Start up: inside the Fire Phone debacle, a selfie stick successor, CES beats the bedroom, CNN’s last-ever video, and more

Posted on January 7, 2015 by charlesarthur

The Mayday button on the Amazon Fire Phone. Perhaps should have been used before it went on sale. Photo by TechStage on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Do not use as a flotation device. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The real story behind Jeff Bezos’s Fire Phone debacle and what it means for Amazon’s future » Fast Company

Austin Carr, in a terrific long read, explaining how the Fire Phone project began in 2010, and had Bezos as a micro-manager:

Some designers bristled at Bezos’s presence and privately questioned his taste, while others who were wowed by his wide-ranging insights loved his approach. Regardless, Bezos’s heavy hand certainly took getting used to, even for Chris Green, Lab126’s VP of industrial design. “In the beginning, Chris would take Jeff’s feedback a bit literally,” says Randall, the former Lab126 VP, “and there was many an evening spent over beers and sushi counseling him, saying, ‘Calm down, it’s going to get better.’”

Bezos drove the team hard on one particular feature: Dynamic Perspective, the 3-D effects engine that is perhaps most representative of what went wrong with the Fire Phone. Dynamic Perspective presented the team with a challenge: Create a 3-D display that requires no glasses and is visible from multiple angles. The key would be facial recognition, which would allow the phone’s cameras to track a user’s gaze and adjust the 3-D effect accordingly. After a first set of leaders assigned to the project failed to deliver, their replacements went on a hiring spree. One team even set up a room that they essentially turned into a costume store, filling it with wigs, sunglasses, fake moustaches, and earrings that they donned for the cameras in order to improve facial recognition. “I want this feature,” Bezos said, telling the team he didn’t care how long it took or how much it cost.

Turns out Bezos isn’t as good a micro-manager for building a phone as Steve Jobs. Result:

According to three sources familiar with the company’s numbers, the Fire Phone sold just tens of thousands of units in the weeks that preceded the company’s radical price cuts.

Was it perhaps somewhere around the 35,000 that I estimated in August? My range was between 26,000 and, generously, 35,000. I’d love to hear the actual figure.

The whole piece, though, gives terrific insight into how Bezos can get it wrong. He thought a single phone – one piece of hardware – could reshape Amazon’s brand, and turn it from a “get stuff cheap online” one, into a “we customers love you, take our money” brand. The two aren’t the same.

February 2014: What the world really needs: A telescopic SELFIE STICK » The Register

Simon Rockman in February 2014:

Mobile World Congress is often as interesting for the silly gadgets as it is for the mainstream announcements.

This (right) is the Selfie Stick, an extendable pole with a Bluetooth control for your phone.

The Selfie comes in two versions: a general one and one for Samsung phones where you have focus control.

Hahahahahawhatdo you mean they’re sold out everywhere?

The first wearable camera that can fly » Nixie

Wearable and flyable

The first wrist-band camera quadcopter.
Nixie flies, takes your photo, and comes back to you.

This feels like it could easily be one of those Great Ideas that is too easily bungled in the execution, but if it works well it could put selfie sticks out of business. Until selfie stick owners swat them out of the sky.

CES, the World’s Largest Trade Show, Is Too Big for Vegas » Bloomberg

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has a problem that many events would love to have: It’s become too big. And it doesn’t want to get any bigger.

With as many as 160,000 visitors to CES—the world’s largest annual trade show—the Nevada city’s sprawling hotels are stretched to the limit. Last January’s gathering of gadget-loving geeks somehow packed in a full 10,000 more people than Las Vegas has rooms for them to sleep in.

The Consumer Electronics Association, the folks who put on the conference and expo, says CES 2015 will have the equivalent of 35 football fields, or about 2 miles of floor space, filled with phones, televisions, smartwatches, washing machines and throngs of people trying to see it all. “In order to enhance the experience for our attendees, we aim to keep attendance between 150,000 and 160,000 so that everyone can get where they need to go,” says CEA Vice President Karen Chupka.

That’s OK – they can sleep in the lines for press conferences showing off LG’s new dishwasher. Actually, the graph with the story suggests that attendees has exceeded the number of available hotel rooms since 2012. I’m pretty sure I slept there in 2012. Could it be that, shock, some people share rooms? Also, how’s AirBnB coming along there? And might some attendees, um, live in Vegas?

The weirdly-synched life of the Google Nest household » The Register

Richard Chirgwin:

At first glance it looks like the typical Utopian vision of Silicon Valley, but Vulture South took a second look and asked ourselves: “what kinds of life does Google think we live?”

The short answer: wealthy, lazy, and either lonely or in a strange 1950’s-sitcom family synchronisation. Everybody rises and sleeps at the same time, everybody leaves and arrives together, and we’re rich enough to have ‘leccy cars but too poor to charge them.

The most obvious believer in the synchronised family is appliance giant Whirlpool. Its Nest integration can “let your washer and dryer know when you’re home and they will automatically switch to quiet mode”. Unless only one occupant is recognised, that means the only time the appliances are allowed to let their hair down and party is when everyone’s away.

The August Smart Lock will tell Nest to change your thermostat settings when you arrive (warm the house up) or leave (switch off the heating) – which begs the question “what if I lock the front door while other people are still at home?” At least the Kwikset Kevo smart lock understands that more than one person might be in a household.

The Withings Sleep System: when you go to sleep it will “let your Nest Thermostat to a comfortable nighttime temperature. Wake up and it will tell Nest you’re ready to start the day.” Once again, the idea that a household might have sleep and wake times staggered by hours seems alien to the developer.

This is my general objection to “internet of things” and “homes of the future” visions: they don’t account for how we actually live. Them: Look, you’ll be able to get your coffee maker to make coffee before you get out of bed! Me: so I’ll have had to put the coffee in the night before. As I have to go downstairs to get the coffee, why not just make it fresh while I’m there?

And so on. Most IOT/HOTF concepts seem to come from 20-somethings who have no concept of running a household. Hence, I think, their limited success.

This is the video CNN will play when the world ends » Jalopnik

Michael Ballaban, who unearthed this Holy Grail-style rumoured-but-until-now-never-confirmed video, which has the notice:

“HFR till end of the world confirmed.”

Hold for release. CNN, once ever so thorough in its factchecking, knew that the last employee alive couldn’t be trusted to make a call as consequential as one from the Book of Revelation. The end of the world must be confirmed.

That leaves open a whole host of unanswered questions. If this is the last CNN employee alive, in the last CNN bureau on Earth, who do they confirm it with? What does confirmation look like? Who can be the one to make that determination, to pronounce the universe itself dead? Is it Wolf Blitzer himself, ever a fan of the Washington Wizards, and thus a man who would know death when he saw it? Would it be Rick Davis, CNN’s head of standards of practices, who has been with the company since its birth and who thus would know CNN’s journalistic practices better than anyone?

Or would it be some sort of living embodiment of CNN itself, ready to proclaim its own demise, as Judgment Day is truly the only thing able to bring about the long-anticipated death of cable news?

And who would be around to watch it?

Um.. that CNN employee? The machines grinding us into nanoparticles to feed into their hoppers? Take your pick.

Breach puts Morgan Stanley client data up for sale » NYTimes.com

Nathaniel Popper:

the bank traced the breach to a financial adviser working out of its New York offices, a 30-year-old named Galen Marsh, according to a person involved in the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Marsh, who had been with Morgan Stanley since 2008, was quickly fired and is currently the subject of a criminal investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a person briefed on the investigation said. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority is also examining the matter.

Morgan Stanley said on Monday that it had determined that Mr. Marsh took data on about 10% of its 3.5 million wealth management customers, including transactional information from customer statements.

The bank said that Mr. Marsh did not take any sensitive passwords or Social Security numbers, and that it had not found any evidence that the breach resulted in any losses to customers. A lawyer for Mr. Marsh, Robert C. Gottlieb, acknowledged on Monday that his client did take the information in question but said that he did not post it online, share it or try to sell it.

Afghanistan war logs: insider breach. NSA/GCHQ documents: insider breach. Morgan Stanley: insider breach. Sony Pictures..?

Hit mobile game Monument Valley and piracy: ‘Only 5%’ of Android players paid for it » VenureBeat

Jeff Grubb:

Piracy is still a big problem on Android.

Developer Ustwo had one of the break out mobile hits in 2014 with its isometric puzzler Monument Valley, but a successful game is not impervious to piracy. The studio confirmed on Twitter today that Monument Valley has had an especially tough time with “unpaid installs” on Android. The company said that 95% of the people playing the game on Google’s mobile operating system did not buy it — although, Ustwo did explain that a small number of those installs are legitimate and were not illegally downloaded. This makes a big dent in Ustwo’s earnings since Monument Valley is a premium-priced game that does not have in-app purchases like Candy Crush Saga or other lucrative mobile releases. Gaming on smart devices surpassed $21bn last year, but it potentially could have more if it weren’t for piracy.

The paid rate was much better on iOS, but it’s still alarming. Ustwo said that 40% of the people who have the game on an Apple mobile device paid for it. Again, that means the majority did not give the developer money.

Depressing numbers, for a game that costs just $4. There’s certainly piracy on iOS – but the astronomical amount on Android really isn’t good news. Does this get factored into the quotes about “revenues from app stores” we see?

There is some confusion over the iOS figure though: it’s not clear whether someone who buys on the iPhone and then downloads to their iPad counts as an “unpaid install”. We also don’t know if that’s how it works on Android – though do 95% of Android owners have multiple devices?

Start up: more on AMOLED deterioration, Panic in the stores, tracking the trolls, questions for 2015 and more

Posted on January 6, 2015 by charlesarthur

AMOLED screens. What will they look like in a few years’ time? Photo by RafeB on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. May contain nuts. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Are AMOLED displays at risk of burn-in? >> PC Pro

Paul Ockenden:

The blacks are better on an AMOLED screen, since its pixels are turned off and emit no light; IPS black pixels merely attempt to block the backlight, with only partial success. AMOLED screens aren’t as sharp as IPS panels, however, and can be more difficult to read in bright sunlight. To my mind, however, the biggest problem with AMOLED displays is that they suffer from screen burn.

The problem is the “O” in the AMOLED acronym, which stands for “organic”. The organic compounds used in AMOLED displays are polymers or copolymers, such as polyfluorene (PFO) and polyphenylene vinylene (PPV), both of which degrade with use.

This is partly due to the fact that the chemistry involved in creating the electroluminescence is irreversible, so the luminous pixels degrade as they’re used up, like a battery. These organic materials tend to crystallise, too – an effect that is exacerbated at higher temperatures. That’s something to bear in mind the next time your phone becomes warm while you’re playing a game or watching a video.

The answer to the headline’s question is “yes”. This seems like the sort of thing that would be easily overlooked by reviewers who use a device for a few days and praise its “gorgeous AMOLED screen“. But come back in a couple of years, and is it still?

The 2014 Panic report >> Panic Blog

Cabel Sasser:

This is the biggest problem we’ve been grappling with all year: we simply don’t make enough money from our iOS apps. We’re building apps that are, if I may say so, world-class and desktop-quality. They are packed with features, they look stunning, we offer excellent support for them, and development is constant. I’m deeply proud of our iOS apps. But… they’re hard to justify working on.
Here’s a way to visualize the situation. First up is a sample look at Units Sold for the month of November 2014: Wow! 51% of our unit sales came from iOS apps! That’s great!

But now look at this revenue chart for the same month… Despite selling more than half of our total units, iOS represents just 17% of our total revenue.
There are a few things at work here:
1. We’re not charging enough for our iOS apps. Or Mac users are simply willing to pay more for apps. Or both.
2. We’re not getting the word out well enough about our iOS apps.
3. The type of software we make just isn’t as compelling to iOS users as it is to Mac users. Our professional tools are geared for a type of user that simply might not exist on the iPad — admins and coders. We might have misjudged that market.

