Maybe we’re going to do this one for real this time? CC-licensed photo by Gervasio Varela on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. That’s the way, uh-huh. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Shameless promo: have you listened to The Human and Machine podcast? It’s a co-presentation by Julia Hobsbawm (of Editorial Intelligence) and myself. We’ve spoken about autopilots, the 737 Max and the implications for self-driving cars with Alex Hern of the Guardian and Dr Jack Stilgoe of University College London.
And coming soon: an episode looking at racism and the internet.

YouTube CEO apologizes to LGBTQ community after outcry • The Verge

Julia Alexander:

»

[YouTube CEO Susan] Wojcicki was pressed about her apology [at Code Conference in Arizona] by Axios’ Ina Fried, who asked the CEO to further expand on her apology.

“I’m really, personally very sorry,” Wojcicki said. “YouTube has always been a home of so many LGBTQ creators, and that’s why it was so emotional. Even though it was a hard decision, it was harder that it came from us — because it was such an important home. And even though we made this decision, we have so many people from the LGBTQ community. We’ve always wanted to openly support this community. As a company we really want to support this community.

“It’s just from a policy standpoint we need to be consistent — if we took down that content, there would be so much other content that we need to take down.”

Everything comes down to context, according to the CEO. Wojcicki said that context is important in deciding when to take action against a channel. For example, rap videos and late night shows often contain words or content that could be considered harmful. Contextually, those videos are fine. It’s the same defense that Crowder and his supporters, both creators and fans, have used, too.

«

As Fried pointed out, this wasn’t a “sorry we did that” apology; it was a “sorry you felt offended” apology, which is a classic non-apology (it’s not “sorry for what we did”, it’s “sorry about how you react”). As for “if we took down that content, there would be so much other content we’d need to take down”: in the words of Twitter personality Darth, “and what’s the down side?”
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How Dropbox is finally breaking free of the folder • Fast Company

Harry McCracken:

»

What’s most intriguing are the new Dropbox’s collaborative features—many of which the service probably couldn’t have shoehorned into File Explorer or Finder, at least in a way that many people would want to use. The existing menu that pops out from Windows’ tray and MacOS’s menu bar doesn’t look much different, but it’s been retooled to show the files that your colleagues are sharing, editing, and commenting upon: “It’s not just about your sync activity or files that you’ve edited, but what’s going on with everyone in your group,” explains Adam Nash, Dropbox’s VP of product. The menu also offers newly sophisticated search, similar to that in the web version, that plumbs the content of files rather than just scanning their names.

Every folder sports a shared scratchpad-like area that lets you type free-form text, numbered or bulleted lists, and to-do items, as well as reference colleagues by their Dropbox @names, giving you the ability to do anything from write a brief description of a folder’s contents to assign tasks to colleagues, who are represented as a row of avatars whom you can discuss items with in comments that show up in the right-hand pane. “The folder feels richer, more like a lightweight project,” says Nash.

With the new Dropbox, the service is taking the wraps off integrations that let you share items via Slack channels and direct messages or in a Zoom meeting. The company is also announcing a new collaboration with Atlassian, maker of such collaboration tools as Jira and Trello. Details on that partnership are yet to announced.

«

Every feature expands to become an app; every app expands to include collaboration and messaging. Then a new feature arises which strips out most of those apps’ functions. Dropbox is presently on the second part of this cycle.
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For sale: Have I Been Pwned • Gizmodo

Jennings Brown:

»

In a blog post, [security researcher Troy] Hunt explained the reasons for his decisions and hopes for the future of the platform.

“It’s time to go from that one guy doing what he can in his available time to a better-resourced and better-funded structure that’s able to do way more than what I ever could on my own,” Hunt wrote.

The blog states that HIBP now has almost 3 million subscribers for notifications, and the platform can now check about eight billion breached records. According to Hunt the site usually gets around 150,000 unique visits on a typical day, and 10 million unique visits on an “abnormal day.”

Troy wrote that traffic spiked in January when he broke the news of the behemoth “Collection #1” breach that exposed 773 million emails and 21 million passwords. Since then, the site has continued to grow and Hunt has come to the realization he “was getting very close to burn-out.”

Now he’s ready to hand much of the workload off. Hunt said he is laying the groundwork for acquisition and has had some early talks with organizations who may be interested in acquiring HIBP.

«

One possible buyer is, apparently, Mozilla; wonder if they’ll try to monetise it if they do purchase it. HIBP is good if you care about data breaches, but since Hunt started it in December 2013, they’ve gone from being a bit unusual to being completely quotidien. It’s almost a surprise if you have an email address that hasn’t been revealed in a breach at some point.
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Facebook will once again pay users to install an app that tracks their app usage • CNBC

Salvador Rodriguez:

»

Facebook on Tuesday announced a new app that will let the company collect data on how people use their smartphones in exchange for money.

The new app is called Study, and it is designed to give Facebook data on what apps participants install, how much time they spend on those apps, what features they use on those apps, what country they’re in, and type of device and network they’re using.

Facebook has a long history of using apps to collect information about usage habits in order to improve its own products.

In 2013, Facebook bought a free security app called Onavo, which let users access a virtual private network, or VPN, to browse the web and download apps with a greater degree of privacy. Facebook used data from Onavo to gather broad information about which apps were popular and how people were using them, which it used to improve its own products, but claims it did not collect information about individual users.

However, Facebook pulled the app from the App Store in 2018 after Apple reportedly told the company that it violated rules then-new rules about user privacy.

«

Meet the new app, same as the old app (but with Apple’s blessing this time).
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Apple has capacity to make all iPhones for US outside of China • Bloomberg

Debby Wu:

»

Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn, is the American giant’s most important manufacturing partner. It will fully support Apple if it needs to adjust its production as the U.S.-Chinese trade spat gets grimmer and more unpredictable, board nominee and semiconductor division chief Young Liu told an investor briefing in Taipei on Tuesday.

“Twenty-five% of our production capacity is outside of China and we can help Apple respond to its needs in the U.S. market,” said Liu, adding that investments are now being made in India for Apple. “We have enough capacity to meet Apple’s demand.”

Apple shares were up more than 1% to $194.99 in New York on Tuesday.

Apple has not given Hon Hai instructions to move production out of China, but it is capable of moving lines elsewhere according to customers’ needs, Liu added. The company will respond swiftly and rely on localized manufacturing in response to the trade war, just as it foresaw the need to build a base in the US state of Wisconsin two years ago, he said.

«

It was all going so well until that mention of Wisconsin.
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Gravity ‘anomaly’ at Moon’s south pole could be buried metallic asteroid • Extreme Tech

Ryan Whitwam:

»

The leading explanation for the gravitational anomaly, according to the researchers, is that the object responsible for the crater is still mostly intact beneath the surface. So, some 4 billion years ago, a mostly metallic asteroid hit the moon and remains embedded in the mantle to this day. Another potential explanation is that the region is naturally rich in oxides that formed as the moon cooled in the distant past. However, the overlap of the crater and increased gravity seems a bit too convenient.

If there is a large metallic object buried under the South Pole-Aitken basin, it could tell us something about the moon’s interior. After four billion years, the iron-nickel remains of the asteroid would have been dispersed throughout the mantle if the moon was geologically active for any significant period of time.

«

Ooooh is it a radio-opaque obelisk with proportions of 1:4:9? Looking forward to the expedition visiting it.
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Worldwide all-in-one (AIO) PC shipments to drop further in 2019 • Digitimes

Betty Shyu:

»

Because of the US-China trade tensions and Intel’s ongoing CPU shortages, worldwide all-in-one (AIO) PC shipments are expected to shrink 5% on year to arrive at only 12.8 million units in 2019, a weaker performance than expected previously, according to Digitimes Research’s figures.

All-in-one (AIO) PCs will account for 12.6% of overall desktop shipments in 2019, Digitimes Research’s numbers showed.

Of the top-4 AIO PC brands, the top-2 brands – Apple and Lenovo – will see sharper shipment declines than others in 2019, while third-place Hewlett-Packard (HP) and foruth-place Dell will both see stead performances.

«

12.8m in a year is about 3.2m per quarter on average. Assume that the top two have 40% of that market, and that that splits 25-15. That would mean Apple is selling 0.8m iMacs per quarter. A tiny fraction will be iMac Pros. And then consider how big the market for the Mac Pro is: likely smaller than for the iMac Pro (because you’d only want the Mac Pro if the iMac Pro didn’t do it for you). So much effort, so few buyers.
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Massive Ebola outbreak spreads across DRC border, infected five-year-old in Uganda • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

»

Health officials in Uganda have confirmed the country’s first case of Ebola stemming from a massive outbreak that has been raging across the border in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since August of 2018.

The World Health Organization reported Tuesday, June 11, that the case is in a five-year-old boy from the DRC who traveled with his family into Uganda on June 9. The boy’s case was confirmed by the Uganda Virus Institute (UVRI), and he’s receiving care in the Ebola Treatment Unit in the western Ugandan town of Bwera, which sits at the border with DRC.

Health officials have feared the spread of the virus, which has festered in DRC’s North Kivu and Ituri provinces for nearly a year. The provinces sit on the eastern side of the country, bordering South Sudan, Uganda, and Rwanda. As of June 9, the WHO reports 2,062 cases (1,968 confirmed and 94 probable), including 1,390 deaths (1,296 confirmed and 94 probable) in the outbreak. It is the second largest Ebola outbreak on record, surpassed only by the 2014 West African outbreak, which involved more than 28,000 cases and 11,000 deaths.

«

Current existential risks to civilisation: climate emergency, asteroid strike, nuclear confrontation/accident.. and pandemic. Quite a lot of scientists worry about the latter one because it would only have to affect a tiny percentage of the population to have a dramatic effect on social order.
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Facebook turned off search features used to catch war criminals, child predators, and other bad actors • Buzzfeed News

Craig Silverman:

»

In August 2017, the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for [Libyan military commander Mahmoud Mustafa Busayf al-Werfalli] for allegedly participating in or ordering the execution of 33 people in Benghazi, Libya. At the core of the evidence against him are seven videos, some of which were found on Facebook, that allegedly show Werfalli committing crimes. His case marked the first time the ICC issued a warrant based largely on material gathered from social media.

Now that kind of work is being put in jeopardy, according to Koenig, executive director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley. She said Facebook’s recent decision to turn off the features in its graph search product could be a “disaster” for human rights research.

“To make it even more difficult for human rights actors and war crimes investigators to search that site—right as they’re realizing the utility of the rich trove of information being shared online for documenting abuses—is a potential disaster for the human rights and war crimes community,” she said. “We need Facebook to be working with us and making access to such information easier, not more difficult.”

Simply put, Facebook graph search is a way to receive an answer to a specific query on Facebook, such as “people in Nebraska who like Metallica.” Using graph search, it’s possible to find public — and only public — content that’s not easily accessed via keyword searches.

