei:

»

Our next POTUS, whether wittingly or not, weaponized Russell Conjugation [the way we see desirable traits in ourselves as undesirable in enemies – eg I’m firm, you’re obstinate and he’s pigheaded] and our coalitional instincts [explained earlier in his post] and performed a jiu-jitsu toss on his opponents, leaving much of the country wondering whether winner-take-all elections for the Presidency are a good thing in a country so evenly divided…

…It’s somewhat of a miracle how every Tweet of his sifts the same factions apart; one side screams in disgust and disbelief, the other piles on with glee. Let’s call that technique of tweeting the Trump Conjugation. Sad!

Many claim the internet creates filter bubbles, but I believe the mechanism by which the Internet amplifies tribalism doesn’t work the way most people describe it. The common explanation is that we form networks with like-minded people and only hear the opinions of those who agree with us, reinforcing our narrow world views.

My belief is that the Internet has increased our exposure to diverse viewpoints, including those from oppositional tribes. I suspect everyone who uses the Internet regularly encounters more diverse opinions, in absolute terms, than prior to the rise of the Internet, and there is research (PDF) to support this. Our information diet is more diverse now, and as opposed to the age before social media or even the Internet itself, we’re exposed to more opinions that both strongly confirm AND counter our beliefs.

«

Wei doesn’t write often, but when he does it’s worthwhile.
link to this extract

The Big List of Naughty Strings • Github

»

The Big List of Naughty Strings is a list of strings which have a high probability of causing issues when used as user-input data.

«

In case you’ve got something you built that needs testing. Sure that Little Timmy Drop Tables is in there somewhere. He’s already got a company in the UK.
link to this extract

Restarting the Emergent newsletter • Craig Silverman

»

I’m Craig Silverman and this is the first version of a restarted newsletter about online rumors, fake news, and misinformation.

If you’re wondering why you’re receiving it, here’s a bit of background: You signed up to receive the newsletter from Emergent.info, my rumor-tracking website. It’s been dormant since March 2015. That’s also the last time I sent this newsletter. 

I’m now covering fake news and online misinformation as the media editor for BuzzFeed News. This newsletter will be a quick digital briefing on those topics.

«

You can subscribe here. If you need more email.
link to this extract

You Draw It: What Got Better or Worse During Obama’s Presidency • The New York Times

Larry Buchanan, Haeyoun Park and Adam Pearce:

»

You Draw It: What Got Better or Worse During Obama’s Presidency

Draw your guesses on the charts below to see if you’re as smart as you think you are.

«

This is terrific: unemployment, convicted immigrants deported, national spending on health care, national debt, number of Mexicans illegally in the US, number of violent crimes, troops in Afghanistan and Iraq – all there, but you have to try to guess (or use your gigantic knowledge) first.

More to the point, this is a terrific use of data journalism to get people at least to see how their beliefs match up to reality. (Trouble is, will they accept that it is reality?) Very like the FT’s interactive with data from the US and UK last December.
link to this extract

How an allegedly fake video killed a much-hyped drone startup • Forbes

Ryan Mac:

»

The lawsuit alleged that Lily did not have a single prototype that functioned as advertised at the time of the launch video’s filming. Instead, it claimed Balaresque and Bradlow brought non-functioning models to the shoot for “beauty shots,” while the first-person angles that supposedly came from the Lily Camera were actually shot by GoPro units that had been strapped to the robot.

In an email cited by the lawsuit, Lily CEO Balaresque wrote to Brad Kremer, a video producer who specialized in snowboarding shoots, that shots from the Lily Drone will be using a “Gopro mounted to a Lily prototype.”

“However, we do not feel comfortable telling people that we shot [view from Lily] scenes with a Gopro (because the whole thesis of our product is that you do not need a Gopro),” he continued. “Can you modify a Gopro image in post-processing so that people cannot tell that it was taken from a Gopro…”

Kremer, who works for video production company CMI Productions, declined to comment to Forbes, citing the ongoing litigation.

«

The use case that the Lily founders thought they had – include yourself in those family holiday photos! – is pretty much completely answered by the selfie stick. Though I can see scores of professional uses for drones (films, TV, reconnaissance) I still can’t see a viable use for consumers at the moment.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: apparently every iPad mini owner in the entire world spends all their time using it in portrait mode and would love to buy a 10.5in version so they can have two side-by-side. We regret the error.

We might have to think about that “secure” line. Photo by Doug Kline 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 11 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Note to Tesla owners: Don’t forget your car keys • Recode

Johana Bhuiyan:

»

Ryan Negri, an angel investor and Tesla owner based in Las Vegas, decided to go for a drive through Red Rock Canyon yesterday to take “some photos of the freshly-fallen snow,” according to a photo caption he posted on Instagram. He unlocked and also started his car using his phone — a handy, somewhat delightful and futuristic-seeming feature — and left the key behind.

As Negri discovered after getting out of the car, it turns out there is no cell reception in a canyon in the middle of the desert — and that the Tesla needs a network connection to use the smartphone-unlocking feature.

«

#utopians
link to this extract

Medium, and the reason you can’t stand the news anymore • Medium

Sean Blanda:

»

Companies from Medium to The Washington Post to Mashable to Buzzfeed all eventually run into the same unthinkable truth: The methods used to fund modern journalism simultaneously undermine trust in the news outlets.

Editors, writers, and executives at today’s news outlets are all in a no-win situation where they are forced to contribute to the causes of their own demise to survive. In any other business, companies would try, fail, and another would take its place. This is good and needed.

But for news, the failures are happening at a glacial pace and bad actors are profiting as the trustworthiness of our news outlets are breaking down in slow motion. The result is the worst kind of feedback loop, where well-meaning people try to “fix” the news. But instead, those methods erode trust in all news outlets leading to a total breakdown in discourse.

You can draw a straight line from the bad incentive structure forced upon news outlets to the unprecedented divisiveness in our country. And it’s time we realized what’s going on.

«

link to this extract

How to use Facebook and fake news to get people to murder each other • BuzzFeed News

Jason Patinkin:

»

Although the vast majority of South Sudan’s population has no internet access — the adult literacy rate in the country is around 30% — social media incitement has had an outsized impact largely because it mainly comes from the South Sudanese diaspora, who are held in extremely high esteem back home.

In November, the UN warned that ethnic cleansing is underway and that the fighting could spill into genocide. Government and rebel leaders stand accused of orchestrating Facebook and Twitter campaigns inciting the violence.

