Start up: Seattle v the Quake, Nadella on phones, Apple Pay in UK, Google’s giant ad and more

Posted on July 15, 2015 by charlesarthur

Forgotten. But by who? Photo by theen… on Flickr.

A selection of 11 links for you. Follow The Overspill on Twitter (this isn’t optional). I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Exclusive: CEO Nadella talks Microsoft’s mobile ambitions, Windows 10 strategy, HoloLens and more » ZDNet

Nadella tells Mary Jo Foley:

If anything, one big mistake we made in our past was to think of the PC as the hub for everything for all time to come. And today, of course, the high volume device is the six-inch phone. I acknowledge that. But to think that that’s what the future is for all time to come would be to make the same mistake we made in the past without even having the share position of the past. So that would be madness.

Therefore, we have to be on the hunt for what’s the next bend in the curve. That’s what, quite frankly, anyone has to do to be relevant in the future. In our case, we are doing that. We’re doing that with our innovation in Windows. We’re doing that with features like Continuum. Even the phone, I just don’t want to build another phone, a copycat phone operating system, even.

So when I think about our Windows Phone, I want it to stand for something like Continuum [which lets you plug a phone into a suitable dock/keyboard and have it render PC-sized screens]. When I say, wow, that’s an interesting approach where you can have a phone and that same phone, because of our universal platform with Continuum, and can, in fact, be a desktop. That is not something any other phone operating system or device can do. And that’s what I want our devices and device innovation to stand for.

Last week’s announcement was not about any change to our vision and strategy, but for sure it was a change to our operating approach.

That last bit puzzles me. What is your “operating approach”, if it isn’t the embodiment of your vision and strategy?
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Sixty-five THOUSAND Range Rovers recalled over DOOR software glitch » The Register

John Leyden:

Jaguar Land Rover is recalling no less than 65,000 of its SUVs due to a software problem that caused the cars’ doors to unlock themselves – potentially while in motion.

The issue, which potentially creates a heightened theft-by-hijack risk, affects Range Rover and Range Rover Sport vehicles sold in the UK over the last two years, the BBC reports. The flaw means that doors can remain unlatched even when in the “closed” position so that they can open while the car is in motion, Automotive News explains.

The recall follows recent reports that car thieves were targeting Range Rovers and BMW X5s using readily obtainable black box kit that made it straightforward to unlock and start cars that relied on keyless ignition systems.

On the plus side, they sold 65,000? Should have said “oh, man, we have to recall TWO MILLION. Yes, very successful year, so sorry, got to go.”
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UK launch of Apple Pay heralds start of something big » CCS Insight

Ben Wood of the analysis company:

UK consumers and retailers, unlike their US counterparts, are familiar with the concept of “tap and pay”; it’s not an unfamiliar mechanism that they need to be educated to adopt.

Add to that the huge number of iPhone users in the UK and it’s clear Great Britain is something of a “golden isle” for Apple. Our research suggests that more than half of active users on some mobile networks have an iPhone; even though many won’t have a model that works with Apple Pay, the fierce brand loyalty that Apple inspires could prompt many to upgrade to a compatible iPhone.

The allure of the Apple brand also means everyone wants to work with the company, or is pushed to do so. Barclays bank initially refused to support Apple Pay, instead favouring its own bPay service. Early this morning, on the launch day for Apple Pay and in the face of considerable customer pressure, Barclays tweeted to say that it would support Apple Pay in the future.

Further evidence of Apple’s clout and determination is getting Apple Pay to work with the complexities of the London Transport network and the body that runs it, TFL. Although Apple isn’t the first company to offer such support, its scale means that millions of people travelling around London now can pay for their travel using an Apple device.

That “more than half of active users on some networks have an iPhone” stat is one worth considering. Generally, iOS has about 30-35% of the smartphone install base in the UK. Another stat to record: UK contactless stats show that in December 2014

“£380.8m was spent in the UK in December using a contactless card. This is an increase of 25.8% on the previous month and 330.8% over the year.”

Let’s see how that changes.
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Apple Pay » Transport for London

Note this part:

Always use the same device

If you use Apple Pay on more than one device, for instance when the same payment card is linked to both an iPhone and an Apple Watch, make sure to choose one device and use it every time you travel, so you:

• Avoid incomplete journeys
• Benefit from daily and weekly capping
Please be aware that you might receive payment notifications on all your devices, regardless of which one was used for touching in or out.

Seems to imply that a different token is created when you put the same card onto the phone and the watch. Which, in the longer term, would mean the watch could be completely independent of the phone (once you figure out how to embed the card..)
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Why buying ‘death of PC’ hype is dangerous » Laptop Mag

Avram Piltch:

Even though people won’t stop using (or buying) computers any time soon, the widespread but incorrect belief that computers are on the way out has serious implications. Corporate executives, investors and developers read the same news stories as everyone else and change their plans accordingly. While the PC space needs more innovation and better apps, many companies that make software and publish Web tools will transition even more of their resources to mobile. Websites that today offer more content on the page for desktop could end up getting stripped down for all users, on the belief that phone screens are the only ones that matter.

“The challenge the PC has is that it isn’t attracting much in the way of apps that exploit its capabilities and resonate with a broad audience,” said Ross Rubin of Recticle Research.

News of the form factor’s demise certainly won’t help.

As investors jump on the anti-PC bandwagon, companies that make computer hardware will be under increased pressure to produce fewer and lower-quality products. Consumers will see fewer innovations like the Microsoft Surface and Lenovo Yoga, and more commodity laptops in their place.

Hate to break it to you, Avram, but customers aren’t generally buying the Surface and the Yoga. They’re already buying, as they have been for years, the commodity products – where NPD says (in the article) that the average desktop sells for $482, and laptop for $442.

Set the rapid improvements in mobile (cameras, processors, form factors, sensors) against the dead-end nature of most PC tasks, and you can see why developer resources in hardware and software are going into mobile. There’s a lot of uncharted territory to explore.
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The earthquake that will devastate Seattle » The New Yorker

Kathryn Schulz:

Under pressure from [tectonic plate] Juan de Fuca, the stuck edge of North America is bulging upward and compressing eastward, at the rate of, respectively, three to four millimetres and thirty to forty millimetres a year. It can do so for quite some time, because, as continent stuff goes, it is young, made of rock that is still relatively elastic. (Rocks, like us, get stiffer as they age.) But it cannot do so indefinitely. There is a backstop—the craton, that ancient unbudgeable mass at the center of the continent—and, sooner or later, North America will rebound like a spring. If, on that occasion, only the southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone gives way—your first two fingers, say—the magnitude of the resulting quake will be somewhere between 8.0 and 8.6. That’s the big one. If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one.

Flick your right fingers outward, forcefully, so that your hand flattens back down again. When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater.

• Last earthquake involving Juan de Fuca: 315 years ago.
• Usual frequency of earthquakes involving Juan de Fuca: every 243 years.
• Variance of quake timing: not given (but known by someone at Oregon State University).
• Value of real estate in Seattle and Oregon: probably falling by the time you read this.
• To put the tech lens on this, consider that Microsoft and Amazon are both headquartered in Seattle. Now wipe them off the map. Pause.
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Google accidentally reveals data on ‘right to be forgotten’ requests » The Guardian

Sylvia Tippman and Julia Powles:

Less than 5% of nearly 220,000 individual requests made to Google to selectively remove links to online information concern criminals, politicians and high-profile public figures, the Guardian has learned, with more than 95% of requests coming from everyday members of the public.

The Guardian has discovered new data hidden in source code on Google’s own transparency report that indicates the scale and flavour of the types of requests being dealt with by Google – information it has always refused to make public. The data covers more than three-quarters of all requests to date.

Previously, more emphasis has been placed on selective information concerning more sensational examples of so-called right to be forgotten requests released by Google and reported by some of the media, which have largely ignored the majority of requests made by citizens concerned with protecting their personal privacy.

These include a woman whose name appeared in prominent news articles after her husband died, another seeking removal of her address, and an individual who contracted HIV a decade ago.

In other words, the “Right to be forgotten” is overwhelmingly about ordinary people who don’t want to be indexed. This is so telling about the PR spin that has gone on around this (“the ruling has already been criticised after early indications that around 12% of applications were related to paedophilia. A further 30% concern fraud and 20% were about people’s arrests or convictions… many other applications have come from corrupt public figures and criminals desperate to hide their past.
An actor who had an affair with a teenager, a celebrity’s child who was convicted of criminal offices and a man who tried to kill members of his family were among the first requests.” Where do you think the Daily Mail got those details?).

And guess what happened when they queried Google about it?

“The underlying source code has since been updated to remove these details.”

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Google’s largest shopping ad EVER spotted on the SERPs » Wordstream

Margot da Cunha:

the new ad format takes up just about the entire right side of the page. But, don’t get too excited, if you look closely you’ll see that this isn’t just one ad for one advertiser, but rather a price comparison between different e-commerce sites and stores. So no, one advertiser cannot pay to completely dominate the right side of the page, but rather can be included in the product comparison sponsored ad on the right side. It looks like regular, non-sponsored Knowledge Graph results, but it’s definitely sponsored. Google started experimenting with adding ads to the bottom of Knowledge Graph results early back in 2014, but most of the info there was still organic.

“The way Google lists the pricing in these makes it much more obvious which options are the less expensive ones, so advertisers will probably have to ensure they have the least expensive option if they take advantage of this new format,” says Slegg.

Clever: advertisers will have to bid more to get placement, yet price lower to be chosen, thus eroding their margins. The only winning strategy long-term is to not need to be found through search. (SERPS in the headline, if you don’t know, is “Search Engine Results Page[s]”.)
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Xiaomi success inspires every man and his dog to make smartphones in China » Reuters

Yimou Lee and Paul Carsten:

The call of the world’s biggest smartphone market is proving irresistible for entrepreneurs in China, where even purveyors of concrete mixers, refrigerators and rock music are mimicking local trailblazer Xiaomi with their own handsets.

But the market shrank in early 2015 for the first time in six years and sales have fallen at one-time leader Xiaomi. That sudden about-turn raises questions over whether there is any chance for the likes of construction machinery maker SANY Group Co Ltd, Gree Electric Appliances Inc of Zhuhai and veteran rockstar Cui Jian.

The slowdown may be too much for all but the largest handset makers, much less a plethora of me-toos, some analysts say. In a crowded market plagued by price wars, entrants will have to convince buyers to abandon established brands with phones that surpass even premium models, US research firm Gartner said.

“It’s not that easy to go bankrupt making phones, but it’s also not easy to be profitable,” said Taiwan-based Gartner analyst CK Lu, who covers the mainland smartphone market. “If you don’t have good differentiation, you’re putting yourself in a saturated market.”

China had 155 smartphone brands selling over 1,000 handsets a month as at end-March, from 110 two years ago, said analyst Neil Shah of Counterpoint Research. In neighbouring India, there were 103 brands, over half of which are Chinese.

There will be a shakeout, but quite when is a separate question.
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Kuwait announces mandatory DNA database for its citizens » DNAForce

The recent suicide bombing that slain 26 innocent people during Friday prayers on the 26th of June has finally reached its ultimatum as the Kuwaiti legislature has now implemented a law that calls for a mandatory DNA testing on every single Kuwaiti citizen including its foreign residents.

The law states that security agencies must help the government to create a database on all 1.3 million Kuwaiti citizens and 2.9 million foreign residents in order to make faster arrests when it comes to criminal cases.

It is also stated that for those who refuse to give out their sample will be sent to jail for a year. It will also come with a fine of $33,000 or €29,700. If a citizen is proven guilty of faking their sample, they are entitled to be imprisoned for seven years.

Note how the foreign residents greatly outnumber the nationals. Will it apply to visitors too? This is a really slippery slope, and Kuwait has put itself halfway down it straight away.
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The real threat posed by powerful computers » The New York Times

Quentin Hardy:

the real worry, specialists in the field say, is a computer program rapidly overdoing a single task, with no context. A machine that makes paper clips proceeds unfettered, one example goes, and becomes so proficient that overnight we are drowning in paper clips.