Late last week, Facebook turned off several features that have long been accessible via graph search, such as the ability to find public videos that a specific Facebook user was tagged in.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Smile! Hackers want to know you’re happy. CC-licensed photo by Delta News Hub on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Buy shares in balaclavas. (Or baclava, why be fussy.) I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

US Customs and Border Protection says photos of travelers were taken in a data breach • The Washington Post

Drew Harwell and Geoffrey Fowler:

»

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials said Monday that photos of travelers had been compromised as part of a “malicious cyber-attack,” raising concerns over how federal officials’ expanding surveillance efforts could imperil Americans’ privacy.

Customs officials said in a statement Monday that the images, which included photos of people’s license plates, had been compromised as part of an attack on a federal subcontractor.

The agency maintains a database including passport and visa photos that is used at airports as part of an agency facial-recognition program. CBP declined to say what images were stolen or how many people were affected.

But CBP makes extensive use of cameras and video recordings at the arrival halls of international airports as well as land border crossings, where vehicle license plates are also captured.

A CBP statement said none of the image data had been identified “on the Dark Web or Internet.” But reporters at The Register, a British technology news site, reported late last month that a large haul of breached data from the firm Perceptics was being offered as a free download on the dark web.

«

A malicious cyberattack rather than an accidental cyberattack? These things are always going to be catnip to a certain group – apparently, in this case, professionals seeking to sell the data. (Though you’d expect this to be amateurs offering it so it can be validated as stolen; or state actors doing the same.)

Suddenly makes it hard to argue that this data should be retained, though.
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Monopsony, not monopoly, is the tech industry’s biggest threat • Fast Company

Glenn Fleishman:

»

The flip side of monopoly, a monopsony results when one company is the sole buyer of a given product or service, including contract and employee labor. Like a monopoly, a monopsony can also result in higher prices and stagnating wages.

The paradox of the digital economy is that certain monopsonies have kept prices low. Logically, you would think that companies that have enormous power to flex would reap the highest profit they can. But we’re in an odd market moment, one that seemingly can’t last. Competition may drive prices down, but companies can’t infinitely squeeze vendors or sell below cost forever. At some point, suppliers balk or go under, or monopsonists crack as their business models prove unsustainable – or courts order changes. Is the end nigh?

Digital economy upstarts – even those 20-plus years old – may face avid competition for what they offer. Amazon isn’t the only company that can sell you any given book – thousands can. In a reader comment on an article at Deadline in 2014 about an Amazon/Hachette pricing dispute, Ward Anderson wrote, “Amazon sells about 50% of the books in North America. And the books it does not sell are readily available elsewhere. That’s not a monopoly.”

Similarly, you can opt to take a Lyft or a taxi instead of an Uber. And hotels, motels, and even Craigslist room rentals compete with AirBnb.

Yet regulators, consumers, and skeptics have feared that tech giants might exercise a de facto monopoly because they drown out other options through attention and convenience. In a monopoly scenario, prices would rise. So far, however, across a wide swath of products and services, they’ve remained low, and many large firms are known to price below cost, or are at least suspected of doing so. This can be illegal under the Sherman Act if this behavior is found to be predatory, as in a 1993 case Walmart lost. Such outcomes are rare, though. The FTC tuts-tuts at the notion of low prices being problematic these days, so long as they are not specifically designed to create a monopoly and raise prices.

«

In a sense, what we (as users) see as monopolies are what those on the other side see as monopsonies. Websites don’t have much choice about optimising for Google; it’s important to be on that first page of search results. Uber drivers, Lyft drivers, do they have a choice? Amazon has shown its power as a monopsony over book publishers a number of times. Perhaps the internet makes it easier for them to arise.
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Looking for free speech in Russia? Try YouTube • The New York Times

Neil MacFarquhar:

»

“The entire social, political part of television is controlled by the authorities,” said Leonid G. Parfenov, an independent news anchor who has been shut out of state TV since 2004 for being too critical of the government. “For that reason, you cannot consider this television journalism — it is just propaganda, they are just employees of the presidential administration.”

Yet voices that the government would mute are heard regularly by tens of millions of Russians in another format: YouTube.

For more freewheeling opinions and commentary — particularly from those critical of President Vladimir V. Putin — YouTube has become the leading way to reach Russian audiences. In particular, it is challenging — if not supplanting — state TV as a source of information for the young…

Free-speech advocates fear that Russia will try to follow the Chinese model of heavy state internet censorship, and the Kremlin has taken initial steps in that direction.

But some critics say that the main threat to Russian YouTube stems from its own success. New money, shows and advertisers are pushing aside the homespun channels that have made it an important outlet, threatening to marginalize serious content, especially politics.

«

Irony that the social network that Russia can’t manipulate is the one that manipulates it back. And of course the recommendation algorithm will take viewers off down rabbit holes…
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Personal details of 23m drivers given out by DVLA • The Times

Graeme Paton:

»

The information watchdog is to hold an inquiry after the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency released the personal details of a record 23 million vehicle owners last year.

The Times has learnt that an unprecedented 63,600 records a day were handed to third parties including bailiffs and private investigators, often allowing motorists to be aggressively pursued for parking and toll road fines.

The DVLA charged organisations to obtain almost 7.8 million records, suggesting that it made £19.4m from the release of the data of almost two thirds of all vehicle owners in the UK.

Motoring groups called for an independent inquiry amid questions over how a data release on this scale could be properly policed, particularly in light of the rigorous new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) introduced across Europe last year.

There are fears that not all organisations that obtained the vehicle records did so legitimately, nor put them to a proper use.

«

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Digital giants face tax setback after G20 agreement • Financial Times

Robin Harding:

»

Digital companies such as Facebook and Google will soon have to pay taxes regardless of their physical presence or measured profits in a country after G20 finance ministers agreed to accelerate a radical shake-up of cross-border corporate tax.

In a communiqué issued after their meeting in Fukuoka, Japan, finance ministers from the world’s largest economies said they aimed to agree on new rules “by 2020”. But there are still big differences to resolve, with the US, home to most of the world’s digital giants, opposed to rules that treat digital companies differently to others.

The proposals will lead to higher tax bills for some of the world’s most valuable companies and transform the basic tenets of international tax for a world where economic value comes from flows of ideas and data rather than physical goods.

“We have a new economic model based on digital activities and based on the sale and exchange and use of massive data,” said Bruno Le Maire, the French finance minister. “For the time being there is no fair taxation of this new economic model.”

«

Hard to figure out what the communique is saying, to be honest. But it’s surely a good move.
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AI deepfakes are now as simple as typing whatever you want your subject to say • The Verge

James Vincent:

»

In the latest example of deepfake technology, researchers have shown off new software that uses machine learning to let users edit the text transcript of a video to add, delete, or change the words coming right out of somebody’s mouth.

The work was done by scientists from Stanford University, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Princeton University, and Adobe Research, and shows that our ability to edit what people say in videos and create realistic fakes is becoming easier every day.

You can see a number of examples of the system’s output, including an edited version of a famous quotation from Apocalypse Now, with the line “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” changed to “I love the smell of french toast in the morning.”

This work is just at the research stage right now and isn’t available as consumer software, but it probably won’t be long until similar services go public. Adobe, for example, has already shared details on prototype software named VoCo, which lets users edit recordings of speech as easily as a picture, and which was used in this research.

«

What do we think, a year? Less?
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Google rewards reputable reporting, not left-wing politics • The Economist

»

To test for favouritism, The Economist ran an experiment, comparing a news site’s share of search results with a statistical prediction based on its output, reach and accuracy.

We first wrote a program to obtain Google results for any keyword. Using a browser with no history, in a politically centrist part of Kansas, we searched for 31 terms for each day in 2018, yielding 175,000 links.

Next, we built a model to predict each site’s share of the links Google produces for each keyword, based on the premise that search results should reflect accuracy and audience size, as Google claims. We started with each outlet’s popularity on social media and, using data from Meltwater, a media-tracking firm, how often they covered each topic. We also used accuracy ratings from fact-checking websites, tallies of Pulitzer prizes and results from a poll by YouGov about Americans’ trust in 37 sources.

If Google favoured liberals, left-wing sites would appear more often than our model predicted, and right-wing ones less. We saw no such trend. Overall, centre-left sites like the New York Times got the most links—but only about as many as our model suggested. Fox News beat its modest expectations. Because most far-right outlets had bad trust scores, they got few search results. But so did Daily Kos, a far-left site.

Our study does not prove Google is impartial. In theory, Google could serve unbiased links only to users without a browsing history. If fact-checkers and Pulitzer voters are partisan, our model will be too.

«

Not surprising, but good to have The Economist do the legwork.
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When will the climate emergency make the earth too hot for humans? • NY Mag

David Wallace-Wells:

»

Since 1980, the planet has experienced a 50-fold increase in the number of places experiencing dangerous or extreme heat; a bigger increase is to come. The five warmest summers in Europe since 1500 have all occurred since 2002, and soon, the IPCC warns, simply being outdoors that time of year will be unhealthy for much of the globe.

Even if we meet the Paris goals of two degrees warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015.

At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer.

At six, according to an assessment focused only on effects within the U.S. from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the country east of the Rockies would be under more heat stress than anyone, anywhere, in the world today.

As Joseph Romm has put it in his authoritative primer Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know, heat stress in New York City would exceed that of present-day Bahrain, one of the planet’s hottest spots, and the temperature in Bahrain “would induce hyperthermia in even sleeping humans.” The high-end IPCC estimate, remember, is two degrees warmer still.

«

As he also points out, every mass extinction apart from that of the dinosaurs in the Earth’s history has been caused by greenhouse gas warming.
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iOS 13 shows a map of where apps have been tracking you • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

As you can see in the screenshots above, iOS 13 presents popup notifications when an app is using your location in the background. The notification also shows a map of the location data a specific app has tracked. The above screenshots show location data tracked by the Tesla app as well as the Apple Store app.

In addition to showing the map, the notification also presents the app’s reasoning for needing background location access. This is Tesla’s explanation:

»

Tesla uses your location to show your proximity to your vehicle (while the app is open), and to optimize phone key on your support vehicles (while the app is in the background).

«

And the explanation for the Apple Store app:

»

We’ll provide you with relevant products, features, and services depending on where you are.

«

…Ideally, the new pop-up reminder notifications with map will make users more aware of how often apps are tracking them in the background. In certain instances, always allowing location access makes more sense – such as Tesla – but the developer explanations will have to convince users of that.

«

Nice idea. It’s probably going to freak app developers out.
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The battle in Israel to build an unhackable phone • FT

Mehul Srivastava:

»

The Intactphone is used by senior UN officials, heads of states and, in one country the company will not name, by a national prosecutor whose predecessor was hacked.

Its cost ranges anywhere from a few thousand dollars to the millions. The most expensive set-up includes privately hosted servers that generate the ephemeral encryption keys that lock each individual communication into a sealed vault, and dozens of phones distributed among government officials.