It’s really hard to say for sure. One thing is for certain: we are more likely to increase the price of our iOS software over time in an effort to make it make sense. And we’re less likely to tackle any huge new iOS projects until we get this figured out.

The problem with getting enough revenues from the iOS store, quite apart from the hassle Panic had when one of its apps was yanked from the store by Apple, is one that will be echoed by many companies. The question is whether it’s inherent to mobile – that niche apps (high value-added, small user numbers) – or to Apple’s store structures, which don’t allow trials (for example).

Global smartphone market to record de-growth [in value] for the first time in 2015, semiconductor to advance as high return industry >> ETNews Korea

It has been forecast that 2015 will be a year in which the global smartphone market will record the first negative growth in history based on the amount. Although a growth is expected based on the forwarding volume, the rate at which average selling price (ASP) decreases has accelerated. The global smartphone market scale in 2014 is estimated at $298.1bn, which increased by 10% from the year before. However, it is forecast that the scale will decrease by 4.3% to $285.2bn next year.

Stock market analyst Kim Hye-yong from Woori Investment and Securities forecast, “The global smartphone ASP this year [2014] is $234.50, which decreased by 13.9% from last year. Next year [2014], it will drop by 16.3% to $196.”

According to Kim, common carrier subsidy policy is not working in the emerging market that centers on the open market and, as a result, high-end smartphones are not selling well across the world. He estimated that Chinese companies, despite their growth on the outside, will record a deficit or just about meeting the breakeven point as their profitability is insufficient.

The Death Of Expertise >> The Federalist

Tom Nichols:

I am (or at least think I am) an expert. Not on everything, but in a particular area of human knowledge, specifically social science and public policy. When I say something on those subjects, I expect that my opinion holds more weight than that of most other people.

I never thought those were particularly controversial statements. As it turns out, they’re plenty controversial. Today, any assertion of expertise produces an explosion of anger from certain quarters of the American public, who immediately complain that such claims are nothing more than fallacious “appeals to authority,” sure signs of dreadful “elitism,” and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a “real” democracy…

…I fear we are witnessing the “death of expertise”: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers – in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all…

…None of this ignorance stops people from arguing as though they are research scientists. Tackle a complex policy issue with a layman today, and you will get snippy and sophistic demands to show ever increasing amounts of “proof” or “evidence” for your case, even though the ordinary interlocutor in such debates isn’t really equipped to decide what constitutes “evidence” or to know it when it’s presented. The use of evidence is a specialized form of knowledge that takes a long time to learn, which is why articles and books are subjected to “peer review” and not to “everyone review,” but don’t tell that to someone hectoring you about the how things really work in Moscow or Beijing or Washington.

This is a storming essay about the ways in which the value of real domain expertise is being degraded and devalued. Read it and gape.

20 questions for 2015 >> Benedict Evans

I wrote a detailed post a few weeks ago looking at some of the key structural questions in mobile – with the platform wars over (their first phase, at least), what’s happening to Android, what will happen to interaction models and so on. But it’s also worth looking at just how much could change just in 2015 – or even in January. Everything is wide open. So, here, in no special order, are 20 questions for 2015, any one of which would change things a lot. I’ve written about most of these topics already in 2014 – in 2015 they’re even more interesting.

Apple questions for 2015 >> Above Avalon

Neil Cybart:

In recognition of the beginning of a new year, I want to share my running list of questions that I have been keeping for Apple in 2015. By no means is this an exhaustive list, but rather things that I know to be on the lookout for.

It’s a pretty long list, if not exhaustive. Some key questions in there, with designer Marc Newson, SVP operations Jeff Williams and ex-iOS chief Scott Forstall all in there. Plus would you believe in an Apple Pen?

Meet the dogged researchers who try to unmask haters online >> MIT Technology Review

Adrian Chen:

Internet hatred [näthat] is a problem anywhere a significant part of life is lived online. But the problem is sharpened by Sweden’s cultural and legal commitment to free expression, according to Mårten Schultz, a law professor at Stockholm University and a regular guest on Troll Hunter, where he discusses the legal issues surrounding each case. Swedes tend to approach näthat as the unpleasant but unavoidable side effect of having the liberty to say what you wish. Proposed legislation to combat online harassment is met with strong resistance from free speech and Internet rights activists.

What’s more, Sweden’s liberal freedom-of-information laws offer easy access to personal information about nearly anyone, including people’s personal identity numbers, their addresses, even their taxable income. That can make online harassment uniquely invasive. “The government publicly disseminates a lot of information you wouldn’t be able to get outside of Scandinavia,” Schultz says. “We have quite weak protection of privacy in Sweden.”

Imagine what the childish (and sometimes dangerous) doxxing wars being played out over various hashtags would look like if every country made available the amount of information that Sweden does. Stieg Larsson, author of the “Dragon Tattoo” books and an investigator into far-right hate groups, didn’t get married because doing so would have required him to state his place of residence.

What it would really take to reverse climate change >> IEEE Spectrum

Ross Koningstein and David Fork were in charge of Google’s “moonshot” announced in 2007 to come up with renewable energy sources that cost less than coal. It was shut down in 2011:

Our reckoning showed that reversing the trend would require both radical technological advances in cheap zero-carbon energy, as well as a method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon.

Those calculations cast our work at Google’s RE<C program in a sobering new light. Suppose for a moment that it had achieved the most extraordinary success possible, and that we had found cheap renewable energy technologies that could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants—a situation roughly equivalent to the energy innovation study’s best-case scenario. Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change. This realisation was frankly shocking: Not only had RE<C failed to reach its goal of creating energy cheaper than coal, but that goal had not been ambitious enough to reverse climate change.

We’re a long way down the climate change road; what would really be needed would be an all-in effort on something like fusion and solar power.

No credit >> All this

Dr Drang:

Thursday night I got a fraud notice via text and email. When I called the bank, I found several charges from an online video game company that my older son uses. He’d made a single purchase, which went through, and then fifteen minutes later four or five charges from that same vendor were attempted and blocked. Was this a programming error at the game company? fraud by the company? fraud by some third party masquerading as the game company? Don’t know. I do know it wasn’t because my son was buying things by mistake—he’s eighteen and has enough experience online to know better. The bank cancelled the credit card and we canceled his game account. Happy New Year.

As I said, this will be our fifth card in the past twelve months. We started 2014 with a card we’d had for a couple of years, but it was replaced in early February after the Target breach. Sometime in spring, the bank caught a fraudulent charge at a Kmart in Chicago, so our 3–4 month old card was cancelled and a new one issued. That one lasted all the way to October, when it was cancelled because of the Home Depot breach. And now this.

When the new card arrives on Monday, I’ll go through the list of accounts and change them all to the new number. My list is on paper, but this time I’m going to switch to a system like Jamie Phelps’s, that’ll allow me to just click a single link instead of dig my way through a series of pages for each account.

It’s puzzling how European banks and retailers were able to coordinate the introduction of Chip+PIN – which would kill this sort of fraud almost dead – and yet the US has completely failed at it. The UK introduced Chip+PIN in 2004. The problem hasn’t gone away – it’s forced it to different places, principally online, where phishing is still a big problem that await Apple Pay-style methods to reduce them.

Start up: fooling image algorithms, Xiaomi’s big year, how AMOLED screens degrade, and more

Posted on January 5, 2015 by charlesarthur

A thing of beauty – and an endangered species? Image by bozontee on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. I’m not at CES, but if anything amazing happens there I might link to it through the week. (This doesn’t feel like an “amazing” year though. The last one to fit that description was probably 2011, when the Motorola Xoom and BlackBerry PlayBook made their first appearances. Ah, memories.)

I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Optical illusions that fool Google-style image recognition algorithms >> MIT Technology Review

A technique called deep learning has enabled Google and other companies to make breakthroughs in getting computers to understand the content of photos. Now researchers at Cornell University and the University of Wyoming have shown how to make images that fool such software into seeing things that aren’t there.

The researchers can create images that appear to a human as scrambled nonsense or simple geometric patterns, but are identified by the software as an everyday object such as a school bus. The trick images offer new insight into the differences between how real brains and the simple simulated neurons used in deep learning process images.

In other words, this sort of thing:

How my mom got hacked >> NYTimes.com

Alina Simone’s mother had her computer encrypted by Cryptowall (essentially uncrackable), ransomed to $500 payable in Bitcoin – which wasn’t easy to sort:

it appeared her payment had arrived too late as well: By the time I got home from Greenpoint, her CryptoWall ransom had been raised to $1,000, and the $500 in Bitcoins she had deposited had vanished. In a panic, she wrote to Mike Hoats asking for advice. What he told her sounded crazy to me. Use the CryptoWall message interface to tell the criminals exactly what happened. Be honest, in other words.

So she did. She explained that the virus had struck the same week that a major snowstorm hit Massachusetts and the Thanksgiving holiday shut down the banks. She told them about the unexpected Bitcoin shortfall and about dispatching her daughter to the Coin Cafe A.T.M. at the 11th hour. She swore she had really, really tried not to miss their deadline. And then a weird thing happened: Her decryption key arrived.

When I shared the news with Mr. Hoats, he was jubilant. “That is great news, truly!” he wrote. “Whoever these yahoos are, they have some little shred of humanity.”

But Mr. Wisniewski had a more pragmatic take. “From what we can tell, they almost always honor what they say because they want word to get around that they’re trustworthy criminals who’ll give you your files back.”

Netflix cracks down on VPN and proxy “pirates” >> TorrentFreak

Netflix is starting to block subscribers who access its service using VPN services and other tools that bypass geolocation restrictions. The changes, which may also affect legitimate users, have been requested by the movie studios who want full control over what people can see in their respective countries.

Do AMOLED phone screens degrade over time? Yes, proof time, but… >> All About Windows Phone

Steve Litchfield wanted to find out whether the colour in AMOLED screens “washes out”:

I happen to have ended up with two Lumia 1020s – one is the workhorse that I’ve used almost every day for eighteen months, while the other is an AT&T model that doesn’t work on UK frequencies and so had hardly been used at all – just the odd test here and there. So, why not try looking at the same screens of content on both the ‘old’ 1020 and the ‘as new’ 1020? Would I be able to tell any difference?

Helping me were my family, who each voted on which screen looked clearer and crisper, without being told of the reason for the test or what they should be looking for. Each phone was set up with the same app, the same content and the same ‘Automatic’ brightness setting. Minor concerns were that the ‘old’ 1020 was on the Developer Preview programme and thus had a slightly newer version of the OS.

He took pictures and everything:

the very pentile nature of the 1020’s screen (and remember the same will be true for devices like the 925) means that a lot of the detail is being handled by the alternating red and blue sub-pixels, effectively edging the smartphone screen down from 768p to a very humble 384p.

18 months doesn’t seem like a long time.

Xiaomi confirms it sold 61m phones in 2014, has plans to expand to more countries >> TechCrunch

Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone maker that raised $1.1bn last month, has confirmed that it sold 61.12m phones last year, bringing in an apparent revenues of 74.3bn CNY (US$12bn) in the process.

The new figures were released by CEO Lei Jun on Weibo and are right in line with the company’s expectation for the year. Xiaomi sold 18.7m devices in 2013, and 7.2m in 2012, so the four-year-old company is continuing to grow its business at a rapid rate — its recent funding round valued it at $45bn and it is now the world’s third largest smartphone maker.

Great! Although note that those numbers mean it sold fewer in calendar Q4 than Q3 (Ben Bajarin charted it here – from 18.1m to 17.1m. Why? No explanation given, but (you’d hope) the venture capitalist investors must have known when they piled in. Bajarin reckons (and it seems very likely) that they fell out of the world’s top five smartphone makers in Q4.