In other words, something really dumb happens, at a global scale. As for those “Terminator” robots you tend to see on scary news stories about an A.I. apocalypse, forget it.

“What you should fear is a computer that is competent in one very narrow area, to a bad degree,” said Max Tegmark, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the president of the Future of Life Institute, a group dedicated to limiting the risks from A.I.

In late June, when a worker in Germany was killed by an assembly line robot, Mr. Tegmark said, “it was an example of a machine being stupid, not doing something mean but treating a person like a piece of metal.”

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Start up: life as an “Invisible”, why use adblocking?, how Spotify’s eating your drive, and more

Posted on July 14, 2015 by charlesarthur

BlackBerry has been a loser as smartphones have taken off in Africa. Photo by shizhao on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Surprise your friend by tweeting an inline link. Follow The Overspill on Twitter to get updates on what’s posted here. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

I was an Invisible Girlfriend for a month » Fusion

Kashmir Hill tried being one of the workers who texts (but never, never sexts) with people who want not-really-just-virtual-but-real boyfriends or girlfriends:

Over all, the number of users who seemed to really want companionship outnumbered the skeptics. The founders say one user told them she was going through chemotherapy and that her real-life boyfriend had dumped her. So her invisible boyfriend had become a serious emotional support while she fought cancer.

I didn’t encounter anyone like that. Instead, I met a guy in his late 20s who wanted to have an extended conversation with his “lovingly nerdy, best-friend-turned-girlfriend” about taxidermy. He said that if he were a taxidermist, he would sew a cat to a dog. I texted, “Would you put a cat head on a dog body or a dog head on a cat body?” But I didn’t get to see his response, nor find out if the conversation was about to go to a darker place that might warrant alerting authorities.

It’s hard to put a price on love. But Crowdsource did. It’s worth a whopping five cents. That’s how much I got paid to write each of these texts.

If I spent an hour answering texts, and took the full five minutes to write each one, I’d be making 60 cents an hour, far below the minimum wage. This is legal because all the workers on the platform are classified as independent contractors rather than employees.

But of course. She’d get $5 for answering 100 texts; the service charged $15-$25 for the same.

Also, this is frighteningly reminiscent of Her, whose central character’s job is writing cards for people too busy to write cards.
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Why I’ve started using an adblocker » Three Dot Lounge

Chuq von Rospach:

The problem for me is not actually the ads. I understand sites need to pay the bills and that advertising is how many sites do that. But so many of the ads today have gotten so aggressive about hiding content from me or blaring unrelated crap into my eyes or in my ears that I have finally had it.

Beyond that, an even bigger problem for me is that more and more networks are using these advertising inclusions to install trackers and beacons to watch me as I wander around the net, and these trackers and beacons are in almost all cases things I have no way to opt out of, have never agreed to use and cannot see what’s being collected and sold about me along the way.

That is why I have finally installed an ad blocker. The ads are in many cases intrusive and annoying, but the growing trend of tracking without my permission and without any way to opt out of the tracking is abusive of me, my privacy and my online experience. And because of that, I’m now blocking the trackers and beacons that do this, and as a side effect the ads have gone away as well. This may hurt the sites that depends on the advertising, and I’m sort of sorry for that — but they are also the sites that have allowed these networks to install these tracker systems onto them, and so they are indirectly complicit in that way.

I don’t see this ending well for small or medium sites reliant on ads; the word about adblocking is going to spread relentlessly, and if it makes sites more pleasant to read then it’s going to snowball. Large sites may be able to shrug off the lure of the crud ads. Smaller ones won’t; you’re already seeing (elsewhere) the effects of the race to the bottom.
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Spotify’s swallowing your disk space – and you can’t stop it » Expert Reviews

Barry Collins:

The streaming service stores a local cache of music on users’ PCs, normally containing their most recently played tracks or music they’ve requested to be stored offline (a feature only available to Premium subscribers).

An update to Spotify earlier this year removed the option to determine where this cache was stored and to limit its size, leaving users who run the software on laptops or tablets with limited capacity SSDs fuming. “I’ve unsubbed yesterday because of this,” wrote one user on the Spotify forums. “I can’t believe how incompetent your software engineers or whoever thought of this idea to take away KEY functionaliites like cache variability and installation paths.”

“Like everyone, I have an SSD as my primary drive and [it] has a very limited space in it,” writes another customer. “With all my music save [sic] offline, Spotify is eating up almost 30% of my SSD space without my knowledge!”

An update to Spotify last week returned the feature that allowed people to select an external drive as the location for the cache. But the option to limit the size of the cache remains missing in action.

Slightly wonkish, but one to properly annoy the wonks.
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Artist arrested on suspicion of ‘abstracting electricity’ to charge iPhone on London Overground train » London Evening Standard

Tom Marshall and Laura Proto:

An artist has criticised transport police after he was arrested for using a plug on a London Overground train to charge his iPhone.

Robin Lee was handcuffed and put into a police van after using the power socket on a train from Hackney Wick to Camden Road on Friday, July 10.

The 45-year-old, who lives in Islington, said the whole episode was “ridiculous” and was first confronted on the train by a police community support officer who said he was taking the electricity illegally.

He was arrested on the platform after getting off at Camden Road. “She said I’m abstracting electricity,” he said. “She kept saying it’s a crime. We were just coming into the station, and there happened to be about four police officers on the platform. She called to them and said ‘This guy’s been abstracting electricity, he needs to be arrested’.”

The plugs say “Cleaners’ use only”. Maybe he should have said he was a cleaner. (He was arrested, and then “de-arrested”.)
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Middle East and Africa smartphone market to top 155m units in 2015 as sub-$200 segment surges » IDC

Featurephone sales fell 20%, smartphone sales grew 66% to hit 36m, or 63% of total regional phone shipments in Q1, driven by cheap Android phones:

almost half of all the smartphones shipped across Africa (45.1%) in Q1 2015 were priced below $100, while almost 75% fall under $200. Low-priced smartphones are also having a considerable impact in the Middle East, with the $100–200 price band accounting for the market’s biggest share.

“This price bracket seems to be the sweet point for most vendors launching in the region, as well as for established vendors looking to increase their shares by targeting the lower end of the market,” says Nabila Popal, research manager for IDC’s Mobile Phone Tracker in the Middle East, Africa, and Turkey. “This has resulted in phones priced under $200 accounting for about 36% of the Middle East smartphone market, while at the other end of the spectrum the $450+ price band has seen its share fall from 25% in Africa and 48% in the Middle East a year ago, to 14% and 34% today.”

Nigeria and South Africa contributed significantly to the overall growth seen in Africa, with the countries experiencing year-on-year growth of 135% and 56%, respectively. Nigeria accounted for 14% of all smartphone shipments across the continent during Q1 2015, while South Africa was responsible for 12%. Samsung, Tecno, and Apple were the leading smartphone vendors in Africa during the quarter, with Huawei being ousted from the top three. The three leading vendors accounted for a combined 55% share of Africa’s smartphone shipments in Q1 2015.

Losers in this: BlackBerry (hit by BYOD) and Microsoft (both the Nokia and Lumia models).
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Nintendo president Satoru Iwata dies of cancer » FT.com

Leo Lewis makes an important point:

however dismally its successor has fared, the original Wii console, released in 2006 as the defining management feat of Mr Iwata, was revolutionary.

Even as Nintendo’s celebrated games designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, was receiving the plaudits for the Wii’s groundbreaking controllers and gameplay, the management hand of Mr Iwata was evident.

Three titles of which Mr Iwata was executive producer — Wii Sports, Wii Fit and Wii Play — were games that sold more than 130m units between them and changed not only the physical way that games were played, but the demographic universe of gaming.

In the global list of best selling video games, Nintendo reigns supreme. Of the top 40 games that have sold or been downloaded more than 15m times, 12 were released under the presidency of Mr Iwata.

One has to hope Nintendo had a really solid succession plan in place.
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Satoru Iwata was Nintendo » The Verge

Sam Byford on Nintendo’s chief executive, a skilled programmer who has died of cancer at 55:

everything Iwata did was driven by an unshakeable belief in what Nintendo is and what it stands for. Nintendo is sometimes late to certain parties, but when it does do things that people have long clamored for, like mobile games or an online service, it does so on its own terms. Iwata passionately stood against the devaluation of games, for example, which is why you won’t see ports of existing Nintendo titles on phones. And his forward-thinking perspective extended to how he ran the company on an operational level. “If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease,” he told an investor who was calling for heads to roll in 2013. “I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world.” The exchange sums up Iwata’s leadership — empathetic on a human level, yet grounded in a firm perspective that it was the right thing to do for business…

…”Trust your passion, believe in your dream,” Iwata said in an inspiring speech at the 2011 Game Developers Conference. “For 25 years, game developers have made the impossible possible. So I ask you, why would we stop now?”

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Facebook’s security chief calls for Adobe Flash to be killed off » HOTforSecurity

Graham Cluley:

Amongst those who would be happy to see the back of Adobe Flash is Alex Stamos, Facebook’s newly-appointed security chief.

In a tweet this weekend, Stamos – who is a respected member of the security community who is credited for improving the security stance of Yahoo at his previous job – said that it was time for Adobe to announce when Flash would be killed off, and for browsers to assist by dropping support at the same time.

“It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date for Flash and to ask the browsers to set killbits on the same day.”

In a followup tweet, Stamos said that Adobe’s death date didn’t have to be today or tomorrow – but a date had to be set in stone for systems to be made more secure:

“Even if 18 months from now, one set date is the only way to disentangle the dependencies and upgrade the whole ecosystem at once.”

Yup. Stake through the heart. Only way.
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Apple’s share of smartphone industry’s profits soars to 92% » WSJ

Shira Ovide and Daisuke Wakabayashi, quoting a Canaccord Genuity report:

One key to Apple’s profit dominance: higher prices. Apple’s iPhone last year sold for a global average of $624, compared with $185 for smartphones running Android, according to Strategy Analytics. In its fiscal quarter ended March 28, Apple sold 43% more iPhones than a year earlier, at a higher price. The average iPhone price in the quarter rose by more than $60 to $659, on the strength of the larger-screen iPhone 6 and 6 Plus models.

As the smartphone market matures and growth slows, it is starting to resemble the personal-computer business in some ways. Average PC prices have plunged, and most manufacturers struggle to eke out profits. But Apple captured more than half of industry profits last year, even though its Mac line accounted for only about six of every 100 computers sold, according to Bernstein Research.

Despite the changing leader boards of the past decade, some industry veterans say Apple’s profit crown looks more secure.

“The dominance of Apple is something that is very hard to overcome,” said Denny Strigl, former chief operating officer of Verizon Communications Inc. “Apple has to stumble somehow or another, and I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

That’s pretty much how I showed it in my latest examination of the PC industry. However, that “92%” figure is misleading; the negative amounts by Microsoft, BlackBerry and others shouldn’t really be included. Otherwise, with Microsoft’s giant $7bn+ writedown on Nokia negating all Samsung’s profit and a chunk of Apple’s, you’ll have a situation in Q2 where Apple makes 150% of industry profits. Clearly not realistic.
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Start up: Reddit implodes, catching criminals via Spotify, Cameron’s mad encryption plan, and more

Posted on July 13, 2015 by charlesarthur

A better way to think of Reddit? Photo by avisualstudy on Flickr.

A selection of 11 links for you. With added anchors, so you can link direct to observations Kontra. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Cops nab fugitives in Cabo San Lucas by tracking Spotify IP address » Ars Technica

David Kravets:

Husband Peter Barr and wife Brittany Nunn of Wellington, Colorado, were brought to Denver days ago and face felony charges in connection to the children’s disappearance. Nunn had lost custody of her children to their fathers, but she did not appear when the exchange was supposed to happen in December. The duo had been on the lam ever since, and they are accused of unlawfully taking the woman’s two biological children, 4 and 6, to Mexico, according to The Coloradoan.

The case was broken by Larimer County Sheriff’s investigator Drew Weber. According to the paper:

Drawing on new investigative tactics, Weber executed a search warrant and pulled records from Nunn’s Spotify account. He found it was being used from an IP address in Mexico. He later pulled search records from Netflix and Nunn’s other accounts and eventually tracked a package that Nunn had ordered to be shipped to Cabo San Lucas.