“Social media has been used by partisans on all sides, including some senior government officials, to exaggerate incidents, spread falsehoods and veiled threats or post outright messages of incitement,” a separate report by a UN panel of experts released in November reads.

It’s a situation that has drawn comparisons to Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, particularly that crisis’s use of Radio Mille Collines, a local radio station, to fan the flames. And South Sudan’s divide is only getting worse.

«

Goebbels would have loved Facebook and Twitter.
link to this extract

Andy Rubin nears his comeback, complete with an ‘Essential’ phone • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman and Mark Bergen:

»

At least one prototype of Rubin’s phone boasts a screen larger than the iPhone 7 Plus’s (5.5-inches) but has a smaller overall footprint because of the lack of bezels, one of the people said. The startup is experimenting with enabling the phone’s screen to sense different levels of pressure, similar to an iPhone, the person said. Rubin’s team is testing an industrial design with metal edges and a back made of ceramic, which is more difficult to manufacture than typical smartphone materials, two of the people said. 

Essential’s engineers are developing a proprietary connector that serves double duty for charging the battery and expanding the phone’s functionality over time, one person familiar with the planning said. The magnetic connector would allow Essential or even third parties to create hardware accessories that add features to the smartphone. For instance, Rubin’s engineers are working on a sphere-shaped camera add-on that shoots high-resolution 360 degree photographs, the person said.

«

1) going to go nowhere. Rubin has a great track record, but this is niche stuff; and modular is a deathwish.
2) increasingly, on reading Gurman’s stories, I feel his sources are in the supply chain, not the actual companies. There’s hardware detail, but very little about how things will work or what their aims are.
link to this extract

Microsoft acquires deep learning startup Maluuba; AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio to have advisory role • Official Microsoft Blog

»

Maluuba’s vision is to advance toward a more general artificial intelligence by creating literate machines that can think, reason and communicate like humans — a vision exactly in line with ours. Maluuba’s impressive team is addressing some of the fundamental problems in language understanding by modeling some of the innate capabilities of the human brain, from memory and common sense reasoning to curiosity and decision making. I’ve been in the AI research and development field for more than 20 years now, and I’m incredibly excited about the scenarios that this acquisition could make possible in conversational AI.

Imagine a future where, instead of frantically searching through your organization’s directory, documents or emails to find the top tax-law experts in your company, for example, you could communicate with an AI agent that would leverage Maluuba’s machine comprehension capabilities to immediately respond to your request. The agent would be able to answer your question in a company security-compliant manner by having a deeper understanding of the contents of your organization’s documents and emails, instead of simply retrieving a document by keyword matching, which happens today. This is just one of hundreds of scenarios we could imagine as Maluuba pushes the state-of-the-art technology of machine literacy.

Sam Pasupalak and his Maluuba co-founder, Kaheer Suleman, have created a very strong engineering and research team that will become part of our Artificial Intelligence and Research organization.

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If they can imagine hundreds of scenarios, could they not imagine one that actually makes one think “wow”? Keyword matching is popular because one almost always uses a relevant word, which can then be retrieved. What would be impressive would be to ask for “that email by that person who I met with at X hotel”. Calendar, ID, email.
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Why would Apple release a 10.5″ iPad? • Studio Neat blog

Dan Provost:

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When the original iPad Pro 12.9″ was introduced in September 2015, Phil Schiller demonstrated the reasoning for that sizing by illustrating that the width of the new iPad is the exact same dimension as the height of the 9.7″ iPad.

This has the advantage of essentially having two full height iPad apps, side by side.
Now, imagine Apple doing the exact same thing, but with the iPad mini.

The math works out perfectly. This new 10.5″ iPad would have the exact same resolution as the 12.9″ iPad Pro (2732 x 2048), but the same pixel density of the iPad mini (326 ppi instead of 264 ppi). Crunch the numbers, do a little Pythagorean Theorem, and you end up with a screen 10.5″ diagonal (10.47″ to be precise, but none of Apple’s stated screen sizes are exact). In terms of physcial dimensions, the width of this 10.5″ screen would be exactly the same as the height of the iPad mini screen.

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OK, so that’s the case, but does anyone use an iPad mini in portrait? Also, would this mean the end of the iPad mini? If this is released, the SKUs are starting to get weird: 7.9in, 9.7in, 10.5in, 12.9in. Notable how Samsung tried multiple screen sizes for tablets, but it released them all at pretty much the same time. That doesn’t seem to have worked out particularly well for them.
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Fitbit off to slow start in 2017 as devices pile up, report says • Bloomberg

Selina Wang:

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The maker of wearable fitness trackers halted production in mid-December because the devices were piling up at retailers and suppliers amid disappointing sales, according to a report by the firm published Tuesday. Demand so far this year is “characterized as weak,” Cleveland Research said, suggesting analysts’ estimates for 2016 fourth-quarter earnings may be too high.

“The start of the year has been bad with Fitbit,” research analyst Ben Bollin wrote in the note. “There are some concerns partners may not get paid for all of the product they have built because demand is so weak,” he wrote, citing comments from a supplier. “Partners had to completely stop production for Fitbit because they are swimming in product.”

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Wow. Demand reckoned to have been low through the fourth quarter. And yet the Fitbit app was high on the list of free apps in the iOS store. One to keep an eye on this year. (Thanks @charlesknight for the link.)
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Exploitee.rs hacked the Samsung Smartcam yet again, this time with a root exploit • Android Police

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After the first wave of exploits [in May 2014], the Smartcam’s local web interface was completely removed, only allowing users to connect to it via the Samsung SmartCloud website. The company hoped that this would remove all possible exploits, but they neglected to remove the actual web server itself (only deleting the interface that the server was running).

Because the web server is still available, another exploit was found – allowing commands to be run on the Smartcam as root. The full technical details can be found on the Exploitee.rs wiki, but essentially, this works by injecting a specific file into the device’s “iWatch” webcam monitoring service as a firmware update. This can then be used to execute commands remotely as the root user, because the web server runs as root.

Interestingly, the Smartcam was developed by Samsung Techwin, a former division of Samsung. Samsung sold its holding stake of Techwin in 2015 to South Korean conglomerate Hanwha Group. The company, now called Hanwha Techwin, is still responsible for the Samsung Smartcam – likely explaining the camera’s poor user experience and security.

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The Exploiteers wiki is worth a browse; seems to be an IoT hacking/exploit wiki. Oddly, no Apple gear in there.
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Android’s emoji problem • Emojipedia blog

Jeremy Burge:

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The Google design team were months ahead of Apple with new emoji in the past year. Support for the latest emojis came to Android in the major Nougat release in August of 2016.