So where’s Xiaomi going? Into multiple smart devices – phones will quickly get played out – but I don’t see any chance of them coming to the US or Europe with a phone in 2015. They’d get fried over the intellectual property issues relating to smartphone patents, where they’ve already been burnt in India.

Mourn the death of the wallet – it holds memories as well as money >> The Guardian

Jess Carter-Morley (who is The Guardian’s fashion editor):

the wallet, that great talisman of adult life, is heading for extinction. As a day-to-day essential, it will die off with the generation who read print newspapers. Most of us, as children, played shops with Fisher Price tills, counting out the plastic coins and swapping them for plastic tomatoes. And we have grown up, and continued to do real shopping, in almost exactly the same way. But that kind of shopping – where you hand over notes and count out change in return – now happens only in the most minor of our retail encounters. Buying a bar of chocolate or a pint of milk, from a cornershop or a train station kiosk. At the shops where you spend any real money, that money is increasingly abstracted. And this is more and more true, the higher up the scale you go. At the most cutting-edge retail flagships – Victoria Beckham on Dover Street, say, or Burberry on Regent Street – you don’t go and stand at any kind of till, when you decide to pay. The staff are equipped with iPads which they can whip out and use to take your payment while you relax on a sofa.

She has a very good point. Also, what will kids do shop-play with in a generation’s time? Will they wave their plastic phones over their plastic readers to say they’ve bought something?

46 times Vox totally fucked up a story >> Deadspin

The Gawker site takes the “we’ll explain the news to you and make it fun!” site to task, pointing out that it’s pretty hard to have people who are really experts in every field they write about. These ones particularly caught my eye (but there are 44 others):

9. Article Headline: Ignore age—define generations by the tech they use

Correction: This post originally gave incorrect dates for the introduction of radio and television technology and the invention of the cell phone. It also mis-labeled the web as the internet. We regret these errors.

10. Headline: The man who escaped both doomed Malaysian Airlines flights

Correction: Many of the key elements of Maarten de Jonge’s story have been disproven by subsequent reporting (particularly by Slate). There is no evidence that De Jonge actually booked a ticket on either flight. We’re sorry for repeating unverified claims.

Getting hoaxed is so dangerously easy for journalists online now. But some bring it on themselves. Now read on..

Peeling an onion: Phony iPhone 6 doom starts a chain reaction >> Macworld

2014 is over, but the Macalope is still cleaning up the mess from the crappiest New Year’s Eve party ever. Because as 2014 wound down, tech sites got wound up about some survey results.

“Here’s Proof That Samsung Owners Are Happier With Their Phones Than iPhone Owners” (indirect link and tip o’ the antlers to mylestaylor)

Business Insider‘s Julie Bort knows the score: It’s Samsung a billion and Apple zero. Or, well, 81 to 79, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

The Macalope is great at this sort of riffing, but there’s a serious point here. As gets pointed out, Business Insider sourced this from Engadget, which sourced it from BGR, and yet none of them looked to see quite when the survey was carried out by ACSI. Turns out it was in May (you can see the unchanged scores – Samsung 81, Apple 79 – that are quoted).

There’s huge amounts of guesswork rolled into the BI piece and another at Hot Hardware (“#bendgate may have affected the scores”). All based on a survey from seven months ago.

And people wonder why “tech sites” didn’t get the Snowden leaks.

Two ‘Lizard Squad’ hackers arrested after Christmas DDoS attacks >> Hacker News

Vinnie Omari, an alleged member of Lizard Squad, arrested by the police investigating PayPal thefts and cyber-fraud offences occurred in 2013-14 while raiding his London home. Law enforcement officials reportedly seized phones, laptops and an Xbox from his home.

“The arrest is in connection with an ongoing investigation into cyber-fraud offences which took place between 2013 and August 2014 during which victims reported funds being stolen from their PayPal accounts,” Thames Valley police said in a press release.
Omari, who is a student of network security and ethical hacking, provided a copy of the search warrant to the Daily Dot, but the details have not been confirmed with local police yet. The press release from the Thames Valley Police Department confirms that Omari was arrested “on suspicion of fraud by false representation and Computer Misuse Act offences [sic].”

“They took everything… Xbox One, phones, laptops, computer USBs, etc.,” Omari said in an email to the Daily Dot, who broke the story.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is also reportedly investigating another Lizard Squad member named Julius “Ryan” Kivimaki a 17-year-old teenager, for his connection to the alleged DDoS attacks against Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. He was arrested by Finnish authorities later this week.

Tick, tock…

Start up: botnets worsen, who really hacked Sony?, mobile PCs in 2015, LizardSquad in detail

Posted on January 2, 2015 by charlesarthur

This stuff doesn’t work on mobile, apparently. Photo by Justin in SD on Flickr.

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

Botnet summary 2014 >> Spamhaus

To nobody’s surprise, botnet activity appears to be increasing. The majority of detected botnets are targeted at obtaining and exploiting banking and financial information. Botnet controllers (C&Cs) are hosted disproportionately on ISPs with understaffed abuse departments, inadequate abuse policies, or inefficient abuse detection and shutdown processes. Botnet C&C domains are registered disproportionately with registrars in locations that have lax laws or inadequate enforcement against cybercrime.

In 2014, Spamhaus detected 7,182 distinct IP addresses that hosted a botnet controller (Command & Control server – C&C). That is an increase of 525 (or 7.88%) botnet controllers over the number we detected in 2013. Those C&Cs were hosted on 1,183 different networks.

Depressing.

New York Times bets on native ads to drive mobile-ad revenue >> Media – Advertising Age

The New York Times is looking at native advertising, sponsorships and video to wring more money from readers coming to the Times on their mobile phones, according to Mark Thompson, president and CEO of The New York Times Co.

Just 10% of the Times’ digital advertising revenue was from mobile ads in the third quarter, but more than half its digital traffic came through mobile devices. Although mobile ad revenue is “growing rapidly,” this gap represents a “significant delta,” Mr. Thompson said at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference in New York on Tuesday.

“It’s a challenge to overcome, but we will overcome it,” he said.

This seems like a natural and necessary evolution, given the low rates of mobile. They won’t make up for desktop, which in turn didn’t make up for print. Advertising rates are falling to zero.

What is going to happen >> AVC

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson with his list of predictions, from which we’ll pick these two:

4/ After a big year in 2014 with the Facebook acquisition of Oculus Rift, virtual reality will hit some headwinds. Oculus will struggle to ship their consumer version and competitive products will underwhelm. The virtual reality will eventually catch up to the virtual hype, but not in 2015.

5/ Another market where the reality will not live up to the hype is wearables. The Apple Watch will not be the homerun product that iPod, iPhone, and iPad have been. Not everyone will want to wear a computer on their wrist. Eventually, this market will be realized as the personal mesh/personal cloud, but the focus on wearables will be a bit of a headfake and take up a lot of time, energy, and money in 2015 with not a lot of results.

I’m very interested in trying Oculus Rift. Wearables are a tough sell anyway. However, Apple isn’t positioning its Watch as any part of what has gone before.

FBI briefed on alternate Sony hack theory >> Politico

Tal Kopan:

Researchers from the cyber intelligence company Norse have said their own investigation into the data on the Sony attack doesn’t point to North Korea at all and instead indicates some combination of a disgruntled employee and hackers for piracy groups is at fault.

The FBI says it is standing by its conclusions, but the security community says the agency has been open and receptive to help from the private sector throughout the Sony investigation.

Norse, one of the world’s leading cyber intelligence firms, has been researching the hack since it was made public just before Thanksgiving.

Norse’s senior vice president of market development said the quickness of the FBI’s conclusion that North Korea was responsible was a red flag.

1) a riled insider or insiders is a far, far more likely path to this hack
2) there’s no way in the world, now that the FBI has said that North Korea did it, and President Obama has echoed that, that the FBI or US government will ever admit to being wrong unless it is part of some gigantic diplomatic deal with North Korea. One has to wonder what NK would give the US in return for making the US eat humble pie in public.

Competition to intensify in flagging mobile PC market in 2015 >> TrendForce

Google’s low-cost Chromebook notebook computer performed well this year, benefiting from its cloud storage capacity and strong data security capabilities. But Chromebook sales were affected by Microsoft’s subsidized low-cost Windows notebooks. In 2014, Google sold about 6.5m Chromebooks and the device’s market penetration [of the mobile market] reached 4%. But if Chromebook uses the 2-in-1 PC concept, it will be difficult for Google to keep the device’s price low, Chen said. TrendForce forecasts Chomebook sales will increase slightly to 8m units in 2015.

This year, Microsoft and Intel both launched subsidy plans for their notebooks and tablets, which had reduced their revenues. “Because they lower manufacturers’ costs, subsidies indirectly benefit consumers, but it will be better if Microsoft and Intel can find more substantial ways to develop the market, such as by utilizing the 2-in-1 concept or cloud computing,” [Caroline] Chen [Trendforce notebook analyst] said.

Notably, this group describes the expected 12.9in iPad as a “2-in-1” device, not a tablet. There’s a certain amount of disagreement between analyst companies on what is a PC, what’s mobile, what’s a 2-in-1, and what’s a tablet; it can make decoding what they say really tricky.

May 2014: Samsung says new Galaxy S5 smartphone is off to a strong start >> WSJ

Noted here for its hindsight value, from an interview in May 2014:

J.K. Shin, who also heads Samsung’s mobile business, said in an interview at company headquarters that sales of the new smartphone reached more than 11m units since its launch in early April, outpacing the Galaxy S4, which sold about 10m in the first month after it was unveiled last year.

Speaking halfway into Samsung’s second quarter, Mr. Shin also said he thinks strong Galaxy S5 sales will lead to higher mobile profit margins and market share in the quarter. He declined to provide specific figures.

“It’s been a month since we began selling the S5, and out of the gate, sales are much stronger than the Galaxy S4,” Mr. Shin said, noting sales were especially good in developed markets such as the U.S., Australia and Germany.

The comments from the top executive at the world’s biggest smartphone maker paint a rosier picture of Samsung’s mobile business than many analysts and investors had been expecting.

What then happened is that Samsung made 20% more S5s than it had S4s, but sold 10% fewer. This meant oversupply in the channel (wholesalers/carriers) and forced price cuts, and so lower profits and slower sales.

Worth considering when you next see a chief executive interviewed, and weigh up what analysts are expecting.

Samsung Electronics should announce its preliminary 4Q results some time next week.

Here’s why The Hunt’s app developer hearts Android >> VentureBeat | Dev | by Barry Levine

While “the conventional wisdom is build first for iOS,” he said, “if we had to do it all over again, I would launch on Android first,” or at the same time as iOS. More than half of The Hunt’s downloads are to Android devices.

The Hunt’s Android version launched last month, and its iOS version came out last year.

The Hunt allows its three million, mostly female users to post a picture of some product they’ve seen online — such as a photo of a dress in a news story — and get feedback from the community of retailers and fellow shoppers about where that item or something similar is sold.

Weingarten noted that his company has “a very successful iPhone app, [with] thousands of daily downloads.”

“I’m not being negative about Apple.”

But, he pointed out, his company is “seeing much stronger engagement rates on Android.”

As one example, more than a third of Android users who have downloaded the app have started Hunts, while only 20% of iOS users have. Additionally, 40% of iOS weekly users are following to see if their Hunt queries have found the product in question, while half of Android users are.

Be good to know some more of the demographics of the users showing these behaviours. An interesting data point though.

Inadvertent algorithmic cruelty >> Eric Meyer

Yes, my year looked like that. True enough. My year looked like the now-absent face of my little girl. It was still unkind to remind me so forcefully.