A private investigator soon joined Weber and helped monitor the family for months while agents with FBI, customs officials and the US State Department worked with the consulate in Mexico on a plan to bring the children and alleged abductors home.

This is how it’s going to be from now on: go on the lam, stay offline. Or get caught. And staying offline will be increasingly difficult.
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Student’s Dilemma, a riff of the Prisoner version with extra credit » Flowing Data

By way of Chris Volinsky, a quiz dilemma for students who want extra credit. It’s a variation on the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a popular game theory example that uses two criminals instead of students and lesser jail time instead of extra credit.

What’s your answer? I take the two.

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FTC exploring Apple rules for streaming music rivals in App Store » Reuters

Diane Bartz and Julia Love:

U.S. government antitrust regulators are looking into claims about whether Apple’s treatment of rival streaming music apps is illegal under antitrust law, according to three industry sources.

Apple recently launched a new music streaming service, Apple Music. It also provides the App Store platform for competing streaming services including Jango, Spotify, Rhapsody and others.

Apple takes a 30% cut of all in-app purchases for digital goods, such as music streaming subscriptions and games, sold on its platform.

While $9.99 has emerged as the going monthly rate for music subscriptions, including Apple’s, some streaming companies complain that Apple’s cut forces them to either charge more in the App Store than they do on other platforms or erode their profit margins.

That’s OK – all Apple needs to do is put its Beats sub on the App Store and take a 30% cut. Oh, wait!

But the 30% tithe has been in place since before Apple had a streaming service. Hard to see the antitrust case here, unlike the ebooks “let’s agree to alter prices upwards” case. Google also has the same 30% cut in place, and a larger market share.
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Bruce Schneier: David Cameron’s encryption ban would ‘destroy the internet’ » Business Insider

Rob Price:

amid heightened terror fears, Cameron says “we must look at all the new media being produced and ensure that, in every case, we are able, in extremis and on the signature of a warrant, to get to the bottom of what is going on.”

The prime minister first indicated that he would try to clamp down on secure communications that could not be decrypted by law enforcement in January, after the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris. His comments sparked an immediate flurry of condemnation from privacy and security activists, but his recent statements show he’s not backing down. (Number 10 has not responded to requests for clarification about Cameron’s comments.)

Business Insider reached out to Bruce Schneier to discuss the feasibility of Cameron’s proposed ban on “safe spaces” online. Schneier, a widely respected cryptography and security expert, is a fellow at the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, serves on the board of the digital-liberties pressure group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and writes frequently on encryption and security. He didn’t hold back.

The Cameron suggestions are clearly nonsense, which as Schneier points out, raises the question of why nobody around him has said “er, we can’t implement that, because it’s totalitarian, and also unworkable.”

So how does Cameron extricate himself from this?
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Why Android and Windows should embrace RAW photography before Apple catches up » The Next Web

Napier Lopez:

Sticking with JPEG is like watching The Lion King on VCR when it’s available on Blu-Ray.

Not everyone cares about taking better photos, but it’s clear many do. Just take a look at apple’s “Shot with iPhone” campaign; advertising for flagship phones centers around cameras, flaunting things like resolution and aperture when a more substantial improvement lies with a feature right under our noses.

For Android and Windows Phone, investing resources into making their RAW files more accessible can help give them a big head start over Apple. RAW support on its own is awesome, but software developers and manufacturers need to make it easy to use before the masses adopt it. I should be able to upload a RAW file straight onto Instagram, not be forced to buy a Lightroom Mobile subscription or load it onto my computer.

In any case, it’s likely RAW will come to iOS too.

Might do, although probably only as an option; it sucks up a lot of storage, and some people are already pushing it on their photo libraries.
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Reddit is not the front page of the internet » The Daily Beast

Samantha Allen with an excoriating (but also pinpoint accurate) take:

Reddit became a web destination and a traffic powerhouse by virtue of the clicking, viewing, and typing habits of a relatively narrow subsection of Internet users. 74% of Reddit users are men, the highest of any social networking website. Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube all come much closer to gender parity. Describing Reddit without making reference to its gender asymmetry is akin to reporting on Pinterest, which is 72% female, without noting that the site caters to women.

And, indeed, when The New York Times reviewed Pinterest in 2012, they rightly referred to it as “female-oriented,” but when the CEO of a 74% male social network resigns after facing intense criticism from its users—much of it laced with misogyny—they somehow forget to label Reddit, in turn, as “male-oriented.” Reddit too often passes in the media as unmarked and neutral territory while sites like Pinterest get pigeonholed as girly.

Reddit is also one of the most youthful social networks, with nearly 60% of its visitors coming in under age 34. For comparison, over 60% of Facebook users are above age 34. Increasingly, younger Internet users seem to perceive Facebook as a network for grandmas but, in 2015, grandmas are as vital a part of the internet as anyone else—even if they’d never be caught dead on its supposed “front page.” Only 2% of people over 50 use Reddit.

She also captures it in one phrase elsewhere: “Reddit is not so much the generic front page of the Internet as it is its spacious, tricked-out man cave: a lot of people can fit inside, but only some people feel comfortable hanging out there.”
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The death of Reddit » Chuq Von Rospach

Von Rospach has been in charge of online community efforts at Apple and Palm, among others:

I see poor management with a naive attitude about the use of the site, weak tools and IP, a mis-aligned power structure where there’s no need for the people with the real power to care what the company wants, no real communication between company and its moderators or users, and a lot of really toxic users and groups that have caused the site major PR and reputation disasters but which the company is both reluctant and in many cases unable to control or remove.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

How do you fix this?

You don’t. You can’t. Reddit has failed, and we are now witnessing its immolation.
So what should Reddit do? Let me say up front this basic fact: if the Reddit board were to call me up and offer me a blank check to come in and fix Reddit for them, I would laugh and hang up. I wouldn’t touch this disaster under any circumstances. But if they were to ask me what advice I have for the idiot stupid enough to take this gig, here’s what I’d tell them:

Don’t try to fix it. It’s broken. It can’t be fixed. Instead, it’s time to decide what the service you want is, and build that service out of the ashes of the failure of this Reddit. A great starting point is the AMA and the most popular reddits. Figure out the revenue model and make sure it’s baked in to this new model. Anything that isn’t part of this new model that exists on the old site will end up being shut down. you can expect that won’t go well when you announce it.

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The dark side of Google 10x » Business Insider

Jillian D’Onfro on how Google’s “10X” projects, which are meant to be the “moonshots” that are ten times better than anything else, can go awry:

One former exec told Business Insider that the gospel of 10x, which is promoted by top execs including CEO Larry Page, has two sides. “It’s enormously energizing on one side, but on the other it can be totally paralyzing,” he says.

“Larry’s job is to point out things you haven’t thought of, so he has to suspend reality a little bit,” he said.

When it comes to building out-there ideas like smart contact lenses, that contrarian instinct makes a lot of sense. But this former employee believes it’s dangerous when that logic gets applied to products that don’t need it.

For example, when Google was designing the remote control for its early iteration of Google TV, Page didn’t think any of the prototypes were ambitious enough.

Why doesn’t it have a screen in case you needed to go to the bathroom and keep watching? Page asked. Why not a mouse pad, a keyboard?

When the team tried to argue that a remote didn’t need those things, Page kept pushing for more ambitious features that no other controllers out there came with.

There are more.
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Google Photos may be uploading your pics, even if you don’t want it to » Nashville Business Journal

David Arnott:

All I had to do to turn my phone into a stealth Google Photos uploader was to turn on the backup sync, then uninstall the app. Whereas one might reasonably believe uninstalling the app from the phone would stop photos from uploading automatically to Google Photos, the device still does it even in the app’s absence. Since making this discovery, I have re-created the issue multiple times in multiple settings on my Galaxy S5.

I reached out to Google, and after reaching someone on the phone and describing the issue, was told to wait for a comment. Several hours later, I received a terse email that said, “The backup was as intended.” If I want to stop it from happening, I was told I’d have to change settings in Google Play Services.

It goes almost without saying that this makes no sense, and makes me not trust Google. Plus, it seems to me to possibly represent a security issue. If I understand how Google Photos works, none of my photos were made public to the wider world. But that’s beside the point — I didn’t want Google to have them, either.

Here’s his tweet when he first discovered it. This might make sense for people who don’t really care, but you delete the app and it lives on? That’s counterintuitive.
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Consumers are ‘dirtying’ databases with false details » Call Week

It only takes a relatively small percentage of database entries to be ‘dirty’ before its value disproportionately declines, according to the report. Companies therefore need to up their efforts to encourage people to give the right information.

The research shows that 60% of consumers intentionally provide incorrect information when submitting their personal details online. Broken down by the types of data provided, birth dates are the most commonly falsified, as almost a quarter of consumers (23%) give the wrong date of birth to companies ‘some of the time’, 9% do this ‘most of the time’ and 5% ‘always’ give the wrong date.

The research also shows that nearly one-third of people give a fake email address and a made-up name at least some of the time. It is a similar story for incorrect information given about home addresses, phone numbers, job titles and company names.

“The upside of providing information has not been articulated,” says managing director at Verve Colin Strong. “The case is not always made by companies about what consumers
are going to get in return for providing information, but people see the immediate effects of being put on more marketing lists and being pursued by online advertising and email spam.”

The original article is actually on Marketing Week, but you have to register, and — you get the picture. The upside is far smaller than the downside (“happy birthday!” emails from sites you logged in to once, say).
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Microsoft mission statement: so many words, most of them empty » FT.com

The wonderful Lucy KEllaway eviscerates Satya Nadella’s memo in which he axed thousands of jobs in Windows Phone:

With some clearing of the throat about how proud he is in announcing it, the CEO unveils the new mission of Microsoft: “to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more”.

The first sign of trouble is the word “planet”. There is a rule that says whenever this word is used as a substitute for “world”, the sentence in which it appears is utter tosh. If the cosmic resonance is gratuitous, the author is writing through his hat.

In the early days of Microsoft, Bill Gates came up with a vastly better mission: a computer on every desk and in every home. There was no windy nonsense about planets, nor any tiresome talk of empowering. Best of all, it was precise. The main problem with the new mission is not its grandiosity but its emptiness. Achieve more what? On this vital question, Mr Nadella is silent.

Indeed, the best way to empower people on the planet to achieve more would be to persuade them to love their mobile devices a little less and turn them off occasionally and get on with something real instead.

Not content with announcing his new mission, Mr Nadella empowers himself to achieve still more: “Today I want to share more on the overall context and connective tissue between our mission, worldview, strategy and culture.”

To have a mission and a vision and worldview is greedy. But to have so many abstract things with lots of connective tissue between them leaves one feeling slightly sick.

One good thing, though: parsing this sort of stuff will remain beyond AI for many years to come. Human: “Oh, he’s firing a ton of people in Devices.” Machine: “VOID.”
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Start up: YouTube’s smartest change, Google + Huawei, the truth on ads, Windows Phone redux, and more

Posted on July 10, 2015 by charlesarthur

When Javascript hits a particular temperature… Photo by Tom Gill on Flickr.

A selection of 11 links for you. Too much, right? I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The ‘terrifying’ moment in 2012 when YouTube changed its entire philosophy » Business Insider

Jillian D’Onfro:

the discovery algorithm often recommended videos that weren’t the best fit. For example, if a user searched for the footage from a recent fight, YouTube might recommend a clip with a thumbnail image of a juicy punch and a title about someone getting knocked out. When the user clicked, the actual video would be not fight footage, but a dude sitting in his living room just talking about the epic punch.

But when the frustrated user clicked through several different videos, the algorithm tallied up the views and counted it as an accomplishment.

“We realized that if we made the viewer click that many times, it didn’t seem to be a good estimate of how much value they were deriving from YouTube,” [YouTube’s director of engineering for search and discovery, Cristos] Goodrow said. “Instead, we realized that if they didn’t leave a video and continued watching, that seemed like a better estimate of the value they were getting.”

So, after bouts of data collection and analysis coupled with countless meetings, YouTube re-jiggered its search-and-discovery algorithm on March 15 to make watch time, not views, the determining factor in what videos to recommend.

