A selection of 12 links for you. Use them wisely. Comments are open (but moderateable).

Acting on Facebook Referral, FTC Gets Federal Court to Shut Down Scam Support Outfit Pairsys – AllFacebook

Acting on a referral from Facebook, the Federal Trade Commission announced Friday that at the commission’s request, a federal court shut down the operations of Pairsys, an Albany, N.Y.-based company that coerced computer users into paying hundreds of dollars apiece for unnecessary technical support and software that was available free-of-charge.

According to the FTC, Pairsys employees cold-called computer users and posed as representatives of Facebook or Google, and the company was also behind online ads that indicated that its phone number was the technical support number for legitimate companies in the industry.

Damn. The Indian “Windows virus” variant was bad enough; now it’s metastatized to the US and UK.

Apple Pay Reality – accepting payments >> Quora

Brian Roemmele:

80% of the US transaction payment card volume comes from 150,000 merchant locations. These are the largest retailers in the US.

If we subtract the MCX members like WalMart and Target we are left with just over 60% of the top 150,000 top volume merchant locations accepting Apple Pay. This number is increasing rapidly as 250,000 medium sized merchant and the 5.5m small merchants join the Apple Pay rocket ride. This group has increased demand for NFC devices by over 3,000%. These merchants are rapidly adding these free upgrades to their existing payment card devices at such a record pace that supplies that were going to be sent to Europe are now being sent to the US. I see no slow down to this demand.

CurrentC User Terms and Conditions >> MCX

So much to choose from here. What about
– no “jailbroken” devices (might rule out some Android fans)
– you have to create a CurrentC account (obviously) for which “you will be asked to provide your name and certain other personal information, which may include, but not be limited to, name, email address, date of birth, and social security number. In addition, you will be asked to provide MCX with your Payment Method account information (such as bank account or other financial account information) necessary to originate, process and settle your payment transactions with participating MCX Merchants.” Though it says in the privacy policy that it doesn’t store those.
– “You grant MCX express written consent to receiving autodialed and prerecorded message calls, text messages or push notification alerts from MCX, or those Third Party Services providers acting on MCX’s behalf, at any mobile telephone number you provide to MCX, regardless of your registration of your mobile device number on any state or federal “do not call” registry. Your express, written permission applies to messages and alerts regarding the MCX payment transaction Services and any optional Services you have elected to receive.”

The privacy policy is amazing too: collects system activity; hardware settings; date and time; location; IP address; and then “may share or disclose” to merchants, third-party providers involved in providing the services, and so on.

It’s quite creepy. And giving a merchant organisation direct access to your bank account? You’d hope US consumers have seen enough examples of hackers breaking into retailers not to go for that.

How crowdsourcing turned on me >> Nautilus

Iyad Rahwan had taken part in a number of Darpa challenges, and succeeded using crowdsourcing. When it came to putting back virtual shredded documents using a crowd, all was going well – until a troll hit and scattered their work:

In our post-mortem analysis, Cebrian and I revealed how the crowd recovered efficiently from its own errors, fixing 86% of them in under 10 minutes. However, the crowd was hopeless against a determined attacker. Before the first attack, our progress on the fourth puzzle had combined 39,299 moves by 342 users over more than 38 hours. Destroying all this progress required just 416 moves by one attacker in about an hour. In other words, creation took 100 times as many moves and about 40 times longer than destruction. [Emphasis added.]

First place was taken by a team of three using custom-designed software. They were far less vulnerable to invasion than we were with our oh-so-open platform. A few days after the contest had ended, our attacker emailed Cebrian from an anonymous address, admitting that he or she belonged to a competing group. They claimed to have recruited individuals through…

Guess which notorious site they recruited them through.

Malicious ads on major websites held users’ files to ransom >> Engadget

A widespread attack has exposed millions to malware that holds files to ransom. The campaign, which was first detected a month ago, placed fake adverts on websites such as Yahoo, AOL and The Atlantic that installed so-called “ransomware” onto a victim’s computer. The attackers stole assets from the likes of Case Logic, Bing and Fancy in order to make the malicious ads appear real, but once a computer becomes infected, things get very bad, very fast, for victims.

The ransomware – named CryptoWall 2.0 – uses Adobe Flash to exploit browser vulnerabilities, installing itself on the affected computer.