And I know, of course, that this is not a deliberate assault. This inadvertent algorithmic cruelty is the result of code that works in the overwhelming majority of cases, reminding people of the awesomeness of their years, showing them selfies at a party or whale spouts from sailing boats or the marina outside their vacation house.

But for those of us who lived through the death of loved ones, or spent extended time in the hospital, or were hit by divorce or losing a job or any one of a hundred crises, we might not want another look at this past year.

To show me Rebecca’s face and say “Here’s what your year looked like!” is jarring. It feels wrong, and coming from an actual person, it would be wrong. Coming from code, it’s just unfortunate. These are hard, hard problems. It isn’t easy to programmatically figure out if a picture has a ton of Likes because it’s hilarious, astounding, or heartbreaking.

This post has been widely shared, but it is worth reflecting on from a distance. Algorithms have dangerous power because once we start them off, it’s really hard to stop them.

Lizard Squad kids: a long trail of fail >> Krebs on Security

In a show of just how little this group knows about actual hacking and coding, the source code for the service appears to have been lifted in its entirety from titaniumstresser, another, more established DDoS-for-hire booter service. In fact, these Lizard geniuses are so inexperienced at coding that they inadvertently exposed information about all of their 1,700+ registered users (more on this in a moment).

These two services, like most booters, are hidden behind CloudFlare, a content distribution service that lets sites obscure their true Internet address. In case anyone cares, Lizardstresser’s real Internet address currently is 217.71.50.57, at a hosting facility in Bosnia.

In any database of leaked forum or service usernames, it is usually safe to say that the usernames which show up first in the list are the administrators and/or creators of the site. The usernames exposed by the coding and authentication weaknesses in LizardStresser show that the first few registered users are “anti” and “antichrist.” As far as I can tell, these two users are the same guy: A ne’er-do-well who has previously sold access to his personal DDoS-for-hire service on Darkode — a notorious English-language cybercrime forum that I have profiled extensively on this blog.

One of the duo alleged to make up Lizard Squad is a 22-year-old Briton who has been arrested and bailed by Thames Valley Police. He’s on Twitter, has been interviewed by Sky News, and denies having taken part in any hack (or DDOS?) of Sony or Microsoft; he claims just to be the group’s spokesman, if his Twitter feed reflects his views.

Let’s see how that works out. He also says the alleged offences for which he has been bailed include some from 2013.

Start up: Do Not Track dying, Android’s lost money, EU’s VAT problem, AdBlocking? surprise!, Xiaomi laptop = fake, and more

Posted on December 31, 2014 by charlesarthur

Moving from Do Not Track to “ah, just track it then”. Photo by Rh+ on Flickr.
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Hey, it’s the last one of the year. See you in 2015.
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A selection of 12 links for you. Wash repeatedly. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Android hardware profits tanked in 2014 >> Re/code

Down by half from 2013, according to mobile analyst Chetan Sharma:

A lot of that is due to the big drop in profits at Samsung, the largest player in the Android market. China’s Xiaomi gained significant market share, but is only modestly profitable thanks to its slim margins. Meanwhile, other players like Sony and Motorola lost money in their Android-based mobile businesses.

That’s obviously of concern to the hardware companies, but it should also be worrisome for Google.

“It is important for Google that the ecosystem stays healthy and balanced,” Sharma told Re/code. “Without profitability, some of these players will eventually disappear and it will primarily become a Samsung + Chinese OEMs ecosystem, which is probably not what Google wants.”

Not sure Google is too worried, as long as lots of people use Android, or Google apps on iOS.

Ebooks Direct and new EU digital sales rules: what now? >> Out of Ambit

Diane Duane:

If you’re a large company with accountants this is one of those things you just shrug and deal with, since you’re already registered for VAT and you’ll just fold this extra paperwork and bureaucracy-management into all the other paperwork your accountants already deal with. However, if you’re (for example) someone on disability who’s keeping themselves afloat by selling digital comics, or a stay-at-home mom running a small electronic travel-publication business from her kitchen table—or for that matter, if you’re a pair of science fiction and fantasy writers running a small ebook publishing business from a tiny cottage at the foot of the Wicklow Mountains—then the extra bureaucracy and paperwork burden is not at all welcome. For some of our colleagues, this increased burden of regulations and bureaucracy simply means they’ll have to shut down. They can’t afford the cost of VAT registry or an accountant, or they won’t be able to procure the necessary IDs and proofs of location from their customers, much less store them for a decade.

This situation is even more onerous in places where, until now, businesses this small were spared having to register for VAT at all. But the EU law regarding sale of digital goods has no such eligibility threshold—no equivalent level above which you’re expected to afford accountancy services and so forth, since you’re making enough money to make it worthwhile registering for VAT in the first place.

The regulations seem onerous – if you sell anything at all electronically, you have to register for VAT. Regulations like this make a subversion via Bitcoin much more attractive and hence likely, which could have a serious (negative) effect on government revenues.

Here’s proof the Xiaomi MacBook Air clone story is fake

Steven Millward:

A reverse Google image search on the fake Xiaomi laptop reveals that the closest image source seems to be an undated clone, with the splendid name Kaka i5 (pictured below), that already has an orange power button. So the Xiaomi laptop hoaxers simply had to Photoshop on an orange Xiaomi logo.

The dubious story first appeared in English on GizmoChina, a site we’ve never heard of before, and then was picked up without further investigation by well-known sites such as 9to5Mac and BusinessInsider (update: story screenshots here and here, respectively). Not so much Pulitzer prize for journalism as Wurlitzer prize for churnalism.

Round of applause for that last phrase, sir. Chapeau.

AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage >> Nicholas Nethercote

Nicholas Nethercote, with what could also be titled “AdBlockPlus actually makes your browser and computer run slower”:

we recently learned that ABP can greatly increase the amount of memory used by Firefox.

First, there’s a constant overhead just from enabling ABP of something like 60–70 MiB. (This is on 64-bit builds; on 32-bit builds the number is probably a bit smaller.) This appears to be mostly due to additional JavaScript memory usage, though there’s also some due to extra layout memory.

Second, there’s an overhead of about 4 MiB per iframe, which is mostly due to ABP injecting a giant stylesheet into every iframe. Many pages have multiple iframes, so this can add up quickly. For example, if I load TechCrunch and roll over the social buttons on every story (thus triggering the loading of lots of extra JS code), without ABP, Firefox uses about 194 MiB of physical memory. With ABP, that number more than doubles, to 417 MiB. This is despite the fact that ABP prevents some page elements (ads!) from being loaded.

An even more extreme example is this page, which contains over 400 iframes. Without ABP, Firefox uses about 370 MiB. With ABP, that number jumps to 1960 MiB. Unsurprisingly, the page also loads more slowly with ABP enabled.

AdBlock Plus has about 19m users. That’s a lot of people penalising their computing experience in order not to penalise their visual experience (and penalise the sites they use).

Fake “The Interview” app is really an Android banking trojan >> Graham Cluley

Researchers at McAfee – in a joint investigation with the Technische Universität Darmstadt and the Centre for Advanced Security Research Darmstadt (CASED), has identified that a threat campaign has been active in South Korea in the last few days, attempting to exploit the media frenzy surrounding “The Interview”‘s release.

McAfee security expert Irfan Asrar tells me that a torrent making the rounds in South Korea, poses as an Android app to download the movie to mobile devices.

However, in truth, it contains an Android Trojan detected by McAfee products as Android/Badaccents.

Android/Badaccents claims to download a copy of “The Interview” but instead installs a two-stage banking Trojan onto victims’ devices.

Amazon-hosted files, sending data back to a site in China, which checks for whether the devices are made in North Korea – though the latter is likely not an important detail.

The slow death of ‘Do Not Track’ >> NYTimes.com

Fred Campbell, who is executive director of the “Center for Boundless Innovation in Technology”, and also a former chief of the Federal Communications Commission’s Wireless Telecomms Bureau:

The idea, known as “Do Not Track,” and modeled on the popular “Do Not Call” rule that protects consumers from unwanted telemarketing calls, is simple. But the details are anything but.

Although many digital advertising companies agreed to the idea in principle, the debate over the definition, scope and application of “Do Not Track” has been raging for several years.

Now, finally, an industry working group is expected to propose detailed rules governing how the privacy switch should work. The group includes experts but is dominated by Internet giants like Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Google and Yahoo. It is poised to recommend a carve-out that would effectively free them from honoring “Do Not Track” requests.

If regulators go along, the rules would allow the largest Internet giants to continue scooping up data about users on their own sites and on other sites that include their plug-ins, such as Facebook’s “Like” button or an embedded YouTube video. This giant loophole would make “Do Not Track” meaningless.

Essentially because, the article points out, collecting user data has become the raison d’etre for so many companies, and the money hose that affords “free” maps, email, and so on. But the US Federal Trade Commission, which is meant to protect consumers, has given up on the task.

How to completely remove Birthdays from Google Calendar >> Medium

Let Brendan Mulligan be your helpful source of future apologies.

How not to run an A/B test >> Evan Miller

Suppose your conversion rate is 50% and you want to test to see if a new logo gives you a conversion rate of more than 50% (or less). You stop the experiment as soon as there is 5% significance, or you call off the experiment after 150 observations. Now suppose your new logo actually does nothing. What percent of the time will your experiment wrongly find a significant result? No more than five percent, right? Maybe six percent, in light of the preceding analysis?

Try 26.1% – more than five times what you probably thought the significance level was.

The “equal sampling” point is often missed in trying to extract significant difference. Terrific piece. Also includes a “Sample size calculator” to help you.

Government secures landmark deal for UK mobile phone users >> GOV.UK

From the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (via Culture minister Savid Javid):

Under the agreement all four of the mobile networks have collectively agreed to:

• a guaranteed £5bn investment programme to improve mobile infrastructure by 2017;
• guaranteed voice and text coverage from each operator across 90% of the UK geographic area by 2017, halving the areas currently blighted by patchy coverage as a result of partial ‘not-spots’;
• full coverage from all four mobile operators will increase from 69% to 85% of geographic areas by 2017;
• provide reliable signal strength for voice for each type of mobile service (whether 2G/3G/4G) – currently many consumers frequently lose signal or cannot get signal long enough to make a call; and
• make the deal legally binding by accepting amended licence conditions to reflect the agreement – it will be enforceable by Ofcom.

What’s odd about this is that the detail of the agreement hasn’t been published, and the problem of coverage tends to be on trains – these requirements could be fulfilled by sticking some mobile masts on the Scottish highlands, but wouldn’t solve many peoples’ problems.

Also, why is a culture minister prodding carriers? Shouldn’t it be the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills?

BlackBerry Classic review: the best BlackBerry ever made >> WSJ

Joanna Stern was a confirmed BlackBerry lover back in the day, and delights in the physical keyboard, trackpad, battery life, call quality, and email-to-calendar features. But:

while I’d love for all those great BlackBerry features to make a comeback, others simply feel out of date.

Calendar and email aside, other preloaded apps are slow and poorly designed. A Rand McNally map from the gas station is likely more up-to-date—and speedier—than BlackBerry’s own maps app. Not only did it struggle to help me find the closest Starbucks in New York City, but it lacks typical features like transit directions and 3-D map options.

BlackBerry recommends dissatisfied users try third-party apps, like Waze or Navfree. But while BlackBerrys can run Android apps, the industry-leader Google Maps isn’t available for the platform.

That brings me to the terrible and confusing app situation. There are now two app stores preloaded on the Classic: Amazon’s App Store and BlackBerry World, which sounds like an amusement park I would have loved in 2008. While you can download Android apps from Amazon’s App Store, many big ones are missing—not just the Google family of apps, but also Uber and Instagram.