Seems obvious. But actually, that’s the sort of customer dissatisfaction that’s really hard to spot in the first place, and then really hard to change – because it upsets the existing order.

Google’s best Android friend » The Information

Amir Efrati:

Unlike other Android hardware partners like Samsung and Xiaomi, Huawei has no ambition whatsoever to compete with Google in mobile software and services. Huawei has agreed to help Google distribute a mobile app store in China, a market where Google has largely been shut out, say people briefed on the talks between the companies. (It remains to be seen whether Google can get a green light from the government to do so.)

Huawei, whose core networking-equipment business has helped it develop relationships with wireless carriers globally, could help Google expand its nascent wireless network service outside the U.S. and work on other wireless experiments to expand Internet access in emerging markets. Google might also seek to license some of Huawei’s patents in that area.

Meanwhile, Huawei this fall will become the first mainland China manufacturer to produce a “Nexus” smartphone together with Google, people with direct knowledge of the project have said. While the phone likely won’t be a big seller, it will serve as a status symbol for a privately-held Chinese firm that is trying to boost its consumer brand around the world and be as beloved as Coca-Cola.

Risky game for Google: Huawei has found it impossible to shake off suspicions in the US about its Chinese ownership and allegations of spying. There’s absolutely no evidence against Huawei, but that isn’t an obstacle for some.

Content blockers, bad ads, and what we’re doing about it » iMore

Rene Ritchie explains why there are sometimes tons of ads on iMore pages – which led one person to write a content blocker for iOS 9. This part though is worth noting:

Just as desktop ads pay far less than old-fashioned print ads, mobile ads pay far less than desktop. Because phone displays are smaller than desktop, ads are also far harder to ignore. They’re not off to the side or a small strip on a big screen. They’re in our faces and in our way.

As more and more people move to mobile, revenue goes down, and the typical response is to amp up the ads in an attempt to mitigate the loss. That, of course, just makes them even more annoying.

Ad networks have not responded well to any of this. Hell, they still haven’t fully responded to Retina and HiDPI displays, and those came out in 2011.

You’d think the ad industry would be at the forefront of user experience, and that making gorgeous, high performance, highly engaging ads would boost conversion and ultimately income for everyone. Unfortunately, it seems like whatever math they’re running shows crappy ads perform well enough that making great ads isn’t worth the extra effort.

Note that first paragraph: “because phone displays are smaller than desktop, ads are also far harder to ignore”. In that case, why do they pay less on mobile, which has more readers?

Scary internet scam becoming disturbingly common » TidBITS

Randy Singer:

While the legions of Mac viruses still haven’t appeared, there is a new nasty out there that takes advantage of this paranoia. It isn’t a virus, a Trojan Horse, or any other sort of actual malware. Instead, it’s more like a phishing scam, using social engineering to get you to do something that the bad guys want you to do. It does it by scaring the willies out of you, and it is becoming disturbingly common. Some call it “scareware” or “ransomware.”

What happens is that you visit a Web site and seemingly have your browser maliciously frozen. You’ll find that you can’t quit, nor can you navigate away from the page by clicking the Back button.

Next, a page or pop-up appears telling you any of a number of stories (often tailored to your location), perhaps that your Mac has a problem or has illegal material on it, or that your data has been encrypted by some malevolent entity.

The real culprit: a (non-destructive) Javascript hack. But if you follow the scam instructions, you will have a real problem.

Musings on autonomous transport: are self-driving Starbucks the future? » Core77

Michael Ditullo:

what happens when the car evolves from a means of transport to a place itself? Commuting to work? Take a Starbucks owned and operated car where you can get a latte and lounge at a table while working on your laptop along the way. A long drive to see the in-laws? Call for a movie car where you can watch a Michael Bay blockbuster in full surround sound on that two hour ride. Need to run some errands and grab lunch? Sounds like a burrito car. Need to work off the day’s stress on the way home? Pick from a workout car or a zen meditation car.

Once upon a time Starbucks called itself the “third place.” Not home, not work, that other place you wanted to go in-between. The self-driving car could very well evolve into that third place, but a place on-the-go. The in-between place becomes something that can also get you where you need to go. I imagine an entire crop of small businesses existing solely on cars. The payment in exchange for the goods and services these businesses provide would pay for the car journey itself.

This all assumes that we’ll need to travel to exactly the same extent. Can we be sure that’s true? Why take the Michael Bay blockbuster car if you could get the same at home? Does the car become a relief from home? So many assumptions are built into the way we view self-driving cars. More working from home, less travel?

The three unlikely lessons from the Microsoft/Nokia Adventure » VisionMobile

Michael Vakulenko:

Looking at the industry through the lens of software-defined business models has helped us to accurately predict years before the story unraveled the duopoly of Apple and Google (2009), the demise of Palm (2009), the outcome of HP’s foray into mobile with WebOS (2010), BlackBerry’s meltdown (2010), and the failure of Windows Phone (2012).

The story repeats in Internet of Things. Much like in mobile, software-defined business models cause deep shifts in how value is created and delivered. The IoT winners will be decided by business model innovation, not by technology, product features or standard committees. VisionMobile’s Stijn Schuermans wrote about it here – What the Internet of Things is not about.

How bad is it for Microsoft if it misses out on the IoT?

Microsoft takes $7.6bn Nokia writedown and cuts 7,800 jobs » FT.com

Richard Waters and Richard Milne with the collateral damage:

The job cuts will include 2,300 of the 3,200 remaining Nokia handset workers in its home country of Finland, adding to a decline in the pulp and paper industry that has led some to dub it the new “sick man” of Europe as unemployment and public debt levels have risen.

Microsoft took on 25,000 workers with the acquisition in April last year, inflating its headcount to 128,000. By the end of March this year it had cut its workforce back to about 119,000.

“In practice, this means the end of Nokia’s old business in Finland,” Juha Sipilä, the country’s prime minister, told a hastily-convened press conference on Wednesday. The situation is so serious in the country, which has been mired in recession for the past three years, that the new centre-right government has called for an extra budget in September to help the affected workers.

Also in the story:

“It’s a repudiation of the Ballmer strategy to buy Nokia,” said Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner. Microsoft should have acquired BlackBerry instead to focus on its core business users, he added — a strategy that the company backed on Wednesday, as Mr Nadella announced a narrowing of the handset division’s focus to making handsets for workers and a smaller number of “flagship” devices.

Yes: Microsoft really should have bought BlackBerry. Wouldn’t have cost much more, and would have been a valuable asset adding to what it’s trying to do. Love to know the discussions that happened, or didn’t, over that.

Wikileaks release indicates Hacking Team sold spyware to FSB, Russia’s secret police » Forbes

Tom Fox-Brewster:

in December 2012, a NICE employee asked Hacking Team whether it had sold directly to the FSB rather than via the Israeli company.

“Yes we did,” the Hacking Team employee responded. “We discussed this opportunity in the past and you were aware of the fact we were working there. I’d like to take advantage of this conversation to ask you a feedback about Azerbaijan.”

Asked about working in Russia, Hacking Team head of communications Eric Rabe said: “We have not sold to blacklisted countries — at least when they were actually on a blacklist. As you know these things can change and a country, that is considered respectable, may later on turn out not to be.”

So classy. Here’s the Wikileaks link, if you’ve got a few spare years to read through the emails.

Hacking Team Flash zero-day tied to attacks in Korea and Japan… on July 1 » Trend Micro

Weimin Wu:

Earlier this week several vulnerabilities were disclosed as part of the leak of information from the Italian company Hacking Team. We’ve noted that this exploit is now in use by various exploit kits. However, feedback provided by the Smart Protection Network also indicates that this exploit was also used in limited attacks in Korea and Japan. Most significantly, these took place before the Hacking Team leak took place; we first found this activity on July 1.

The exploit code we found is very similar to the code published as part of the Hacking Team leak. As a result of this, we believe that this attack was carried out by someone with access to the Hacking Team tools and code.

According to the Adobe security bulletin, the vulnerability CVE-2015-5119 affects all of the latest Flash versions on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Adobe has since provided a security update for this vulnerability.

Not clear from this – and apparently not to Trend Micro either – whether this attack was by Hacking Team, or by someone who had already broken into their systems and was using this attack for themselves.

In other news, Adobe’s security update team must be one of the hardest-working in the industry.

Apple plans record number of new iPhones » WSJ

Lorraine Luk and Daisuke Wakabayashi say it has ordered 85m-90m devices – up from 70m-80m last year:

The changes in the iPhone models expected to be released later this year will be less noticeable than last year’s. The phones are expected to feature Apple’s Force Touch technology that can distinguish between a light tap and deep press, allowing users to control a device differently depending on how hard they push on the screen, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple has added this feature to the Apple Watch and MacBook laptop computer.

In addition to keeping the display size unchanged, Apple is expected to keep the screen resolution about the same, according to people familiar with the matter.

It may offer a fourth color for the aluminum casing of the iPhone, in addition to silver, gold and space gray, these people said.

Force Touch is being signalled so strongly it would be surprising if it weren’t there. (I’ll elucidate later.)

Finland enlists convicted Lizard Squad hacker to fight cyber crime » Newsweek

Caroline Baylon:

17-year-old Julis Kivimaki, a member of the infamous Lizard Squad hacking group, was found guilty of over 50,000 counts of computer crime by a Finnish court, local media have reported, but rather than face prison time, the judge has ordered that Kivimaki himself help “fight against cyber crime”.

The extent of Kivimaki’s punishment will be a two-year suspended sentence, the confiscation of his computer, and being made to return some €6,500 in profits earned from cyber crime.

Kivimaki, known by the online nickname “zekill”, has been hacking since age 15 and committed a wide range of attacks directed at individuals, engaging in online harassment and identity theft, as well as corporations, where he triggered data breaches, hijacking of emails, and stealing credit card information.

To catch a thief…

Start up: Windows Phone hits the buffers, more Flash woes, do Google ads discriminate?, and more

Posted on July 9, 2015 by charlesarthur

If there’s a stream and nobody listens… hang on. Photo by jjjj56cp on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. They flip, they bend, they twirl away. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Zero-day Flash player exploit disclosed in ‘Hacking Team’ data dump » The Hacker News

Swati Khandelwal:

While analyzing the leaked data dump, researchers discovered at least three software exploits – two for Adobe Flash Player and one for Microsoft’s Windows kernel.
Out of two, one of the Flash Player vulnerabilities, known as Use-after-free vulnerability with CVE-2015-0349, has already been patched.

However, the Hacking Team described the other Flash Player exploit, which is a zero-day exploit with no CVE number yet, as “the most beautiful Flash bug for the last four years.”
Symantec has also confirmed the existence of the zero-day flaw in Adobe Flash that could allow hackers to remotely execute code on a targeted computer, actually allowing them to take full control of it.

Researchers found a Flash zero-day proof-of-concept (POC) exploit code that, after testing, successfully worked on the most latest, fully patched version of Adobe Flash (version 18.0.0.194) with Internet Explorer.

Successful exploitation of the zero-day Flash vulnerability could cause a system crash, potentially allowing a hacker to take complete control of the affected computer.

Flash depresses me. I removed it from my machine some time ago; it’s basically a malware vector whose functions can almost always be replaced with HTML5 by normal users. See below.

How to enable click-to-play plugins in every web browser » Hot-To Geek

Chris Hoffman:

Most web browsers load Flash and other plug-in content as soon as you open a web page. Enable “click-to-play” plug-ins and your browser will load a placeholder image instead — click it to actually download and view the content.

Click-to-play allows you to conserve download bandwidth, improve page load times, reduce CPU usage, and extend laptop battery life. This feature gained popularity with Flashblock for Firefox and is now built into modern browsers.

Do this, for the safety of your system.

Satya Nadella email to employees on sharpening business focus » Microsoft News Center

Phones. Today, we announced a fundamental restructuring of our phone business. As a result, the company will take an impairment charge of approximately $7.6bn related to assets associated with the acquisition of the Nokia Devices and Services business in addition to a restructuring charge of approximately $750m to $850m.