Yet the vast majority of Android users still can’t see these new emojis. Instead, they see this:

Unicode 9 support was first added to Android 7.0 in August, followed by genders and professions which arrived with 7.1 in October 2016. This was some timely updating from Google, especially compared to previous years.

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84% of iOS users visiting Emojipedia are using iOS 10.x; just 4% of Android visitors are using the latest, 7.x (though that’s 6x greater than the number in the wild, 0.7%). Quoth Burge:

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With numbers like that, it’s no wonder so many apps are providing their own custom emoji support these days.

Snapchat, Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram and Slack all use emoji-replacement images on Android; in a trend started by Twitter with Twemoji which was released when the most popular browser on Windows (Chrome) didn’t include emoji support.

WhatsApp and Telegram even use Apple’s own emoji images on Android, and makes a custom keyboard to display them…

…The answer for users is very clear: if you care about new emoji support, be careful which phone you purchase. Unless you like looking at empty boxes.

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It does feel a bit “first world problem”, but the deeper point is that security elements in newer versions of Android never reach many users.

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Pandora’s eyes are bigger than its wallet • Bloomberg Gadfly

Shira Ovide:

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Pandora said late Thursday that its business is going gangbusters — so wonderfully, in fact, that it needs to fire 7% of its main workforce in the U.S. 

The good news is the online radio service is doing better financially than it told investors to expect. Revenue is higher than predicted, at least in part because the company is willing to cram in more commercial breaks between songs. And there’s a good reason for Pandora’s eagerness for higher advertising sales at the risk of annoying its users with ads: It needs the money. 

Running Pandora Media Inc.’s business in the 12 months ended Sept. 30 burned through $301m in cash, counting what the company spent on computers and other resources to stream songs to its listeners. And the company at Sept. 30 held about $258m in cash and relatively liquid financial instruments. At its current rate of cash burn, then, the company will exhaust its reserves of ready cash in about 10 months. 

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But but but! As Ovide points out, though it has been free cashflow-negative for five quarters in a row (and 8 of the past 11) it can get more cash by a rights issue, or issuing more stock, or a loan. But that’s only going to be a holding position – she reckons it’s in line for a sale. (Ironic, since Pandora is public, and Spotify is angling to go public this year, but isn’t profitable either, and has a giant loan sucking it dry.)
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Trolls decided I was taking pictures of Rex Tillerson’s notes. I wasn’t even there. • The Washington Post

Doris Truong was convicted in her absence on Twitter of having been the (also Asian, also female) person who seemed to be taking pictures of Tillerson’s notes during a break in his confirmation hearing:

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Even more bizarrely, one Twitter user insisted that “facial software on the video” led to the “almost positive” conclusion that the woman was me.

But even if people believed that the person at the hearing wasn’t me, they wanted to know who she was. And that’s what’s particularly alarming about this time in our society: Why are people so quick to look for someone to condemn? And during the confusion about the woman’s identity, why is it presumed that she is a journalist? Or that taking pictures of notes in an open hearing is illegal? Or, for that matter, that she was even taking pictures of Tillerson’s notes?

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The urge to accuse is extraordinarily strong online. If you renamed Facebook to “Pitchforks” and Twitter to “Flaming Torches” you’d pretty much have it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Afraid so – machine learning is coming for your poker game. Photo by Jeremy Brooks on Flickr.

A selection of 14 links for you. It’s a lot, isn’t it? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The Internet IS a Thing: use it to find license plate readers • networked inference

Kenneth Lipp:

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A few years ago I was searching for info about Automatic License Plate Readers, ALPR, Googling by manufacturer “Genetec.” I found a “Read Me” file from an FTP server, that it turned out was a live ALPR server for the City of Boston, with classified watchlists including thousands on a “Gang/Terror” watch.

At the time I was just searching Google, but once I found something interesting I used a variety of other tools to remotely scan the server and its directories to see what I could learn.

I found out recently that you could search Shodan, the Search Engine for the Internet of Things, for text in the “html” field. Shodan indexes, among other data about the physical architecture of the Web, headers which provide response codes (like 100, 200, “404 Error,” etc), and often descriptive information about the function of the computer (or machine, or site, for the purposes of Shodan’s heuristic, host).

In Boston I located a Genetec AutoVu server. I searched Shodan for html:”autovu”

This brings back four results, once filtered to just the US (probably two ALPR systems, 3 IP addresses, one is repeated in the results)…

…What we have in this case appears to be a field test for an occupancy-detection/plate-reader hybrid solution, located in Boydton, in Virginia, all the way down on the North Carolina border — where would you look at that there’s a Microsoft Data Center.

I know off the top of my head that Massachusetts state was working with Xerox on such a system on state roads, which in addition to scanning and archiving plate numbers of passing cars used a computer vision algorithm to determine how many people are in the car (or perhaps whether the car has only one or more than occupant — this type of system is frequently deployed for monitoring occupancy-restricted lanes — “carpool lanes.”)

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And this stuff is on the internet, at least in the US. Lipp has written much more on this in a series of blogposts.
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Facebook risks breaking its perfect business model • Bloomberg Gadfly

Shira Ovide on Facebook’s decision to start revenue-sharing on pre-roll and mid-roll (yuk) ads in videos:

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Facebook has become – surprisingly – the perfect business for the smartphone age, and a big reason is it has spent essentially nothing to keep users enthralled. For the most part, companies that publish political articles or cooking videos on Facebook don’t make money directly from that material, although they use those items to assemble a big fan base and then point those people to websites and apps where the companies make money selling ads or subscriptions.

Those articles and cooking videos keep users hanging out on Facebook, and the company keeps all the money it makes from selling advertisements that fill in gaps between those posts and videos they paid nothing to publish. It may not be fair, but it has made for a wildly successful and profitable business. 

If Facebook is now willing to give 55% of ad dollars from those video ads, that means cracks are emerging in Facebook’s free ride with its army of content suppliers. (Facebook also has experimented with splitting ad dollars with semiprofessional video stars who have attracted television-sized audiences on YouTube.)

Sharing money is more equitable but could damage Facebook’s finances. Consider Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube. The video website makes roughly one-third of the money Facebook generates from each user. It’s not clear exactly why. Facebook may be doing a better job stuffing ads into every spot it can. Surely part of the gap is explained by Facebook paying almost nothing to stock the social network with posts, photos and video, while YouTube hands off 55 cents of every dollar it generates to the creators of popular videos.

