Just another day in American media, according to Michael Crichton. Photo by idccollage on Flickr.

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A selection of 12 links for you. See? It’s already Tuesday. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The non-monetizable product blind spot • The Information

Sam Lessin on why there is no great calendaring, or digital address book, or news reader app:

»The problem with afterthoughts in the context of big companies is that the best people don’t want to work on them, and whenever there is a tradeoff between the core business and an afterthought, the afterthought loses.

There are plenty of products people want, but they’re not good businesses. It is because they fail as businesses that they can’t be built as products, not the other way around.

So, for something like iCloud, or Apple Music, it’s no surprise that they struggle to produce good consumer products. And it is no surprise that Apple’s attempts in some categories without obvious business models—like productivity apps—have failed too.

Could a great music service or better cloud services help Apple sell more phones? Of course. However, dollar for dollar and moment for moment, these services are not the easiest or next best way for Apple to sell more of the hardware that makes them who they are.

Google is, of course, the other giant to reference in this discussion. On one hand, with its massive search-advertising cash cow, historical “20% time” policy and extreme freedom for engineers, Google has supported more products with no immediate business benefit than almost any big company I can think of.

Even Google, however, ultimately shut down Google Reader rather than invest the money and time to make it great. And while Google’s mail and calendar products are the best of the options available, the company is clearly under-investing in them relative to what they could.

Why? Because Google gets paid for high-intent clicks from search. Products that don’t drive the core economics of the business are easy to start, but hard to make succeed in the culture and framework of business decision making.

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New wave of malvertising leverages latest Flash exploit • Malwarebytes Labs

Jérome Segura:

»The setup for these malvertising attacks relies on a combination of techniques that start with the fraudulent advertiser choosing a victim, typically a legitimate website in the retail, or legal business. The goal is to use someone else’s identity to appear legitimate when approaching ad networks.

The ad banners are designed professionally by the miscreants and then hosted along with the ad code on shadowed domains. The owners of said domains are completely unaware that a subdomain has been created on their hosting platform, let alone that it is serving malicious ads.

Here is the interesting part though. The ads are typically clean of any malware for anyone trying to manually verify them. The JavaScript code looks benign no matter how many times you refresh the page or rotate IP address. This is because the rogue version of the JavaScript is served conditionally, with the proper referer, user-agent, sometimes even your screen resolution, and several other parameters.

Once a genuine user is identified (a victim that happened to browse a particular publisher serving that ad), another series of checks – which we call fingerprinting – is performed to ensure that only those that are likely to get infected are indeed redirected to the Angler exploit kit.

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Flash! Again! (Via Rob Leathern.)
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Why not all Chromebooks will get Android apps • PCWorld

Chris Hoffman:

»Google is adding Android app support to Chrome OS, but your Chromebook might not get it. Despite Google’s promise of a five-year lifespan for Chromebooks, most Chromebooks released more than two years ago will be left out.

Google published a list of Chromebooks, Chromeboxes, and Chromebases that will get Android apps. This isn’t necessarily a complete list yet, and new devices may be added.

If you want to be one of the first people to get your hands on this feature when it debuts in the developer channel with Chrome version 53 in June 2016, you’ll need an Asus Chromebook Flip, Acer Chromebook R11, or Google Chromebook Pixel (the 2015 model only).

A variety of other Chromebooks—primarily ones less than two years old—will receive Android app support later in 2016. But older Chromebooks—even very capable ones—are left out.

«

Suspect the arrival of Android apps will drive a fair number of new purchases, though.
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Hackers stole 65 million passwords from Tumblr, new analysis reveals • Motherboard

Lorenzo Francheschi-Bicchierai:

»On May 12, Tumblr revealed that it had just found out about a 2013 data breach affecting “a set” of users’ email addresses and passwords, but the company refused to reveal how many users were affected.

As it turns out, that number is 65 million, according to an independent analysis of the data.

Troy Hunt, a security researcher who maintains the data breach awareness portal Have I Been Pwned, recently obtained a copy of the stolen data set.

Hunt told Motherboard that the data contained 65,469,298 unique emails and passwords. (Tumblr did not immediately respond to a request to confirm the figure).

«

They were hashed with random bytes and salted with an unspecified algorithm. So not really a risk – but the emails that go with them are being circulated. Then again, what’s the value of an email? The list of 65 million is being sold for $150.
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Google’s DeepMind tried to justify why it has access to millions of NHS patient records • Business Insider

Sam Shead with the followup on this story:

»New Scientist questioned why Google DeepMind needs access to so much data on so many people, including those who have never experienced kidney problems, for the app, which is called Streams.

Streams — used by Royal Free clinicians in three separate trials since December 2015 — is designed to detect acute kidney injury (AKI), a condition that kills more than 1,000 people a month. It uses an algorithm developed by the NHS.

A Google DeepMind spokeswoman provided Business Insider with the following statement:

»

It’s difficult to predict who will develop acute kidney injury, which is why the NHS national algorithm is applied across a wide spectrum of patients. For example, fit 25-year-olds can develop AKI as a consequence of an appendicitis as much as an 80-year-old with a hip fracture, and it’s essential to pick all these cases up early.

In this case, the sharing of information is both necessary and proportionate to the purposes: failure to share a historical data set effectively would carry risk of avoidable harm if a patient presented to the Royal Free London and information could not be effectively presented to a clinician. There has been no sharing of identifiable information that is not relevant to direct clinical care in the context of this application. At all times, DeepMind Health acts only as a data processor, and the Royal Free retains control over the data.

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Anti-choice groups use smartphone surveillance to target ‘abortion-minded women’ during clinic visits • Rewire

Sharona Coutts:

»Last year, an enterprising advertising executive based in Boston, Massachusetts, had an idea: Instead of using his sophisticated mobile surveillance techniques to figure out which consumers might be interested in buying shoes, cars, or any of the other products typically advertised online, what if he used the same technology to figure out which women were potentially contemplating abortion, and send them ads on behalf of anti-choice organizations?

The executive—John Flynn, CEO of Copley Advertising—set to work. He put together PowerPoint presentations touting his capabilities, and sent them to groups he thought would be interested in reaching “abortion-minded women,” to use anti-choice parlance.

Before long, he’d been hired by RealOptions, a network of crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) in Northern California, as well as by the evangelical adoption agency Bethany Christian Services…

…What Flynn realized is that he could use the same technologies to infer that a woman might be seeking an abortion, and to target her for ads from anti-choice groups.

“We can reach every Planned Parenthood in the U.S.,” he wrote in a PowerPoint display sent to potential clients in February. The Powerpoint included a slide titled “Targets for Pro-Life,” in which Flynn said he could also reach abortion clinics, hospitals, doctors’ offices, colleges, and high schools in the United States and Canada, and then “[d]rill down to age and sex.”

“We can gather a tremendous amount of information from the [smartphone] ID,” he wrote. “Some of the break outs include: Gender, age, race, pet owners, Honda owners, online purchases and much more.”

Flynn explained that he would then use that data [using geo-fencing] to send anti-choice ads to women “while they’re at the clinic.”

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Which is why you’d want a smartphone that doesn’t allow advertisers to track you via its ID or other data.
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I am not my internet personality • The Cut

Julieanne Smolinski:

»It is part of the modern condition to pose and posture online, and it can be very fun to make fun of the various ways in which people make asses of themselves. But the unfiltered nature and open playing field of social media make it easy to forget that it’s all a performance. In person, Michael was great! Really and truly. His terrible use of social media was part deliberate schtick and part stone-cold, childlike buffoonery, but it was all very lovable. (You know, like Entourage.) Demi adored Michael the person but eventually, she realized that keeping tabs on him made it harder for her to separate the real guy from the Scarlett Johansson Her guy.