This isn’t actual lost money, but lost value of the business – a “goodwill” writedown. The phones aren’t any more or less profitable as a result.

I am committed to our first-party devices including phones. However, we need to focus our phone efforts in the near term while driving reinvention. We are moving from a strategy to grow a standalone phone business to a strategy to grow and create a vibrant Windows ecosystem that includes our first-party device family.

Translation: phones that don’t run Windows are not needed. Say goodbye to those Nokia featurephones (24.7m in Q1, likely fewer in Q2, probably zero by Q4).

In the near term, we will run a more effective phone portfolio, with better products and speed to market given the recently formed Windows and Devices Group. We plan to narrow our focus to three customer segments where we can make unique contributions and where we can differentiate through the combination of our hardware and software. We’ll bring business customers the best management, security and productivity experiences they need; value phone buyers the communications services they want; and Windows fans the flagship devices they’ll love.

Translation: cheap Lumias continue; will do a flagship. Business customers will get support on whichever platform.

In the longer term, Microsoft devices will spark innovation, create new categories and generate opportunity for the Windows ecosystem more broadly. Our reinvention will be centered on creating mobility of experiences across the entire device family including phones.

Translation: phones aren’t so important, are they?

September 2013: The deal that makes no sense » Stratechery

Ben Thompson, back in September 2013:

Early this morning Microsoft acquired Nokia for €3.79 billion (plus €1.65 billion for patents). It is a deal that makes no sense.

While industry observers love to pontificate about mergers and acquisitions, the reality is that most ideas are value-destroying. It is far better to form an alliance or partnership; most of the benefits, none of the costs.

A partnership similar, in fact, to the one formed just two years ago between Microsoft and Nokia.

From Microsoft’s perspective, that was a brilliant deal; Matt Drance characterized it as “Microsoft Buys Nokia for $0B,” and he wasn’t far off. The premier pre-iPhone phone maker, with what was even then one of the best supply chains, distribution networks, and brands in the world would be exclusively devoted to Windows Phone.

There is nothing further to be gained by an acquisition.

Actually, turned out to have negative value, financially speaking. (The whole post is very well worth re-reading in hindsight.)

Two-Factor authentication » Apple Developer

Is going to be built in to iOS 9 and OSX 10.11 (aka “El Capitan”):

Whenever you sign in with your Apple ID on a new device or browser, you will verify your identity by entering your password plus a six-digit verification code. The verification code will be displayed automatically on any Apple devices you are already signed in to that are running iOS 9 or OS X El Capitan. Just enter the code to complete sign in. If you don’t have an Apple device handy, you can receive the code on your phone via a text message or phone call instead.

Once signed in, you won’t be prompted for a verification code again on that device unless you erase your device, remove it from your device list, or need to change your password for security reasons. When signing in on the web, you can choose to trust your browser so you won’t be prompted for a verification code the next time you sign in from that computer.

The problem with 2FA is always “what if I lose my phone?” Google gets around this by letting you have printed codes that act as verification numbers; it’s a good idea that Apple might do well to take up.

But this looks a lot better than the version used at present in iCloud.

Study suggests Google’s ad-targeting system may discriminate » MIT Technology Review

Tom Simonite:

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the International Computer Science Institute built a tool called AdFisher to probe the targeting of ads served up by Google on third-party websites. They found that fake Web users believed by Google to be male job seekers were much more likely than equivalent female job seekers to be shown a pair of ads for high-paying executive jobs when they later visited a news website.

AdFisher also showed that a Google transparency tool called “ads settings,” which lets you view and edit the “interests” the company has inferred for you, does not always reflect potentially sensitive information being used to target you. Browsing sites aimed at people with substance abuse problems, for example, triggered a rash of ads for rehab programs, but there was no change to Google’s transparency page.

What exactly caused those specific patterns is unclear, because Google’s ad-serving system is very complex. Google uses its data to target ads, but ad buyers can make some decisions about demographics of interest and can also use their own data sources on people’s online activity to do additional targeting for certain kinds of ads. Nor do the examples breach any specific privacy rules—although Google policy forbids targeting on the basis of “health conditions.” Still, says Anupam Datta, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University who helped develop AdFisher, they show the need for tools that uncover how online ad companies differentiate between people.

Google didn’t respond to the researchers’ requests. But, oddly, it changed the language on that transparency page. This is the AdFisher study

Apple Music and the listener-to-buyer ratio » Music Industry Blog

Mark Mulligan on the maths of streaming v buying:

What quickly becomes apparent is that the most viable route to ensuring Apple Music streaming revenue offsets the impact of lost iTunes sales revenue is as big an installed base of streaming users as possible. The more Apple Music users there are, the more likely more of them will find and listen to your music. This is why the scale argument so is so important for streaming and also why small labels feel the effect less quickly. If you have a vast catalogue you don’t need to worry too much about the listener-to-buyer ratio because you have so many tracks that you are a much bigger target to hit. The laws of probability mean that most users are going to listen to some of your catalogue.

Let’s say you are a big major with 1 million tracks out of the 5 million tracks that get played to any meaningful degree in streaming services. That gives you a 20% market share. But if you are an independent with 50,000 tracks that gives you 1%, 20 times less than the major. Which means that you are 20 times less likely to have your music listened to. And that is without even considering the biases that work in favour of the majors such as dominating charts and playlists, and other key discovery points.

YouTube gaming star PewDiePie ‘earned $7m in 2014’ » BBC News

YouTube continues to be a profitable enterprise for its top tier stars, who earn money from advertisements placed around their videos.

The site’s terms and conditions forbid creators from disclosing how much they earn, but on Monday gamer Olajide Olatunji, known as KSI, told the newspaper Metro he had earned enough money to buy his parents a house.

Although some stars supplement their income with product placement deals, [Felix] Kjellberg [aka PewdiePie] says he does not do very many.

“I make more than I need from YouTube,” he wrote on Reddit. “With that freedom, but also to respect my fans for making that possible, I don’t end up doing many endorsements.”

[Ian] Maude [of Enders Analysis] has a word of caution for anybody eyeing up YouTube with dreams of becoming a millionaire.

“As with many things, a few people at the top do exceptionally well but there’s a long tail of people who don’t make any money at all,” he said.

Why can’t they disclose how much they earn?

Apple Watch sales plunge 90% » MarketWatch

Brett Arends:

two-thirds of the watches sold so far have been the lower-profit “Sport” version, whose price starts at $349, according to Slice, rather than the costlier and more advanced models that start at $549.

In an ambitious bid for the luxury market, Apple also unveiled a gold “Edition” model priced at $10,000 or more. So far, fewer than 2,000 of them have been sold in the U.S., Slice contends.

Slice bases its research on electronic receipts sent to millions of email addresses following purchases. The company conducts market research on behalf of consumer-goods companies, among others, many of them in the Fortune 500.

Wall Street has been desperately trying to work out how well the new watch has been selling, but Apple has been refusing to say. The company, which in the past has updated Wall Street on the sales of new products soon after the launch, has yet to release any numbers about the watch.

Those Edition watches will have made a ton of profit. But apparently the fall in sales is “ominous”. Seems like about 3m sold in the US in the quarter. That’s about four times the number of Android Wear devices sold in seven months or so from multiple manufacturers at lower prices worldwide last year. Ominous.

Start up: Samsung’s missing numbers, Lizard Squad hacker convicted (but..), transparent aluminium!, and more

Posted on July 8, 2015 by charlesarthur

The internet of things, old style. Photo by Leo Reynolds on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Gawp at them. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Optically clear aluminium provides bulletproof protection » Total Security Solutions

While the U.S. Navy is busy with the development of a new bulletproof material called Spinel, Surmet Corporation is already commercially producing its own version called ALON®. Technically known as aluminium oxynitride, Star Trek fans may be more familiar with the term “transparent aluminium” first proposed by Scotty in the 1986 movie, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. While ALON isn’t quite what Scotty had in mind (it’s not truly a transparent metallic aluminium, but rather a transparent aluminium-based ceramic), it’s pretty darn close.

transparent aluminium Bloody hell, it is too. If this isn’t a con, it’s amazing. (And it’s aluminIum, dammit.)

Lizard Squad hacker convicted on 50,000 hacking charges » Daily Dot

William Turton:

Julius “zeekill” Kivimaki, 17, was sentenced to a two-year suspended prison sentence and was “ordered to fight against cybercrime” according to Finnish media. The charges against Kivimaki include data breaches, felony payment fraud, telecommunication harassments, and other counts relate to fraud and violations of company secrets. Neither the Ministry of the Interior, Police Department of Finland, nor the District Court of Espoo, the court presiding over Kivimaki’s case, were available for comment in time for publication due to time differences.

Kivimaki helped lead massive distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Microsoft’s Xbox Live and Sony’s Playstation Network over last year’s winter holidays, making international headlines. Kivimaki appeared on camera during an interview with U.K. television station Sky News. Blair Strater, a victim of Kivimaki’s repeated harassment, was “absolutely disgusted” by the ruling, he told the Daily Dot in a phone interview, because he felt the sentence was too light. Kivimaki has, according to Strater, repeatedly called in fake threats to American law enforcement, resulting SWAT teams arriving at the Strater residence, a practice commonly known as “swatting.” For three years, Kivimaki has harassed the Strater family by stealing their identities and wreaking havoc on their finances and personal lives, Strater said.

Doubt he would have got that little in the US, despite his age.

Television is no longer the screen of choice for kids » Advertising Age

Anthony Crupi:

Mobile devices are so popular with kids that nearly half of the 800 parents quizzed by Miner & Co. reported that they confiscate their kids’ tablets when they act up and make them watch TV instead, thereby fostering a sort of Pavlovian response that equates TV with punishment. (That these parents simply don’t restrict their kids’ access to video altogether when they misbehave suggests that they’re raising a generation of spoiled content junkies, but that’s another story.).

“Go to your room and watch TV!”

The anxious ease of Apple Music » The New Yorker

Alex Ross:

So, contrary to plan, Apple has not necessarily succeeded in making music better. Then again, it might not be doing long-term damage; indeed, it might not be having much effect at all. The musicologist Deirdre Loughridge recently published a blog post about the history of music-subscription services, which date back to sheet-music lending libraries in the 18th century.

By the 1830s, pundits were fretting that such libraries were undercutting the economics of the music business and altering the nature of listening. “One enjoys superficially, one always wants something new,” a critic groused in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. A few decades later, a piano teacher wrote, “Music lending libraries could very well be called ‘music snacking libraries.’” Almost identical complaints are being levelled at Spotify, YouTube, and the rest. These anxieties are now forgotten because, as Loughridge notes, the very existence of music-lending libraries has been forgotten. If they hurt music sales, the damage was soon repaired. Loughridge suggests that this obscure history should promote a “healthier skepticism toward claims that any model represents ‘the’ answer for the music industry.”

All I’d ask for from Apple Music is what Deezer offers, called “Flow”: one press and it generates a neverending playlist based on what you’ve listened to and liked, but adding new “alike” tracks.

How the tech press forces a narrative on companies it covers » Medium

Aaron Zamost:

I don’t remember who told me company narratives were like a clock. I was at Google, where I’d taken a job on the communications team despite zero experience in communications. During my early days there, I tried to navigate my new profession by listening to the many comms experts already at the company from whom I would learn so much. One theory about narratives stuck with me: A company’s narrative moves like a clock: it starts at midnight, ticking off the hours. The tone and sentiment about how a business is doing move from positive (sunrise, midday) to negative (dusk, darkness). And often the story returns to midnight, rebirth and a new day. It was a passing remark, and hardly revolutionary — it closely followed the hero’s journey and other theories of storytelling. But it made a ton of sense.

Oh wow, does it ever. (Though: not just tech, is it?)

Smartphone trends in the US » Tech.pinions

Jan Dawson:

One of the key things I’m hearing – and which was somewhat evident already in the Q1 2015 results the carriers announced – is that the huge upgrade cycle which happened in 2014, and especially in Q4, is somewhat sucking the wind out of sales in 2015 so far. Though that upgrade cycle was partly driven by massive iPhone sales, and is therefore good news for Apple, it seems to be somewhat depressing Android device sales in the first half of 2015, despite the new device launches from major vendors including Samsung, LG, and HTC.