The company saw a boost after the Israel Innovation Authority took a stake and helped market the technology abroad, especially in the US and in Mexico. Now it is developing a commercial version, that will run on a custom-built phone designed to mimic the look of a normal smartphone. That would allow people to carry a secure phone without drawing attention.

“In the first few years we have had the product battle-test by some very high-tech customers — intelligence agencies, governments,” said Mr Sasson. “Now we are going wider.”

The battle lines are oddly concentrated in Israel, where NSO and Communitake are part of an industry that includes companies like Cellebrite, recently valued at $600m, which unlocks encrypted smartphones for governments, and Verint Systems, the $3.7bn cyber surveillance company that has hundreds of engineers in Israel working on software used by the FBI and European law enforcement.

They thrive on graduates of the Israeli army’s surveillance units, including Unit 8200, the signals intelligence and decryption division from which Eran Karpen, Communitake’s chief operating officer, hails. And they also benefit from Israel’s reputation for world-beating cyber surveillance, and the mystique of its intelligence agencies, especially in the Middle East.

For smaller companies like Communitake, that is a key asset.

«

I’m a little wary of this story, because there’s no external validation of its claims. Which governments have bought it? Why hasn’t everyone bought it? There are plenty of claims, but actual empirical proof is much harder to come by.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The way for modern men to stay in touch? Games voice chat systems. CC-licensed photo by Carlota Maura on Flickr.

A selection of 11 links for you. Yeah, another week. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

For men who hate talking on the phone, games keep friendships alive • Kotaku

Cecilia D’Anastasio:

»

[Eddie] Gill, a physician from Hingham, MA, is 30 years old—around the age when, according to an oft-cited study by Royal Society Open Science, the number of friendships the average man maintains dramatically declines. He is not a phone guy. He’ll talk to his mom, or his grandparents. Other than that, he finds keeping in touch with friends and family to be as difficult as chasing around his seven-month-old, or working with his patients. Like others his age, Gill says that his close friendships from high school and college have atrophied, not only because of the distance but because of their mutual aversion to talking on the phone.

“The absolute exception,” said Gill, “are the friends I regularly play games with.”

Put Eddie Gill and one of his friends on the phone, and it would be painful for both parties—stilted conversation, awkward silences, brusque goodbyes. But drop them into a game of Apex Legends and the conversation flows freely.

Over Xbox voice chat, Gill gabs with his buddies about the latest Game of Thrones episode, their favorite NFL teams and, sometimes, their personal lives. When his wife was pregnant, he told his friends over a game of Destiny 2. Like over two dozen other people Kotaku spoke to—the vast majority of whom were men—Gill says online gaming has replaced phone calls, and even real-life meetups. It’s cemented male relationships that might otherwise have evaporated.

“I don’t think I would be as close with these guys if we didn’t hang out online the way we do,” Gill says of his childhood friends with whom he plays Apex Legends. “It would be impossible.”

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Such a great piece of observation.
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Dutch news aggregate website Blendle ditches pay-per-article service • DutchNews.nl

»

Dutch digital news aggregator Blendle is to stop selling individual news articles for ‘quarters’ and will focus instead on its premium subscription service.

Blendle launched in 2014 as an online news platform that collected articles from a variety of newspapers and magazines and sold them on a pay-per-article basis.

In 2017 the company launched its premium service which provides readers with pre-selected article suggestions and magazine access for €10 a month.

‘Nine in 10 start-ups are dead within a year, but we are still around five years on,’ Klopping is quoted as saying in the AD. ‘I lead a team of 50, we have 60,000 subscribers and 100,000 people who pay per article. But I have to be honest. We are still not making a profit.’

«

Hard to see this surviving in the face of Apple News(+).
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Is Heshmat Alavi, writer on Iran, a fake run by MEK opposition? • The Intercept

Murtaza Hussain:

»

In 2018, president Donald Trump was seeking to jettison the landmark nuclear deal that his predecessor had signed with Iran in 2015, and he was looking for ways to win over a skeptical press. The White House claimed that the nuclear deal had allowed Iran to increase its military budget, and Washington Post reporters Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly asked for a source. In response, the White House passed along an article published in Forbes by a writer named Heshmat Alavi.

“Iran’s current budget is funded largely through ‘oil, taxes, increasing bonds, [and] eliminating cash handouts or subsidies’ for Iranians, according to an article by a Forbes contributor, Heshmat Alavi, sent to us by a White House official,” Rizzo and Kelly reported. The White House had used Alavi’s article — itself partly drawn from Iranian sources — to justify its decision to terminate the agreement.

There’s a problem, though: Heshmat Alavi appears not to exist. Alavi’s persona is a propaganda operation run by the Iranian opposition group Mojahedin-e-Khalq, which is known by the initials MEK, two sources told The Intercept.

“Heshmat Alavi is a persona run by a team of people from the political wing of the MEK,” said Hassan Heyrani, a high-ranking defector from the MEK who said he had direct knowledge of the operation. “They write whatever they are directed by their commanders and use this name to place articles in the press. This is not and has never been a real person.”

«

So similar to 2001-2, when false intelligence from Iraq opposition members helped drive the US invasion of Iraq. Except that this time the administration didn’t even bother to check whether the person existed.
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Technical glitches plague Cruise, GM’s $19bn self-driving car unit • The Information

Amir Efrati:

»

Aside from software shutting off unexpectedly, other more common issues that have surfaced in regular testing of Cruise’s self-driving cars include near collisions with other vehicles, strange steering or unexpected braking—all of which can unnerve passengers, according to previously undisclosed data. (A human backup driver is always present to grab the wheel if anything goes wrong.) Moreover, the cars are relatively slow: in testing in San Francisco, trips typically take 80% longer than they would with a regular car, according to people with knowledge of the company. Cruise did not have a comment.

And comparing Cruise’s vehicles to how regular cars driven by people perform suggest that Cruise’s system, by the end of this year, is expected to be only 5% to 10% as safe as human-level driving in terms of the frequency of crashes, internal data shows. (See separate story.)

Cruise’s problems are not unique. Alphabet’s Waymo, which last December launched a limited robotaxi service with human backup drivers in suburban Phoenix, also has struggled. Uber, which has poured more than a billion dollars into its own self-driving car technology, has been largely stymied since one of its vehicles killed a pedestrian last year. None of the programs are close to offering safe driverless vehicles to the public at a meaningful scale, let alone showing how they might operate the vehicles profitably.

«

I find it really hard to know where we are on this timeline. In 2012, it took a colossal effort for Google to categorise cat videos. Last week a conference heard that you could do the same work for $200 in the cloud. Are we maybe just expecting too much, too soon of self-driving vehicles?
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The guy who made a tool to track women in porn videos is sorry • MIT Technology Review

Angela Chen:

»

There is still no proof that the global system—which allegedly matched women’s social-media photos with images from sites like Pornhub—actually worked, or even existed. Still, the technology is possible and would have had awful consequences. “It’s going to kill people,” says Carrie A. Goldberg, an attorney who specializes in sexual privacy violations and author of the forthcoming book Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls. “Some of my most viciously harassed clients have been people who did porn, oftentimes one time in their life and sometimes nonconsensually [because] they were duped into it. Their lives have been ruined because there’s this whole culture of incels that for a hobby expose women who’ve done porn and post about them online and dox them.” (Incels, or “involuntary celibates,” are a misogynistic online subculture of men who claim they are denied sex by women.)

The European Union’s GDPR privacy law prevents this kind of situation. Though the programmer—who posted about the project on the Chinese social network Weibo—originally insisted everything was fine because he didn’t make the information public, just collecting the data is illegal if the women didn’t consent, according to Börge Seeger, a data protection expert and partner at German law firm Neuwerk. These laws apply to any information from EU residents, so they would have held even if the programmer weren’t living in the EU.

«

GDPR! *empties shot glass*
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25 things Apple announced for iOS 13 that we want on Android • Android Police

Rita El Khoury:

»

While the dominating rhetoric over many years has been Apple’s uncanny ability to announce an Android feature that has existed for years as innovative and ground-breaking, things have changed recently. 2019 was one of the most interesting thanks to plenty of both small and big additions to iOS 13 that leave us a little doe-eyed and jealous. So here are twenty five new iOS features we’d really like to see on Android.

«

Top thing: sign in with Apple. The list is quite surprising. (The comments are.. comments.)
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Apple’s new sign-in button is built for a post-Cambridge Analytica world • The Verge

Russell Brandom:

»

Apple is introducing its own single sign-on (SSO) service, a direct competitor to the services offered by Google and Facebook. The new service is aimed at paring back data collection, with only minimal data shared with the app and a promise to quarantine any data collected within Apple itself so it can’t be used for other purposes. More importantly, the service will be mandatory for any iOS apps using SSO, which makes it an instant competitor to Google and Facebook’s offerings.

That might seem like an odd move from a hardware company, but Apple has made an explicit push toward web services in recent years, with a particular focus on privacy. The new sign-on button fits right in with iMessage’s focus on encryption and Safari’s push against third-party tracking, all fitting in with Apple’s broader vision of itself as a cleaner and more controlled alternative to the rest of the tech world. Unlike iMessage, that system won’t be restricted to iPhone users. It will be available on Android and web browsers, too, which means there’s less concern about lock-in than you might think.

It also means the system could reach more users than any previous effort, aiming for internet-wide scale in a way that few Apple products do. But unlike cookie-blocking or encryption, this latest move is targeted at legitimate software as much as hostile intruders. The people losing data from this change won’t be hackers or third-party ad networks, but apps you’ve purposefully installed on your phone and networks you’ve chosen to join. It’s a product of the growing scope of privacy concerns in the wake of Cambridge Analytica, and it’s a sign of just how much tech infrastructure needs to be rebuilt as our expectations of privacy change.

«

Also has some explanation of how this works (it’s not quite just giving you a fake email). Brandom suggests “it’s just shifting your trust from Google/Facebook to Apple”, but that isn’t right. Apple doesn’t have any incentive to take a meta-view on that data, unlike the other two.
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Acting budget chief seeks reprieve on Huawei ban • WSJ

Dan Strumpf:

»

The request from Mr. Vought, dated June 4, asks for a delay in the implementation of portions of the National Defense Authorization Act… The delay, if enacted, would be a reprieve for Huawei, which has been the target of a series of US actions that threaten its dominance in telecommunications technology. In addition to the law targeting its business, they include last month’s Commerce Department order placing Huawei on a blacklist preventing the sale of American technology to the company, as well as an executive order that paves the way for a ban on Huawei from doing business in the US.

The letter says the NDAA rules could lead to a “dramatic reduction” in the number of companies that would be able to supply the government, and would disproportionately affect US companies in rural areas—where Huawei gear is popular—that rely on federal grants. The letter asks for the restrictions on contractors and on federal loan and grant recipients to take effect four years from the law’s passage, instead of the current two years, to give affected companies time to respond and give feedback.