The gap between public and private personae used to be the exclusive concern of entertainers, but now anybody who wants to can live Martin. Plenty of prestige bloggery has been devoted to analyzing the phenomenon of “social-media happiness fraud,” which we’ve somehow elevated to Russian-novel levels of agony: Those people posing in bikinis? Don’t feel too envious of them, we’ve been told, for they are dead inside, too.

The ability to “research” people this way has already been catastrophic for casual dating, as we’ve all been forced to reduce other human beings to a series of forensic clues so as not to be murdered or have a boring two hours at a restaurant. While certainly expedient, the newish convention of deciding whether you like somebody before you have ever been in their physical presence is both depressing and a teensy bit unfair.

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This gap between someone’s online personality and their offline one is too infrequently observed.
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Apple prepping thinner MacBook Pros with OLED strip above keyboard, Touch ID for Q4 • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»According to a new note from reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo at KGI Securities and corroborated by our sources, Apple plans to introduce a dramatically overhauled MacBook Pro later this year. Kuo says the device will have a new “thinner and lighter” design with design cues taken from the 12-inch MacBook, as well as Touch ID support and a new OLED display touch bar above the keyboard.

Kuo’s report explains that the MacBook Pro updates are the “brightest spot for Apple’s 2016 rollouts” and will come to both the 13-inch and 15-inch models sometime during the fourth quarter of this year.

The OLED display touch bar will replace the physical function keys along the top of the keyboard, while the design will adopt new metal injection molded hinges as reported earlier this year. Additionally, the refreshed MacBook Pros are said to feature USB-C support and Thunderbolt 3.

In addition to upgrading the 13in and 15in MacBook Pros, Apple will also introduce a new 13in MacBook similar to that of the 12in Retina model that was just upgraded with performance boosts. According to Kuo, Apple plans to make the MacBook Air the entry-level option, while the MacBook will become the mid-tier choice and the MacBook Pro will remain the high-end variant.

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No Retina display on the MacBook Air? But I suppose Apple is looking to create a gap between the Air, and the “MacBook” and the Pro.
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2008: Michael Crichton’s 1993 prediction of mass-media extinction now looks on target • Slate

Jack Shafer in May 2008:

»In 1993, novelist Michael Crichton riled the news business with a Wired magazine essay titled “Mediasaurus,” in which he prophesied the death of the mass media—specifically the New York Times and the commercial networks. “Vanished, without a trace,” he wrote.

The mediasaurs had about a decade to live, he wrote, before technological advances—”artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page”—swept them under. Shedding no tears, Crichton wrote that the shoddy mass media deserved its deadly fate.

“[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality,” he lectured. “Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it’s sold without warranty. It’s flashy but it’s basically junk.”

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Shafer reckoned Crichton was going to be vindicated:

»As we pass his prediction’s 15-year anniversary, I’ve got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It’s gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren’t going extinct tomorrow, Crichton’s original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.

«

Now at the 23-year mark, and you could call it either way. The NYT isn’t dead, though; and most print papers are still going.
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A lesson on infrastructure from the Anderson Bridge fiasco • The Boston Globe

Larry Summers and Rachel Lipson:

»Sometimes small stories capture large truths. So it is with the fiasco that is the repair of the Anderson Memorial Bridge, connecting Boston and Harvard Square. Rehabilitation of the 232-foot bridge began in 2012, at an estimated cost of about $20 million; four years later, there is no end date in sight and the cost of the project is mushrooming, to $26.5 million at last count.

This glacial pace of implementation does not reflect the intrinsic technical difficulty of the task. For comparison, the Anderson Bridge itself was originally completed in just 11 months in 1912. General George Patton constructed nearly 40 times as much bridging in six months as American soldiers crossed the Rhine to win World War II. And even modern-day examples abound; for instance, in 2011, 14 bridges in Medford were fixed in just 10 weekends. In contrast, the lapses exposed by the Anderson Bridge project hold key lessons for America’s broader inability to solve its infrastructure problems…

…[The] delay is at one level the result of bureaucratic ineptitude and the promiscuous distribution of the power to hold things up. At another level, it is the failure of leadership to insist on reasonable accountability to meet reasonable deadlines. Perhaps, at a deeper level, it is the failure of citizenry to hold government accountable for reasonable performance — a failure that may in part reflect a lowering of expectations as trust in government declines.

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Summers, of course, was former secretary of the US Treasury. This examples points to a worrying problem for the US: it is simply becoming overwhelmed by its own complexity.
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Someone’s trying to gut America’s strongest biometric privacy law • The Verge

Russell Brandom:

»For years, the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act has been a headache for any tech company working with facial recognition. It’s a simple law, requiring a person’s explicit consent before a company can make a biometric scan of their body. In the eight years since the law was first passed, those scans have become a central part of products like Google Photos, Snapchat filters, and Facebook’s photo-tagging system. All three companies are currently facing lawsuits for allegedly violating the Illinois law, producing biometric face prints without notifying Illinois citizens.

Now, Illinois’ law is facing sudden and quiet changes that would dramatically reduce its power.

Yesterday, Illinois State Senator Terry Link quietly proposed a revision to the biometrics act, attached to a long-delayed bill concerning unclaimed property procedures.

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Which would, as it happens, end the three lawsuits at once. Facebook indicated it likes the revision.
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The week in business • The New Yorker

James Surowiecki:

»A familiar argument for low state income taxes holds that, if rates are too high, wealthy people will simply move. The fundamental assumption behind this argument is that rich people are able to pick up and go when conditions no longer suit them. But a new study, lead-authored by Cristobal Young, a sociology professor at Stanford University, finds that this image is largely a myth. The authors looked at every tax return filed by millionaires between 1999 and 2011 (some 3.7 million unique filers), and found that only 2.4 per cent of millionaires move in a given year, a lower rate than that of the general population. The study also found no evidence that millionaires are less likely to live in states with high income taxes.

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Inconvenient truth.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

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Peter Thiel: the new public enemy No.1? Photo by apostolosp on Flickr.

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

Revealed: How copyright law is being misused to remove material from the internet • The Guardian

Alex Hern, with a story that starts when Annabelle Narey complained on Mumsnet about the work done by BuildTeam Holborn Ltd of London; the company complained, she and Mumsnet declined to remove it. But:

in April, the decision was made for her, in a very peculiar way. Mumsnet received a warning from Google: a takedown request had been made under the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), alleging that copyrighted material was posted without a licence on the thread. As soon as the DMCA takedown request had been filed, Google de-listed the entire thread. All 126 posts are now not discoverable when a user searches Google for BuildTeam – or any other terms. The search company told Mumsnet it could make a counterclaim, if it was certain no infringement had taken place, but since the site couldn’t verify that its users weren’t actually posting copyrighted material, it would have opened it up to further legal pressure. In fact, no copyright infringement had occurred at all. Instead, something weirder had happened. At some point after Narey posted her comments on Mumsnet, someone had copied the entire text of one of her posts and pasted it, verbatim, to a spammy blog titled “Home Improvement Tips and Tricks”. The post, headlined “Buildteam interior designers” was backdated to September 14 2015, three months before Narey had written it, and was signed by a “Douglas Bush” of South Bend, Indiana. The website was registered to someone quite different, though: Muhammed Ashraf, from Faisalabad, Pakistan.

Obviously, shenanigans. The question is by who, for what, and when. Any more details on that website or its operators welcomed. (Or other examples of similar backdate-and-DMCA.)