Two avenues: malvertising, and Flash. Advertising is always going to be a risk; Flash, though, you can do something about. Like removing it. You don’t have it on your phone, after all.

Mobile in China — the year of the looking glass >> Medium

Julie Zhuo:

The strangest thing about iPhone usage in China was how most people had accessibility mode turned on. In other words, a persistent tab was always covering some part of the screen, though you could move it around along the edge. I wasn’t aware this feature even existed, but apparently you can use it to avoid having to use the power and home buttons. Baffled, I asked my cousin why this option was so commonly turned on. She said it was because people were concerned about their home button malfunctioning (apparently it’s enough of a meme that multiple people I talked to cited this reason) and as repairs are expensive they’ve resorted to not using the hardware buttons altogether.

I’ve seen this too (in Dubai) and the reason given was the same. (Personally, I’ve used lots of iPhones and never had a home button fault, but if repairs are expensive..) The Accessibility function is in Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> (scrolllll dowwwwnnn) AssistiveTouch -> (turn it on).

Plenty more to digest (not Apple-related) about the world’s biggest smartphone market, China, in this great post.

Facebook offers life raft, but publishers are wary >> NYTimes.com

David Carr on Facebook’s suggestion to publishers that they just publish stuff directly into Facebook itself, and do a revenue split on the adverts shown there:

It reminds me very much of those times when other digital behemoths tried to persuade content providers into letting them host the publishers’ content. In the early days, when AOL was dominant, the service preyed on the publishers’ fear that if they didn’t put their content inside the walled garden of AOL, their content would be invisible. That strategy benefited AOL in the short run, but no one prospered in the long run.

And I remember a visit to Google when Sergey Brin, a founder of the company, and some of his colleagues talked about how clunky most news web pages were — sound familiar? — and offered to host content with quicker load times and a revenue share. That went nowhere fast.

Once companies reach a certain scale online, they have a tendency to decide that while they love the Internet, they would like a better version. And, oh, by the way, they should run it. (All considered, Apple has already pulled off that trick, creating a private enclave of apps that it controls.)

Introducing Fire TV stick >> Amazon Media Room: Press Releases

Apart from “DUAL-CORE 1GB RAM 8GB STORAGE DUAL-BAND DUAL ANTENNA” (none of which will mean anything to the average person; Amazon is clearly aiming at the geek buyer who goes for the Chromecast), I found this interesting, about the inclusion of a remote control:

Customers have told us they want to use a remote control, not just their phones, to watch TV. Now, everyone in the household can watch movies and TV shows without borrowing your phone—use the included remote to easily navigate and discover movies, TV shows, apps, and games.

The impossibility of killing the remote control is one of those factors about internet TV that makes it so hard to do well.

Apple’s iPhone 6 Sales outpace Samsung Galaxy Note 4 in South Korea >> Chinatopix

The three South Korean carriers all reported strong sales, with the end result after one day being more than 500,000.

Compare this to the Galaxy Note 4’s 30,000 sales at the same time point, it is clear why some analysts are pointing to Apple’s final push into South Korea, after years of being shrugged off by the country, in favour of their own homegrown brands.

KT were the first carrier to start selling the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, reporting 10,000 sales in 1 minute and 50,000 sales in 30 minutes. SK Telecom, the largest carrier in South Korea, gave even more praise to the early sales of the iPhone.

This is not good news for Samsung, which can normally rely on the Galaxy smartphones to come up big in South Korea. The Galaxy S5 was shunned in South Korea, in favor of the LG G3, which outsold Samsung’s flagship 3 to 1 for most of the year.

Did not know that about the G3. LG has really shown how to turn a phone business around.

Meanwhile, the Note’s apparently slow sales have to be seen in context: Samsung has been selling them since 2011, so you’d guess that anyone who wants one likely has one already.

Even so, likely to be a few high fives about this in Cupertino.

Leaked Rite Aid docs say Apple Pay may never come >> SlashGear

Here is the text of the alleged internal memo:

Please note that we do not accept Apple Pay at this time. However we are currently working with a group of large retailers to develop a mobile wallet that allows for mobile payments attached to credit cards and bank accounts directly from a smart phone. We expect to have this feature available in the first half of 2015.