In general, I suspect we’ll see somewhat lower rates of upgrading this year than we did last year, as there were a number of factors that drove higher than usual rates in 2014 and many of those customers will now not be upgrade-eligible until late 2015 or even 2016.

Convenient for Apple that it doesn’t really focus its efforts until late in the year.

Samsung sees seventh straight profit decline » WSJ

Jonathan Cheng and Min-Jeong Lee:

When the Galaxy S6 and its curved-screen variant, the Galaxy S6 Edge, were launched in April, the phones were praised by reviewers and greeted with strong advance orders from consumers. But Samsung appears to have badly miscalculated in its expectations for what kinds of smartphones these consumers were after. According to a person familiar with the matter, the company initially expected to sell four Galaxy S6 smartphones for each Galaxy S6 Edge that it sold, and set up its production facilities accordingly. Instead, demand was much likely closer to even for the two devices, the person said. That led to a glut of unsold Galaxy S6 devices—particularly white-coloured devices—and not enough Galaxy S6 Edge smartphones, the person said.

Analysts quoted in the story are estimating between 71m and 76m smartphones shipped in the quarter, of which the S6 and Edge would be “slightly more than 20%” (that’s 14.2m-15.2m – so take it as 15m). Being left with a colour variant is bad, bad news.

The reddit rebellion, how should reddit make money?, the disappearance of high-end Android » Stratechery

From Ben Thompson’s paid daily briefing:

This is a pretty clear screw-up by Samsung that suggests they don’t understand just how starkly the smartphone market has bifurcated: the only people buying a high-end Android phone want the top-of-the-line, and that means the Edge. Anyone who is concerned about price isn’t going to save $100 by buying a normal S6; they’re going to save $500 and get a perfectly serviceable phone that runs the exact same software. That said, I suspect that even had Samsung properly forecast Edge demand sales would have still been disappointing…

…it does seem likely that the S6 stole whatever HTC One customers existed: the Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer just reported a loss of $261 million on revenues of just over $1 billion; the company originally forecast revenues of $1.57 billion but the One M9 has been a complete flop. It seems likely (pending LG’s numbers) that there is only room for one high-end Android model, for now anyways; small solace for Samsung, but solace nonetheless.

I don’t usually excerpt from subscriber products like Thompson’s (because it’s effectively breaking the paywall, which is his livelihood) but this was too apposite to miss. Subscribe. It’s low-priced and insightful. (His suggestion for how reddit should make money is smart.)

Billion dollar turnaround: Sony Mobile CEO » ArabianBusiness.com

Neil King:

As an inevitable by-product of the unit’s recent performance, [Sony Mobile chief Hiroki] Totoki has had to fend off rumours that Sony is, or was, planning to sell off its mobile division as a result of the dire financial results. A defence, he says, is easy to make when you look at the reasons behind the poor figures. “The speculations arose because in 2014 we made a huge loss as a mobile business,” he says. “It mainly came from the write-off of the goodwill of our impairment asset. When we bought back Ericsson’s share [in 2012], we bought back 100 percent of it. And obviously that price was high. We had to write it down and it made a substantial loss for the company.

“But this was an accounting loss and did not impact our cash flow. Our cash flow is very healthy. But the accounting loss was so huge — that’s why people have speculated like this. “Before that rumour, we exited the VAIO business, which was the PC business. That led people to think that Sony would exit the smartphone business, as well. But the smartphone business is very different from PCs. “Smartphones are completely connected to other devices, also connected to people’s lives — deeply. And the opportunity for diversification is huge. We’re heading to the IoT (Internet of Things) era and have to produce a number of new categories of products in this world, otherwise we could lose out on a very important business domain.”

Two things: the writeoff of value wasn’t the entirety; Sony still made an operating loss, even ignoring goodwill writeoffs. Secondly, the IoT argument is why I think Microsoft will stick with the smartphone business despite its horrendous losses. Interesting to see Sony Mobile using it too.

Start up: uncommenting The Verge, Siri v lights, the washing machine trials, web ad delights, and more

Posted on July 7, 2015 by charlesarthur

Life without the Apple Watch: which word fits? Photo by alexknowshtml on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you: laugh and point at the screen as though you found something funny. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

We’re turning comments off for a bit » The Verge

Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief:

What we’ve found lately is that the tone of our comments (and some of our commenters) is getting a little too aggressive and negative — a change that feels like it started with GamerGate and has steadily gotten worse ever since. It’s hard for us to do our best work in that environment, and it’s even harder for our staff to hang out with our audience and build the relationships that led to us having a great community in the first place.

That’s a bad feedback loop, and we want to stop it. So we’re going to call timeout for a while and turn comments off by default on all posts for the next few weeks. It’s going to be a super chill summer.

We’re still dedicated to community, so our forums will remain open — in fact, we’ll be doing more to promote great posts from the forums on our front page and on our social channels than ever before. And we’ll be turning comments on on a post-by-post basis when we want to open things up, so look for that.

But in the meantime, let’s all take that minute and relax. Let someone else curate your playlists, you know? Comments will be back. There will always be another party. Freedom lasts forever.

I refer the honourable ladies and gentlemen to my analysis from last November of how Gresham’s Law explains precisely this phenomenon. We’ll see how the “comments will come back, honest” works out.

And here’s the Verge forum discussing it. Guess which tech company the discussion quickly degenerates into accusing The Verge of favouring? It’s the tech version of Godwin’s Law, and just as corrosive.

Aparna Chennapragada, head of Google Now, discusses apps, search, AI » Re/code

Mark Bergen:

Chennapragada spelled out the three-pronged direction of the product — what she called the “bets” her team is taking. The first bet was embedding Now with Google’s full “Knowledge Graph” — the billions-thick Web of people, places and things and their many interconnections.

The second is context. Now groks both the user’s location and the myriad of signals from others in the same spot. If you enter a mall, Now will tailor cards to what people in that mall typically ask for. “Both your feet are at the mall. You shouldn’t have to spell it out,” Chennapragada said. “Why should I futz with the phone and wade through 15 screens?”

And this is where the third benchmark for Now comes in: Tying that context to the apps on your phone, or ones you have yet to download. In two years, Google has indexed some 50 billion links within apps. In April, it began listing install links to apps deemed relevant in search. Indexed apps will be included in Now on Tap when it arrives in the latest Android version this fall.

Your phone knows you’re at the mall. Is this a place where I need my phone to know I am? I find these scenarios puzzling, because “things I might be at the mall to do” are truly difficult to narrow down, and enunciate, and likely aren’t the same between visits. The times I’d need Google Now to leap into action would be when I found myself somewhere unscheduled and without transport. That’s when I want help.

Hacking Team responds to data breach, issues public threats and denials » CSO Online

Steve Ragan:

Newly published documents from the cache include invoices for services with Italian law enforcement, Oman, South Korea, UAE, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Lebanon, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Brazil, Singapore, Egypt, and Vietnam. The total value of the invoices is €4,324,350 Euro.

The hack went without comment for several hours, until members of Hacking Team woke on Monday morning. One of the company’s staffers, Christian Pozzi, offered several comments on the breach, despite his statement that he couldn’t comment.

“We are awake. The people responsible for this will be arrested. We are working with the police at the moment,” Pozzi wrote.

“Don’t believe everything you see. Most of what the attackers are claiming is simply not true…The attackers are spreading a lot of lies about our company that is simply not true. The torrent contains a virus…”

Pozzi took to Twitter to repeat the same message for the most part, the key points being that Hacking Team is working with law enforcement on this matter, that the massive torrent file has malware in it (it doesn’t), customers are being notified, and that his company has done nothing illegal: “… We simply provide custom software solutions tailored to our customers needs…”

My week without Apple Watch » Tech.pinions

Ben Bajarin:

When I had the Apple Watch on, I averaged 28 fewer times I looked at my iPhone each day. This is a good proxy of how notifications on the watch help minimize the number of times I need to look at my phone to see the nature of each notification.

After reflecting on what looking at my phone fewer times meant in my daily life, I concluded the experience was less disruptive. Don’t get me wrong — I love my iPhone. It is my primary computer. However, having to respond to your phone or pull it out of your pocket or bag for each phone call or text message turns out to be fairly disruptive. As I’ve observed my wife’s behavior as well with her Apple Watch, she articulates similar feelings. As she is out and about, not having to fumble through her purse each time her phone dings is a less disruptive experience in many daily situations. Particularly since not all notifications are important or in need of an immediate response. However, without the use of the Apple Watch, you would not know this without getting your phone out and looking at it. This is an area of immense value that can only be understood once experienced.

I’d agree with this: I’m using an Apple Watch, and the value in not having to have your phone right there is substantial – but also difficult to quantify, because of course you can do without it. Filtering notifications matters; but being able to see or respond to the ones you deem urgent matters a lot.

(If you have an Apple Watch, Bajarin is working with a company called Wristly to do research; you could join.)

Hats off to web advertising. No, really. » WSJ

Chris Mims:

Vast advertising markets that had to decide what ad to show in milliseconds meant that from the very beginning of internet advertising, unprecedented amounts of data were flowing into growing quantities of computing power.

Like a kind of Manhattan project for data, solving the problem of ad matching and delivery meant taking formerly obscure areas of research and transforming it into something everyone could use. “Powerful machine learning techniques were just starting to be developed in academia,” says [Gokul] Rajaram [formerly lead engineer at early ad network Juno, then Google and Facebook, and now at Square], but ad networks would have been impossible without them.

As I researched, I discovered the alumni of ad tech platforms are everywhere, launching startups and leading projects within established companies. What they all have in common is an unusual and broadly powerful toolkit that is being applied to everything from agricultural drones and cybersecurity to food safety and the improvement of hiring practices.

It’s a fair point: we love to hate ads, but the necessity of making them work has driven a lot of improvement.

Here’s what it’s like to control your lights with Siri » The Verge

Jacob Kastrenakes:

If you’re anything like me, you’ll immediately begin using this ability to mess with the people you live with: turning off lights so that they’re sitting in a dark room, turning on a light while they’re set up to watch Netflix. I didn’t see the Siri control as much more than a novelty at first, but the utility became more apparent once I set up two lamps in the same room. At that point, it became easier to turn them on and off simultaneously with Siri than to walk over to each one individually. It’s a basic start, but there’s so much more you could do once additional pieces of the home become connected.

Must be a hell of a big room for it to be easier to talk to the phone than to stand up. Also, what is the “so much more” you can do? Lights are the classic “wrong application”: we usually turn lights on when we enter a room, turn them off when we leave. In between, there’s hardly ever anything we want to do to them – and if we do, then it’s either a short reach, or a couple of steps. Pretending otherwise is automation for its own sake.

Home automation still needs really simple sensors and actuators that we can fit ad-hoc to things we choose, not devices where it’s built-in but not actually useful.

Chaebol slapfight: Samsung, LG in first trial over washing machine vandalism » BusinessKorea

Cho Jin-young:

In the first trial between the two Korean home appliance giants, the legal representatives for LG gave an item-by-item rebuttal of the allegations that CEO Cho Seong-jin and two other officials at the company broke the doors of three Samsung washing machines intentionally.

“The doors of the front-door washing machines are big and heavy, so they can naturally tilt downward to some extent and swing a little bit, which can be easily found in other washing machines,” a legal representative for LG appealed.

The attorney also raised suspicions about the authenticity of the damaged washing machines presented to the court as evidence, arguing that the products seemed to have had more scratches than before, and that they could not be the results of Cho touching the washers.

What’s “de minimis non curat lex” in Korean? (Also: “first” trial?)

YouTube is the No.1 music streaming platform – and getting bigger » Music Business Worldwide

Scary news for those who don’t feel YouTube is paying music rights-holders enough: it’s the biggest music streaming service on earth, and it’s growing faster than Spotify or any of its rivals.

That’s according to MBW analysis of the latest market stats out of the UK and US, which show that YouTube increased its market share of total on-demand streams in the first six months of this year on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the first half of 2015 in the US, overall on-demand streams grew 92.4% year-on-year to 135.2bn.