“While the Administration recognizes the importance of these prohibitions to national security,” the letter states, “a number of agencies have heard significant concerns from a wide range of potentially impacted stakeholders who would be affected” by the rules as written.

In addition, the letter said “rural Federal grants recipients may be disproportionally impacted by the prohibition.”

«

So Huawei is super-threatening, but not if it might mean people in rural areas (which tended to vote for Trump) might be inconvenienced in getting their hourly dose of Facebook?
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Huawei cuts orders to key suppliers after US blacklisting • Nikkei Asian Review

Cheng Ting-Fang and Lauly Li:

»

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, confirmed that orders from Huawei have declined since the Chinese company was hit with a de facto ban on using US technology. Taiwan-based Auras Technology, a top supplier of cooling modules for Huawei devices, said a Chinese customer’s orders were affected, without naming the company.

A source familiar with Huawei smartphone orders told the Nikkei Asian Review that the company has downgraded its forecast for total smartphone shipments in the second half of 2019 by “about 20% to 30%” from the previous estimate following the US move to put the tech giant on the so-called Entity List, which in effect bans American companies from working with Huawei and its affiliates.

Other suppliers worldwide also need to comply with the new U.S. regulation if they are indirectly shipping a certain amount of American technologies to Huawei.

“Suppliers are receiving different ranges of order adjustments,” the person familiar with Huawei’s smartphone business said. “Suppliers mainly for markets outside of China were affected the most, while some suppliers that help Huawei in its home market actually benefited from the rising demand amid patriotic sentiment.”

Another representative at a Huawei supplier that makes power-related components for its smartphone and telecom gear businesses told the Nikkei Asian Review the Chinese company has suspended some orders.

«

In the second half of 2018 Huawei shipped 112.5m phones (up 33% on the previous year), so maybe it’s just going to stand still. You’d imagine its ambition was to keep growing at the same rate.
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Google warns of US national security risks from Huawei ban • Financial Times

Kiran Stacey and James Politi:

»

Google in particular is concerned it would not be allowed to update its Android operating system on Huawei’s smartphones, which it argues would prompt the Chinese company to develop its own version of the software.

Google argues a Huawei-modified version of Android would be more susceptible to being hacked, according to people briefed on its lobbying efforts. Huawei has said it would be able to develop its own operating system “very quickly”.

One person with knowledge of the conversations said: “Google has been arguing that by stopping it from dealing with Huawei, the US risks creating two kinds of Android operating system: the genuine version and a hybrid one. The hybrid one is likely to have more bugs in it than the Google one, and so could put Huawei phones more at risk of being hacked, not least by China.”

Washington has been concerned for years that telecoms equipment sold by Huawei could be used by Beijing for hacking. But since Donald Trump entered office, these concerns have come to the fore.

«

Seems a bit of a stretch. The obvious retort from the US admin side would be “so tell everyone not to buy from Huawei. Get a logo like ‘Intel Inside’ but saying ‘Google Inside’ – ‘Good To Google’? – and rely on that.”
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Uber’s path of destruction • American Affairs Journal

Hubert Horan:

»

Most public criticisms of Uber have focused on narrow behavioral and cultural issues, including deceptive advertising and pricing, algorithmic manipulation, driver exploitation, deep-seated misogyny among executives, and disregard of laws and business norms. Such criticisms are valid, but these problems are not fixable aberrations. They were the inevitable result of pursuing “growth at all costs” without having any ability to fund that growth out of positive cash flow. And while Uber has taken steps to reduce negative publicity, it has not done—and cannot do—anything that could suddenly pro duce a sustainable, profitable business model.

Uber’s longer-term goal was to eliminate all meaningful competition and then profit from this quasi-monopoly power. While it has already begun using some of this artificial power to suppress driver wages, it has not achieved the Facebook- or Amazon-type “plat form” power it hoped to exploit. Given that both sustainable profits and true industry dominance seemed unachievable, Uber’s investors de cided to take the company public, based on the hope that enough gullible investors still believe that the compa ny’s rapid growth and popularity are the result of powerfully effi cient inno vations and do not care about its inability to generate profits.

These beliefs about Uber’s corporate value were created entirely out of thin air. This is not a case of a company with a reasonably sound operating business that has managed to inflate stock market expectations a bit. This is a case of a massive valuation that has no relationship to any economic fundamentals. Uber has no competitive efficiency advantages, operates in an industry with few barriers to entry, and has lost more than $14bn in the previous four years. But its narratives convinced most people in the media, invest ment, and tech worlds that it is the most valuable transportation company on the planet and the second most valuable start-up IPO in U.S. history (after Facebook).

Uber is the breakthrough case where the public perception of a large new company was entirely created using the types of manufactured narratives typically employed in partisan political campaigns. Narrative construction is perhaps Uber’s greatest competitive strength.

«

He then rips apart its economics; you’ll be happy to take an Uber (well, perhaps; it’s putting taxi drivers who make a profit out of business) but certainly avoid the shares.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. Lots of people have. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

Let’s talk about how HBO’s Chernobyl series depicted radiation. CC-licensed photo by Frost Bite Photography on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 11 links for you. Visually intact. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

As Walmart turns to robots, it’s the human workers who feel like machines • The Washington Post

Drew Harwell:

»

The nation’s largest private employer has unleashed an army of robots into more than 1,500 of its jumbo stores, with thousands of automated shelf-scanners, box-unloaders, artificial-intelligence cameras and other machines doing the jobs once left to human employees.

The swarm is already remaking how the retailer’s more than 1 million US “associates” go about their daily work. Given the chain’s ubiquity across the country, the local Walmart store also is likely to become the first place millions of Americans meet a real-life, working robot.

Walmart executives have promised the all-hours robot workhorses will let employees endure less drudgery and enjoy “more satisfying jobs,” while also ensuring shoppers see cleaner stores, fuller shelves and faster checkouts.

But the rise of the machines has had an unexpected side effect: Their jobs, some workers said, have never felt more robotic. By incentivizing hyper-efficiency, the machines have deprived the employees of tasks they used to find enjoyable. Some also feel like their most important assignment now is to train and babysit their often inscrutable robot colleagues.

Customers, too, have found coexisting with machines to be confusing, if not alarming.

«

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Microsoft quietly deletes largest public face recognition data set • Financial Times

Madhumita Murgia:

»

Microsoft, which took down the database days after the FT reported on its use by companies, said: “The site was intended for academic purposes. It was run by an employee that is no longer with Microsoft and has since been removed.”

Two other data sets have also been taken down since the FT report was published in April, including the Duke MTMC surveillance data set built by Duke University researchers, and a Stanford University data set called Brainwash.

Brainwash used footage of customers in a café called Brainwash in San Francisco’s Lower Haight district, taken through a livestreaming camera. Duke did not respond to requests for comment. Stanford said it had removed the data set after a request by one of the authors of a study it was used for. A spokesperson said the university is “committed to protecting the privacy of individuals at Stanford and in the larger community”.

All three data sets were uncovered by Berlin-based researcher Adam Harvey, whose project Megapixels documented the details of dozens of data sets and how they are being used.

Microsoft’s MS Celeb data set has been used by several commercial organisations, according to citations in AI papers, including IBM, Panasonic, Alibaba, Nvidia, Hitachi, Sensetime and Megvii. Both Sensetime and Megvii are Chinese suppliers of equipment to officials in Xinjiang, where minorities of mostly Uighurs and other Muslims are being tracked and held in internment camps.

«

Good work by Harvey with Megapixels, but that sound is the stable door closing while the horse heads off into the distance.
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Smartphone shipment forecast cut to 1.35 billion for 2019 as uncertainty prevails • Canalys

»

The latest numbers show that smartphone shipments will reach 1.35 billion units in 2019, a year-on-year decline of 3.1%. Due to the many uncertainties surrounding the US/China trade talks, the US Executive Order signed on 15 May and subsequent developments, Canalys has lowered its forecasts to reflect an uncertain future.

Canalys’ base assumption is that restrictions will be imposed stringently on Huawei, once the 90-day reprieve expires, having a significant impact on its ability to roll-out new devices in the short term, especially outside of China. Canalys anticipates that Huawei is taking steps to mitigate the effect of component and service supply issues, but its overseas potential will be hampered for some time. The US and China may eventually reach a trade deal to alleviate the pressure on Huawei, but if and when this will happen is far from clear.

Canalys’ published forecasts reflect what will happen should there be no major political changes. “It is important to note that market uncertainty is clearly prompting vendors to accelerate certain strategies to minimize the short- and long-term impact in a challenging business environment, for example, shifting manufacturing to different countries to hedge against the risk of tariffs. But with recent US announcements on tariffs on goods from more countries, the industry will be dealing with turmoil for some time,” said Nicole Peng, VP, Mobility.

“We expect the other major smartphone vendors will have short-term opportunities while Huawei struggles. Samsung will be the biggest winner, thanks to its aggressive device strategy and its ability to quickly ramp up production, through the Korean firm may struggle to entirely fill the shortfall,” said Rushabh Doshi, Research Director, Canalys. “It will take other vendors until late 2019 to react to the new opportunities. Samsung’s control over component supply gives it a major advantage.”

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No 10 denies claim by chancellor that emissions target will cost UK £1tn • The Guardian

Seth Jacobson:

»

Downing Street has shot down claims made by the chancellor, Philip Hammond, that tackling the climate crisis would cost £1tn and require spending cuts for schools, hospitals and the police force.

No 10 said plans to create a net zero carbon economy would cost no more than the UK’s existing plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The firm response will be seen as a rare rebuke for Hammond, who warned Theresa May that reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero could cost the country £1tn and lead to industries becoming “economically uncompetitive” without government subsidies.

In a letter to the prime minister, Hammond said the proposed 2050 net zero target – one of the most far-reaching proposed in the world – would mean less money for schools, the NHS and police forces, the Financial Times reported.

Downing Street said analysis from the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) showed that the cost of a net zero carbon economy would “fall within our existing spending plans”.

A spokeswoman for No 10 would not comment directly on the letter, but warned against any cost estimates which conflated economic costs with public spending.

“There are a lot of figures out there on this issue that don’t factor in the benefits or consider the costs of not doing this,” she said.

“The costs related to meeting this target are whole-of-the-economy costs, not a fiscal cost, and so it’s not really right to frame it as a trade-off for public spending,” she said.

«

Seems a bit weird for Hammond to make such an elementary error in calculation, unless he’s just trying to kill the whole thing – which would be disastrous.
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Google Stadia launches 4K game-streaming in November for $9.99/mo • TechCrunch

Lucas Matney:

»

Top-level details are the company’s Stadia Pro service will launch in November for $9.99 per month. The price gets you 4K 60fps streaming but you’ll need at least a 35 mbps internet connection to get that speed. Alongside the streaming capabilities, you’ll get access to some Stadia games with the Pro subscription.