If customers attempt to pay for a transaction with Apple Pay, a message will prompt both customer and cashier for a different form of payment. Please instruct cashiers to apologize to the customer and explain that we do not currently accept Apple Pay, but will have our own mobile wallet next year.

This is going to fail, not because Apple Pay is somehow magical, but because hackers will target the woeful security of CurrentC (ugh, the name) – which uses QR codes and insists on direct access to the customer’s current (not credit) account, and stores customer details.

It’s hard to believe that there’s been a real security audit of CurrentC. Perhaps they’ll publish it.

Why I don’t trust copypaste >> Securinti

I was talking to a good old friend when I accidentally hit ctrl-v instead of ctrl-c. Normally, this would be no big deal: I’d immediately notice my mistake and correct it. My friend wouldn’t notice anything.

But things went different this time. I was working on a photoshop project earlier that day. The data stored in my clipboard was not clear text, but an image. Facebook seems to treat images in a different way: it sends them right away, without having the need to press enter or “send”. Long story short: I sent my friend some image data from a project I’ve been working on. Not a big deal, or is it?

It is.

Why @Evleaks is giving up reporting phone scoops >> The Next Web

Evan Blass (aka phone leaker Evleaks)

These matters are always somewhat complicated, but like many things, it mostly comes down to money. Trying to monetize a stream of Twitter leaks is not easy. First I tried monthly sponsorships. Then weekly. Then single sponsored tweets. I took donations — felt like online panhandling.

I also started a website, and it’s actually done somewhat respectably, but with all the leaks going out on Twitter anyway, people have little incentive to visit, and most of my tech-savvy-heavy audience seem to be pretty heavy ad-block users, as well. It all adds up to an unsustainable living, and with a progressively worsening disease [Ed; Blass was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis], I need to make sure I can prepare myself better for the future, financially.

Best wishes for a lasting treatment for his MS.

A selection of 7 links for you. Use them wisely.

96pc of web users ‘opt to see porn’ — Telegraph

Rhiannon Williams:

The vast majority of broadband customers are choosing not to opt in to porn filters that prevent access to adult content, despite Prime Minister David Cameron’s insistence they are vital to protect “our children and their innocence”.

Only 4% of new Virgin Media customers have signed up to the parental controls, alongside 5% of BT and 8% of Sky newcomers, according to a new report by Ofcom
.
In the second of three reports examining the approaches the ‘big four’ internet service providers (ISP) are taking to implement the filters, Ofcom found that TalkTalk’s take-up rate was 36%, having offered parental filtering services since May 2011, two years prior to the government initiative.

Filed under “government initiatives that were successful in providing a choice that people completely ignored.”

Amazon Fire Phone review — The Verge

David Pierce:

The Kindle Paperwhite is what the Fire Phone should be, a device perfectly suited to its task with subtle improvements lurking behind every corner. And who knows? Maybe in seven more years we’ll have the smartphone equivalent. But this Fire Phone is more like that first Kindle: a device with so many features, so many ideas, that it has either forgotten or ignored what it’s supposed to be for. Dynamic Perspective and Firefly are impressive technological achievements with bright futures (if by some miracle Amazon can get its developers on board), and the Fire Phone is a remarkably efficient shopping machine. But it’s not a very good smartphone.

Nod ring lets you control gadgets with a wave of the hand >> Gadget Lab — WIRED

The stainless-steel ring is packed with motion sensors, a Bluetooth 4.0 antenna, and a pair of processors. According to Nod co-founder and CEO Anush Elangovan, the ring uses a Bluetooth Low Energy connection for all its needs; early prototypes of the ring included tests for NFC and Wi-Fi Direct chips, but those were too power-hungry and big.

Because of Bluetooth 4.0’s energy-efficiency, the Nod ring is able to squeeze an entire day’s worth of battery life out of a mere 23-mAh battery–essentially a rechargeable watch battery. The ring can also connect to Wi-Fi-controlled devices by using a smartphone as a Bluetooth gateway. Nod says the ring is designed to be worn all day–you can wear it while you’re in the shower or taking a swim, just as long as you don’t go below 170 feet.

It was sounding so good until it got to the bit about “entire day”. That should not be the horizon for a wearable’s battery life.