Startup employees invoke obscure law to open up books • WSJ

Rolfe Winkler:

For more than a year, Jay Biederman has pestered Domo Inc. for its financial statements. The former manager wants to estimate how much his tens of thousands of shares in the tech startup are worth. Domo, whose software analyzes corporate data, has rejected those requests, he said, keeping its financial records under wraps like most privately held startups. But the law may be on Mr. Biederman’s side. He recently discovered section 220 of Delaware’s corporate law, which can compel locally incorporated companies such as Domo to open up their books to shareholders. The law, little known in Silicon Valley, is a potentially valuable tool for thousands of tech workers who received stock awards to join fast-growing startups, as well as other small investors, who now question their shares’ worth… …Some companies are now pushing employees to waive their right to inspect the books as a condition for receiving stock awards, says Richard Grimm, an executive compensation attorney. Fitness tracking company Fitbit Inc. and online dating site Zoosk Inc. both did so as private companies, according to their IPO filings. Fitbit declined to comment. Zoosk didn’t respond to questions.

You just have to ask. Another tricky thing: lots of startup employees are given options to buy, not actual shares.

Xiaomi – Broken engagement • Radio Free Mobile

Richard Windsor thinks Xiaomi has poor engagement with its ecosystem and is struggling on the smartphone side:

I think that there is real risk that in Xiaomi’s 2016 [smartphone] units decline YoY on the back of a much softer market and much tougher competition. The edge that Xiaomi carved out for itself did not last long and I see it having to cut prices in order to minimise market share losses. Hence, it is not difficult to see revenues declining by 10% or more in 2016. In this instance, Xiaomi will have to act quickly and trim its operations back in order to avoid a loss both at the EBIT level and in terms of cash flow.

He puts a price tag of $5bn on it – rather than the $50bn others did last year when investing. Seems more reasonable.

Molekule ::

Welcome to a whole new air purification experience—unobtrusive, portable, and 100% effective. From the inside out, Molekule has reimagined what clean air ought to look and feel like.

Yours for $800. Let me think for a moment about what air should look like. And feel like. Still, good to know we’re not in a bubble.

Parsing Spotify’s financials • Beyond Devices

Jan Dawson does a deep dive:

The other interesting aspect of Spotify’s results is the split in its revenue sources, among which paid subscriptions and advertising account for over 99%. The split between those two has remained relatively constant over the last three years, with subscribers generating roughly 90% of revenue, and advertising the other 10%. That’s notable, because Spotify has over two times as many free subscribers as paid subscribers, but those paid subscribers generate nine times as much revenue. To look at it another way, the paid subscribers generate roughly 80 euros a year in revenue each, while the free subscribers generate just $3-4. This has been a matter of some controversy within the music industry, but in that podcast episode I referred to earlier, we discussed this, and Ryan Wright’s take was that the existence of free streaming is actually important from a perspective of creating a funnel for future paid subscribers.

I’ll have “paying subscribers”, please. Spotify’s problem filling its ad inventory, even as it does it better, is how poorly they pay relative to the costs they impose through licensing payments to labels. Fun exercise which only Spotify can do: what if you removed the cost of the label payouts for free streamers? How does that affect the costs v revenues? That’s where Apple Music is. (I think it’s “a lot less lossmaking”.) The other point to look at is how much of the IFPI’s paid streaming money comes from Spotify. It’s surprising.

Pointless features add to browser bloat and insecurity • The Register

Richard Chirgwin:

It might be time for the warlocks of the Web and brewers of JavaScript to revisit their ever-burgeoning developer wish-lists and sweep away the rubbish. Researchers from the University of Illinois have looked at how users and Website designers respond to the feature-list, and their study suggests there’s a whole lot of kruft that nobody – site owners or end users – are using. Or, as El Reg would put it: your browsers and Web servers are bloating with features nobody wants, and contribute nothing but extra lines of code. As they write at Arxiv: “We find, for example, that 50 per cent of the JavaScript provided features in the web browser are never used by the top ten thousand most popular websites,” the paper states. It’ll surprise nobody that at least some of the non-execution of features is down to site ad-blockers and the like, but the end result is: “83 per cent of available features are executed on less than 1 per cent of the most popular 10,000 websites.”

Examples: “ambient light events” (lets browser react to light level around machine; used by 14 of 10,000 in the study – and why do they use it? Isn’t that an OS thing?); “Encoding standard” which converts between encodings. One site uses it. And guess what? Those extra features also create security vulnerabilities. Clearly there’s a space for a new, lightweight browser. Again.

Sunk • The Atavist Magazine

Mitch Moxley with an epic tale of what sounds like the modern Heaven’s Gate:

The script called for an epic battle. In the movie’s third act, the forces of the Eight Faery Kingdoms defend their aquatic empires from annihilation by the evil Demon Mage and his spectral legions. Five hundred extras would play the opposing armies. But in January 2010, when Jonathan Lawrence, the director of Empires of the Deep, showed up for the shoot, in Qinyu, a resort town in coastal China, he saw only about 20 extras, mostly ornery Russians complaining that they hadn’t been paid in weeks. How would he turn 20 people into 500? On top of that, their costumes—swamp green rubber suits decorated with scales, octopus suckers, and shells—looked like poorly made Halloween getups. Some of them had fins glued to their heads. Lawrence was in most ways a strange choice to be running a massive film set in China. A 40-something director from Los Angeles with just one feature-film credit, he made his living directing shorts, commercials, and music videos. But then again, ever since he saw Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark as a teenager in 1981, he had waited for this chance.

Then again, remember how everyone thought John Carter (the daft sorta-sci-fi film from 2012 which cost $264m to make) would bankrupt its studio? Took $284m at the box office. Nobody knows anything.

Microsoft announces streamlining of smartphone hardware business • Microsoft News Center

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday announced plans to streamline the company’s smartphone hardware business, which will impact up to 1,850 jobs. As a result, the company will record an impairment and restructuring charge of approximately $950m, of which approximately $200m will relate to severance payments. “We are focusing our phone efforts where we have differentiation — with enterprises that value security, manageability and our Continuum capability, and consumers who value the same,” said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “We will continue to innovate across devices and on our cloud services across all mobile platforms.” Microsoft anticipates this will result in the reduction of up to 1,350 jobs at Microsoft Mobile Oy in Finland, as well as up to 500 additional jobs globally. Employees working for Microsoft Oy, a separate Microsoft sales subsidiary based in Espoo, are not in scope for the planned reductions. As a result of the action, Microsoft will record a charge in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2016 for the impairment of assets in its More Personal Computing segment, related to these phone decisions.

I take it that “Enterprises that value security, manageability and our Continuum capability” requires the intersection of all three elements, since you can get the first two all over the place. And “consumers who value the same” seem to be in short supply. Microsoft is going to be selling so few of these phones it may as well deliver them by courier.

Avoiding BlackBerry’s fate • The Brooks Review

Ben Brooks responds to Marco Arment’s “this looks bad for Apple” re AI:

Let’s assume that Marco is right and Apple isn’t even fucking trying big data or AI. (I personally feel there is little chance this is a correct assumption, but whatever. It actually doesn’t matter.) Let’s say, for shits and giggles, that Facebook wins at AI and Google wins at big data and Amazon does something else we don’t care about for this post. Does Apple become irrelevant? If you assume that they do, then essentially you think the iPhone paved the way. You think that the iPod was the first MP3 player, you think OS X was state of the art — and on and on. Apple rarely does it first. None of those things did it first. It’s not a zero-sum game. Apple succeeds right now because they do it better. Will it be hard to catch up? Maybe, but so far it’s not been hard for Apple at all. Not under Steve Jobs, and not under Tim Cook. Let’s also not forget Maps. When the iPhone came out, I don’t think Apple was prepared for just how crucial mapping would be. They just relied on Google to get it right. And then, Apple Maps. Is it better? That’s subjective. But it is most certainly good enough. The Apple Watch wasn’t even close to being the first. Is it amazing? Depends. But is it better than any other smart watch? Yes. So, even if Facebook, Google, and Amazon beat Apple to something, they would all very much want their something on the iPhone. Because: iPhone.