At launch, the service is coming to the USA, UK, Canada, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden. Users in Hawaii, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands aren’t supported on Stadia.

We also learned that playing Stadia on a mobile device will be confined to the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3a at launch so that means no iOS or iPadOS devices at launch though you’ll be able to play in the Chrome browser on your Mac. Not a ton of love for Apple devices though.

Google will be offering a free base subscription next year that lets gamers who purchase titles from the Stadia store stream them for free at 1080p 30fps. This is a major announcement and something that Google really slid into the stream at the very end, but this is really going to put some pressure on the company to have some quality free content to keep gamers interested in the Pro tier.

«

This will be going up against Apple Arcade, an all-you-can-eat games fest targeting iOS and macOS (and tvOS.. well, Apple TV) devices which is probably going to launch about the same time for the same money but will work offline and won’t require you to buy games.

Dedicated gamers already have consoles; “no console” isn’t an attraction for them. Not gonna lie, looks tough for Google.
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Why HBO’s “Chernobyl” gets nuclear so wrong • Forbes

Michael Shellenberger:

»

HBO tries to clean-up some of the sensationalism with captions at the very end of the series. None note that claiming a baby died by “absorbing” radiation from its father is total and utter pseudoscience.

There is no good evidence that Chernobyl radiation killed a baby nor that it caused any increase in birth defects.

“We’ve now had a chance to observe all the children that have been born close to Chernobyl,” reported UCLA physician Robert Gale in 1987, and “none of them, at birth, at least, has had any detectable abnormalities.”

Indeed, the only public health impact beyond the deaths of the first responders was 20,000 documented cases of thyroid cancer in those aged under 18 at the time of the accident.

The United Nations in 2017 concluded that only 25%, 5,000, can be attributed to Chernobyl radiation (paragraphs A-C). In earlier studies, the UN estimated there could be up to 16,000 cases attributable to Chernobyl radiation.

Since thyroid cancer has a mortality rate of just one percent, that means the expected deaths from thyroid cancers caused by Chernobyl will be 50 to 160 over an 80-year lifespan.

At the end of the show, HBO claims there was “a dramatic spike in cancer rates across Ukraine and Belarus,” but this too is wrong.

«

I loved this series, but yes, it overstates the risks. The simple fact that it took such a colossal screwup and almost wilful ignorance of the reactor’s state – ignoring the xenon pit (well worth reading; the Wiki article is great), the computer’s advice to shut down – to make it blow up shows that even crappy old reactors are hard to break. The risk of a truly enormous explosion if the core had reached groundwater was real, though.

Nuclear is the safest form of electrical generation – in terms of lives lost per gigawatt – until we get some numbers on wind turbines and solar panels. (The pollution from manufacturing the latter might count against it.) And nuclear is ideal for providing a base load.
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Michelin rolls out an airless tyre that will be “puncture-proof” • Car and Driver

Sebastian Blanco:

»

Michelin’s new Unique Puncture-Proof Tire System (Uptis) does away with one of the defining aspects of tires as we’ve known them for more than 100 years: the air inside. Unlike past attempts at airless tires, Uptis functions the way other modern tires do and, Michelin claims, will provide a similar driving experience.

Unveiled at the company’s sustainable-mobility-focused Movin’On Summit in Montreal today, Uptis is a tire without a traditional sidewall that carries its load by the top thanks to a new resin-embedded fiberglass material that Michelin was granted over 50 patents for.

“The idea was to develop a technology that was strong enough to carry the load but light enough to replace the air,” Cyrille Roget, technical and scientific communication director for the Michelin Group, told Car and Driver. “If you have a load on the tire and you cut all the spokes at the bottom, you will see that nothing will change, demonstrating that the load is carried by the top of it, not by the under parts.” Other airless tires, he said, often carry the load at the bottom of the tire, which is very inefficient and causes extra heating due to compression.

«

Grr. “For which Michelin was granted over 50 patents”, I think. This sounds impressive, until you look at the stats for punctures: the average (American) driver will experience five flat tyres in their lifetime. In other words, perhaps one every four years. And of course air isn’t just for inflation; it also provides damping against potholes and bumps. So this needs to have a lot more going for it than just being puncture-proof, or else needs to be used in very adverse situations.
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Quantum leaps, long assumed to be instantaneous, take time • Quanta Magazine

Philip Ball:

»

When quantum mechanics was first developed a century ago as a theory for understanding the atomic-scale world, one of its key concepts was so radical, bold and counter-intuitive that it passed into popular language: the “quantum leap.” Purists might object that the common habit of applying this term to a big change misses the point that jumps between two quantum states are typically tiny, which is precisely why they weren’t noticed sooner. But the real point is that they’re sudden. So sudden, in fact, that many of the pioneers of quantum mechanics assumed they were instantaneous.

A new experiment shows that they aren’t. By making a kind of high-speed movie of a quantum leap, the work reveals that the process is as gradual as the melting of a snowman in the sun. “If we can measure a quantum jump fast and efficiently enough,” said Michel Devoret of Yale University, “it is actually a continuous process.”

«

You can take the plunge into the Nature paper, or the slightly less cold plunge into the rest of the article. Both are pretty mindboggling. Though empirically, of course a quantum leap can’t happen “instantaneously” because there’s no such thing; there’s only “measurably fast” and “immeasurably fast”. Sadly, though, knowing that it’s “measurably fast” won’t help us build nuclear fusion reactors or faster-than-light drives.
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Apple backs off crackdown on parental-control apps • The New York Times

Jack Nicas:

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After promoting its latest software updates in a splashy two-hour presentation on Monday morning, Apple articulated its new policy in a short blog post on a section of its website for developers.

The post said parental-control apps could now use two technologies that Apple had recently cited as grounds for their removal from iPhones.

One technology, mobile device management, or MDM, enables parents to take control of a child’s phone. The other is a virtual private network, or VPN, which parents can use to block certain apps on a child’s phone.

In the post, Apple said the apps could use the technologies if they didn’t “sell, use or disclose to third parties any data for any purpose” and included that promise in their privacy policies.

“These apps were using an enterprise technology that provided them access to kids’ highly sensitive personal data,” an Apple spokeswoman said in a statement. “We do not think it is OK for any apps to help data companies track or optimize advertising of kids.”

She did not say whether Apple had found evidence of the apps doing so. The app makers deny such activity. The spokeswoman declined to say why Apple had changed its mind.

Fred Stutzman, the chief executive of Freedom, an app that helped people track and limit their time on iPhones, said, “My reaction is: Why this last year of pain? And we end up exactly in the same place.”

«

Stutzman says the policy cost his company more than $1m since its implementation in August, which suggests to me that Freedom was doing pretty well. Not great PR work by Apple, though.
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Apple restricts ads and third-party trackers in iPhone apps for kids • TechCrunch

Zack Whittaker:

»

Apple has told developers to stop including third-party trackers in apps designed for kids — or they face having their apps pulled from the app store.

The tech giant quietly updated its guidelines for apps that are submitted to the app store’s kids category following the keynote address at its annual developer conference on Monday.

“Apps in the kids category may not include third-party advertising or analytics,” the new guidelines say. Previously, the guidelines only restricted behavioral advertising tracking.

Apple also currently prohibits apps in the kids category from including links that point outside the app or contain in-app purchasing.

Apple has come under fire for its recent marketing campaign claiming “what happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone,”  which critics say is misleading. All too often apps include ads or tracking code that allows app makers to collect information about the device, including its location and other data, and send it back to base so companies can better target its users with ads, learn more about how you use the app, and more.

Just last week, the Washington Post found over 5,400 app trackers were uploading data from an iPhone over a single week — even at night when the phone owner was asleep.

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Wonder if Google will follow suit.
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How China is wiping memories of Tiananmen Square off the internet • VICE News

David Gilbert:

»

It was a Friday evening in May in the Nanxi district of Yippin, a Chinese city of around 4.5 million people, when Deng Chuanbin posted a picture of a bottle of wine on Twitter.

The bottle’s label featured the word “ba jiu,” a near homophone of “89,” and below it was an image depicting the iconic Tiananmen Square “Tank Man.”

Deng, a documentary filmmaker who has in the past worked with well-known Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, then thought better of it and quickly deleted the image. But the damage was done; within 30 minutes, the police were at his door. They confiscated his phones and computers, and arrested him. He’s been in detention ever since.

Deng is one of at least 27 activists, artists, and netizens who have been detained, questioned or disappeared since the start of May, according to Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a coalition of Chinese and international human rights NGOs. Their offense: “picking quarrels” — a charge the Chinese government levels at those who dare to even reference the Tiananmen Square protests. These 27 are “likely just a drop in the bucket” of all those affected, the group said Monday.

The Chinese military killed as many as 10,000 people during Beijing’s vicious crackdown on pro-democracy protesters 30 years ago. But today, those victims and the horrific events of June 4, 1989, in Tiananmen Square have been virtually wiped from China’s collective memory.

«

Is this true, though? Somehow Tiananmen lives on in China, even through the fact that it’s an avoided topic – a roadblock that emerges in the way that it leads to censorship.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

CC-licensed photo by Bill%20Strain on Flickr

»You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email (arriving at about 0700GMT each weekday). You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.«

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

The weatherman: the man who decided D-Day • User Journal

John Bull:

»

As [geophysicist-turned-weather forecaster Group Captain James] Stagg prepared to deliver his daily briefing to Eisenhower, he thought about what the Supreme Commander would be hoping to hear. With only eight days to go until 5th June — D-Day — Ike and his staff would be looking for confirmation that the weather was going to be acceptable.

Just what “acceptable” meant in this context had taken Stagg and his staff months to work out. Every element of the combined amphibious assault brought different, complex weather restrictions into play.

The navy, for example, said that surface winds could not exceed Force 3 onshore or Force 4 at sea. Any more than that and the flat-bottomed landing craft carrying the infantry would be driven off course or swamped. The first wave of tanks, which were to be floated ashore from 5000 yards out using inflatable side-panels, would also likely flounder.

This wasn’t their only requirement. The tides also needed to be just right to allow mines and obstructions to be cleared. They also needed visibility of at least three miles if the battleships, cruisers and destroyers assembled offshore were to be used as artillery support. Finally, to have any hope of supplying and reinforcing the beachheads they needed the wind to remain low for at least D-Day 1 as well.

The demands of the air force were even greater. Fog in Britain would ground their planes completely and heavy clouds would cause a whole variety of problems. The fighters and fighter bombers needed a cloud base of no less than 1,000ft, whilst the medium and light bombers tasked with neutralising gun emplacements during the landings needed both visibility of three miles and a cloud ceiling not less than 4,500ft. The heavy bombers meanwhile, which were intended to disrupt German reinforcements and destroy infrastructure, ideally needed no more than 5/10ths cloud cover below 5,000ft and a cloud ceiling not below 11,000ft.