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How surveillance changes people’s behavior • Harvard Magazine

Jonathan Shaw, in a very long article on this topic:

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“Google was ground zero,” [Wilson professor of business administration Shoshana] Zuboff begins. At first, information was used to benefit end users, to improve searches, just as Apple and Amazon use their customers’ data largely to customize those individuals’ online experiences. Google’s founders once said they weren’t interested in advertising. But Google “didn’t have a product to sell,” she explains, and as the 2001 dot.com bubble fell into crisis, the company was under pressure to transform investment into earnings. “They didn’t start by saying, ‘Well, we can make a lot of money assaulting privacy,’” she continues. Instead, “trial and error and experimentation and adapting their capabilities in new directions” led them to sell ads based on personal information about users. Like the tinkerers at Ford, Google engineers discovered “a way of using their capabilities in the context of search to do something utterly different from anything they had imagined when they started out.” Instead of using the personal data to benefit the sources of that information, they commodified it, using what they knew about people to match them with paying advertisers. As the advertising money flowed into Google, it became a “powerful feedback loop of almost instantaneous success in these new markets.”

“Those feedback loops become drivers themselves,” Zuboff explains. “This is how the logic of accumulation develops…and ultimately flourishes and becomes institutionalized. That it has costs, and that the costs fall on society, on individuals, on the values and principles of the liberal order for which human beings have struggled and sacrificed much over millennia—that,” she says pointedly, “is off the balance sheet.”

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How celebrity death hoaxes power fake news • Digiday

Lucia Moses:

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Web traffic-goosing tricks come and go. But if there’s one that has enduring appeal, it’s the celebrity death hoax.

In the past few weeks alone, internet pranksters have “killed off” Queen Elizabeth, Tony Hawk, Miley Cyrus and Hugh Hefner, to name a handful that have been debunked by the website Gossip Cop. Some trace its peak to the site Global Associated News, a fake-news headline generator that web entrepreneur Rich Hoover said he started as a joke.

Since then, others have discovered the celebrity death hoax as a tried-and-true scheme to drive traffic to their sites, which they’re monetizing with ads. The fake stories follow a loose pattern: Often coming from sites with legit-sounding names like Msmbc.co and Nbctoday.co, the stories tend to focus on young, popular celebrities with many fans who would be shocked by their premature death, causing a burst of traffic to the site, which is paid for with programmatically served ads.

Michael Lewittes, founder of Gossip Cop, said he once was seeing as many as two or three death hoaxes a week. “Eddie Murphy and Adam Sandler have died, probably collectively, 15 to 20 times on the internet,” he said.

The rise of platforms and ad tech have enabled the spread of celebrity death, just as it has other types of fake news. Some pranksters have used Twitter to fool people about celebrity deaths, using accounts that sound like actual news outlets.

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Celebrity *anything* tends to drive clicks. Hell, you can even get people to *vote* for you with the power of celebrity, even if you’re talentless.
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US appeals court revives antitrust lawsuit against Apple • Reuters

Stephen Nellis and Dan Levine:

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iPhone app purchasers may sue Apple Inc over allegations that the company monopolized the market for iPhone apps by not allowing users to purchase them outside the App Store, leading to higher prices, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Thursday.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling revives a long-simmering legal challenge originally filed in 2012 taking aim at Apple’s practice of only allowing iPhones to run apps purchased from its own App Store. A group of iPhone users sued saying the Cupertino, California, company’s practice was anticompetitive.

Apple had argued that users did not have standing to sue it because they purchased apps from developers, with Apple simply renting out space to those developers. Developers pay a cut of their revenues to Apple in exchange for the right to sell in the App Store.

A lower court sided with Apple, but Judge William A. Fletcher ruled that iPhone users purchase apps directly from Apple, which gives iPhone users the right to bring a legal challenge against Apple.

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That could get interesting.
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The eye of the storm: a look at EyePyramid, the malware supposedly used in high-profile hacks in Italy • TrendLabs Security Intelligence Blog

Federico Maggi:

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Two Italian citizens were arrested last Tuesday by Italian authorities (in cooperation with the FBI) for exfiltrating sensitive data from high-profile Italian targets. Private and public Italian citizens, including those holding key positions in the state, were the subject of a spear-phishing campaign that reportedly served a malware, codenamed EyePyramid, as a malicious attachment. This malware was used to successfully exfiltrate over 87 gigabytes worth of data including usernames, passwords, browsing data, and filesystem content.

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Caught how? One of them bought a licence key for MailBee under his own name, and used the key in the attack code. Operational security is tough.
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Asking the wrong questions • Benedict Evans

Evans looks at forecasts of the future from the 1960s:

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Some of this has happened more or less as predicted – we did get air traffic control, automated subway trains and computerised taxation (except in the USA). There are some great comedy predictions here too – that ‘centralised wire tapping’ would take until 2030, or never, or that people in both 1964 and 2016 thought we’d have automated driving ‘by 2020’. 

However, to me the interesting thing is how often the order is wrong. What we now know to be the hard problems were going to be solved decades before what we now know were the easy ones. So it might take until 2020 to ‘fax’ a newspaper to your home, and automatic wiretapping might be impossible, but automatic doctors, radar implants for the blind, household robots and machine translation would be all done by 1990 and a machine would be passing human IQ tests at genius level by 2000. Meanwhile, there are a few quite important things missing – there is no general-purpose computing, no internet and no mobile phones. There’s no prediction for when everyone on earth would have a pocket computer connected to all the world’s knowledge (2020-2025). This aren’t random gaps – it’s just not that they thought X would work and didn’t know we’d invent Y. Rather, what’s lacking is an understanding of the structural impetus of computing and software as universal platforms that would shape how all of these things would be created. We didn’t make a home newspaper facsimile machine – we made computers.

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Damn, Apple is losing a lot of people • Gizmodo

Christina Warren:

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Here is a list of some of the high level employees who have left Apple since January 2016 and where they have gone, if that information is available:

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It’s a long list (24 names), from multiple departments – though five are PR or media (is that a crucial department?). Notable that many in that list are going to Tesla. Either Tesla is the attractive place, or it’s good at the PR job of announcing recruitment wins.
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Xiaomi stops disclosing annual sales figures as CEO admits the company grew too fast • TechCrunch

Jon Russell:

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Xiaomi has forgone its tradition of revealing how many smartphones it sold the previous year. The strategy yielded many headlines for the highly-regarded Chinese outfit, but today its CEO admitted that Xiaomi has been in transition after growing “too fast”.