Tricky argument. A lot of the doomsaying is predicated on the idea that nobody can catch up on Google in machine learning (likely) *and* that nobody can make an adequate ML system even if they try to catch up. The latter doesn’t quite hold up when you think about it.

Inside Disney’s messy (and now closed) video game business • Tech Insider

Ben Gilbert:

One of the most common refrains among ex-Disney staffers was that Disney had a strong aversion to risk. They say Disney was rarely willing to make the investment — both financial and philosophical — required to become a major player in the video game business. “Disney is very buttoned up, financially, to an extent that was surprising to me,” former Disney Interactive senior VP and general manager Alex Seropian told Tech Insider. Seropian was the guy in charge of running Disney’s “core” game group from 2009 until 2012. He was the guy who oversaw various game studios that Disney bought, who worked with external development studios to create games that could be made in-house. He’s also a co-founder of Bungie Studios, the development studio that created blockbusters like “Halo” and “Destiny.” After nearly twelve years as CEO, Seropian moved over to Microsoft after its purchase of Bungie to oversee the launch of the first ever “Halo” game. Seropian understands how to create major new video games within a large corporation. But his knowledge and experience only got him so far at Disney. “Any big company has a finance department, has financial folks embedded in the product units, or business units will take the finances of the business very seriously, etc.” Seropian said. “But I found at Microsoft that there was a little more of a focus on the product, at least from the business decision-making aspect, with a little bit more of, ‘If we make the right thing the profits will come.'” Not at Disney.

Culture.

Champerty, Gawker and Peter Thiel • Caterina.net

Caterina Fake (who co-founded Flickr and many others):

It’s hard to pick a side in the Gawker-Thiel-Hogan lawsuit, reported today in Forbes, but the lawsuit and its outcome are a mere sideshow to the main story, which is that this case is a terrifying development for those of us who value a free, democratic media. What is most frightening about this lawsuit is that the press has always played a significant role in defending the small and powerless against the big and powerful. Gawker has played this role in its own tabloid style, but Thiel’s funding of this lawsuit shows how money can protect that power through third-party litigation funding.

Nah, it’s not hard to pick a side. Gawker were arses in putting up the Hulk Hogan content, but under the law that applies in the US it had a perfectly valid First Amendment right to do so. (A court has already ruled to that effect; the Hogan win elsewhere will be struck down on appeal.) That would have been different elsewhere with tougher privacy laws. But Gawker’s in the US, and it pokes usefully at the pompous in tech. Thiel, meanwhile, has made himself as welcome as the proverbial turd in the swimming pool. There’s some discussion as to whether Gawker became a target for Thiel because of this story. (Which is also unimportant – but that’s how the First Amendment works.)

No, you’re meant to use it in your house. Photo by Global X on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Because reasons. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

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Nothing but the truth • The Marshall Project

Robert Kolker:

Gabriel Campos-Martinez — 35, unassuming, and dour, with a shock of black hair and an intense stare — had been living with Medellin for about six months, and everything about his story raised suspicion. He told police that Medellin woke up one December morning and said he was leaving for Mexico, and that was the last Campos-Martinez had seen of him. But police could find no evidence that Medellin had gone anywhere in the weeks before the gruesome discovery — no ticket purchases, no gas station visits on his credit card. They learned that someone had transferred Medellin’s Social Security direct-deposit to an account controlled by both Medellin and Campos-Martinez. The latter’s browser history showed searches for diamond and gold websites, which made the cops wonder whether he’d been trying to sell some of Medellin’s belongings. Then there was the article that Campos-Martinez had apparently viewed online on December 27 — the last day Medellin was seen alive — about the best way to dismember a human carcass. All that evidence, however, was maddeningly circumstantial. A search of the Hollywood apartment the two men had shared turned up very little: no murder weapon, no incriminating physical evidence. Their interrogations didn’t yield much either.

It’s a deep dive into how US police have changed interrogation techniques. You can read pretty much the same piece (though with a different example) in the New Yorker from 2013. Either is fascinating. My key takeaway? Liars find it hard to tell their made-up story in reverse chronological order, and lack detail.

Coming soon: express even more in 140 characters • Twitter Blogs

Todd Sherman, senior product manager:

So, you can already do a lot in a Tweet, but we want you to be able to do even more. In the coming months we’ll make changes to simplify Tweets including what counts toward your 140 characters, so for instance, @names in replies and media attachments (like photos, GIFs, videos, and polls) will no longer “use up” valuable characters. Here’s what will change:…

Two biggest changes: @names won’t be part of the character count (include up to 50 people in your Twitter canoe! To 48 peoples’ annoyance!) and @-replies will be visible to everyone, not just those who follow the @-replied person and yourself. The latter is a reversion to how Twitter worked before May 2009.

Google Maps directions may soon lead you to … more ads • Associated Press

Michael Liedtke:

You might start seeing more ads when getting directions from Google’s popular mapping service. The ads, called “promoted pins,” will highlight restaurants and other merchants located along your way. They’ll show up inside the directions map as Google routes you to your destination. Google has displayed text ads alongside its online maps for several years. But the change announced Tuesday marks the first time the Internet company has inserted the equivalent of a digital billboard into the directions map itself. Google is importing the concept to its Maps app from Waze, a smaller traffic-navigation service that the company also runs. Google Maps boasts more than 1 billion users worldwide, but not everyone will see the new ads right away.

Images started getting ads a few weeks ago. Once ads come in, it’s irreversible. Choose for yourself whether you want to view companies’ reliance on them as an addiction, or an infection (along the lines of a retrovirus which inserts itself into the DNA – like HIV).

Apple opening Siri, developing Echo rival • The Information

Amir Efrati:

Apple hopes to make the Siri SDK available in time for its annual conference for developers in June. To work with Siri, the third-party apps will need some kind of search-query box that Siri could fill with the user’s verbal request once the app is accessed. It’s unclear what would happen if an iPhone or Apple Watch owner had multiple apps that did the same thing, like Uber and Lyft, and then asked Siri to “book me a ride home.” (Don’t bother asking Siri to book an Uber ride today; the results are typically terrible.) An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment. As for its Echo-competitor, Apple has been working on the device since long before the $180 Echo launched in mid-2015, according to a person with direct knowledge and another person briefed on the project. The Echo has been a surprise hit even among some non-tech-savvy English speakers. Like the iPhone already does today, the Web-connected Apple speaker in development would allow people to turn on/off or change settings for home appliances and other devices that support Apple’s “HomeKit” software, says the person with direct knowledge of the project. Such items include lights, sensors, thermostats, plugs and locks. Making a speaker won’t be a stretch for Apple—it has made speakers before, including speakers designed for the iPod music player.

Oddly enough, I was listening today to John Gruber’s Talk Show with Rene Ritchie, where both these ideas were discussed: Ritchie suggested the Echo idea had been one path that Apple tried with the Apple TV in experimentation. My question is, what use is a voice-operated gewgaw if you don’t have internet lights etc?