You can ignore BlackBerry’s warnings and load other Android apps manually, but it takes work.

So in that sense, it’s still like BlackBerrys from a few years ago – and the app gap is still one that is going to put the standard consumer off.

Highly recommended: Dieter Bohn’s great piece of review writing (which is actual writing as entertainment as well as information): BlackBerry Classic review at The Verge.

Infography: iPhone vs. Android shows north vs. south split (and in real time) >> TomSoft

The results are quite interesting: it shows that the split android/iPhone happens more at a country/continent level than at a user level. USA, England, Japan are in their vast majority « iPhone users », while South America, Spain, Indonesia are much more Android focused. France is one of the few balanced countries.

In other words, seems another north vs. south split, or rich vs. poor (it seems for instance that some Brazilian big cities are iPhone users while the rest of the country is much more Android).

Dubious about this; Android has the majority smartphone installed base in pretty much every country. And geolocated tweets are a tiny part of the total; hard to tell if they’re represented proportionally.

Start up: Coolpad’s built-in malware backdoor, LG v Samsung, Rockstar’s patent fizzle, Google’s PR spin game, and more

Posted on December 24, 2014 by charlesarthur

A Coolpad smartphone. Back door not shown.

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This is the last collection of Overspill links until next week (at least). Have a great Christmas – and thanks to the hundreds of people who are coming to read every day. You’re always welcome.
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A selection of 11 links for you. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

SuperBeam Pro: easy & fast WiFi direct file sharing >> iTunes App Store

Works by Wi-Fi Direct (aka p2p sharing). Seems to be superfast, but one also wonders if Apple is going to be entirely happy about this. (Found via Producthunt.)

Rockstar consortium to sell 4,000 patents to RPX Corp. for $900m >> WSJ

Starting late last year, Rockstar sued several companies for allegedly infringing their patents, including Google and Cisco. Last month, Rockstar settled its suits against Google and Cisco. Financial details weren’t disclosed, but Cisco told investors in early November that it had recorded a pretax charge of $188 million to settle the Rockstar litigation.

As part of the deal with RPX, Rockstar will drop the remainder of its suits, which include claims against Samsung Electronics, LG, HTC and Huawei.

The settlements follow others in the long-running smartphone patent wars.

For instance, in May, Apple and Google agreed to drop all lawsuits between the two companies, and in August, Apple and Samsung agreed to end all litigation between the two companies outside the U.S. Apple and Samsung are still battling in federal court in California, where Apple has won two jury verdicts finding that Samsung infringed its designs for the iPhone.

Whether the Rockstar companies recouped its $4.5bn investment is an open question. In the minds of some experts, the $4.5bn figure reflected the high point of a frothy market that developed for patents in the earlier days of the smartphone industry.

The Rockstar companies squeezed more than three years of use out of the 4,000 patents, and will keep licenses going forward. The 2,000 patents they held back from Rockstar—and aren’t part of the sale to RPX—were among some of the most valuable in the Nortel portfolio.

Turns out that smartphone patents were just a sideline which led both Google and its rivals to drop huge amounts. (Google rather more than the others, through Motorola’s continued losses until it could sell it off. But nobody won.)

CoolReaper revealed: a backdoor in Coolpad Android devices >> Palo Alto Networks Blog

Claud Xiao and Ryan Olson:

Coolpad is the sixth largest manufacturer of smartphones in the world, and the third largest in China. We recently discovered that the software installed on many of Coolpad’s high-end Android phones includes a backdoor which was installed and operated by Coolpad itself. Today we released a new report detailing the backdoor, which we’ve named “CoolReaper.”
After reviewing Coolpad complaints on message boards about suspicious activities on Coolpad devices, we downloaded multiple copies of the stock ROMs used by Coolpad phones sold in China. We found the majority of the ROMs contained the CoolReaper backdoor.

CoolReaper can perform the following tasks:
• Download, install, or activate any Android application without user consent or notification
• Clear user data, uninstall existing applications, or disable system applications
• Notify users of a fake over-the-air (OTA) update that doesn’t update the device, but installs unwanted applications
• Send or insert arbitrary SMS or MMS messages into the phone.
• Dial arbitrary phone numbers
• Upload information about device, its location, application usage, calling and SMS history to a Coolpad server.

Fabulous! All that extra software for no charge! (Coolpad is on sale in the west, by the way.)

They say it’s specifically tailored to hide what it does, and that Coolpad has ignored customer complaints about unwanted app installs. Their conclusion:

CoolReaper is the first malware we have seen that was built and operated by an Android manufacturer. The changes Coolpad made to the Android OS to hide the backdoor from users and antivirus programs are unique and should make people think twice about the integrity of their mobile devices.

Google adds song lyrics to search results but it feels like a cheap cash grab >> PCWorld

Ian Paul:

Google has figured out a way to deliver more instant answers in search results and boost music sales on Google Play simultaneously: song lyrics. Following Bing’s lead from October, Google is now surfacing lyrics for a limited number of songs when you search for “[song title] lyrics.”

Unlike Bing, however, you won’t see the full list of song lyrics in your search results. To see the complete lyrics you have to click a link to Google Play. There you’ll also have options to buy the track or subscribe to Google Play’s All Access subscription service.

If Bing’s song lyrics roll out convinced you to switch to Microsoft’s search engine, however, don’t bother switching back. Google’s song lyric catalog is extremely limited compared to its competitor. In fact, the new feature seems like more of a ploy to push people to Google Play than a truly helpful search function.

I hadn’t noted that Bing was already doing song lyrics. Google says it has licensed the lyrics it displays. But – as this article notes, and Techcrunch points out – it’s another annexation by Google of a content business.

LG boss may miss CES due to washing machine fiasco >> CNET

Cho Mu-Hyun:

South Korean prosecutors have imposed a travel ban on Jo Seong-jin, head of LG’s Home Appliance and Air Solution Company, who had been slated to represent LG at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show 2015 in Las Vegas.

Samsung earlier this year filed a lawsuit for property damages and defamation against Jo and four other LG Electronics executives after the IFA tradeshow in Berlin, Germany, claiming that the LG execs intentionally sabotaged the door hinges of one of its washing machines at an electronics store there. Samsung provided as evidence the damaged washing machine and CCTV footage allegedly showing Jo “willfully” damaging the appliance.

Who knew bathos could be so hilarious.

Xiaomi may adopt sapphire for covers of 5.7in smartphone >> Digitimes

China-based smartphone vendor Xiaomi Technology is likely to adopt sapphire for protective covers of Xiaomi 5, its 5.7-inch flagship model that will be showcased at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show, Taiwan-based supply chain makers cited industry sources in China as indicating.

Japan-based Kyocera in early 2014 launched smartphones with protective covers made from internally-produced sapphire in the US market through cooperation with Verizon Wireless, while China-based Vivo and Huawei Device also launched smartphones with sapphire covers, the sources said.

If Xiaomi decides to adopt sapphire, existing sapphire production capacity is not sufficient to meet the demand, according to sources with Taiwan-based sapphire wafer makers.

Even with Xiaomi’s smartphone volumes, this probably isn’t possible. Maybe a high-end model?

Why Sony’s breach matters >> Learning by Shipping

Steve Sinofsky, who (of course) used to be at Microsoft:

in late 1996, seemingly all at once everyone started opening Word documents to a mysterious alert like the one below.

This annoying but benign development was actually a virus. The Word Concept virus (technically a worm, which at the time was a big debate) was spreading wildly. It attached itself to an incredibly useful feature of Word called the AutoOpen macro. Basically Word had a snazzy macro language that could do anything automatically that you could do in Word just sitting in front typing (more on this later). AutoOpen allowed these macros to run as soon as you opened a document. You’d receive a document with Concept code in AutoOpen and upon opening the document it would infect the default (and incredibly useful) template Normal.dot and then from then on every document you opened or created was subsequently infected. When you mailed a document or placed it on a file server, everyone opening that document would become infected the same way. This mechanism would become very useful for future viruses.

Looking at this on the team we were rather consternated. Here was a core business use case. For example, AutoOpen would trigger all sorts of business processes such as creating a standard document with the right formats and metadata or checking for certain conditions in a document management system. These capabilities were key to Word winning in the marketplace. Yet clearly something had to be done.

And that was just the start of a long run of malware. But he thinks we’re better off now.

Google just had to spin the Sony hack >> The Illusion of More

David Newhoff on Google’s PR spin around the “Goliath” emails uncovered by the Sony hack, which he calls a Pavlovian bell-ringing for its meme of “internet freedom”:

It’s no secret that motion picture producers and Google have an ongoing dispute with regard to piracy of filmed entertainment, and I think it’s a safe bet both parties regularly consult with counsel regarding their own interests. As such, I personally think one of the more serious results of this leak is the rather dramatic breach of attorney/client privilege. I don’t think we want a society in which hackers can arbitrarily violate this fundamental right in our legal system. Apparently, though, Google’s Sr VP and General Counsel, Kent Walker, was unfazed by this implication — perhaps Google is hacker proof — when he was quoted in Variety saying, “We are deeply concerned about recent reports that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) led a secret, coordinated campaign to revive the failed SOPA legislation through other means.” And as of this week, Google has launched a campaign it calls Zombie SOPA. Ding-a-ling!

Walker is not speaking as an attorney, but rather as a PR guy, when he plays the word secret like that in order to imply a conspiracy, knowing full well that communications between clients and attorneys are almost always secret. But near the end of the article, he is also quoted plaintively wondering why champions of the First Amendment like the MPAA would “want to censor the Internet.” Hear them ring! Of course any discussion about legal remedies to mitigate piracy are tantamount to censorship, right?

Why Samsung is losing out to low cost rivals >> Jana Mobile

Samsung’s flagship Galaxy series is extremely popular among the emerging market smartphone users that make up mCent’s user base (eight of the top ten devices used to access the mCent app in November 2014 came from the Samsung Galaxy series). However, the Galaxy is likely to become less popular as lower-priced competitors enter the market. This is partly due to the total price of components and assembly for Galaxy devices, which have steadily risen in the face of prevailing market trends. If the current trend is sustained, manufacturing and component costs for a Samsung Galaxy [from 2010] will be higher than the global average selling price for a smartphone in 2015…

…In November 2014, Samsung accounted for 40% of sessions on the mCent app for Android. It has been the most popular smartphone brand among users in our markets since the launch of the mCent app in June 2014, yet its popularity has been waning. In the key markets of Brazil, Indonesia, and India, Motorola, Smartfren, and Micromax have become noticeably more popular. We expect this trend to continue into 2015.

With the caveat, however, that they’re talking about the flagship Galaxy phones, not the cheapo phones that it sells at rock-bottom prices.

Though this is becoming a story that everyone is telling: Samsung losing out to the low-cost rivals. Its earnings guidance for the fourth quarter will come out in early January.

Mathematicians have finally figured out how to tell correlation from causation >> Quartz

Zach Wener-Fligner:

determining causal relationships is really hard. But techniques outlined in a new paper promise to do just that. The basic intuition behind the method demonstrated by Prof. Joris Mooij of the University of Amsterdam and his co-authors is surprisingly simple: if one event influences another, then the random noise in the causing event will be reflected in the affected event.

For example, suppose we are trying to determine the relationship between the the amount of highway traffic, and the time it takes John to drive to work. Both John’s commute time and traffic on the highway will fluctuate somewhat randomly: sometimes John will hit the red light just around the corner, and lose five extra minutes; sometimes icy weather will slow down the roads.

But the key insight is that random fluctuation in traffic will affect John’s commute time, whereas random fluctuation in John’s commute time won’t affect the traffic.

Smart – watch for this to filter through into all sorts of everyday algorithms in the next few years.