The writing was on the cards, even as early as January 2016 when Xiaomi revealed it had sold “over 70 million” devices in 2015. An impressive number, for sure, given the backdrop of slowing smartphone sales worldwide, but it was short of the company’s public target of 80m, which was reduced from an initial 100m.

It’s been fairly evident from analyst reports that 2016 wasn’t a year for blockbuster Xiaomi growth. While it featured near the top of the sales pile in China, and held steady in India, its top emerging market, there was no great acceleration as in past years. For example, sales jumped from 7.2m in 2012, to 18.7m in 2013 and 61m in 2014.

A Xiaomi rep confirmed to us that the company will not be disclosing its 2016 sales numbers.

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That $45bn valuation (at its last funding round in December 2014) doesn’t look so solid any more.
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Poker is the latest game to fold against artificial intelligence • MIT Technology Review

Will Knight:

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In a landmark achievement for artificial intelligence, a poker bot developed by researchers in Canada and the Czech Republic has defeated several professional players in one-on-one games of no-limit Texas hold’em poker.

Perhaps most interestingly, the academics behind the work say their program overcame its human opponents by using an approximation approach that they compare to “gut feeling.”

“If correct, this is indeed a significant advance in game-playing AI,” says Michael Wellman, a professor at the University of Michigan who specializes in game theory and AI. “First, it achieves a major milestone (beating poker professionals) in a game of prominent interest. Second, it brings together several novel ideas, which together support an exciting approach for imperfect-information games.”

Later this week, a tournament at a Pittsburgh casino will see several world-class poker players play the same version of poker against a program developed at Carnegie Mellon University.

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Computers playing poker get an advantage over humans: they don’t have emotions, and they don’t have “tells” – the unconscious signals we give off to indicate tension or otherwise.

However, poker is amazingly hard for computers:

»

tellingly, it contains levels of uncertainty, such as when an opponent may be bluffing, that are found in many real-world situations that AI has not yet mastered. Poker players cannot see their opponents’ hands, meaning that, in contrast to checkers, chess, or Go, not all of the information contained within the game is available to them.

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About 10^160 paths for each hand in heads-up no-limit Texas Hold’em.
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2016 marked fifth consecutive year of worldwide PC shipment decline • Gartner

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For the year 2016, PC shipments totaled 269.7m units, a 6.2% decline from 2015. PC shipments have declined annually since 2012.

“Stagnation in the PC market continued into the fourth quarter of 2016 as holiday sales were generally weak due to the fundamental change in PC buying behavior,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. “The broad PC market has been static as technology improvements have not been sufficient to drive real market growth. There have been innovative form factors like 2-in-1s and thin and light notebooks, as well as technology improvements, such as longer battery life. This end of the market has grown fast, led by engaged PC users who put high priority on PCs. However, the market driven by PC enthusiasts is not big enough to drive overall market growth.”

“There is the other side of the PC market, where PCs are infrequently used. Consumers in this segment have high dependency on smartphones, so they stretch PC life cycles longer. This side of the market is much bigger than the PC enthusiast segment; thus, steep declines in the infrequent PC user market offset the fast growth of the PC enthusiast market.”

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Hasn’t found the bottom yet, then. The other notable point is that the “Others” category (all those who aren’t Lenovo, HP, Dell, Asus, Apple or Acer) shrank by 19% in the fourth quarter, against 17% for the year – suggesting that the squeeze on the smaller players is getting worse. In total, “Others” went from 77.6m in 2015 to 64.5m. Those lost 13m sales are going to hurt balance sheets.
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Saving you bandwidth on Google+ through machine learning • Google product blog

John Nack, Google+ product manager:

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Traditionally, viewing images at high resolution has also meant using lots of bandwidth, leading to slower loading speeds and higher data costs. For many folks, especially those where data is pricey or the internet is spotty, this is a significant concern.

To help everyone be able to see the beautiful photos that photographers share to Google+ in their full glory, we’ve turned to machine learning and a new technology called RAISR. RAISR, which was introduced in November, uses machine learning to produce great quality versions of low-resolution images, allowing you to see beautiful photos as the photographers intended them to be seen. By using RAISR to display some of the large images on Google+, we’ve been able to use up to 75% less bandwidth per image we’ve applied it to.

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“Google+ product manager” must be one of those depressing jobs. This is a great application, though on my slow connection the picture alone took absolutely ages – over 30 seconds – to load.
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Techdirt’s First Amendment fight for its life • Techdirt

Mike Masnick, Techdirt’s founder:

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As you may have heard, last week we were sued for $15m by Shiva Ayyadurai, who claims to have invented email. We have written, at great length, about his claims and our opinion — backed up by detailed and thorough evidence — that email existed long before Ayyadurai created any software. We believe the legal claims in the lawsuit are meritless, and we intend to fight them and to win.

There is a larger point here. Defamation claims like this can force independent media companies to capitulate and shut down due to mounting legal costs. Ayyadurai’s attorney, Charles Harder, has already shown that this model can lead to exactly that result. His efforts helped put a much larger and much more well-resourced company than Techdirt completely out of business.

So, in our view, this is not a fight about who invented email. This is a fight about whether or not our legal system will silence independent publications for publishing opinions that public figures do not like.
And here’s the thing: this fight could very well be the end of Techdirt, even if we are completely on the right side of the law.

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I don’t agree with Masnick on everything (specifically: the value of copyright) but he always argues his case well; and he’s not afraid to call a spade a spade. It’s likely Techdirt will set up a legal defence fund. That could be a worthy cause for donations.

It’s also a sign of the US’s media getting an inkling of what it’s like to be in the news business in the UK: you always need to be thinking about libel risk.
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The slow, sad, and ultimately predictable decline of 3-D printing • Inc.com

John Brandon:

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I often think of that Saab part [a cupholder which had broken, and which he wanted to replace] as a good model of what went wrong. (By the way, I promise not to use any metaphors for 3-D printing from now on.) For starters, I really wanted to print the cup holder. I even asked a well-known Thingiverse designer for help, and was going to pay him, but he said the part was too complex. Wait, what? Too complex for a well-known designer? He even used the word “hassle” in his email back to me. The part is not something you’d use on a NASA spaceship. It does have a spring attached to two pieces of plastic that fold together.

What about a water bottle cage for my bike? Shouldn’t be a big problem. There are plenty of designs. But when I actually printed one of them, it broke on my first ride. Also, a much more important piece of data: A water bottle cage costs about $4 at Amazon.com but even a relatively short spool of filament costs $65. The math doesn’t compute. And, it doesn’t make sense to spend the time.