How to escape that forced Windows 10 upgrade you mistakenly agreed to • PCWorld

Mark Hachman:

On Monday, hordes of angry Windows users pelted Microsoft with complaints about being lured into upgrading their PCs over the weekend. For months, Microsoft has been urging users running Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 to upgrade to Windows 10 before the free offer expires on July 29. But the series of dialog boxes and other messages that Microsoft has sent users have become increasingly deceptive, burying the opt-out links amid text that appears to commit users to the upgrade. Normally, closing the dialog box by clicking the red box in the upper righthand corner automatically opted out. Over the weekend, clicking that red box started opting users in to the upgrade. That not only flies in the face of years of user-interface design, it contradicts Microsoft’s own advice for dealing with suspicious dialog boxes. “Never click ‘Agree’ or ‘OK’ to close a window that you suspect might be spyware,” states Microsoft’s page on viruses and malware. “Instead, click the red ‘x’ in the corner of the window or press Alt + F4 on your keyboard to close a window.”

The explanations of how to opt out are like one of those text Adventure games: you’re in a twisty passageway, with taskbar popups behind and in front of you.

Samsung is done with the Android Wear OS • Fast Company

Mark Sullivan:

It was at Google I/O two years ago that Samsung announced its Gear Live smartwatch (now discontinued) running the Android Wear OS. Two years later the collaboration is over. Samsung executives told Fast Company today that no more Samsung Android Wear devices are in development or being planned. The executives said Samsung’s own Tizen OS, used in almost all the company’s wearables now, is far more battery-efficient than Android Wear. Also, Tizen is becoming the standard OS on other Samsung products from TVs to refrigerators, the executives said.

One is slightly tempted to call Android Wear a little bit dead (even though Android Wear 2 brings a keyboard! For a watch!). By my calculations, in the past week it crossed a lifetime install figure of 4m, based on the number of downloads from the Google Play Store.

Facebook’s troubling one-way mirror • NYTimes.com

Jim Rutenberg:

For outlets like The Daily Caller, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post or The New York Times — for whom Facebook’s audience is vital to growth — any algorithmic change can affect how many people see their journalism. A cautionary tale came in 2014. The news site Upworthy was successfully surfing the Facebook formula with click bait headlines that won many eyeballs. Then a change in the Facebook algorithm punished click bait, which can tend to overpromise on what it links to. Steep traffic drops followed. (Upworthy has recovered, in part by relying on more on video.) Throughout the media, a regular guessing game takes place in which editors seek to divine how the Facebook formula may have changed, and what it might mean for them. Facebook will often give general guidance, such as announcing last month that it had adjusted its programming to favor news articles that readers engage with deeply — rather than shallow quick hits — or saying that it would give priority to live Facebook Live videos, which it is also paying media companies, including The New York Times, to experiment with.

News outlets as rats in Skinner boxes. So much for the internet as the great leveller which would allow anyone to flourish.

Pittsburgh offers ultimate test for Uber’s self-driving Fusions • TribLIVE

Aaron Aupperlee:

The car took control with the click of a button. Mathew Priest, the Uber employee in the driver’s seat who was no more than a passenger at this point, took his hands off the wheel and foot off the pedal as the car drove itself east on the 31st Street Bridge. The Ford Fusion slowed to a stop behind several cars at a red light and turned left onto River Avenue. Uber is testing its fleet of self-driving cars on the streets, bridges and hills of Pittsburgh, the ride-sharing company confirmed Wednesday. The San Francisco-based firm has said little about its progress in developing autonomous vehicles since it opened the Advanced Technology Center 15 months ago in Pittsburgh’s Strip District. John Bares, head of Uber’s Pittsburgh lab, took a Tribune-Review reporter on a ride in a Fusion hybrid that drove itself for portions of the trip. It was the first time Uber allowed a member of the media to ride in a test car in self-driving mode, he said.

Autonomous cabs? Very Total Recall. Uber is thinking just over the horizon, and this is it bringing that closer.

This newspaper used an algorithm to play a nasty trick on readers in comments section • Adweek

Gabriel Beltrone:

A publication in Pakistan is taking an aggressive approach to stressing the importance of press freedoms—by helping readers better understand the unpleasantness of having their own words inverted. The Daily Times and agency Grey Singapore wanted to drive home the dangers of censorship with their “Free My Voice” campaign. They wrote an algorithm that automatically flipped the meaning of commenters’ posts, and applied it to comments beneath a controversial article about the Islamic country’s blasphemy law (which includes such punishments as life imprisonment for desecration of the Quran—but often finds accused parties murdered before their trials are complete). Commenters praising the article or its subject automatically found themselves criticizing it, and vice versa, with the site changing their intent over and over. Eventually, the gimmick bounced them to a landing page for the publication’s campaign, where they could sign a petition supporting it, or donate.

This is AWFUL. No, I meant AWFUL. Dammit – I typed AWFUL.

How to recover from an Alpha ransomware attack • Graham Cluley

David Bisson:

Alpha is the third ransomware to ask for gift cards as ransom payment in recent weeks. Last week, I reported on TrueCrypter and Cyber.Police, two ransomware variants which asked that victims pay them in Amazon and iTunes gift cards, respectively. Both TrueCrypter and Cyber.Police suffered from design flaws which largely rendered them as little more than a nuisance. It would appear the same is true for Alpha. A bug in the ransomware’s code prevented the emails to which victims are supposed to send payments from being listed. But that doesn’t even matter anymore. Michael Gillespie has since spotted a more significant coding vulnerability, which he has used to develop a decryption tool for the ransomware. Any victim who has been affected by Alpha should download Gillespie’s utility here.

The choice of notionally untraceable gift card codes rather than the notionally untraceable bitcoin suggests that either bitcoin’s value has been too variable (unlikely – it’s ransomware, who cares about the precise value?), or victims have found it too hard to get bitcoin accounts (possible), or that it’s just a lot less hassle to sell gift card codes than bitcoin. Leaning toward a mixture of the last two.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

How can an unsafe car be safe? It’s all in the framing. Photo by Arslan 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 12 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Machine bias: there’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks • ProPublica

Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu and Lauren Kirchner:

»Borden and her friend [both aged 18, who had stolen two bicycles] were arrested and charged with burglary and petty theft for the items, which were valued at a total of $80.

Prater was the more seasoned criminal. He had already been convicted of armed robbery and attempted armed robbery, for which he served five years in prison, in addition to another armed robbery charge. Borden had a record, too, but it was for misdemeanors committed when she was a juvenile.

Yet something odd happened when Borden and Prater were booked into jail: A computer program spat out a score predicting the likelihood of each committing a future crime. Borden — who is black — was rated a high risk. Prater — who is white — was rated a low risk.

Two years later, we know the computer algorithm got it exactly backward. Borden has not been charged with any new crimes. Prater is serving an eight-year prison term for subsequently breaking into a warehouse and stealing thousands of dollars’ worth of electronics.

«

You can read how the analysed the data, and download the dataset.
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Unsafe cars can save lives • Marginal REVOLUTION

Alex Tabarrok:

»David Ward, secretary general of Global NCAP told the Wall Street Journal:

»

Global NCAP strongly believes that no manufacturer anywhere in the world should be developing new models that are so clearly sub-standard,” he said. “Car makers must ensure that their new models pass the UN’s minimum crash test regulations, and support use of an airbag.

«

Let’s take a closer look. These cars are very inexpensive. A Renault Kwid, for example, can be had for under $4000. In the Indian market these cars are competing against motorcycles. Only 6 percent of Indian households own a car but 47% own a motorcycle. Overall, there are more than five times as many motorcycles as cars in India.