Did North Korea really attack Sony? >> The Atlantic

Bruce Schneier:

Allan Friedman, a research scientist at George Washington University’s Cyber Security Policy Research Institute, told me that from a diplomatic perspective, it’s a smart strategy for the U.S. to be overconfident in assigning blame for the cyberattacks. Beyond the politics of this particular attack, the long-term U.S. interest is to discourage other nations from engaging in similar behavior. If the North Korean government continues denying its involvement no matter what the truth is, and the real attackers have gone underground, then the U.S. decision to claim omnipotent powers of attribution serves as a warning to others that they will get caught if they try something like this.

Sony also has a vested interest in the hack being the work of North Korea. The company is going to be on the receiving end of a dozen or more lawsuits—from employees, ex-employees, investors, partners, and so on. Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain opined that having this attack characterized as an act of terrorism or war, or the work of a foreign power, might earn the company some degree of immunity from these lawsuits.

I worry that this case echoes the “we have evidence — trust us” story that the Bush administration told in the run-up to the Iraq invasion.

Schneier is very sceptical of the US explanation. It’s noticeable how few security experts are on board with the US’s claims over this.

Start up: Google gets lyrical, Snapchat clone killing, the stolen smartphone business, and more

Posted on December 23, 2014 by charlesarthur

“Do you know Google’s getting into another content business?” “You hum it, I’ll play it”. Photo by guzzphoto on Flickr.

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

What did they say? Google including song lyrics in search results >> WSJ Digits blog

Google is trying to answer some of the world’s biggest questions. That list now includes: Wait, what did he just sing?

Song lyrics are now part of the increasingly robust packet of information Google shows in its search results, a move that threatens traffic to popular lyrics sites.

It’s unclear when Google started showing lyrics on the initial results people see when searching for, say, “Love Is Blindness lyrics.” (A TechCrunch article traces it to a post on a blog about SEO that points to this Google+ post from Dec. 19.) For now, the lyrics apply only to U.S. searches.

A Google spokewoman said, with apologies to Led Zeppelin we’re sure, “There’s a feeling you get when you turn to a song and you know that the words have two meanings. Well it’s whispered that now if you go search the tune, maybe Google will lead you to reason. Ooh, it makes you wonder.”

Makes you wonder if lyric sites are stuffed – as in, how can they make their businesses work now? How many content businesses is Google going to tramp into?

North Korea experiencing severe internet outages >> Associated Press

North Korea experienced sweeping and progressively worse internet outages extending into Monday, with one computer expert saying the country’s online access is “totally down.” The White House and the State Department declined to say whether the U.S. government was responsible.

That’s the internet in North Korea, home to 24m people, where the internet is available to.. nobody quite knows how many people.

Huge privacy flaw uncovered in mobile phone networks >> HOTforSecurity

Graham Cluley:

In the last year or so there’s been a lot of bad news about how intelligence agencies and hackers can exploit weaknesses in internet communications to snoop upon our conversations and private messages.

Indeed, such has been the avalanche of revelations that it’s not uncommon at all to hear security researchers advise you to turn off your phone’s WiFi, and communicate via regular calls vand SMS messages instead because of the 3G phone network’s built-in advanced encryption.

Well, there’s bad news folks…

Two German security researchers have uncovered what they claim are serious security flaws that could allow criminals and intelligence agencies to spy upon private phone calls and text messages transmitted via cellular networks.

Still, as long as it doesn’t interfere with our film release schedule, that’s OK.

2015: The Year of Android >> Rusty Rants

Russell Ivanovic of Shifty Jelly:

I don’t often make predictions, but I’m willing to make this one: 2015 is going to be a huge year for Android. I’m not talking about the Market Share Wars, I never cared for them and Android won them long ago. I have little interest in the Who Makes The Most Money Wars either, I’m often baffled as to why people even care. As a developer and user of mobile platforms I’m more interested in app profitability, quality and diversity. I think 2015 is going to be a huge one for Android in this regard. Don’t believe me, ok, allow me to walk you through why.

Let’s start off with a myth: “No one makes money on Android”. I hear that all the time. The irony of the fact that we make 80% of our daily income on Android doesn’t escape me as these people wax eloquent about how this is a well established fact

Shifty Jelly does nicely from a podcast app; but Apple offers a free podcast app, so it’s not surprising that he sees money from Android and not iOS.

Reading this, though, he doesn’t quite explain what will make 2015 the specific year, or how we’ll measure it. More that it’s not a bad place for developers to be – which those who are interested in it probably know already.

More subtly, Android’s expansion in 2015 is going to be in low-income countries. Total revenues will go up, but per-install revenues will probably fall – and mobile ad rates will fall in line with installation growth.

6 things I learned from riding in a Google Self-Driving Car >> The Oatmeal

Matthew Inman:

Riding in a self-driving car is not the white-knuckled, cybernetic thrill ride one might expect. The car drives like a person, and after a few minutes you forget that you’re being driven autonomously. You forget that a robot is differentiating cars from pedestrians from mopeds from raccoons. You forget that millions of photons are being fired from a laser and interpreting, processing, and reacting to the hand signals of a cyclist. You forget that instead of an organic brain, which has had millions of years to evolve the cognitive ability to fumble its way through a four-way stop, you’re being piloted by an artificial one, which was birthed in less than a decade.

The unfortunate part of something this transformative is the inevitable, ardent stupidity which is going to erupt from the general public. Even if in a few years self-driving cars are proven to be ten times safer than human-operated cars, all it’s going to take is one tragic accident and the public is going to lose their minds. There will be outrage. There will be politicizing. There will be hashtags.
It’s going to suck.

But I say to hell with the public. Let them spend their waking lives putt-putting around on a crowded interstate with all the other half-lucid orangutans on their cell phones.

The secret world of stolen smartphones, where business is booming >> Wired

Matthew Shaer:

A picture slowly emerged of a so-called credit-mule scheme, ingenious in its simplicity and impressive in its reach. Middlemen such as Shamshad were dispatched to seemingly random American cities, where they trolled homeless shelters and halfway houses, offering $100 to anyone who would buy, on their behalf, a few on-contract phones from a local electronics store.

Back in California, the contraband was handed off to Wen and Tan, who arranged to have the phones shipped to their contacts in Asia. The profit margin was enormous: In North America, wireless carriers typically subsidize the cost of our smartphones in order to lure us into multiyear voice and data contracts. To obtain a phone, in other words, we fork over a small fraction of the device’s actual market worth. Wen and Tan took advantage of the system by obtaining iPhones — through middlemen and mules — for $200 a pop, then selling them in China for close to $1,000.

Records obtained by the eCrime Unit indicate that in a single year, Wen mailed 111 parcels using his FedEx account. By the time the whole operation was brought down in March of 2013, he and his wife had become very wealthy, to the tune of close to $2.5m in annual income.

Terrific article, rich in detail and observation. The numbers implied in the insurance sums and the numbers is amazing.

From messaging apps to ecosystems : Line, WeChat, Viber & Others >> Counterpoint Technology

Neil Shah:

It is foolish to ignore the growing scale of these platforms which are growing in capabilities and are becoming ecosystems in themselves.

If we look at carefully these platforms are beginning to look identical and at some point in future will become a commonplace. However, the differences that will make them standout or survive in long run is their business model and their reach in terms of capabilities and user base.

These ambitious app based platforms are expanding their reach across multiple areas attracting users to spend more time communicating, shopping as well as consuming content. These are creating greater amount of stickiness and using their horizontal business model to scale and with presence on the major platforms from iOS to Android to Windows to target the complete pie of smart devices users.

Notably including Samsung ChatON (reckoned here to have 100m monthly active users), but not Apple’s iMessage – which probably has about 300m MAUs.

What happened when Marissa Mayer tried to be Steve Jobs >> NYTimes.com

Nicholas Carlson (in an extract from his forthcoming book on Yahoo:

Previous Yahoo C.E.O.s had underinvested in mobile-app development, plowing money into advertising technology and web tools instead. A couple of days into the job, Mayer was having lunch at URL’s when an employee walked up to her and introduced himself as Tony. “I’m a mobile engineer,” Tony said. “I’m on the mobile team.”

Mayer responded to Tony, “Great, how big is our mobile team?” After some back and forth, Tony replied that there were “maybe 60” engineers. Mayer was dumbfounded. Facebook, for instance, had a couple of thousand people working on mobile. When she queried the engineering management department, it responded that Yahoo had roughly 100. “Like an actual hundred,” Mayer responded, “or like 60 rounded up to 100 to make me feel better?” The department responded that it was more like 60.

Companies like Facebook and Google are known for their fast-paced product updates. Yahoo, by contrast, was sluggish. Yahoo Mail, with its 30 billion emails a day, was arguably the company’s most important product. But despite the decline in desktop email use, Yahoo hadn’t built mail apps for smartphones. It had simply made the Yahoo Mail website usable on smaller mobile screens.

Although we know how the story turns out, it seems like this is going to be a book worth reading. (There are all sorts of pieces you could pull out of this article. Yahoo has been such a mess for so long.)

Microsoft removes all third-party Snapchat apps from the Windows Phone store >> TechCrunch

Jon Russell:

The ban on third parties may not last for too long, however. We know that Snapchat is working on building a mobile messaging platform, and that could mean that it finally releases an official API to allow third parties to connect to its service while providing increased protection for user privacy.

That said, the company recently introduced video advertising so keeping its service free of third party apps on all devices gives it absolute control over targeting its user base with ads, thus potentially maximizing its value to advertisers.

None of this means much for Snapchat fans on Windows Phone, who have never had an official app and now don’t even have unofficial ones. Such are the problems of being a ‘third’ platform in today’s iOS-Android dominated world.

I recall Stephen Elop at Nokia in mid-2013 pointing to a Snapchat-compatible app as evidence of how things were improving. (It’s worth looking back at to see how things haven’t changed for Windows Phone in those 18 or so months.) Wonder if this clearout was some sort of precondition by Snapchat before it would build a first-party app.

Start up: Samsung ChatON going off, USB apps for iPad, the ‘uncanny valley’ for algorithms, Sony hack history, and more

Posted on December 22, 2014 by charlesarthur

Bitcoin mining: significantly lower health and safety risk than other forms.

A selection of 10 links for you. Wipe off excess. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Apple, is USB allowed now? >> Medium

Matt Ronge, pointing to Duet Display, which lets you use an iPad (via Lightning) as an extra screen for a Mac running 10.9 or better:

For the past year, we’ve been working on an app (launching early 2015) that turns your iPad into a graphic tablet for your Mac (like a Wacom tablet). Our app at its core also streams video content from the Mac to the iPad, so we were very interested in USB connectivity early on in our project.

We knew that using USB instead of Wifi was a decision we had to make early on, as it would completely change our direction of development. USB offers a reliable, low latency connection which is 100x better than any wireless technology (especially with Yosemite experiencing serious Wifi reliability issues).

We were also very hesitant to build a business around a decision Apple may change on a whim. So we submitted an app to test the waters, would Apple allow an app that requires USB? An Apple representative called us and informed us USB connectivity was not allowed.

Duet Display looks like it could be fun, though one usually wants a bigger display – but if you had an 11in Macbook Air, a full-size iPad would almost double your screen size, and improve the resolution a lot.

Our tactics for Gamergate are outdated >> Space Channel 6

Brianna Wu:

For me, personally, I intend to keep lessening the amount I’m posting and writing about Gamergate. Everyone knows they are very sexist, very unhealthy individuals. Thanks to my Patreon, GSX’s full time staffer will document this behavior for law enforcement leaving me free to speak out for change in the industry and make inclusive games.

My suggestion to people rightly outraged about this movement, is to ask yourself what you currently want to accomplish. It’s my suggestion that it would be most helpful to shift the conversation back to representation in the industry. I think the gains in raising awareness of Gamergate have diminished, while the threat of giving the lunatic fringe the attention they desire has stayed the same.