From that experience, I knew something was wrong. As the Newsweek article notes, you can print only so many Yoda heads before you wonder why you bought the device. A 3-D printer won’t magically terraform anything right before your eyes, and it even has problems with slightly complex car parts. I even remember my nephew, who is working as an intern for me this year, saying the industry needs to figure out this problem. It’s fun for a while, but eventually you realize you need to do something practical after paying almost $1,000 for the product.

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It’s that: the costs just never add up.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: “Alibaba” was mispelt as “Alababa” in the article about Yahoo yesterday. What’s an extra i between friends, though?

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.

What if someone takes over your phone using voice commands you can’t recognise? Photo by TechStage 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.

Back by minimal demand! A selection of 17 links for you. (It’s 20-17, after all.) Please do not abuse them in Russian hotels. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Why America is self-segregating • Points

Danah Boyd:

»

Naive as hell, Mark Zuckerberg dreamed he could build the tools that would connect people at unprecedented scale, both domestically and internationally. I actually feel bad for him as he clings to that hope while facing increasing attacks from people around the world about the role that Facebook is playing in magnifying social divisions. Although critics love to paint him as only motivated by money, he genuinely wants to make the world a better place and sees Facebook as a tool to connect people, not empower them to self-segregate…

…In the springs of 2006, I was doing fieldwork with teenagers at a time when they had just received acceptances to college. I giggled at how many of them immediately wrote to the college in which they intended to enroll, begging for a campus email address so that they could join that school’s Facebook (before Facebook was broadly available). In the previous year, I had watched the previous class look up roommate assignments on MySpace so I was prepared for the fact that they’d use Facebook to do the same. What I wasn’t prepared for was how quickly they would all get on Facebook, map the incoming freshman class, and use this information to ask for a roommate switch. Before they even arrived on campus in August/September of 2006, they had self-segregated as much as possible.

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The longer piece has much more data, and is even more remarkable.
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Demo: Hidden Voice Commands • UC Berkeley/Georgetown U research

An eight-strong team from the two universities show how machines can hear things that you can’t – and will act on them:

»

The video below shows black box attack attack being carried out in presence of background noise with the target phone kept at a distance on 10.1 ft away from the speakers used to play the attack audio. 

The understanding of attack commands by a human listener is subject to priming effects:  when we already know the actual message embedded in an obfuscated command, we unconsciously “hear” that message in the noise. This effect is so extreme that we can even “hear” primed messages when no such message actually exists; see, for example, Sounds you can’t Unhear. 

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The video is creepy, and amazing. They’ve published a paper too.

I mean, imagine if you broadcast one of those “hidden” commands over some speakers to direct the phone belonging to, say, a resident of a tower in New York to open a URL which exploited a known Android security flaw so you could take the phone over and passively connect to the microphone. Imagine.
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How volunteer reviewers are saving the world from crummy – even dangerous – USB-C cables • Fast Company

Glenn Fleishman:

»

Nathan Kolluru [who has been testing and then reviewing USB-C cables bought from Amazon] has also seen the downside of being fully independent: In July, he wrote about a warning from Amazon that he risked termination of his Prime account after he tried to return some non-standards-compliant cables.

But surely this isn’t how the hardware world should work for consumers. Shouldn’t there be a formal source of information about a new technology’s promise and pitfalls that isn’t reliant on manufacturers and industry trade groups?

Well, yes, there should. And for a glorious few decades there was, in the form of test labs at computer and other electronics trade magazines. Before the rise of the internet, tech companies that wanted to reach consumers and businesses bought advertising in magazines such as PC Magazine, PCWorld, and InfoWorld. That made such publications highly profitable, which funded large staffs and testing labs.

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Hey, guess what happened to them? But this is a good article about what the USB people can and can’t do. Though it doesn’t give us much of a timeline for when it will all be plain sailing as it always almost is with USB-A.
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Longtime Apple programmer and Swift creator leaves Apple for Tesla • Ars Technica

Andrew Cunningham:

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Ted Kremenek, another longtime Apple developer who has been with the company since 2007, will be taking over Lattner’s duties as Swift project lead.

[Chris] Lattner has worked at Apple since 2005, and he’s been involved in a lot of major tools and software initiatives over the years. His extensive resume lists many versions of Xcode going back to at least version 3.1, LLVM and the Clang frontend, OpenCL, LLDB, and Swift. He also did some work on macOS, helped tune software performance for the Apple A6 used in the iPhone 5, and helped with the transition to 64-bit ARM CPUs that began with the iPhone 5S. His resume shows a willingness to create, adopt, and evangelize new software and programming languages, which will no doubt be a component of his work at Tesla.

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11 years is a fair length of time. But equally, Lattner was clearly important at Apple, which couldn’t find a way to keep him. You can see that becoming the person in charge of self-driving software at Tesla would be attractive. And clearly, Apple doesn’t have the same means of attracting him.
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78% of global smartphones will be sold to replacement buyers in 2017 • Strategy Analytics

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According to the latest report from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies (WSS) services: Global Smartphone Sales by Replacement Sales vs. Sales to First Time Buyers by 88 Countries : 2013-2022, global smartphone replacement sales outweighed sales to first time buyers in 2013, for the first time ever. In 2017, we expect 78% of global smartphones will be sold to replacement buyers. We forecast replacement smartphone sales will continue to dominate smartphone sales across all six regions by 2022.

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I think they mean 78% of smartphones globally, but anyhow. Saturation beckons.
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LG Electronics, moving away from modular model, plans new smartphone • WSJ

You know that thing where annoying people say “I told you so”? I told you so about LG’s modular plan.

Also, I think we can declare 2016 “the year of moving away from modular smartphones”. Besides all the other things it was.
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Apple’s 2016 in review • Chuqui

Former Apple employee Chuq von Rospach:

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Why make a product?

If you boil business down to essentials, there are only three reasons a product should exist:

Because it makes you money: Most products need to make you money and contribute to the financial success of the company. Some are going to be more profitable than others, but you shouldn’t be doing products that lose you money (buy hey, we’ll make it up in volume!). Unless…

Because it’s strategic: Sometimes you create a product for strategic reasons: it’s not going to make you money, but it’s necessary to compete, or it creates other opportunities where you can profit indirectly (iTunes is a great example of this, where most of the profit came from iPod sales and later music and media sales), or you’re investing in in something that in the long term you expect will make you money some day, but you need to start now and let the market grow (but you can’t really wait until it does, because someone else will take the market from you first) — the Apple TV, while labelled a hobby for years, was such a strategic investment. So were the early Airport devices, because Apple saw wireless as a big part of its future and a long-term competitive advantage, but existing WIFI devices were pretty terrible and had horrible user experiences.