Motorcycles are also much more dangerous than cars.

«

So easy to overlook the prevailing market conditions. How many motorbikes have airbags? A car without one is still safer.
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Spotify revenues topped $2bn last year as losses hit $194m • Music Business Worldwide

Great scoop by Tim Ingham delving into Luxembourg filings:

»Spotify brought in a whopping $2.18bn (€1.95bn) in revenues in 2015, growing its income by 80% in the year.

Net losses stood at a painful  $194m (€173.1m), but these grew much slower – widening by just 6.7% compared to 2014.

In a financial filing in Luxembourg uncovered by MBW, Spotify told its investors that “in many ways, [2015] was our best year ever”.

Advertising revenues nearly doubled in the 12 months, up 98% to $219m (€195.8m).

Meanwhile, subscription revenues grew by a slightly slower pace, up 78% to $1.95bn (€1.74bn).

In terms of Spotify’s total $2bn+ income (negligible ‘other’ revenues aside), ads therefore claimed 10.1% – an improvement on the 9.2% share seen in 2014, but another reminder of how heavily the company relies on people paying for premium accounts.

«

The costs of sales and marketing, and general and administrative, are growing very fast. R+D not so much. Is there a point where it can swing to profitability?
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Adblocking puts $32bn at risk globally by 2019 • Optimal

Rob Leathern:

»We recently collaborated with Wells Fargo Securities on a survey of US smartphone users, asking them about their ad blocking preferences, and as a result we produced a US model of display ad revenue lost to blocking ($12.1 billion by 2020, the full model is available with registration here). The data we shared also assisted Wells Fargo (along with MagnaGlobal figures) to produce the following estimates of global ad spend at risk from ad-blocking. You’ll need to be an accredited investor to read their report and see their reasoning, but they gave us permission to reproduce the top-level figures here ($ in millions):

«

Leathern thinks those figures are “conservative”.
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Fraudulent claims made by IBM about Watson and AI • Roger Schank

»I started a company called Cognitive Systems in 1981. The things I was talking about then clearly have not been read by IBM (although they seem to like the words I used.) Watson is not reasoning. You can only reason if you have goals, plans, and ways of attaining them, and a comprehension of the beliefs that others may have and a knowledge of past experiences to reason from. A point f view helps too. What is Watson’s view on ISIS for example?

Dumb question? Actual thinking entities have a point of view about ISIS. Dog’s don’t but Watson isn’t as smart as a dog either. (The dog knows how to get my attention for example.)

I invented a field called Case Based Reasoning in the 80’s which was meant to enable computers to compare new situations to old ones and then modify what the computer knew as a result. We were able to build some useful systems. And we learned a lot about human learning. Did I think we had created computers that were now going to outthink people or soon become conscious? Of course not. I thought we had begun to create computers that would be more useful to people.

It would be nice if IBM would tone down the hype and let people know what Watson can actually do can and stop making up nonsense about love fading and out thinking cancer. IBM is simply lying now and they need to stop.

AI winter is coming soon.

«

link to this extract

Why the virtual reality hype is about to come crashing down • WSJ

Christopher Mims:

»Makers of virtual reality headsets think 2016 will be the year of VR. The experience “is radically different than any computing experience you’ve had before,” says Marc Metis, a vice president at HTC Corp., maker of the Vive headset.

Content creators, however, tell a different story. VR isn’t ready for prime time.

This gap between expectations and reality means the VR hype train is about to crash into a wall.

In my experience, VR demos can be very impressive. The problem is that most are just that—demos.

As new, highly touted headsets arrive this year, how much content will be available, and how deep will these experiences be? The short answers: not much, and fairly shallow…

…Unfortunately, much nongame VR content, including so-called “360 video,” doesn’t support that illusion. Rather than feeling that you are in a place, experiencing an event, current 360 video tends to make you feel like your head is “in a fishbowl of video,” as Mr. Pinnell puts it. Such experiences make me fear that 360 video will be the next 3-D TV, something nobody asked for and few will use.

«

By definition, hype crashes at some point. But this points to an essential thing about VR: it’s content-based. Without the content – or unless you can create the content yourself easily – it’s completely wasted. Imagine if the web had had to rely on professionals to create content, and we were in 1995; that’s sort of where VR is now.
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CMA response to BIS consultation on the future of the Land Registry • Publications – GOV.UK

The Competition and Markets Authority is the UK’s monopolies regulator. Here is its summary on the government’s proposals to sell of Land Registry:

»Government’s preferred option would create a privatised vertically-integrated business engaged in both monopoly and commercial activities. The CMA believes that as a result, the business may fail to maintain or improve access to its monopoly data, and may seek to weaken competition to its own commercial products, despite the best efforts of oversight bodies to regulate prices and impose safeguards.

«

There’s more detail in this PDF. I find this amazing: a government oversight body essentially criticising government policy.

I hope that it will affect that policy, but it needs the right minister to hear it. I don’t know if there’s anyone listening beyond the dogma whistle.
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Tim Cook acknowledges iPhone cost high in India • Business Insider

Jim Edwards:

»Apple CEO Tim Cook just gave his most detailed commentary yet on the effect the high price of the iPhone has on the device’s declining sales. In an interview with NDTV’s Vikram Chandra in India, Cook was asked a tough question about whether the iPhone — which costs about $600 in the US but is more expensive almost everywhere else in the world — was really worth its price.

iPhone sales fell 16% in the most recent quarter, and the iPhone is losing market share to Android almost everywhere. Analysts believe iPhone sales will continue to decline all through this year.

Cook replied that he did think the iPhone might be priced too high in India, and he said the company would consider lowering the price: “I recognise that prices are high. We want to do things that lower that over time to the degree that we can.”

That is a significant acknowledgement.

«

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Apple’s Touch ID rules may be designed to protect human rights • Macworld

Glenn Fleishman:

»Consider a restriction to Touch ID’s continuous use that I just uncovered. Apple didn’t intend for this addition to be a secret, but it somehow added it in September 2015 and didn’t document the change until a few days ago. (Apple confirmed the change for me.)

You can read about it in detail, but the gist is that on top of the 48-hour countdown between Touch ID uses before a passcode is required, the “new” change adds a separate timer.

After six days of unlocking with just Touch ID (and not restarting), the 48-hour clock is replaced with an eight-hour one. If you go eight hours or more between unlocking with Touch ID, you’re required to unlock with the passcode. As soon as you enter the passcode, the 48-hour and 6-day countdowns are reset.

Why add an eight-hour timer? Apple declined to offer any insight into why it was added, nor why it wasn’t documented until last week. I have some thoughts, mostly in the form of analogy.

«

I’d wondered, like many, why TouchID was being more pernickety about wanting my passcode. Fleishman’s argument makes a lot of sense.
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Exclusive: Xiaomi revenues were flat in 2015 • Fortune

Scott Cendrowski:

»Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone maker and second highest-valued startup in the world at $45 billion, barely grew sales at all last year.

Revenue for 2015 reached 78 billion yuan ($12.5bn), a 5% rise from 2014’s 74.3bn yuan, a person in the company’s public affairs office said for the first time over the weekend. Taking into account the falling value of the Chinese currency, the yuan, sales rose 3% in US dollar terms.

Xiaomi has been mum about the 2015 sales total since founder Lei Jun gave a revenue target of 100 billion yuan ($16bn at the time) at a government meeting in March last year. The Xiaomi public affairs official, Ge Liang, announced the 2015 figure in an interview this weekend at a Beijing tech conference. The interview later ran on a few Chinese news sites, including the conference’s own. (One of the news sites, China News Net, has since deleted it.)