The majority of this growth was down to YouTube (plus Vevo and other video services), which saw a stream volume increase of 109.2% to 76.6bn.

Though it seems like Vevo is a big player in this. But yes, YouTube swamps everything else.

Start up: bitcoin for Greece?, news apps’ key problem, when hamburger menus are good, and more

Posted on July 6, 2015 by charlesarthur

Coming to the UK on 14 July? Apple Pay photo by DopiesLife.com on Flickr.

A selection of 7 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Why it’s totally okay to use a hamburger icon » UXmatters

Steven Hoober:

Not too long ago, I was observing a test in which the subject was a mechanic in a truck repair shop. He didn’t have a computer at home, had no access to a smartphone, so had no base of knowledge. But we gave him a smartphone and an app to try out. He did fine with the big, obvious bits on the screen and performed every task. Then, we got to the tricky part. We asked him to reconnect the phone to the IoT (Internet of Things) device we were testing, then refresh the display on the screen.

“Hmm… I don’t see it. Maybe in here?” he said, tapping Menu, where he found the Refresh button. He said, “Ah, there it is,” as he tapped it.

I’ve experienced this sort of observation over and over again. Why? Well, first because of a fundamental behavior of mobile-device users, who do not scan a page top to bottom and left to right, but always gravitate toward the center. In Figure 3, you can see a chart showing where users tapped when presented with a scrolling list of selectable items.

The same preference for the center applies to tap accuracy, speed, and comprehension. When designing, I assume users view and read the center, then move outward if they do not find the information they need.

This is actually starting to become a design principle of mine. Assume that users focus on and interact with things at the center of a page, and make sure that you can live with their missing or ignoring things at the top and bottom edges.

Some pushback in the comments: how do you get back from the hamburger?

The problem every news aggregation app faces » Medium

Simon Owens:

The chief problem I have with many news apps is they don’t deliver the level of customization that I can get on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks. I launched my Twitter account in late 2008. In the intervening years I’ve accumulated a list of over 700 people whom I follow, and for a significant portion of those people I wouldn’t be able to remember my reasoning for following them. In some cases they’re colleagues I’ve worked with. In others they’re writers and journalists I admire. But there are still plenty more I followed because something in their profile caught my eye or they authored an article I enjoyed but have long since forgotten.

But despite not having a complete understanding of all my follow choices, my Twitter feed is a well-oiled machine, one that produces a rich tapestry of news and commentary (and plenty of jokes) every time I open it.

True, but it’s taken him six years to reach that level of aggregation on Twitter. News apps don’t get that. But his key point is that

“The problem is that news tastes go beyond mere categories and keywords.”

And that’s the crux of it.

Some miners generating invalid blocks » bitcoin.org

For several months, an increasing amount of mining hash rate has been signaling its intent to begin enforcing BIP66 strict DER signatures. As part of the BIP66 rules, once 950 of the last 1,000 blocks were version 3 (v3) blocks, all upgraded miners would reject version 2 (v2) blocks.

Early morning UTC on 4 July 2015, the 950/1000 (95%) threshold was reached. Shortly thereafter, a small miner (part of the non-upgraded 5%) mined an invalid block – as was an expected occurrence. Unfortunately, it turned out that roughly half the network hash rate was mining without fully validating blocks (called SPV mining), and built new blocks on top of that invalid block.

Note that the roughly 50% of the network that was SPV mining had explicitly indicated that they would enforce the BIP66 rules. By not doing so, several large miners have lost over $50,000 dollars worth of mining income so far.

All software that assumes blocks are valid (because invalid blocks cost miners money) is at risk of showing transactions as confirmed when they really aren’t. This particularly affects lightweight (SPV) wallets and software such as old versions of Bitcoin Core which have been downgraded to SPV-level security by the new BIP66 consensus rules.

Now bitcoin is getting the inertia problems of widespread use and software updates.

Leak suggests iPhone 6s and 6s Plus will be able to capture 4K video » MobileSyrup.com

Igor Bonifacic:

If a new leak is to be believed, the next iPhone will feature a 12 megapixel rear-facing camera that is able to capture 4K video.

The leak comes courtesy of anonymous poster on China’s Sina Weibo website.

If true, that will mean that the 6s and 6s Plus will boast cameras that are a significant upgrade from the already excellent shooters that are found on their predecessors.

While 4K TVs and computer displays still have a long way to go before they’re ubiquitous, there’s a case to be made that consumers could still get use out all those extra pixels. Current smartphones, TVs and computers might not be able to display 4K content at its native resolution, but consumers will still see an improvement in visual quality through downsampling.

A couple of things. (1) “If a new leak is to be believed”? This takes arms-length writing to an extreme. Later in the piece he says “Of course, it’s impossible to verify a rumour like this one”, which is patently untrue. You just need much, much, much better connections. (2) It can’t be surprising that the next iPhones will have better cameras. The only question will be how much better. (3) I’d like a clearer explanation of how it’s useful to shoot video at that resolution.

Apple Pay expected to go live in the U.K. on July 14th, £20+ transactions starting this fall » 9to5Mac

Mark Gurman:

Apple appears to be planning to enable its Apple Pay iPhone mobile payments service in the United Kingdom on July 14th, according to sources at multiple retailers. Apple has informed some Apple Retail employees in the U.K. that Apple Pay support will go live on that Tuesday, while an internal memos for supermarket Waitrose plus an additional retail partner indicate the same date…

Apple will also begin training its U.K staff on supporting Apple Pay on July 12th.

Given that the UK has widespread availability of NFC terminals, the UK could quickly become the largest location for Apple Pay payments – the penetration of iOS devices is high (32% or so of smartphones).

Huawei says Honor brand on track to sell 40 million smartphones » Chinadaily.com.cn

Huawei Technologies Co Ltd’s Honor brand has sold 20m smartphones in the first half of 2015 and by should reach its goal of 40m shipments by the year end, double the 2014 figure.

Honor’s sales amounted to $2.6bn of revenue during the first half of the year, Honor President George Zhao said at the launch of the Honor 7 phone in Beijing.

Huawei, the world’s No. 4 handset maker, has invested heavily in the past two years to establish Honor as a stand-alone brand to compete against Beijing-based Xiaomi Inc to win over young, fashion-conscious customers.

Zhao said that he expected 15%, or 6m, of the unit’s total sales this year to come from overseas, with the majority coming from China.

Since you’re wondering, that gives the Honor an average selling price (ASP) of $130 – which puts it some way below the top-end Android price, and lower even than Lenovo.

Fearing return to drachma, some Greeks use bitcoin to dodge capital controls » Reuters

Jemima Kelly:

Although absolute figures are hard to come by, Greek interest has surged in the online “cryptocurrency”, which is out of the reach of monetary authorities and can be transferred at the touch of a smartphone screen.

New customers depositing at least 50 euros with BTCGreece, the only Greece-based bitcoin exchange, open only to Greeks, rose by 400% [translation: tripled – CA] between May and June, according to its founder Thanos Marinos, who put the number at “a few thousand”. The average deposit quadrupled to around 700 euros.

Using bitcoin could allow Greeks to do one of the things that capital controls were put in place this week to prevent: transfer money out of their bank accounts and, if they wish, out of the country.

“When people are trying to move money out of the country and the state is stopping that from taking place, bitcoin is the only way to move any value,” said Adam Vaziri, a board member of the UK Digital Currency Association.

The problem is that in order to translate your euros into bitcoin, you have to find someone willing to take your euros – and you also have to have the euros available. It’s getting money out of the Greek banks that has been the problem lately. And this remains a minority sport.

Start up: Apple Music’s likely effects, no Paypal in Greece, how Bitstamp was hacked, and more

Posted on July 3, 2015 by charlesarthur

Of 58 aboard, only 15 survived. But was the crash due to machine or human error?

A selection of 8 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Why the next few months of Apple Music will throw up a few surprises » Music Industry Blog

Mark Mulligan:

As we revealed on our MIDiA Research report on Apple Music back in March 28% of iOS users stated they were likely to pay for the service. Among downloaders the rate is 39% and for existing subscribers that rate rises to 62%. Consumer surveys of course always over-report so we shouldn’t expect those rates of paid adoption but the relative values are interesting nonetheless.

Given that 50% of existing subscribers are iOS users the implications are that a big chunk of Spotify et al’s subscribers will at the very least try out Apple’s 3 month trial, which is plenty enough time to get build a comprehensive library of playlists and to get hooked. But there is also going to be a big wave of downloaders that do not currently subscribe that will try it out.

As the iOS 8.4 update virtually pushes iTunes Music users into starting the trial on updating, expect pretty widespread uptake of the trial. Apple reached 11 million users for iTunes radio within 5 days of launch, 21 million within 3 months. Apple Music has had a far bigger build up and is much more deeply integrated into iOS so a fairly safe bet is that those numbers will at the very least be matched.

It’s getting people to pony up that’s hard. Adding Android users (with Apple Music for Android in autumn) might just be the icing on the cake; iOS is where the numbers and easy money will be.

Mulligan points to other surprises too – read on there.

Reddit’s AMA subreddit down after Victoria Taylor departure » Business Insider

Biz Carson:

The iAMA and Science subreddits both were set to private today after Reddit’s director of Communications, Victoria Taylor was allegedly dismissed. In a Reddit thread about her departure, she replied that she was “dazed” and “hopefully” plans to stay in the PR field.

Reddit and Taylor have not yet responded to request for comment.

One of Taylor’s job duties was coordinating the site’s popular AMAs. Two of the site’s most popular posts ever are AMAs: the one with Barack Obama and a conversation with a man with two penises. The AMA subreddit became such a popular section of the site that Reddit eventually spun it out into its own app.

Something’s up at Reddit; it’s either going to come through this much stronger, or run into the sand.

40 states line up with Mississippi in Google Adwords pharma scrap » The Register

Andrew Orlowski:

Attorneys General representing 40 US states have filed an amicus brief backing Mississippi attorney general Jim Hood’s investigation into Google.

In December, the giant multinational sued the state of Mississippi after it had opened an investigation into Google’s business practices (claiming Hood’s complaints did not come under state law jurisdiction), and earlier this year a District Court froze this investigation.

The attorneys say if the freeze is upheld, it will have a chilling effect on investigative subpoenas across the US.

Hood’s 79-page subpoena inquires mainly into Google’s advertising practices, focussing on the sale of illegal and controlled substances.

Four pages consist of inquiries into how Google deals with IP enforcement. It follows from a 2011 non-prosecution agreement (NPA) between Google and the FBI, the FDA and Rhode Island into rogue drug traffickers, who used Google Adwords to move their wares. Google agreed to a $500m fine, $230m of which was funnelled to Rhode Island.

The NPA lapsed in 2013, three months early, with no indication from Federal authorities that Google had actually complied. That’s when the states got serious.

This is an odd case. Hood comes across as a little obsessed (but is that bad in a lawman?), but Google comes across as vindictive – and not a little defensive.

Bitstamp Incident Report (PDF) » Bitstamp

The bitcoin exchange had 18,000 BTC, worth (then) about $5m, stolen:

On 9 December 2014, Bitstamp’s Systems Administrator, Luka Kodric, received a phishing email to his Gmail account. Unlike some of the others targets, Kordic did have access to Bitstamp’s hot wallet. The email header had been spoofed to appear as if it had been sent from konidas@acm[.]org, although it was actually received from a Tor exit node [the email chain and header details can be seen in full at Appendix A].

ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery, which describes itself as the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society. The sender was offering Mr. Kodric the opportunity to join Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE), the International Honour Society for the Computing and Information Disciplines.

The UPE site is hosted within the acm.org domain. On 11 December, as part of this offer, the attacker sent a number of attachments. One of these, UPE_application_form.doc, contained obfuscated malicious VBA script. When opened, this script ran automatically and pulled down a malicious file from IP address 185.31.209.145, thereby compromising the machine.

As the security researcher The Grugq observed, “Computer security is such an unsolved problem that Bitstamp lost $5m because someone had macros enabled in Microsoft Word.”