To be blunt, I’m not sure endlessly talking about Gamergate does anything anymore.

I’m not sure it did past the second month. Idiots enjoy being idiots, and won’t be dissuaded from that track.

Topsy suggests a gradual dimunition in the number of tweets on this topic from 50,000 to 20,000 over the past month (and bear in mind that the obsessives tweet many, many times per day).

BuildZoom office burglary – $5000 reward – update!! >> BuildZoom

David Petersen of BuildZoom, from which equipment was stolen:

After our story was covered on ABC 7 News, we were contacted by a nearby startup that was burglarized on July 6th and July 13th. Comparing footage, it’s clear that the same person broke into both offices.

Update 2: It appears that this woman is breaking into SF startups with a Doorking / DKS code entry system. She has obtained a master key and is able to enter any office with this system.

Update 3: We believe we have identified the burglar. It’s a local San Francisco woman who has been convicted of similar crimes in the past. An acquaintance of hers emailed with photographs and additional information. It certainly looks like her.

Someone with a master key for office doors in SF? That’s a problem.

Facebook’s popularity among teens dips again >> Bloomberg

A report yesterday by Frank N. Magid Associates Inc. found that the portion of 13- to 17-year-old social-media users in the U.S. on Facebook slipped to 88% this year from 94% in 2013 and 95% in 2012. In the same period, Twitter and messaging applications rose in popularity in that age group, the study showed.

The Menlo Park, California-based company first warned a year ago that teens weren’t using its website as often as before. Facebook stopped discussing teen usage on its earnings calls after last year’s disclosure alarmed investors. While the issue was all but forgotten as the company’s advertising revenue reached new highs, it’s a bigger concern now, according to Tero Kuittinen, a managing director at Magid in New York.

“You look at Facebook and you say, ‘Wow, something really changed in 2014,’” Kuittinen said. “If kids are starting to use so much of their daily time on messaging apps, surely it’s going to hurt somebody.”

Among 13- to 17 year-olds, Twitter usage climbed 2 percentage points to 48%, according to the report. While more people use Facebook and its messaging app than any competitor, its user base tends to be older, with 55% of Facebook Messenger users being 37 or younger. By the same measure, 86% of Snapchat Inc.’s users and 83% of Kik Interactive Inc.’s users are under 37.

Seems reasonable to think that messaging apps are pulling teens away from Facebook.

2015: the year we get creeped out by algorithms >> Nieman Journalism Lab

Zeynep Tufekci:

It turns out computers have a built-in “uncanny valley” (that creepy feeling android robots generate when they kind of look human). Just like we don’t want robots too human-shaped — we want them to know their place — it turns out we aren’t too happy when our computers go from “smart” (as in automating things and connecting us to each other or information) to “smart” (as in “let me make that decision for you”).

Algorithmic judgment is the uncanny valley of computing.

Algorithms (basically computer programs, but here I’m talking about the complex subset that is being used to calculate results of some consequence, which then shape our experience) have become more visible in 2014, and it turns out we’re creeped out.

Tufekci is super-smart, and always ahead of the curve.

htmlwidgets: JavaScript data visualization for R >> RStudio Blog

Today we’re excited to announce htmlwidgets, a new framework that brings the best of JavaScript data visualization libraries to R. There are already several packages that take advantage of the framework (leaflet, dygraphs, networkD3, DataTables, and rthreejs) with hopefully many more to come.

An htmlwidget works just like an R plot except it produces an interactive web visualization. A line or two of R code is all it takes to produce a D3 graphic or Leaflet map. Widgets can be used at the R console as well as embedded in R Markdown reports and Shiny web applications.

This looks terrific (if you’re into R.)

Bitcoin’s collapse is worse than the ruble’s >> Quartz

Matt Phillips & Melvin Backman:

Why the collapse in bitcoin? One of the clearest answers seems to be that it’s gotten harder to use bitcoin for some of its less savory uses, such as dodging taxes and buying drugs. Governments increasingly are trying to clamp down on the “dark web” sites where bitcoin quickly was the cryptocurrency of choice. Collapses of large, unregulated bitcoin exchanges — such as Mt. Gox — have done little to instill confidence in the currency either.

Mt Gox was a key reason for the start of the collapse. Yet the nearer Bitcoin gets to its 2011/12 levels, and the more people are using it (thus ironing out the speculative element), the more it looks like a really useful product. The implications of the blockchain are fascinating.

Absolute Sownage >> Attrition.org

Over the last two months, the multi-national Sony Corporation has come under a wide range of attacks from an even wider range of attackers. The backstory about what event prompted who to attack and why will make a mediocre made-for-TV movie someday. This article is not going to cover the brief history of hacks; readers can find details elsewhere. Instead, the following only serves to create an accurate and comprehensive timeline regarding the recent breaches, a cliff notes summary for easy reference.

Starts in April 2011, by the end of which we were up to 21. Current count: 24.

Why the sharing economy could be the internet’s most divisive revolution yet >> The Guardian

By me, on the “sharing economy” companies such as Uber and AirBnB:

what would happen if an Airbnb guest was harmed by fire, or a carbon monoxide leak – a constant concern for hotels. Airbnb’s site says owners “should” make sure they have a functioning CO detector and are following gas safety regulations. But although the money for any stay is paid via Airbnb, Robinson says he doesn’t know who would be responsible if someone were injured that way.

“I’m not a lawyer,” says [Patrick] Robinson [AirBnbB’s public policy director in Europe]. It seems surprising that the eventuality hasn’t come up in business meetings, but Robinson declines to discuss it.

It’s a scenario that has exercised insurance companies, which are wrestling with the question of who is liable in a collision involving a car being driven on an Uber journey, or one of the other car rental services, or a complaint involving Airbnb clients. Premiums might rise, or need extra tweaking.

I still find it surprising if AirBnB hasn’t discussed – and even worked out a plan – for the eventuality of poisoning or death at one of its lets, given that it receives the payments for them.

Samsung says ‘cya’ to ChatON smartphone messaging app >> WSJ

Samsung is closing ChatON, for which it claims a “user base” of over 200m users. To which everyone else says: O RLY? And they used it so much you’re closing it?

“Samsung’s failure in messaging apps is endemic of a broader struggle for the company in software and services,” said Rajeev Chand, managing director at Rutberg & Co., a San Francisco-based investment bank that focuses on the mobile industry.

Mr. Chand said he was puzzled by Samsung’s inability to parlay its massive handset sales into at least some traction in software and services, calling it “the defining issue for the company’s long-term success.”

“If they don’t succeed in apps and software, Samsung has a very large risk of being relegated to an increasingly shrinking-margin company,” he said, referring to the recent gains that low-cost Chinese and Indian competitors have made in handset sales in recent months.

Add in this from April:

Strategy Analytics, a Newton, Mass.-based research firm, said in a report Tuesday that U.S. users of Samsung’s devices spend little time on its own messaging, music and voice-activated applications including apps like ChatON, the South Korean company’s answer to services like WhatsApp, Line and Viber.

The report said that U.S. users of Samsung’s Galaxy S3 and S4 smartphones logged an average of six seconds per month using ChatON, compared to more than 11 hours per month on Facebook and about two hours per month on Instagram.

Six. Seconds. This is Samsung’s problem, writ large (or small). By contrast, Apple failed with Ping – but that was a social media app built on top of iTunes, itself a successful Apple-owned platform; iTunes remained. Samsung is left with nothing.

And it was always reluctant to give any hard numbers about ChatON. The irony is that ChatON is going to remain open for slightly longer in the US – apparently that’s one of the busier places.

Even more fun: at the end of November, Samsung categorically denied that it was going to close ChatON. Denials, eh?

Corrected: the author of the Gamergate post is Brianna Wu, not Anita Sarkeesian. Apologies, and thanks to Ron Hayter.

Start up: so who did hack Sony? Apple on Pay, Pegatron workers, BlackBerry’s phone timing, and more

Posted on December 19, 2014 by charlesarthur

“Hey, from here you can see the posters for The Interview coming down!” Photo of Pyongyang, North Korea, by orangetruck1 on Flickr. (Searching Flickr for CC-licensed photos of “North Korea” yields some strangely anodyne pictures from “North Korea travel”.)

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

Why the Sony hack is unlikely to be the work of North Korea >> Marc’s Security Ramblings

Marc Rogers, with the only piece you need to read on the Sony hack, making 10 points (a couple excerpted here):

It’s clear from the hard-coded paths and passwords in the malware that whoever wrote it had extensive knowledge of Sony’s internal architecture and access to key passwords. While it’s plausible that an attacker could have built up this knowledge over time and then used it to make the malware, Occam’s razor suggests the simpler explanation of an insider. It also fits with the pure revenge tact that this started out as.

4. Whoever did this is in it for revenge. The info and access they had could have easily been used to cash out, yet, instead, they are making every effort to burn Sony down. Just think what they could have done with passwords to all of Sony’s financial accounts? With the competitive intelligence in their business documents? From simple theft, to the sale of intellectual property, or even extortion – the attackers had many ways to become rich. Yet, instead, they chose to dump the data, rendering it useless. Likewise, I find it hard to believe that a “Nation State” which lives by propaganda would be so willing to just throw away such an unprecedented level of access to the beating heart of Hollywood itself.

5. The attackers only latched onto “The Interview” after the media did – the film was never mentioned by GOP right at the start of their campaign.

CNN was reporting on Thursday night that (unnamed) hackers stole a sysadmin’s credentials to get access to the company’s system. That fits with everything we know, though that’s not unknown for hackers who aren’t nation states; it’s been used by external hackers trying to get into companies for ages. What doesn’t fit a nation state attack is what Rogers points to in No.4: if North Korea wanted, it could ruin Sony silently.

What still puzzles me is why US sources are indicating that they think it is North Korea. Perhaps I’m too disbelieving it would do something weird like this.

Apple Pay will change marketing, not just payments >> Business Insider

If you think Apple Pay is only about payments, you’re not alone. UBS recently noted that Apple Pay (unlike Google Wallet) doesn’t let you “push” offers to people, and speculated that flaw would keep some merchants away from the platform.

[CEO of Vibes, Jack] Philbin disagrees because Apple already has a way for merchants to push these offers: Passbook.

“The marketing is done through Passbook,” said Philbin. “Apple Pay is just the payment functionality.”

Passbook has been around since 2012. What’s changed is that iPhone users are paying a lot more attention to their mobile wallets now that there’s an easy way to pay for things from their phones as well.

Vibes’ clients — which include retailers like Gap, The Home Depot, and Bloomingdales— saw a 54% increase in people installing coupons or loyalty cards into Passbook from September to October, which Philbin attributes to the introduction of Apple Pay.

Apple ‘failing to protect Chinese factory workers’ >> BBC News

Filming on an iPhone 6 production line showed Apple’s promises to protect workers were routinely broken. It found standards on workers’ hours, ID cards, dormitories, work meetings and juvenile workers were being breached at the Pegatron factories.

Apple said it strongly disagreed with the programme’s conclusions. Exhausted workers were filmed falling asleep on their 12-hour shifts at the Pegatron factories on the outskirts of Shanghai.

One undercover reporter, working in a factory making parts for Apple computers, had to work 18 days in a row despite repeated requests for a day off. Another reporter, whose longest shift was 16 hours, said: “Every time I got back to the dormitories, I wouldn’t want to move.

“Even if I was hungry I wouldn’t want to get up to eat. I just wanted to lie down and rest. I was unable to sleep at night because of the stress.”

Apple declined to be interviewed for the programme but said “”We are aware of no other company doing as much as Apple to ensure fair and safe working conditions.We work with suppliers to address shortfalls, and we see continuous and significant improvement, but we know our work is never done.”