A Xiaomi spokeswoman says, “We have never shared the revenue figure and we are not able to comment on the figure that you shared. What we have shared is we sold over 70 million smartphones in 2015 despite the shrinking of the smartphone market.”

«

Xiaomi’s smartphone shipments were up 14.5%, so if its revenues – which now also include TVs and set-top boxes and air conditioners and so on – rose 5%, that’s not a healthy sign. Could it just be that all the money pumped into Xiaomi was chasing the wrong business model?
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The definitive guide to decoding Washington’s anonymous sources • Huffington Post

Ryan Grim and Jason Linkins:

»You have surely noticed that story after story is powered by the musings of anonymous congressional aides, lawmakers and White House officials. Can you believe any of this? Yes. But it depends. To a non-initiated reader, the description of these anonymous creatures may appear to be quite random. But embedded within them are major giveaways about the reliability of the information being passed on, and how much credit you should give it. For example, if the author of the story you’re reading is an experienced Capitol Hill reporter, the description of the source you’re reading is likely the result of an explicit agreement between the source and the reporter.

«

Useful primer for the US elections; roughly the same works for UK politics too.
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How Thync, startup behind brain-zapping gadget, almost died • Bloomberg

Ellen Huet:

»Khosla Ventures, a VC firm known for investing in out-there businesses like plant-based egg substitutes, biofuels and artificially intelligent toys, made an early investment in Thync when it led the Los Gatos, Calif., startup’s $13 million funding round in 2014. Thync, which created one of the first consumer brain-stimulation devices on the market, advertised a $199 white dongle that sticks to a person’s forehead with an accompanying strip on the back of their neck. The wearer presses a button on their phone and gets a 10- to 20-minute “vibe session.” The electric current that followed would give them quick energy or calmness, helping them perk up without coffee or sleep without drugs.

The concept drew in tech’s early adopters and quantified-self devotees, eager to try the Valley’s newest frontier-busting trend. Industry socialite Susan MacTavish Best hosted an “evening of vibes” last year at her Victorian home in San Francisco, where startup founders, executives and artists could sample Thync’s electrical pulses alongside a buffet of grilled romaine, pork-belly candy and blackberry-smash cocktails while jazz pianist ELEW performed live.

«

Note that: one of the *first* brain-stimulation devices. This makes Silicon Valley, the TV series, look more and more like a documentary.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Your smartphone’s apps and software uses distraction like a magician – but is that a good thing for you? Photo by ThaQeLa 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. Unlucky for some (principally those who work in base 12). I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

For the first time, Google beat Apple in US PC sales — and that’s really bad news for Microsoft • Business Insider

Matt Weinberger achieves the trifecta of all three of the big names in a headline:

»Today, two very important things happened for the future of the PC as we know it.

First: For the first time ever, low-cost Google Chromebook laptops outsold Apple’s Macs during the most recent quarter, analyst firm IDC tells The Verge.

Manufacturers including Dell, Lenovo, and HP sold over 2 million Google-powered Chromebooks combined, versus around 1.76 million Macs, IDC estimates.

Second: those same Google Chromebooks are getting full access to Android’s Google Play store, opening the door for those laptops to run a significant portion of the 1.5 million Android apps out in the wild.

For Apple, it’s not necessarily great news, but it’s not the end of the world, either. Quarter after quarter, Macs have shown sales growth, bucking the overall shrinkage of the PC industry. And Apple has always been a company that’s content to completely and profitably own a small piece of a much larger pie.

But for Microsoft, it means that the pressure is on — Google’s slow-but-steady attack is bearing some real results, and it’s not great news for Windows 10.

«

Weinberger’s right; that 2m is over 10% of the US market (of 13.6m). And PC OEMs get better margins on Chromebooks (no Windows licence to pay). And soon those machines will be attractive to younger users because they’ll be able to run Android apps. (In passing: potentially a problem for Apple unless it can get iOS apps to run on Macs.)
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Tech support locker scam poses as failed Microsoft Update • The Register

John Leyden:

»Cybercrooks have put together a new scam that falls halfway between ransomware and old school browser lockup ruses.

The new class of “tech support lockers” rely on tricking users into installing either a fake PC optimiser or bogus Adobe Flash update. Once loaded the malware mimicks ransomware and locks users out of their computers. Unlike Locky, CryptoWall and their ilk it doesn’t actually encrypt files on compromised Windows PCs, however.

Jérôme Segura, a senior security researcher at Malwarebytes, said “tech support lockers” represent a class of malware more advanced than browser locks and fake anti-virus alerts of the pre-ransomware past.

“This is not a fake browser pop up that can easily be terminated by killing the application or restarting the PC,” Segura writes in a blog post. “No, this is essentially a piece of malware that starts automatically, and typical Alt+F4 or Windows key tricks will not get rid of it.”

One strain of tech support locker employs a subtle piece of social engineering trickery by waiting until a users restarts their computer before confronting users with a fake Windows update screen. Users are told their computers can’t be restarted normally supposedly because of an “expired license key”. Thereafter a screen locks a user out of their computer in an attempt to trick marks into phoning a support number, staffed by scammers.

«

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The strange science of why airport security lines spiral out of control • NY Mag

Drake Baer:

»Queues are governed by Little’s Law, which states that the number of items in a queuing system (the length of a queue) is equal to the average waiting time per item (how long each interaction takes) times the number of items arriving per unit time (how many people/things are coming in).

For queues with “servers” — someone handling transactions with whomever’s at the front of the line — the server needs to have some idle time, otherwise the queue, according to the math, could grow without limit. For a queue with only a single server, the rule of thumb is about 15 percent to 20 percent idle time. If there’s lots of servers (like a call bank with hundreds of people taking calls), then they don’t need as much idle time, because there’s less of a chance of every server being occupied at once, causing the line to build and leading to the inevitable viral videos.

A lot of this, Larson says, has to do with the profoundly human quality of variability. If queues were mechanical — like in a well-run factory, where the time of arrival and the time of service for each transaction were highly predictable — then a server could be super busy and queues still wouldn’t form.

But people are neither predictable nor identical in how they approach airline travel.

«

Damn people.
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The hack at ShapeShift • Money And State

Erik Vorhees:

»Last fall, we realized the “minimum viable product” server architecture established originally for ShapeShift was insufficient. We needed a professional to join the small team, and craft a scalable, and secure, server apparatus upon which our technology could grow.

We hired such a person, and patted ourselves on the back for our proactive decision. On paper, he looked great; the reference we called confirmed his prior role and responsibility. He’d even been into Bitcoin since 2011/2012 and had built miners in his room. Awesome. We’ll call this new employee Bob… indeed his real name starts with a B.

Over the next months, Bob built and managed ShapeShift’s infrastructure. He did okay, nothing special, but we were content to have a professional taking care of devops at least well enough to enable our engineers to build upon the architecture.

In the first quarter of this year, as the market discovered what we already knew – that our world will be one of many blockchain assets each needing liquidity with the other – exchange volumes surged at ShapeShift. Ethereum was on the rise, specifically. Our infrastructure was not ready for the pace of growth. It was like riding a bicycle upon which jet engines suddenly appear full-thrust.

Unfortunately, Bob did little to be helpful. He puttered around aimlessly while the team worked long hours to keep the ship together.

Scratch that, actually, Bob was not aimless.

He was preparing to steal from us.