Now you can unlock your Moto X with a digital tattoo — The Official Motorola Blog

Made of super thin, flexible materials, based on VivaLnk’s eSkinTM technology, each digital tattoo is designed to unlock your phone with just a touch of your Moto X to the tattoo, no passwords required. The nickel-sized tattoo is adhesive, lasts for five days, and is made to stay on through showering, swimming, and vigorous activities like jogging. And it’s beautiful—with a shimmering, intricate design.

It’s another step in making it easier to unlock your phone on the go and keep your personal information safe. An average user takes 2.3 seconds to unlock their phone and does this about 39 times a day—a process that some people find so inconvenient that they do not lock their phones at all. Using NFC technology, digital tattoos make it faster to safely unlock your phone anywhere without having to enter a password. 

So much more convenient than those “fingerprint” things. Those only stay all the.. oh wait.

Chrome’s been eating your laptop’s battery for years, but Google promises to fix it — PCWorld

Google is just now responding to a bug in Chrome for Windows that may have been sapping users’ batteries for years.

Chrome’s battery drain problem was brought to wider attention by Forbes contributor Ian Morris, who noticed that Chrome for Windows was using considerably more power than other browsers.

The issue, he wrote, is that Chrome doesn’t return the system’s processor to an idle state when it’s not doing anything. Instead, Chrome sets a high “system clock tick rate” of 1 millisecond, and leaves it at that rate, even if the browser’s just running the background.

By comparison, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer only ramps up the tick rate for processor-intensive tasks such as YouTube, and otherwise returns it to the default rate of 15.625 milliseconds. According to Microsoft, setting the tick rate consistently at 1 millisecond can raise power consumption by up to 25% depending on your hardware configuration.

This bug wouldn’t be too surprising if it was introduced in a recent update. But according to Morris, the first report of it popped up in 2010, and a more recent bug report in Chromium has been racking up new comments since November 2012.

World domination first, bugfixes second. Quitting Chrome is definitely an easy way to gain battery life.

Google, Roboto and Design PR — Subtraction.com

Khoi Vinh:

There’s essentially no news in this article other than, “Google has revised Roboto using some recent best practices of type design.” And yet the Mountain View company has been able to spin that non-story into a story that claims that the company is fundamentally reinventing typography. I’ve seen the same publicity gears at work again and again over the past year, whether it’s about material design, Google’s card metaphor usage, their maps redesign, or even the narrative of how the company is integrating design itself.

The idea that Google actually is fundamentally reinventing typography has been thoroughly debunked elsewhere. So it’s an effective piece of PR.

The Nokia Lumia 1020 reaches End of Life status on September 14th. — Evleaks

As in “Microsoft’s Mobile Devices division won’t be making any more”, not “the existing devices won’t be supported”. The 1020 didn’t sell – the camera is fantastic, but people who want a fantastic camera buy a DSLR. People who want a smartphone, well, for the most part they aren’t buying a Lumia if they can afford what the 1020 cost.

A selection of five links for you. Use them wisely.

There’s life above 20 kilohertz! A survey of musical instrument spectra to 102.4 kHz — Caltech

Trumpets and even violins make noises well above hearing range, and if you have the right equipment then people can tell a difference in playback. Maybe Neil Young is right after all?

Intel beats estimates, raises forecast on improved PC market — Re/code

Chipmaker Intel said on Tuesday that an improved PC market helped it to deliver quarterly earnings that exceeded its initial estimates. The company also hiked its full-year sales outlook.

Intel reported second-quarter earnings of $2.8bn, or 55 cents per share, on sales of $13.8bn for the three months ending in June.

The company raised its expectations last month, saying it expected sales to be about $13.7bn, up from its original April forecast of $13bn. At the time, the company said that the improved health of the business PC market was largely responsible for the improved outlook.

OK, so the business PC market – in line with business generally – is up. But part of the driver of that business PC market growth has been the end of life of Windows XP – launched in October 2001. Vista was released in 2005, so there’s a long time to wait for the same uplift.

Oh, but there’s also this:

After essentially missing out on the early days of the tablet, Intel has set an ambitious goal of powering 40m tablets this year, the bulk of them likely to run Android. The company also sees a growing business in selling laptops running Google’s Chrome OS.

Intel’s mobile unit, though, posted quarterly revenue of $51m, down 83% year on year and off 67% from the first quarter. (CEO Brian Krzanich said in a statement that Intel remains on track to hit that goal.)