Because it matters to you: And sometimes you do it because you feel it has to be done. Apple’s strong commitment to accessibility is one very visible place where they are clearly investing not because it’ll make them money, but because it’s an important thing to do.

I bring this up because it helps me frame my view of the reality of the Macintosh product line and why I think Apple’s gotten some things very wrong with it.

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This has been a very widely shared article (but linked here just in case). Von Rospach makes many good points: one gets a feeling that Apple is struggling to keep its arms around everything it’s doing and keep it all timely. That has become a much bigger problem with its expanding product range, and there have been lacunae when it was smaller (iMovie and iPhoto languished for years, as did iWork). But that doesn’t excuse the stunning lag on the Mac Pro, and the decisions around the MacBook Pro – for which von Rospach gives this analogy from experience:

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Back when I was running most of Apple’s e-mail systems for the marketing teams, I went to them and suggested that we should consider dumping the text-only part of the emails we were building, because only about 4% of users used them and it added a significant amount of work to the process of creation and testing each e-mail.

Their response? That it was a small group of people, but a strategic one, since it was highly biased towards developers and power users. So the two-part emails stayed — and they were right. It made no sense from a business standpoint to continue to develop these emails as both HTML at text, but it made significant strategic sense. It was an investment in keeping this key user base happy with Apple.

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Registering a Microsoft Surface Pro 4 • Medium

Justin Searls got a Surface Pro 4:

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I’ll have a lot more to say about my experiments in trying out Windows over the coming days, but as a special Christmas bonus edition, I thought I’d share the steps that were apparently required for me to register my Surface Pro 4 with Microsoft.

As I got in bed last night, I activated tablet mode for the first time and while perusing the don’t-call-it-Metro tile page, I saw an app called “Surface”. I have one of those, I thought, I should tap that!
At first blush, the purpose of the app is to introduce you to the Surface’s features, process device registration, solicit customer feedback, and so forth. The first thing the app asks of its users is to register the Surface device for benefits that include both requesting (and cancelling!) hardware service. Since part of my aforementioned experiment is to begrudgingly click “yes” to every asanine pop-up and prompt the operating system throws at me, I decided to go ahead and register the device.

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Partly this is an argument for not trying to register devices while in bed. But it’s also a cautionary tale for UX designers. And it’s entertaining too. For longer reading, his “warm takes” on the experience are excellent.
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Yahoo leaves behind $30bn ‘company’ that does nothing • MarketWatch

Therese Poletti:

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When Yahoo Inc. officially becomes a part of Verizon Communications Inc., it will leave behind a “company” with no workers and no product. Yet this entity, which doesn’t even have a name yet, is worth more than six times the amount Verizon is paying for the internet portal that web users have known for decades.

The rest of Yahoo is made up of its Asian assets – a roughly 36% stake in Yahoo Japan and 16% equity stake in Alababa Group Holding Ltd – as well as $7.1bn in cash, a large portfolio of patents, certain minority investments and its convertible notes. Considering Yahoo’s market cap at the close of trading Monday, after Verizon said it would pay $4.8bn for the core business, was more than $36bn, Wall Street appears to value these assets at more than $30bn.

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Then again, you could argue that in its last few months the part of Yahoo that Verizon *is* buying was a company that did nothing.

And “Altaba” is an awful name.
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CES proves carmakers still confused about autonomous driving • The Information

Amir Efrati:

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Mr. Hafner’s [of Mercedes, which has teamed up with Nvidia] comments are interesting given a view among traditionalists in the self-driving field—including people who work at Waymo (formerly Google), Baidu and Ford—that Nvidia’s approach, which is sometimes called “end-to-end deep learning,” either won’t work or is outright dangerous.

Coincidentally, a day before the Mercedes-Nvidia announcement, a primitive version of Nvidia’s “AI-trained” car being demonstrated in a parking lot outside the exhibition hall veered off course. It would have crashed into a portable wall if Nvidia engineers hadn’t remotely stopped it, according to a person who saw the incident.

Danny Shapiro, senior director at Nvidia’s automotive business, said in an interview that the car’s self-driving system, called “pilot net,” had been “trained” earlier in the week during cloudy conditions so when the sun came out on Thursday, the system was unprepared. He added that the car is not representative of Nvidia-powered autonomous driving systems because it was making driving decisions based on data from just one camera. Nvidia’s latest system supports vehicles with many more cameras and other sensors.

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But how long will it take to train them in every conceivable weather, road and other condition?
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Alphabet said in talks to sell Skybox satellite business • Bloomberg

Mark Bergen and Ashlee Vance:

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Alphabet Inc. is in talks to sell the Skybox Imaging satellite business it acquired for $500m less than three years ago, another sign the technology giant is ratcheting back grand ambitions to blanket the globe with internet service.

Planet Labs, a satellite imaging startup, may acquire Skybox, according to people familiar with the situation. Some employees from the Alphabet division, renamed Terra Bella last year, are moving to Planet Labs as part of the deal, while others may get different positions at Google, according to these people. They asked not to be identified because the transaction is private.

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Wow. Things really are getting tight at Alphabet. When Google bought Skybox, its ambitions looked completely untrammeled; the potential looked huge to know everything about trade all over the world. Now? A retreat.
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Why Google might sell its Fiber business • The Information

Kevin McLaughlin:

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Google underestimated the costs of laying fiber. Meanwhile, Google Fiber’s consumer appeal was eroded as rivals upgraded their services by offering faster speeds and better pricing. Google Fiber executives hoped to sign up around 5 million subscribers within five years but only had around 200,000 subscribers by the end of 2014, a former Google employee said in August. Google paused the buildout in 11 cities where it had planned to offer coverage. Mr. Page ordered the Google Fiber team to cut costs by using wireless technology to continue expanding Fiber to other cities.

That raises deep questions about Google Fiber’s future. Wireless technology doesn’t have enough capacity to offer the same broadband and TV service as a fiber network. At the same time, Google Fiber can’t just stop service. It has signed contracts in cities to operate the service for several years, so it’s legally bound to ensure that the service remains operational and continues to be supported, said another former Google Fiber employee.

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Suitors could include CenturyLink, says McLaughlin. Odd how nobody is seeing these retrenchments as defeat for Google; if Apple (say) were publicly to sell off or give up on something, the DOOM noise would go all around the internet.