«

This is a riveting read – not short, but thorough and worthwhile.
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Avoiding BlackBerry’s fate • Marco.org

»Becoming a major big-data AI services company doesn’t happen completely in secret and suddenly get released to the world, completed, in a keynote. It’s a massive undertaking, spanning many years, many people, and a lot of noticeable interaction with the world. It’s easier to conceal the development of an entire car than a major presence in AI and services.

Google is extremely well-placed for where they think the puck is going. They could be wrong — these AI services could be a socially awkward fad like Google Glass or a tonedeaf annoyance like Clippy. Google launches a lot of weird, geeky, technologically impressive things that go nowhere.

If Google is wrong, and computing continues to be defined by a tightly controlled grid of siloed apps that you poke a thousand times a day on a smooth rectangle of manufacturing excellence, Apple is fine. They’re doing a great job of what computing is today, and what it will probably continue to be for a long time.

But if Google is right, that’s a big problem for Apple.

«

Apple is pretty busy in AI and machine learning systems; it has been hiring. I think there’s a more subtle threat to Apple: what if you don’t use “things” to interact with these systems any more?
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Mirrors blamed for fire at world’s largest solar plant • Associated Press

»A small fire shut down a generating tower Thursday at the world’s largest solar power plant, leaving the sprawling facility on the California-Nevada border operating at only a third of its capacity, authorities said.

Firefighters had to climb some 300 feet up a boiler tower at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in California after fire was reported on an upper level around 9:30 a.m., fire officials said.

The plant works by using mirrors to focus sunlight on boilers at the top of three 459-foot towers, creating steam that drive turbines to produce electricity.

But some misaligned mirrors instead focused sunbeams on a different level of Unit 3, causing electrical cables to catch fire, San Bernardino County, California fire Capt. Mike McClintock said.

David Knox, spokesman for plant operator NRG Energy, said it was too early to comment on the cause, which was under investigation.

«

Pretty dramatic fire – it melted lots of stuff.
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How technology hijacks peoples’ minds — from a magician and Google’s design ethicist • Medium

Tristan Harris, who leaves you in no doubt from this article’s first line, which is “I’m an expert in how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities”:

»If you’re an app, how do you keep people hooked? Turn yourself into a slot machine.

The average person checks their phone 150 times a day. Why do we do this? Are we making 150 conscious choices?

How often do you check your email per day?

One major reason why is the #1 psychological ingredient in slot machines: intermittent variable rewards.
If you want to maximize addictiveness, all tech designers need to do is link a user’s action (like pulling a lever) with a variable reward. You pull a lever and immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing. Addictiveness is maximized when the rate of reward is most variable.

Does this effect really work on people? Yes. Slot machines make more money in the United States than baseball, movies, and theme parks combined. Relative to other kinds of gambling, people get ‘problematically involved’ with slot machines 3–4x faster according to NYU professor Natasha Dow Shull, author of Addiction by Design.

But here’s the unfortunate truth — several billion people have a slot machine their pocket:
•When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we got.
•When we pull to refresh our email, we’re playing a slot machine to see what new email we got.
•When we swipe down our finger to scroll the Instagram feed, we’re playing a slot machine to see what photo comes next.
•When we swipe faces left/right on dating apps like Tinder, we’re playing a slot machine to see if we got a match.
•When we tap the # of red notifications, we’re playing a slot machine to what’s underneath.

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That’s only the addiction side, and some of that is accidental; what Harris points to is that much of what gets us glued to distractions is intentional by the companies involved (including, as he points out, YouTube, owned by his ex-employer). His website is http://timewellspent.io
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Modular phone Ara to finally launch • The Register

Kieren McCarthy:

»The Ara project was originally announced in October 2013 and was part of the acquired Motorola Mobility business. Since then it has become part of Google’s Advanced Technology and Products (ATAP) division.

Despite periodically putting out videos touting Ara’s possibilities, however, little has been heard about the project and many assumed it was going the way of so many other Google projects: into the trash.

Not so. And ATAP Head of Creative, Blaise Bertrand, said at Google’s I/O conference on Friday that the phone will launch to developers in the fourth quarter of this year, with a consumer version put out sometime in 2017.

The phone even has a website, complete with more videos, so it must be happening.

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Except, as one of the commenters points out, the modularity won’t extend to the screen, GPU, CPU, RAM or sensors. So basically all the things that were meant to make this useful if modular won’t be modular.
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Google built a tiny radar system into a smartwatch for gesture controls • The Verge

Dieter Bohn:

»”How are you going to interact with an invisible computer?”

When you hear a question like that posted in a conference room at a major tech corporation like Google, you expect you’re going to be in for an hour or two of technophizing with few tangible results at the end of it.

But then somebody sets a smartwatch on the table in front of you. You snap your fingers in the air just a couple of inches away from it. And the digital watch face starts spinning.

Ivan Poupyrev, who posed that question (and many more) works at Google’s ATAP [Advanced Technology and Projects] research lab and is the technical project lead for Project Soli, which is designed to prove that we can embed tiny radar chips into electronics so that we can use minute hand gestures to control the digital world around us. Why on earth would you want radar in a smartwatch?

To prove that you can interact with an invisible computer. Duh…

…By comparison to the electronics and the machine learning algorithms, actually deciding which gestures should do what seems easy. But if you think about it a minute, maybe it’s not. With a touchscreen, you can see buttons and sliders. With physical switch, you can feel the snick when you flick it on. But if there’s nothing but air, how do you guide the user?

“Is everything going to have its own interface?” Poupyrev asks. “Is every switch, every smart sprinkler, or cup going to have its own? It’s going to create confusion.” One of Soli’s goals is to create a common design language that’s easy to learn but flexible enough to control a lot of things.

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I got the impression, reading the article, that neither Bohn nor the Googlers could figure out what the killer use case for this technology would be – or even if there is one.
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December 2015: How Theranos misled me • Fortune

Roger Parloff, in December 2015, after the Wall Street Journal exposed how Theranos wasn’t doing what it claimed, tried to figure out why he had come away convinced, for an article in 2014, that it was doing all those things – including “more than 200” types of blood test:

»After Theranos’s Oct. 22 statement, I contacted officials there to inquire how many tests it had actually been commercially performing by proprietary means in June 2014, when I had reported that it was offering more than 200. A spokesperson acknowledged to me that it was fewer than 200, but declined to specify how many. She said she’d send a statement.

The company’s statement arrived Nov. 3. “As discussed when you visited Theranos,” it said, “Theranos could perform hundreds of tests (more than 200) using its proprietary technologies. The reports you reviewed at Theranos covered many of those tests Theranos developed for use with finger-stick samples.”

(The company had, indeed, provided me in the Spring of 2014 with what it said were—and what looked to be—validation studies for scores of different diagnostic tests, though, in truth, I lacked the expertise to assess their significance.)

The statement then went on to address my followup question, which was basically: If you were capable of doing 200-plus tests using your proprietary methods, why weren’t you in fact doing them?

Here, with trademark, Theranos-ian opacity, is the reply: “Over time, we’ve been optimizing our clinical lab to bring up tests that are more commonly ordered, and in some cases move resources off the proprietary tests that are less commonly ordered to get to a point where the ordering patterns we are seeing can all be accommodated through our finger-stick technology.”

Got that?

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Parloff’s walk back through his notes, and Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes’s opaque replies, are a laudable attempt to try to figure out what happened. It’s something that can – has – happened to many journalists: you think you understand it, and you let them whitewash you. Only by repeatedly asking “just explain that to me in more detail” do you finally get to the core. Or in Theranos’s case, the void where the core should be.
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Guns replaced with selfie sticks • Tumblr

For example:

Though the Schwarzenegger one that heads the site actually captures something about Arnie that had always been only implied.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.