The list of demands didn’t stop there. Both air force and army agreed that for the transport aircraft carrying the paratroopers to find their targets they’d need at least a half-moon and a cloud ceiling of 2,500ft over their targets. Winds could also not exceed 20mph (roughly Force 5) or the paratroopers would be unable to jump. The gliders had similar limitations. Finally, the army pointed out, they needed the weather to be dry during and after the landing (without significant rain beforehand) else the roads and beaches would quickly become unusable.

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And you thought you had responsibilities.
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238 Google Play apps with more than 440 million installs made phones nearly unusable • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

If the prevalence of abusive Google Play apps has left you numb, this latest report is for you. Carefully concealed adware installed in Google-approved apps with more than 440 million installations was so aggressive that it rendered mobile devices nearly unusable, researchers from mobile security provider Lookout said Tuesday.

BeiTaAd, as the adware is known, is a plugin that Lookout says it found hidden in emojis keyboard TouchPal and 237 other applications, all of which were published by Shanghai, China-based CooTek. Together, the 238 unique apps had a combined 440 million installs. Once installed, the apps initially behaved normally. Then, after a delay of anywhere between 24 hours and 14 days, the obfuscated BeiTaAd plugin would begin delivering what are known as out-of-app ads. These ads appeared on users’ lock screens and triggered audio and video at seemingly random times or even when a phone was asleep.

“My wife is having the exact same issue,” one person reported in November in this thread discussing BeiTaAd. “This will bring up random ads in the middle of phone calls, when her alarm clock goes off or anytime she uses any other function on her phone. We are unable to find any other information on this. It is extremely annoying and almost [makes] her phone unusable.”

…Lookout reported the behavior of BeiTaAd to Google, and the apps responsible were subsequently either removed from Play or updated to remove the abusive plugin. There’s no indication that CooTek will be banned or otherwise punished for breaching Play terms of service on such a mass scale and for taking the steps it did to hide the violation. The remaining 237 CooTek apps that embedded the plugin are listed at the end of Lookout’s post.

«

Ad fraud on a huge scale, no doubt. Just as the invention of the ship created the shipwreck, the ad-supported app created ad fraud.
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Youtube flip-flops on suspending video blogger accused of harassment • CNBC

Jennifer Elias:

»

Vox.com producer Carlos Maza, who identifies as gay, initially complained to YouTube on June 1, saying that [Stephen] Crowder, a popular YouTube user, made homophobic and racial slurs toward him in his videos. Crowder[‘s channel], which has 3.84 million subscribers, earns an estimated annual revenue of $81,000 from YouTube, according to social analytics company SocialBlade.com.

YouTube responded Tuesday, saying that after a four-day long “in-depth investigation,” Crowder’s videos were “hurtful” but didn’t violate any of the platform’s policies. Maza became the target of more harassment as a result of that decision, he told CNBC.com, adding that he had received increased death threats from Crowder supporters since Tuesday night.

Wednesday morning, the company announced a new anti-harassment policy that will crack down on users and accounts that express supremacy over other groups. However, Crowder’s videos remained available and YouTube continued to tell CNBC that they didn’t violate the policies.

Two hours later, the company publicly tweeted at Maza, saying it had decided to suspend Crowder’s monetization after all.

«

Complete and utter mess which demonstrates that YouTube doesn’t have any consistent application of whatever its rules are; the only things that makes it take notice are huge amounts of press coverage, or advertisers pulling out. This can’t go on.
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Youtube bans videos promoting Nazi ideology • The Guardian

Jim Waterson:

»

The company confirmed it would no longer host videos that glorified fascist views or material that denied the existence of the Holocaust, following years of criticism over its role in spreading far-right hate and conspiracy theories.

The video-sharing website, which is owned by Google, said on Wednesday it would ban any videos “alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status”.

This would include “inherently discriminatory” videos promoting Nazi ideology or content denying that well-documented violent events took place, such as the deaths of millions of Jews in the second world war or the Sandy Hook school shooting in the US.

Platforms such as YouTube have traditionally taken a light-touch approach to hosted material, adopting a broad defence of free speech to justify the extremist views users post.

This has become increasingly untenable under relentless media and public scrutiny, and pressure from advertisers. YouTube banned a handful of high-profile extremists, including Alex Jones of Infowars, in the last year.

Much of the criticism has been aimed at YouTube’s algorithm-driven recommendation system, which helps keep people on the site by suggesting new videos they might be interested in. Critics have said it leads people towards more and more extreme and conspiratorial videos, and that this can incentivise users to produce more extreme material to try to drive up view counts and earn a larger slice of the ad revenue.

YouTube said changes to its algorithm introduced in the US in January had more than halved the number of views that “borderline content and harmful misinformation” receives from recommendations.

«

So the question is, does this fit in with its reversal over the complaint by Carlos Maza about Steve Crowder, or is it separate? The “exclusion based on… sexual orientation” would certainly apply to what Crowder said.

It’s happening slowly, but the supertanker is turning and heading for the port marked “publisher”. However there is collateral damage – such as the independent publisher who uses YT to publish (and monetise) documentaries about hate speech.
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iOS 13 introduces new ‘optimized battery charging’ feature • Mac Rumors

Juli Clover:

»

For example, if you often charge your phone up at night while you sleep, Apple might charge it to 80% right away, but wait until an hour or so before you wake up to charge the remaining 20%.

That keeps your iPhone at an optimal capacity for battery health, rather than keeping it close to 100% on the charger.

Avoiding topping up the battery continually while it sits on the charger reduces the amount of time that your device spends at maximum capacity, and over time, this could extend the life of your battery.

Battery health has been a hot topic over the course of the last year, after Apple was found throttling the processor speeds of iOS devices with degraded batteries to prolong device life as long as possible.

That issue spurred Apple to be more forthcoming about overall battery health, providing details about capacity and performance in the Battery portion of Settings.

«

Clever move. Wonder if it notices when your alarms are on, or whether it just notices what time in the morning you tend first to pick it up?
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Ambulance chasers are readying themselves for GDPR assault • Telecoms.com

Jamie Davis:

»

Although it is not necessarily the most flattering of terms, the ambulance chasers are readying themselves for an assault on the GDPR negligent.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has set a deadline of August 29 for consumers to complain about the sale of PPI products in the UK. This effectively means all the firms set-up to manage the complaints on behalf of consumers will become redundant. Most will evolve however, the legal world is simply too profitable, and GDPR seems a prime opportunity.

While it might not be the most common practice for the moment, there are certainly examples. Numerous law firms, Hayes Connor Solicitors for example, are already advertising their services for the British Airways data breach, impacting roughly 400,000 people. This is an on-going investigation, though the financial penalty for this breach could be as much as €918 million.

As more PPI lawyers find themselves at the mercy of free time, more will turn their attentions to new fields of expertise. Due to the headline-worth nature of data breaches and privacy violations, as well as the potential consequence to the individual, this is an area which is primed for the legal buzz.

Big fines have been promised

So far, there is only one example of a Data Protection Authority (DPA) swinging the heavy stick of GDPR at a major firm. France’s watchdog fined Google €50 million for numerous offenses, and while there have been other significant breaches over the last few years, most occurred at a time prior to the heavy fines of GDPR.

“Serious fines are coming in the summer, including to some of the big companies,” said Paul Breitbarth, Director of Strategic Research and Regulator Outreach at Nymity. “The DPAs [Data Protection Authorities] are taking this very seriously and so should we.”

«

Just waiting for the automated phone calls asking “Have you been mis-sold GDPR advice?” And then all the GDPR-chasing companies being forced to sue each other for using phone numbers without opt-in consent.
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Amazon is (unwittingly?) helping police build a surveillance network with Ring doorbells • CNET

Alfred Ng:

»

If you’re walking in Bloomfield, New Jersey, there’s a good chance you’re being recorded. But it’s not a corporate office or warehouse security camera capturing the footage – it’s likely a Ring doorbell made by Amazon. 

While residential neighborhoods aren’t usually lined with security cameras, the smart doorbell’s popularity has essentially created private surveillance networks powered by Amazon and promoted by police departments.

Police departments across the country, from major cities like Houston to towns with fewer than 30,000 people, have offered free or discounted Ring doorbells to citizens, sometimes using taxpayer funds to pay for Amazon’s products. While Ring owners are supposed to have a choice on providing police footage, in some giveaways, police require recipients to turn over footage when requested.

Ring said it would start cracking down on those strings attached.

“Ring customers are in control of their videos, when they decide to share them and whether or not they want to purchase a recording plan. Ring has donated devices to Neighbor’s Law Enforcement partners for them to provide to members of their communities,” Ring said in a statement. “Ring does not support programs that require recipients to subscribe to a recording plan or that footage from Ring devices be shared as a condition for receiving a donated device…”

…”Our township is now entirely covered by cameras,” said Captain Vincent Kerney, detective bureau commander of the Bloomfield Police Department. “Every area of town we have, there are some Ring cameras.”

«

CCTV, privatised and – that unique American touch – monopolised.
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The Apple Watch is now the control center for your health • WIRED

Robbie Gonzalez:

»

Unlike Garmin and FitBit, which distribute features across a wide range of devices (the former sells no fewer than five unique fitness trackers, the latter more than a dozen), Apple packs its few products with as many features as it can. Sure, you can have your pick of colors and bands, and you can pay extra for LTE connectivity, but functionally speaking, each new generation of Apple Watch is identical. Like the iPhone before it, Apple’s wearable is designed to appeal to as many people as possible, by being whatever those people want or need it to be.

With these latest updates, opting into Apple’s jack-of-all trades approach no longer means sacrificing on specialized features. For consumers who wanted to track their menstrual cycles, Fitbit had been an obvious choice. To monitor long-term trends in their fitness, Garmin was the clear option. But later this year, when a software update enables the Apple Watch to do both, that decision will become more difficult.

This is how Apple eats its competition’s lunch: one bite at a time. Personal health, as the phrase suggests, means different things to different people. The most effective, individualized devices will need to meet users where they are, no matter where that is. By covering as many bases as possible, Apple is positioning itself to do exactly that.

“Apple is taking steps in the right direction on multiple fronts, simultaneously,” says Mitesh Patel, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who studies whether and how wearable devices can facilitate improvements in health. “It’s clear they’re trying to democratize access to managing your own health, whether it’s by monitoring your biometrics, your activity, your menstrual cycle, your hearing health, or whatever.” Those are all things you once had to track actively, or visit a doctor to assess. Now, you can monitor them anytime, anywhere, passively, simply by wearing a device on your wrist.

«

The only remaining question is whether Apple is prepared to let the Watch function with Android phones (or at least, be set up without an iPhone) in order to grow Watch sales. It’s an idea that worked when it had a product called the iPod and an older, better-selling one called the Mac.
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Developers sue Apple over App Store practices • Reuters

Stephen Nellis:

»

Two app developers on Tuesday sued Apple Inc over its App Store practices, making claims similar to those in a lawsuit brought by consumers that the U.S. Supreme Court recently allowed to proceed.