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Alphabet cuts former Titan drone program from X division, employees dispersing to other units • 9to5Google

Seth Weintraub:

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In 2014, Google bought Titan Aerospace, maker of high altitude, solar-powered drone aircraft. At the time Google noted, “It’s still early days, but atmospheric satellites could help bring internet access to millions of people, and help solve other problems, including disaster relief and environmental damage like deforestation.” Titan previously said that its drones could collect real-time, high-resolution images of the earth, carry other atmospheric sensors and support voice and data services…

…In mid-2015 Titan team experienced a crash in the Arizona desert which was in 2016 revealed to be a wing fault. Later last year, under the moniker ‘Skybender’ reports surfaced from Spaceport America in New Mexico that Google planned to use 5G for dispersing internet, but the team there seemed to be experiencing significant problems.

We’ve now heard and Alphabet has confirmed, that the Titan group was recently shut down and engineers were told to look for other jobs within Alphabet/Google in the coming months. Over 50 employees were involved in the process. The Titan Team has been dispersing to other groups including the Project Loon effort, which similarly aims to distribute internet via high altitude balloons.

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Spring cleaning really started early. Loon is still going, but at this rate Google X will be Google x. Don’t forget too that it’s still trying to sell off its robotics division, originally purchased as Boston Dynamics.
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Parrot is laying off a third of its drone division • Recode

April Glaser:

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Parrot, the French drone maker, announced today it is planning to lay off one-third of its drone-related workforce — about 290 employees — after poor performance in its fourth quarter caused it to miss sales estimates by 15%.

Specifically, Parrot said margins are so low in the consumer drone business that it wouldn’t be able to generate “profitable growth … over the medium and long term.”

This echoes other industry commentary that DJI has been undercutting the market with much cheaper-priced drones. Parrot isn’t alone in cutting back.

Chris Anderson, CEO of drone software firm 3D Robotics, estimated in an October interview with Recode that DJI dropped prices by as much as 70% in less than a year, which is a key reason his company stopped making drones altogether after it entered the market in 2015 with its Solo quadcopter. The company now focuses solely on drone software.

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I feel that consumer drones aren’t a real market – just a fad. I’m not so certain about the business market either: Amazon is doing lots of testing, but you’d expect it to. Google ditto. This doesn’t mean they can make them work profitably compared to people with vans.
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How search engines are killing clever URLs • The Atlantic

Lindsay Gellman on Icann’s largely failed attempt to get us all excited about new top-level domains:

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Although investors scrambled—and shelled out up to $185,000 a pop—for the chance to snatch up the new domains and profit as gatekeepers, uptake among end-users has been underwhelming. More than three years after the program’s launch, roughly 26m new generic top-level domains have been registered, compared with the 164m registered “legacy” top-level domains.

Cyrus Namazi, the vice president of domain-name services and industry engagement at ICANN, acknowledged that demand for new top-level domains won’t eclipse that for legacies “any time soon.”

Yet Namazi believes registrations for the new extensions will continue to grow. “We are in the embryonic stages of the expansion,” he said.

Indeed, the fresh prospect of a virtual gold rush has set the niche market for domains abuzz, drawing veteran investors eager to place bets on what they see as a long-overdue expansion of the Internet’s architecture that will gain traction over time. Major players in the domain world include registries, which operate a given top-level domain, and registrars, which dole out individual URLs from registries to users. Their shared mission: identify and control access to desirable domains.

Those who have a stake in the new top-level domains argue that short, clean URLs ensure that brands will be remembered and found online. They predict that firms will continue to compete vigorously for attractive domains to signal trustworthiness to users.

Richard Tindal, the chief operating officer of Donuts Inc., a registry that operates new top-level domains like “.guru” and “.email,” said that while the new extensions have yet to reach a “tipping point of awareness,” he believes they will be “ubiquitous” within a few years as users realize the possibilities for customization and more firms adopt them.

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I recognise the irony in saying this while posting on a site whose suffix is “.blog” (WordPress gave it to me free), but people have become used to trusting the standard TLDs dating back to 1991 or so; other ones much less so. And standard economics suggests that if you vastly increase the available domains, the new ones don’t rise in value. Quite the opposite.
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I was a victim of a Russian smear campaign. I understand the power of fake news. • The Washington Post

Anne Applebaum:

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Why are Americans so vulnerable to fake news, both domestic and foreign-sourced? Why do they consume it and pass it on? A part of the explanation lies with the Republican Party, which told people for years to hate and fear “Washington” and has now created a constituency that actually prefers information generated by the Kremlin or white supremacists to fact-checked or edited news. In this election, the distrust of Hillary Clinton also made people shy away from anyone who seemed to support her.

But it is also true that we are living through a global media revolution, that people are hearing and digesting political information in brand-new ways and that nobody yet understands the consequences. Fake stories are easier to create, fake websites can be designed to host them, and social media rapidly disseminates disinformation that people trust because they get it from friends. This radical revolution has happened without many politicians noticing or caring — unless, like me, they happened to have seen how the new system of information exchange works. This is true not only in the United States and Europe but around the world. Half of all Filipinos are active Facebook users, and millions of them shared the scare stories and fake news that helped elect President Rodrigo Duterte, a populist who claims he has personally carried out nonjudicial executions.

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Applebaum was the subject of fake news reports which bounced around Russian “news” sites for a while in 2015 after she began writing about Ukraine.
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World energy hits a turning point: solar that’s cheaper than wind (and coal) • Bloomberg

Tom Randall:

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It started with a contract in January to produce electricity for $64 per megawatt-hour in India; then a deal in August pegging $29.10 per megawatt hour in Chile. That’s record-cheap electricity—roughly half the price of competing coal power. 

“Renewables are robustly entering the era of undercutting” fossil fuel prices, BNEF chairman Michael Liebreich said in a note to clients this week.

Those are new contracts, but plenty of projects are reaching completion this year, too. When all the 2016 completions are tallied in coming months, it’s likely that the total amount of solar photovoltaics added globally will exceed that of wind for the first time. The latest BNEF projections call for 70 gigawatts of newly installed solar in 2016 compared with 59 gigawatts of wind. 

The overall shift to clean energy can be more expensive in wealthier nations, where electricity demand is flat or falling and new solar must compete with existing billion-dollar coal and gas plants. But in countries that are adding new electricity capacity as quickly as possible, “renewable energy will beat any other technology in most of the world without subsidies,” said Liebreich. 

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Seemed worth marking this point.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified. Despite such a long layoff.