The (slight) rise of _nomap » OpenSignal blog

Samuel Johnson, on OpenSignal’s checking of how many Wi-Fi networks added the suffix “_nomap” to stop Google mapping their location:

This graph also shows a rise beginning at the end of 2013 and continuing into 2014. Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s privacy incursions occurred during the summer of 2013 – and so it is possible that the heightened awareness about privacy issues could have led to more people taking care that Google was not recording their Wi-Fi hotspot. However, compared to the number of global Wi-Fi networks detected by OpenSignal, it is clear that the number that adopted Google’s solution is very small.

So why is this? Obviously it was deeply concerning that Google were tracking payload data – but it is not in itself concerning that they are collecting Wi-Fi SSIDs (after all, this is what we at OpenSignal do). Those technologically savvy enough to have followed the story (and continued to do so months after the initial outburst of outrage) will know that Google had publicly pledged to stop tracking Wi-Fi payload data, and so any appending _nomap to their Wi-Fi hotspots would not make any difference to that.

We’ve finally hit the breaking point for the original Internet » The Washington Post

Brian Fung:

It’s finally happened. The North American organization responsible for handing out new IP addresses says its banks have run dry.

That’s right: ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers, has had to turn down a request for the unique numbers that we assign to each and every smartphone, tablet and PC so they can talk to the Internet. For the first time, ARIN didn’t have enough IP addresses left in its stock to satisfy an entire order — and now, it’s activated the end-times protocol that will see the few remaining addresses out into the night.

The end of IPv4 has been forecast for a few years now. Looks like it’s actually going to happen, and we’ll move to IPv6.

PayPal no longer works in Greece—and why that matters » Quartz

Shelly Banjo:

Adding to their list of woes, Greeks can no longer use their PayPal accounts.

Limits on how much money Greeks can take out of banks put in place by their debt-stricken government as it negotiates with lenders have effectively crippled the online payment service, which relies on traditional banks and credit cards to transfer money.

According to a PayPal spokesman:

Due to the recent decisions of the Greek authorities on capital controls, funding of PayPal wallet from Greek bank accounts, as well as cross-border transactions, funded by any cards or bank accounts are currently not available. We aim to continue serving our valued customers in Greece in full, as we have for over a decade.

Except that they can’t serve their valued customers. So, why does it matter?

PayPal’s shutdown in Greece reminds us how difficult it is to disintermediate banks from the flow of money.

Well duh. Did you think it was all going to bitcoin? As the Bitstamp link above shows, good luck with that.

Faulty credit card-sized connector led to crash of 20-tonne plane » Bloomberg Business

Tim Culpan:

A faulty connector about the size of a credit card helped trigger a series of mechanical and human failures that led to the crash of a 20-ton aircraft in February, killing 43 people, investigators in Taiwan found.

Microscopic tests of a soldered connector joint on the TransAsia Airways Corp. plane engine showed potential cracking, and the connector failed post-crash tests, the Aviation Safety Council said in a report today.

That failure is at the heart of why the ATR72 twin-propeller plane incorrectly sounded a cockpit warning and an engine adjustment known as autofeather. That set in motion a series of pilot errors that eventually crashed the aircraft into a downtown Taipei river Feb. 4.

The autofeather made the engine ineffective. Pilot error then played a big part: they shut down the other engine, wrongly thinking it was the affected one.

How do you design faults like those out of a system? First the machines screw up, then the humans.

Start up: Wi-Fi password sharing?, machine intelligence smart and stupid, Pebble Time review, and more

Posted on July 2, 2015 by charlesarthur

You’ll never believe what happens if you play it backwards. Photo by Janitors on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Show them eagerly to the person beside you! I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

UH OH: Windows 10 will share your WiFi key with your friends’ friends » The Register

Simon Rockman:

A Windows 10 feature, Wi-Fi Sense, smells like a security risk: it shares WiFi passwords with the user’s contacts.

Those contacts include their Outlook.com (nee Hotmail) contacts, Skype contacts and, with an opt-in, their Facebook friends. There is method in the Microsoft madness – it saves having to shout across the office or house “what’s the Wi-Fi password?” – but ease of use has to be teamed with security. If you wander close to a wireless network, and your friend knows the password, and you both have Wi-Fi Sense, you can now log into that network.

Wi-Fi Sense doesn’t reveal the plaintext password to your family, friends, acquaintances, and the chap at the takeaway who’s an Outlook.com contact, but it does allow them, if they are also running Wi-Fi Sense, to log in to your Wi-Fi. The password must be stored centrally by Microsoft, and is copied to a device for it to work; Microsoft just tries to stop you looking at it. How successful that will be isn’t yet known.

“For networks you choose to share access to, the password is sent over an encrypted connection and stored in an encrypted file on a Microsoft server, and then sent over a secure connection to your contacts’ phone if they use Wi-Fi Sense and they’re in range of the Wi-Fi network you shared,” the Wi-Fi Sense FAQ states.

Has been on Windows Phone for ages, yes, but most WP users don’t know any significant number of other WP users (because they’re so few). Not so with Windows. Microsoft says it only allows internet access and not LAN access – via port restrictions? That’s going to get hacked for sure.

Or could people maliciously spread their Wi-Fi details to try to sniff people’s viewing habits and details?

Pebble Time review » Wareable

Sophie Charara:

First things first, the Pebble looks better in real life than the pics you’ll have seen online. The black model is a little boring but will look neat under suit sleeves – for the record, we prefer the red and black Time.

Admittedly, the Time is plasticky, with a stainless steel bezel, but it retains the toy-like charm of the original Pebble while adding friendlier, more unisex curves. It’s very light at just 42.5g including the standard strap, 20% thinner at 9.5mm and the new slightly curved body helps to make it comfortable to wear on the wrist.

It’s amazing how many smartwatch manufacturers are satisfied with making devices that sit flat on top. The Time is the kind of smartwatch you can forget you’re wearing, until it vibrates.

I bought an original Pebble on Kickstarter. This? Looks like a toy compared to the Apple Watch. Not quite half the price, but really nothing like half as attractive.

Apple Sim iPads change the international data roaming game » Fortune

This morning, Apple and GigSky teamed up to offer travelers the ability to instantly connect to a local data network in more than 90 countries and territories upon touchdown—no need to visit a kiosk, talk to a service agent, or really, do anything at all. Instead, iPads with AppleSIM cards will automatically offer the option to sign up for a data plans as soon as a local network is in reach. (The GigSky network includes most of Western Europe, from France and Germany to the Netherlands; Australia; South Africa; parts of the Middle East; and beyond.)

Because travelers are accessing onto local networks, rather that roaming from their domestic carrier, prices are impressively affordable as long as you’re traveling on the beaten path. Entry-level data plans begin at just $10, covering anywhere between 10MB (in Papua New Guinea) to 75 MB (in Italy); in countries with better access, the premium plans top out at 3GB for $50. By comparison, AT&T’s best deal currently charges $30 for 120 MB or $120 for 800 MB.

Latest iPads only have them preinstalled, although for older ones you can get Apple SIMs in its stores, apparently.

Superconductivity record bolstered by magnetic data » Scientific American

Edwin Cartlidge:

The long-standing quest to find a material that can conduct electricity without resistance at room temperature may have taken a decisive step forward. Scientists in Germany have observed the common molecule hydrogen sulfide superconducting at a record-breaking 203 kelvin (–70 ˚C) when subjected to very high pressures. The result confirms preliminary findings released by the researchers late last year, and is said to be corroborated by data from several other groups.

Some physicists urge caution, however. Ivan Schuller at the University of California in San Diego, says that the results “look promising” but are not yet watertight.

Pressure of 1.5 million atmospheres. Don’t hold your breath for this one.

Why the BBC is wrong to republish ‘right to be forgotten’ links » The Guardian

Julia Powles:

The reaction to [BBC Online managing editor Neil] McIntosh’s post was predictable, inaccurate and devastating. The Times led with “BBC lists stories on abusers and rapists hidden under ‘right to be forgotten’”, gratuitously highlighting two stories.

The first was a 12-year-old story about a settlement between an alleged rape victim and the Catholic church, over incidents that occurred a half-century ago. The long-deceased abuser clearly couldn’t have filed the obscurity request with Google – leaving, rather less salaciously, the victim.

The second case concerned a nanny jailed for child abuse. Even a cursory Google search coupled with the basics of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act would have told the journalist that an unspent conviction for such an offence clearly denied any reasonable claim to delisting. Caution raised, a bit more searching would have revealed the truth: that the conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal. That former nanny has been exculpated under the law of the land – but not by Google and not, it seems, by the press either.

Other publications followed suit. Boing Boing drew attention to a rape story. Given it concerned a fairly recent conviction in 2012, clearly the sex offender has no entitlement to be delisted.

But what about his friend who was also named in the article because he happened to be in the house where the attack took place?

The “right to be forgotten” is so poorly understood, which frustrates the hell out of me. (See the comments under the article.) I wrote an explanation of what it is, and what it is not; please, before you discuss the topic with me (or anyone), read and absorb it. The topic is simple. It just takes a bit of thought.

Growing conspiracy theory: is spy equipment really included in Samsung smartphone batteries? » BusinessKorea

Cho Jin-young:

A video circulating on Facebook and YouTube that was posted at the beginning of the last week of June shows that after tearing off a sticker that wraps around the battery of the Galaxy S4, the man in the video points to a small coil inside, saying, “This is the spy equipment.”

He remarked, “Samsung can record pictures on your smartphone and overhear your calls through the coil shaped like this antenna,” adding, “So, you’d better tear off the sticker that wraps the battery first and use the phone.”

In fact, this video attracted 12 million views on Facebook only four days after it was initially posted, and around 300,000 people reportedly shared the video.

However, local media outlets pointed out that this conspiratorial video originated from a misunderstanding about the Near Field Communication (NFC) antenna, a communication technology that makes it possible to transmit different kinds of wireless data to a distance of 10 cm.

Would be fun to know how weird ideas like this get started. I’ve seen a few incoming search queries on this to this blog, and wondered what was going on (it was because I wrote about Samsung obviously knowing whether people use replacement batteries).

DRAM spot prices hit 28-month low, says Taiwan Central News Agency » Digitimes

Jessie Chen:

Spot prices for 4Gb DDR3 chips already declined 17.55% in the second quarter, after falling 12.77% in the first quarter, the report quoted DRAMeXchange as saying.

Since 2015, DRAM spot prices have been dragged down by sluggish PC sales and a slowdown in smartphone demand, the report noted.

Hadn’t heard about this slowdown in smartphone demand anywhere else. China has, but elsewhere? Dram prices are often an early warning though.

Google apologises for Photos app’s racist blunder » BBC News

Google says it is “appalled” that its new Photos app mistakenly labelled a black couple as being “gorillas”.

Its product automatically tags uploaded pictures using its own artificial intelligence software.
The error was brought to its attention by a New York-based software developer who was one of the people pictured in the photos involved.

Google was later criticised on social media because of the label’s racist connotations.
“This is 100% not OK,” acknowledged Google executive Yonatan Zunger after being contacted by Jacky Alcine via Twitter.

“[It was] high on my list of bugs you ‘never’ want to see happen.”

Machines can’t be racist, of course; but quite how Google is going to prevent this happening again is an open question. Neural network/deep learning like this isn’t something you can tweak directly. You can’t really peer inside it. Great when it’s drawing arcane pictures, not good when it’s mislabelling pictures.

Could this computer save your life? » CNN

Jillian Eugenios:

“In one panel of scans that we looked at, when you look at the number of times that radiologists sent someone home with a clean bill of health, about 7% of the time that patient was ultimately found to have cancer,” said John Zedlewski, a data scientist with Enlitic, a medical technology company.

When Zedlewski used Enlitic’s algorithm against the same panel, there weren’t any mistakes.

How does it work? Enlitic’s technology uses machine learning — which some say is a version of artificial intelligence. It takes medical information from one patient — whether it’s a CT scan, an X-ray or details about, say, a tumor — and then converts it into a mathematical representation. It’s then added to a large pool of data and compared to other patients who have experienced similar issues.

Think of it as crowdsourcing your symptoms. And not just with one or two people, but millions. The more data the computer has, the smarter it gets, and the more accurate the diagnoses.

At least that’s the dream.

Seems to have a large base of data.

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