California-based app developer Donald R. Cameron and Illinois Pure Sweat Basketball alleged in federal court in San Jose, California that Apple engaged in anticompetitive conduct by only allowing the downloading of iPhone apps through Apple’s official App Store. Apple also requires developers to price their apps in tiers ending in 99 cents and takes up to a 30% commission from developers on the sale of apps.

“This practice is analogous to a monopsonist retailer paying artificially low wholesale prices to its suppliers,” the developers said in their suit. “In both paradigms a competitive market would yield better post-commission or wholesale prices, and fairer profit, for developers’ digital products.”

The claims center on the same Apple practices highlighted in a lawsuit brought by consumers, arguing that Apple’s practices have artificially inflated the price of software in the App Store.

«

So Apple is being sued by both consumers (which is what the recent Supreme Court decision allowed) and developers? As Ben Thompson notes in his Stratechery newsletter, this doesn’t really make sense, legally speaking, because it creates a sort of double jeopardy – as though a store were being sued both by its customers and its suppliers. If the monopsonist retailer is paying artificially low wholesale prices, then customers must be benefiting from lower prices. If the developers’ argument is that Apple kept prices high, then developers are getting more money, so what’s the beef?
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Foxconn’s delays might finally give Wisconsin the upper hand • The Verge

Josh Dzieza:

»

Even if Foxconn fails to hit its subsidy targets, Wisconsin taxpayers will be out a lot of money. The state has already spent hundreds of millions on land and infrastructure for the project, costs that go to waste if the company simply walks away. Furthermore, the way the contract is structured means Wisconsin could end up paying more per job if Foxconn hires fewer people.

The capital investment portion of the subsidy package is pegged to hiring, but not in the same way as the jobs subsidies. While Foxconn doesn’t get any hiring subsidies if it fails to meet employment thresholds, it can still get subsidies for its investments in buildings and equipment, minus whatever percentage it missed its job target by. [It was contractually obliged to have a certain number of people employed by the end of 2018 to qualify for subsidies.]

For example, if Foxconn only employs 260 people at the end of this year, half its minimum target, but invests $1bn in construction, Wisconsin could end up paying Foxconn almost $300,000 per job. Other scenarios take the cost per job above $500,000.

Jon Peacock, director of the Wisconsin Budget Project, worries that the relative ease of getting investment subsidies encourages Foxconn to build a highly automated factory rather than something employing the blue collar manufacturing workers who had featured prominently in President Donald Trump and former Governor Walker’s pitch for the deal. (It’s worth noting that Foxconn is aggressively pursuing automation in its other facilities as labor costs rise.) “I think one of the problems with the contract right now is that it makes it much easier to qualify for investment credits than job credits and that we might be incentivizing robots,” Peacock says.

Which brings up the second reason Foxconn might want to revisit the contract: it might not be eligible for the capital investment credits at all.

«

Still one of the most amazing boondoggles actually backed by Trump; clearly now running into the sand, and the new Democratic leaders in the state are sharpening their knives.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Dark and… lethal. Ikea recalled this dresser because it can kill by toppling onto toddlers. CC-licensed photo by buhny on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Chin up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

New report suggests ‘high likelihood of human civilization coming to an end’ starting in 2050 • VICE

Nafeez Ahmed:

»

A harrowing scenario analysis of how human civilization might collapse in coming decades due to climate change has been endorsed by a former Australian defense chief and senior royal navy commander.

The analysis, published by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, a think-tank in Melbourne, Australia, describes climate change as “a near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilization” and sets out a plausible scenario of where business-as-usual could lead over the next 30 years.

The paper argues that the potentially “extremely serious outcomes” of climate-related security threats are often far more probable than conventionally assumed, but almost impossible to quantify because they “fall outside the human experience of the last thousand years.”

On our current trajectory, the report warns, “planetary and human systems [are] reaching a ‘point of no return’ by mid-century, in which the prospect of a largely uninhabitable Earth leads to the breakdown of nations and the international order.”

«

You might as well read it. Forewarned is forearmed.
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Dressers keep killing kids, so Ikea is finally redesigning them • Fast Company

Katharine Schwab:

»

Ikea is releasing a new product line designed to prevent deadly furniture accidents. Ikea is unveiling the new dressers, which come with built-in safety features, after the company recalled 29 million dressers in 2016 and again in 2017 following the deaths of eight toddlers. The children were crushed when Ikea’s furniture tipped over on them. One of the deadly designs remains on the market today.

The new product line, called Glesvar, includes three types of dressers. The first has an interlocking method similar to what you find in many filing cabinets: If you open one drawer, the dresser prevents you from opening any of the other drawers at the same time. This interlocking mechanism remains until the consumer has properly attached the dresser to the wall, so that there’s no chance of tip-over.

The second Glesvar dresser is similar to the first but more extreme: It won’t let you open any of the dresser’s drawers until you’ve secured it to the wall. The third design has only two legs and must be affixed to the wall completely, since the wall acts as a primary support for the dresser.

For the time being, only the first dresser will be sold in the United States (as well as Germany and the U.K.). It’s the only design that is compliant with a newly proposed update to a safety standard that requires freestanding dressers be structurally sound and not tip over if a 60-pound weight is attached to any of their open drawers

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If “design is how it works”, that’s quite an example of lethal design.
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US requiring social media information from visa applicants • The New York Times

Sandra Garcia:

»

Visa applicants to the United States are required to submit any information about social media accounts they have used in the past five years under a State Department policy that started on Friday.

Such account information would give the government access to photos, locations, dates of birth, dates of milestones and other personal data commonly shared on social media.

“We already request certain contact information, travel history, family member information, and previous addresses from all visa applicants,” the State Department said in a statement. “We are constantly working to find mechanisms to improve our screening processes to protect U.S. citizens, while supporting legitimate travel to the United States.”

In March 2017, President Trump asked the secretary of state, the attorney general, the secretary of homeland security and the director of national intelligence to put in effect “a uniform baseline for screening and vetting standards and procedures,” according to a memo published in the Federal Register. Requiring information about the social media accounts of visa applicants was part of that.
The move represents a step up from a September 2017 measure in which the Homeland Security Department proposed and enacted a regulation calling for the surveillance of social media use of all immigrants, including naturalized citizens.

«

This is odd, because a couple of days before this story appeared I re-applied for an ESTA (the UK to US visa travel waiver – in effect the “visa that means you don’t need a visa”), and though the social media question was there, it was optional. Has it changed now? Nobody seems to answer this (and I don’t feel like pretending to fill out an ESTA to find out). The first refusals based on this content will be quite an event, though.
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London ethics panel outlines five steps for facial recognition in policing • UKAuthority

Mark Say:

»

The [independent London Policing Ethics] panel said that facial recognition software should only be deployed by police if the five conditions can be met:

• The overall benefits to public safety must be great enough to outweigh any potential public distrust in the technology.

• It can be evidenced that using the technology will not generate gender or racial bias in policing operations.

• Each deployment must be assessed and authorised to ensure that it is both necessary and proportionate for a specific policing purpose.

• Operators are trained to understand the risks associated with use of the software and understand they are accountable.

• Both the Met and the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime develop strict guidelines to ensure that deployments balance the benefits of this technology with the potential intrusion on the public.

London’s police force has carried out 10 trials on the use of the technology, but some have prompted criticisms of misuse. Civil liberties group Liberty focused on trials at the Notting Hill Carnival and questioned whether the algorithm had been tested for bias.

«

The panel “also highlighted the results of a survey of more than 1,000 Londoners on their attitudes to facial recognition that showed more 57% felt its use by the police is acceptable, and the figure increased to 87% when it is used in searching for serious offenders.” Everyone likes intrusive stuff if it’s used to catch the bad guys (and gals).
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MacBook Pro keyboard failures: why Apple’s dust excuse is bull [Teardown + Explanations] • Reddit/apple

:

»

From my experience as an Apple Technician, here are the most commonly reported problems at my store, in order of most to least common:
• No-input, particularly from all vowel keys, most commonly used consonants, spacebar, enter, and shift
• Multi-input, particularly from all vowel keys, most commonly used consonants, spacebar, enter, and shift
• Sticky/Crunchy/Stuck keys.
•

As for demographic, the most common folks we see with these issues are:
• Writers or any kind (blog, scripts, office workers, etc)
• Students of all kinds
• Programmers. …

«

He’s pretty sure it isn’t dust, which he demonstrates in all sorts of ways. (“Dust” wouldn’t explain why it tends to be the most commonly used keys, and particularly the spacebar – which should be the most tolerant, since there’s more of it? – that tend to be affected.) So what is it?

»

As for what the actual cause is, honestly I don’t know. My suspicion is that the metal dome experiences metal fatigue and slowly begin to lose connection, or that that little U-shaped cutout in the centre of the dome weakens and starts to easily bounce when pressed, making contact 2+ times. I honestly cannot test this at home, my equipment is woefully inadequate to go that deep.

«

Well look surely this new generation of keyboard will…
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An update on our efforts to protect minors and families • Official YouTube Blog

»

The vast majority of videos featuring minors on YouTube, including those referenced in recent news reports, do not violate our policies and are innocently posted — a family creator providing educational tips, or a parent sharing a proud moment. But when it comes to kids, we take an extra cautious approach towards our enforcement and we’re always making improvements to our protections. Here are a few updates we’ve made over the past several months:

«

What it cites (stung, clearly, by the NY Times report featured yesterday)is: “restricting live feature” so kids can’t stream unless clearly accompanied by an adult; disabling comments on videos with minors; and “reducing recommendations… to include videos featuring minors in risky situations”.

Nothing at all, though, about how its recommendation system which drives 70% (70%!!) of views is directing paedophiles towards videos of children.

YouTube isn’t going to deal with this until some existential event forces it to.
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65+ iOS 13 features that Apple didn’t show off at WWDC • 9to5Mac

Jordan Kahn:

»

Today at its WWDC keynote presentation, Apple officially announced iOS 13 arriving later this year for iPhone users. The company demoed a few of the notable new features including Dark Mode, a new swipe-based gesture keyboard, as well as new features for Siri, Photos and AirPods. It also, however, quickly flashed a slide on stage showing over 65 other new iOS 13 features arriving with the release this fall. Take a look…

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“Indian English Siri voices” 👀
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Here’s why Apple just killed off iTunes • Music Industry Blog

null:

»

Craig Federighi’s tongue-in-cheek quip”One thing we hear over and over: Can iTunes do even more?” hints at just how bloated and no longer fit for purpose iTunes had become.

iTunes actually started off as a tool for ripping and burning CDs. In fact, its original marketing slogan was ‘Rip Mix Burn’. It evolved into a tool for managing and playing music and supporting the iPod. Over time it layered in videos, books, apps, Apple Music etc etc. But one thing iTunes never excelled on, even before it suffered from feature bloat, was being a great music player. It was if it could never quite shake off its origins. Apple Music has of course picked up the player baton and run with it for Apple. Now that iTunes has splintered into three apps, we should start to see the evolution of three distinct sets of user experiences. Apple hasn’t pushed the boat out yet because it has a fundamentally conservative user base that has to have change implemented at a steady rate in order not to alienate it…

…Apple is now poised to go deep across a wide range of content offerings. Unbundling its apps and subscriptions gives it the agility to build sector specific user experiences and marketing campaigns. Separating out podcasts is particularly interesting, as Apple is making the call that they do not belong with music. A stark contrast to Spotify’s approach. Indeed, Spotify may just be approaching its own iTunes moment, with an app that is trying to do too many things for too many different use cases. iTunes just committed hara-kiri to enable Apple to compete better in the digital content marketplace. Spotify may need to do something similar soon.