Pegatron’s Wikipedia entry doesn’t say who else it makes things for. Its corporate social responsibility report for 2013 (PDF) says “‘Joyful Working; Happy Living’ is Pegatron Group’s caring philosophy to employees.” Some employees, perhaps.

Former Apple supplier Wintek shutters China plants >> FT.com

Taiwanese group Wintek, formerly a major supplier of touchscreens for Apple’s iPhone and iPad, has shuttered two plants in southern China and axed 7,000 jobs, leaving unpaid suppliers to chase debts of Rmb230m ($37m).

Armed police surrounded the plants in the city of Dongguan as workers collected their final pay this week, while suppliers demonstrated in front of the factories.

The company sought insolvency protection in October, filing in Taiwan for a restructuring of more than NT30bn ($961m) in debts owed to both local and mainland lenders and suppliers.

The move to in-panel technology with the iPhone 5 didn’t go Wintek’s way; now it’s laying off thousands of staff and may go bust. Keeping up with Apple’s demands is tough.

Stop the presses! >> Counternotions

Kontra, on the dire “reporting” of the (untrue) suggestion by the replacement plaintiff’s lawyers that Apple had deleted songs on peoples’ iPods (it hadn’t):

Yes, journalism isn’t exact science, but from epidemiology to space exploration, from technology reporting to business coverage, the sheer amount of fact-free, opinion-framing ‘news’ is now exceeding our collective ability to notice, care or correct. Yes, journalism has always been messy, but the speed with which it’s generated, aggregated and distributed may now be overwhelming us. Yes, we have ever growing access to filtering software to shape our own sphere of coverage, and yet tens of millions of people read, and likely most believed, that Apple had deliberately and secretly deleted competitors’ songs from users’ iPods, an impression which may never be sufficiently corrected.

All people needed to do was say “Apple deleted songs, court told” and they’d have been factually correct, even if the claim is bunkum.

Sony Pictures employees now working in an office “from ten years ago” >> TechCrunch

John Biggs:

She works for Sony Pictures. She said she’s now working in an office on lock-down, a throw-back to an earlier time when the Internet wasn’t around.

“We are stuck in 1992 over here,” she said.

She requested anonymity but agreed to talk a bit about her day-to-day experience as a Sony Pictures Employee post-hack. She said things were getting back to normal and were, in some ways, more pleasant.

But the thing that bothers her most is the need to depend on old technology to do new work, now.

“We had barely working email and no voicemail so people talked to each other. Some people had to send faxes. They were dragging old printers out of storage to cut checks,” she said. “It was crazy.”

…“My bank account was hacked [on the day of the first attack,]” said our source who works at SPE offices in Los Angeles. “At first we just thought it was total coincidence.”

Now she suspects someone found something in the email dump that allowed them to access her accounts.

Smart journalism from Biggs.

Why the BlackBerry Classic is critical to the new BlackBerry >> CNET

Roger Cheng:

CEO John Chen made a few remarks, then pulled out the Classic for a photo opportunity. But as the presentation went on, it was clear whom the company was targeting: the IT guy working in a highly regulated business.

The conversation dashed past the typical walkthrough of the Classic’s features, spending a healthy chunk of time on the phone’s enterprise software capabilities and looping in guests like the chief information officer for Citco Fund Services, the founder of Niederhoffer Capital Management and the chief operating officer of Ontario-based Mackenzie Richmond Hill Hospital.

It’s a far cry from Alicia Keys, the pop music sensation BlackBerry once played up as its “global creative director.”

The timing of this launch fascinates me: two days before BlackBerry announces its quarterly results. Look back to September, and BlackBerry launched the Passport on 24 September – two days before it announced (not great) results.

And yes, BlackBerry’s quarterly results are today (Friday) at 1300GMT. Analyst forecasts are for $936m in revenue (a fall against the year-ago period) and a 5c per share loss. Perhaps we’ll hear how many Passports were sold, and whether it has a future.

Different relationships with their phones: iPhone versus Android >> The Network Garden

Mark Sigal did some user testing:

in the new app that we are building, one question in user testing was how important having a desktop web version of the functionality would be.

Get this, 90% of the Android users thought it was pretty important, most commonly because the test user saw the PC as the central part of their computing experience — even though the app is for a highly mobile type of action.

By contrast, 90% of the iPhone users looked cockeyed at the question, noting that the action is designed for palm in the hand, on the go types of behaviors, adding (I’m paraphrasing) that their iPhone is their hub, not the PC.

Same questions. Same product feature for feature; a variety of young to middle age males and females, and the only difference is iPhone versus Android.

His blog is worth reading more generally.

Nokia publishes maps on your iPhone, leaves Lumia in the shadows >> IT Vikko

This is a link to the Google Translation of this page (the headline is from the Bing translation, but it doesn’t have a static URL):

Nokia is not planning to upgrade in the near future the Here Maps application for Lumia phones. “When Nokia made handsets, we were a little different. Now, we are developing application on the basis of a realistic markets.”

Ouch. Harsh divorce; the parent doesn’t want to see its child any more.

Start up: smartphone epochs, UK buyers slow on tablets, OnePlus faces India patent suit, Uber redux, and more

Posted on December 18, 2014 by charlesarthur

Ahh – a Nokia smartphone. Photo by David Roessli on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Slippery when wet. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The Innovator’s Stopwatch. Part 2 >> Asymco

Horace Dediu:

As diffusion proceeds through each adopter category, the product is re-positioned to address each group’s presumed behavior. Innovators (first 2.5% of the population) are offered novelty, a chance to experiment and uniqueness of experience; early adopters are offered a chance to create or enhance their position of social leadership; the early majority build imitate the leadership of the early adopters and justify it with productivity gains; the late majority are skeptics but, given a set of specific benefits, join the earlier adopters. Finally the laggards reluctantly agree to adopt as their preferred alternative of not adopting disappears.

The theory suggests that a firm can be successful if they modify their marketing and perhaps product mix to accommodate these adopter categories in a timely manner.

If this is the case however, why is it that those who have access to these data (i.e. who is buying and when) not to do the right thing?

Really you have to read it for the graphs, showing the rise and fall of Palm/WinMob, Nokia, Samsung (projected), and the rise of China and India. But what about Apple?

Mobile Innovation: we need to get past the App Store duopoly >> Continuations

Albert Wenger, of VC firm Union Square Ventures:

Many people have pointed to the amazing commerce integrations in WeChat in China as an example of what can be done. What fewer have said though is that China does not have an app store duopoly. So WeChat has been free to innovate on commerce without having to live in the confines of what Apple or Google deem appropriate (and hence not in conflict with their own ambitions). As far as I can tell Chinese smartphones work just fine and any claim that centralized app stores are required for security or quality control is simply a pretense for wanting to extract more economics. The price of Chinese phones also does away with the claim that cross subsidization is required for adoption or phone innovation.

I thought USV was sure that Android was going to be the only app store anyone would need. Now it isn’t? Also, why not just go HTML5, as some of the commenters suggest?

Huawei, with 30,000 patents in China, is preparing to sue Xiaomi >> Patently Apple

local first-generation smartphone manufacturer rivals in China such as Huawei and ZTE are now going after Xiaomi where they know they’re weak: Patents. With Ericsson’s success against Xiaomi in India, both Chinese rivals are now racing to file lawsuits.

A Korean report tapping into industry sources stated that earlier this week Huawei and ZTE were known to be preparing to sue Xiaomi, OPPO, and Bubugao for infringement of their patent rights.

Earlier, Huawei and ZTE sent out a warning letter to these companies asking them to stop infringing on their patents and pay legitimate royalties. However, as they did not respond, Huawei and ZTE decided to take legal action against them.

An industry source added that “It was confirmed that China’s second-generation smartphone manufacturers had been violating four to five patents related to communications technology, including WCDMA, which is used in 3G mobile communications.”

Huawei and ZTE are strong patent holders, collecting more than 70 percent of relevant royalties in China’s mobile phone market. Huawei has nearly 30,000 of the 39,000 mobile phone patents in China. It has also registered 7,000 patents this year alone.

Oh dear, it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.

OnePlus has been ordered to stop selling the OnePlus One in India after legal action by Micromax >> Android Police

Ryan Whitwan:

Micromax—which plans to launch its YU brand with Cyanogen soon—has gone to the Delhi High Court to allege OnePlus is infringing on its exclusive licensing of Cyanogen OS. The court agreed, and now OnePlus is barred from selling, marketing, or even importing its devices in India. Additionally, the company is not permitted to ship any device in India that bears the Cyanogen logo or branding even after it gets the OS situation worked out.

As we recently discussed, OnePlus says it was only notified of the exclusive agreement between Micromax and Cyanogen two weeks before the OPO was to launch in India. It plans to have a custom ROM of its own ready by February, with a beta release sooner. However, the devices shipping in India right now still have CyanogenMod installed. They won’t get official support or updates, but apparently that’s not good enough for Micromax.

Dixons Carphone shines but we’re not taking the tablets >> London Evening Standard

Computer tablets have failed to capture the [UK] consumer’s imagination this Christmas — they were tipped to be the biggest festival seller but sales have actually fallen, according to the boss of Dixons Carphone.

Seb James, chief executive of the newly merged phone and electricals retailer, suggested most people already had one and a technology shift was needed before people buy new versions.

His comments come as the company, created from a merger of the Currys, PC World parent and Carphone Warehouse, reported its first set of half-year results since the deal this year.

Sales rose 5% to £5.02bn in the six months to beginning of November. However, the company made a £20m loss before tax, thanks to the £100m spent on the merger — lawyer and banker fees alone amounted to about £11m.

Wonder what form a “technology shift” would need to take to get people buying a new round of tablets.

Uber: Exec accessed reporter’s private trip info because she was late >> Naked Security

Lisa Vaas:

In a letter to Senator Al Franken, Uber says it accessed a reporter’s account because “She was 30 minutes late” to a meeting and an executive wanted to know when she’d show up so he could meet her in the lobby.

And flash his iPhone at her. And tell her that he was tracking her, according to a report from The Guardian.

In fact, Uber New York General Manager Josh Mohrer reportedly poked at BuzzFeed reporter Johana Bhuiyan’s personal data twice, on both occasions tracking her movements without her permission.

As an excuse, it’s lame. As a reason, it’s also lame. That hasn’t stopped Uber’s general counsel saying in the letter that it has a “strong culture of protecting [passenger] information.” Except when it doesn’t, clearly.

And as Franken pointed out in response, the letter doesn’t answer his questions – viz, what “legitimate” business purposes are for accessing customer data inside Uber.

Smartphone Comparison Chart >>Gnod

Interactive, and covering pretty much everything available in the US. Helpful if you are a specification freak; otherwise, more of a curio, though one on which you could waste an easy half an hour.

Shifting Freebase over to Wikidata >> Freebase on Google+

When we publicly launched Freebase back in 2007, we thought of it as a “Wikipedia for structured data.” So it shouldn’t be surprising that we’ve been closely watching the Wikimedia Foundation’s project Wikidata[1] since it launched about two years ago. We believe strongly in a robust community-driven effort to collect and curate structured knowledge about the world, but we now think we can serve that goal best by supporting Wikidata – they’re growing fast, have an active community, and are better-suited to lead an open collaborative knowledge base.

So we’ve decided to help transfer the data in Freebase to Wikidata, and in mid-2015 we’ll wind down the Freebase service as a standalone project. Freebase has also supported developer access to the data, so before we retire it, we’ll launch a new API for entity search powered by Google’s Knowledge Graph.

Google bought MetaWeb in 2010; this move, giving the responsibility to the crowd, suggests either that upkeep was too expensive, or that Google has found better ways to do it internally.

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