Mobile is barely a pimple on Intel.

And here’s another thing: try finding any correlation between Intel’s revenues in its PC Client group (which is separated out from its Data Center group, Internet of Things group, Mobile, and Software & Services revenue) and worldwide PC shipments, either in the same quarter or for the succeeding quarter.

You won’t find it. It’s about 0.33 – where perfect correlation is 1, and “it’s random, man” is 0. Given that Intel provides the processors for the PC business, you’d expect to see it hovering at least around 0.75.

But the “PC Client group” revenues are both microprocessors, and “motherboards and other chips” – where the latter seems to inject enough variability (read: noise) into the data that it overwhelms the signal.

Digital Generation Gap — Tech.pinions

Bob O’Donnell on a study of 2,500 people from around the world; this takes in about 1,000 respondents in the US and UK:

As expected, the younger you are, the more you use your smartphone. The older you are, the more you use your PC. The degree of differences between age groups and the nearly perfect tracking with age was somewhat surprising however. Of course some of this has to do with using the devices we are most comfortable with. Younger people have grown up with smartphones and older people grew up using PCs. However, there’s also a difference in the type of activities and the amount of time spent on them between the different groups. Some of the activities older people do are arguably better suited to PCs and vice versa.

A big unanswered question is, how will this chart look in 5 years? Will the 18-24 year olds maintain this split of device usage as they age into the 25-34 group (and so on), or will their likely shifting of activities as they get older adjust their device usage? (Of course, there’s also the strong possibility we’ll have more device categories to add to the mix in 5 years, but that’s a topic for another column.)

This is part of why commenters get so grumpy when you talk about a shift away from PCs towards smartphones and tablets: they’re all on PCs.

Apple and IBM forge global partnership to transform enterprise mobility — Yahoo Finance

The new IBM MobileFirst for iOS solutions will be built in an exclusive collaboration that draws on the distinct strengths of each company: IBM’s big data and analytics capabilities, with the power of more than 100,000 IBM industry and domain consultants and software developers behind it, fused with Apple’s legendary consumer experience, hardware and software integration and developer platform. The combination will create apps that can transform specific aspects of how businesses and employees work using iPhone and iPad, allowing companies to achieve new levels of efficiency, effectiveness and customer satisfaction—faster and easier than ever before.

As part of the exclusive IBM MobileFirst for iOS agreement, IBM will also sell iPhones and iPads with the industry-specific solutions to business clients worldwide.

Well that might goose iPad sales a little. It’s all in the execution, of course. You can see two scenarios: IBM executes this incredibly well, and Microsoft and Android devices find themselves effectively locked out of the enterprise market for tablets and phones.

Or IBM screws it up, and it’s all just the same as it was before.

One could expect it will be somewhere in the middle – which still isn’t good for Microsoft and Android OEMs. Nor, indeed, BlackBerry.

Top 10 smartphones in May 2014 – Galaxy S5 fails to displace iPhone 5s — Counterpoint Technology

According to Counterpoint’s channel survey across 35 countries, Apple’s iPhone 5s continues to be the bestselling phone in the world, a spot that many expected to be taken by Samsung’s Galaxy S 5. The highly anticipated Galaxy S5 comes in at second place but still a quite distant number two in terms of (sell through) unit sales. The iPhone 5c shipments continue to decline but Apple continued clearing excess inventory for the iPhone 5c during the month. Apple iPhone 5c sales put it behing Samsung’s last year’s flagship Galaxy S4 and Galaxy Note III.

The top ten goes
Apple (5S)
Samsung (S5)
Samsung (S4)
Samsung (Note 3)
Apple (5C)
Apple (4S)
Xiaomi (M3)
Samsung (Galaxy S4 mini – a cut down version of last year’s flagship)
Xiaomi (Hongmi Redrice)
Samsung (Galaxy Grand 2 – a 2013 phablet, lower-priced, 5.25in screen).

The key point is that the iPhone 5S is doing the same numbers that the iPhone 5 was last year. Now, that might not be encouraging – that’s stalled growth, right?

But Samsung is selling fewer S5s than it was selling S4s last year. That suggests that the premium market for Apple is still staying the same, while that for Samsung is falling away. Or did it overshoot the market in terms of features it provided with the S3 or S4?