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Apps absorb as many other apps as they possibly can until it’s decided they need to be broken up into as many other apps as they possibly can.
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The radiation showstopper for Mars exploration • European Space Agency

»

While astronauts are not considered radiation workers in all countries, they are exposed to 200 times more radiation on the International Space Station than an airline pilot or a radiology nurse.

Radiation is in the Space Station’s spotlight every day. A console at NASA’s mission control in Houston, Texas, is constantly showing space weather information. If a burst of space radiation is detected, teams on Earth can abort a spacewalk, instruct astronauts to move to more shielded areas and even change the altitude of the Station to minimise impact. One of the main recommendations of the topical team is to develop a risk model with the radiation dose limits for crews travelling beyond the International Space Station.

ESA’s flight surgeon and radiologist Ulrich Straube believes that the model should “provide information on the risks that could cause cancer and non-cancer health issues for astronauts going to the Moon and Mars in agreement with all space agencies.”

Recent data from ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter showed that on a six-month journey to the Red Planet an astronaut could be exposed to at least 60% of the total radiation dose limit recommended for their entire career.

“As it stands today, we can’t go to Mars due to radiation. It would be impossible to meet acceptable dose limits,” reminds Marco.

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Shall we tell Elon Musk?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Apple is forking its mobile OS: iPad gets its own, with more file support and a different multitasking interface, coming later this year. Photo © Apple.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

Google Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain? • alexdanco.com

Alex Danco wrote this on Thursday, before the WSJ story that the DOJ was looking at Google on antitrust grounds:

»

Chrome’s market dominance in recent years is a great example of how Google has used its scale and influence to draw the back-end plumbing of the internet more tightly under its control, all under the banner of “it’s all open source; how could we be bad guys?” It’s not like we haven’t seen this playbook before: an Android phone may be running open source Linux (cool!), but without Google Services and the Google Play Store, it’s a brick. They’ve mastered separation of the strategic openness of Android with the accompanying strategic closed-ness of everything that runs on it and makes it actually worth something.

The biggest fight here recently is over standardizing the rules around DRM: the Digital Rights Management framework of laws and restrictions that came into being through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and govern the rules around digital access and permission. (The free software community, as you might guess, absolutely hates DRM. I’ll probably write another Snippets issue soon about this.)

Google has done something sneaky here: by successfully lobbying for DRM standards in web browsers across the whole internet, Google has made it so that anyone can build or modify their own Chrome-based browser as they want to, just like before. But in order for it to be able to play video (a pretty big prerequisite of the modern internet), they have to license a proprietary DRM plugin from Google called Widevine.

This isn’t the first time Google has used this tactic, and it’s a good one: “Oh, nice open source project you’ve got there! You’re free to do anything you want with it, which obviously makes us the progressive good guys of the Free Internet. However, if you want it to actually work in any real-world conditions, then you’ll need to license our proprietary stuff and play by our very particular rules.”

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Certainly a better argument than many on this.
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On YouTube’s digital playground, an open gate for paedophiles • New York Times

Max Fisher and Amanda Taub:

»

YouTube never set out to serve users with sexual interests in children — but in the end, Mr. Kaiser said, its automated system managed to keep them watching with recommendations that he called “disturbingly on point.”

Users do not need to look for videos of children to end up watching them. The platform can lead them there through a progression of recommendations.

So a user who watches erotic videos might be recommended videos of women who become conspicuously younger, and then women who pose provocatively in children’s clothes. Eventually, some users might be presented with videos of girls as young as five or six wearing bathing suits, or getting dressed or doing a split.

On its own, each video might be perfectly innocent, a home movie, say, made by a child. Any revealing frames are fleeting and appear accidental. But, grouped together, their shared features become unmistakable.

“I’m really scared of it,” said Christiane [mother of a 10-year-old girl whose innocent swimming video came to attention]. “Scared of the fact that a video like this fell into such a category.” The New York Times is withholding the family’s surname to protect its privacy…

…Jennifer O’Connor, YouTube’s product director for trust and safety, said the company was committed to eradicating the exploitation of children on its platform and had worked nonstop since February on improving enforcement. “Protecting kids is at the top of our list,” she said.

But YouTube has not put in place the one change that researchers say would prevent this from happening again: turning off its recommendation system on videos of children, though the platform can identify such videos automatically.

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It feels like we get at least one story like this per week, and YouTube never ever makes the obvious fix.
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The abominable Laffer Curve • Coppola Comment

Frances Coppola:

»

The Laffer curve is back. [Touted by Tory leadership contender Sajid Javid, who said cutting tax rates “could bring in billions of extra revenue”.]

Not that it has been absent for long, really. Seven years ago, to much applause, George Osborne cut the top rate of tax from 50% to 45%. When the cut took effect there was a large increase in tax take. At the time, Conservative pundits crowed that this proved not only that the Laffer curve was real, but that we now know where its peak is.

This is the cut that Javid refers to in the video clip. But sadly he is wrong. The tax cut didn’t raise “billions”. We don’t actually know if it raised anything at all.

The tax cut was advertised a year in advance, giving rich people plenty of opportunity to reorganise their finances so as to avoid the 50% rate and take advantage of the tax cut (this is known as “reverse forestalling”). Predictably, there was a large fall in tax revenue from the rich prior to the cut taking effect, and a large increase afterwards. The 50% rate itself had also been advertised a year in advance, so there was also large increase in tax take from the rich before it took effect and a fall afterwards. Thus, throughout its short existence, tax take from the 50% rate was distorted by forestalling and reverse forestalling effects. We will never know how much tax it would have raised once the forestalling effect had worn off, and we therefore don’t know whether Osborne’s tax cut increased or reduced tax take. Consequently, we are none the wiser about the Laffer curve peak.

But  there is an even bigger problem. The Laffer curve plots total tax take versus top tax rates, not tax take from the rich versus their tax rates. It thus relies for its shape on multiplier effects from tax changes.

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Coppola is an economist, and she eviscerates the very concept of the Laffer curve (sketched, in myth, on a napkin on the Reagan years.)
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FTC gets jurisdiction for possible Facebook antitrust probe • WSJ

Brent Kendall and John D. McKinnon:

»

The Justice Department and FTC now have established that each is responsible for antitrust issues for two of the Big Four tech companies: the Justice Department has authority over Google and Apple, while the FTC has oversight of Facebook and Amazon.

It was unclear whether the allocations of Apple and Amazon were related to the same agreement that divided Google and Facebook between the agencies. But Google and Facebook appear to be closest to being in the agencies’ investigative crosshairs.

The FTC and Justice Department share authority in enforcing US antitrust law and at times must work out turf arrangements regarding which agency will handle what issues.

The FTC already has spent more than a year investigating Facebook on privacy issues related to how it handles users’ data. That probe, however, doesn’t focus on antitrust questions of whether Facebook is stifling competition in the digital realm. The fact that the commission formally secured jurisdiction on those issues suggests it is considering even more rigorous scrutiny of the social media giant.

«

As with Google, it’s a bit difficult to know on what grounds the FTC would go ahead. Where’s the consumer harm? Sure, Facebook’s takeover of Instagram and WhatsApp cornered the market in social media. But it’s pretty difficult to see a persuasive case emerging.
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Best of iOS 13: The 15 most exciting new features coming to your iPhone and iPad – BGR

Faster, darker, swipier, mappier (with its own version of Street View – 12 years after Street View was launched), and more. Plus you can bump phones to share audio; I remember a few years ago Craig Federighi introducing AirDrop and saying “you won’t have to bump your phones together”, mocking a then-popular Android app, Bump (bought by Google) for sharing content.
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iPadOS, coming “this fall”: thumb drives, more gestures, “desktop-class” browsing • Ars Technica

Sam Machkovech:

»

iPadOS does put a welcome, Apple-like spin on multi-window support: supported apps will allow users to grab and drop content between windows. Federighi showed this off by using a “tap-and-drag” feature to move attachments and links from one Mail window to another on the same screen. He pointed out that third-party apps like Microsoft Word will also support the feature. But he said nothing about such multi-window support working with multiple apps on the same screen—such as dragging-and-dropping Safari content into a Microsoft Word window.

An update to iPad’s native file-browsing interface looks decidedly more like MacOS, with a column-view option that enables file preview tabs and quick-action menus. iPadOS will support a suite of new file sharing options, including iCloud folder sharing and file servers.

Arguably the biggest file-system win, at least for owners of recent USB Type-C iPads, is native file-browsing support for thumb drives, SD cards, and directly connected cameras. (We’ll have to wait to see how many older iPads will support the same thing via legacy adapter devices, but this at least directly answers a major criticism Ars leveled at the most recent iPad model.)

iPadOS’ version of Safari will no longer render mobile-browser versions of sites by default. Instead, it will deliver “desktop-class browsing.” Apple promises to render sites on iPadOS as built for the desktop version of Safari, only with Apple layering its own iPad-specific tweaks on top via software (mostly for the sake of “touch input”). Whether this will ultimately require website designers to juggle another spec for browsers remains to be seen, in spite of Apple’s promises. (“Sites like Google Docs… work great in Safari now,” Federighi said, at least.)

«

We’ll see what Google has to say about that. It likes pushing its Docs, Sheets and similar apps; perhaps it can see more going on in them. Also: now has mouse support. That’s nice.
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Apple expands tvOS gaming with PS4, Xbox One S controller support • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

»

At the 2019 WWDC keynote today, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the company is expanding Apple TV controller support to include “two of the best and most popular game controllers available, Xbox One S and PlayStation DualShock 4” with the next tvOS update. Note that this expansion does not include original Xbox One control pads that shipped with the 2013 version of the system—only the Bluetooth-equipped controller update that premiered alongside Microsoft’s One S update in 2016 will work with Apple TV.

The announcement, which drew large and sustained applause in the presentation hall, comes nearly four years after Apple’s second-generation Apple TV became the company’s first foray into TV-based gaming since the ill-fated Pippin. At launch, Apple TV games were required to support the hardware’s touchpad-focused, tilt-sensitive remote, and those games could optionally support any number of MFi controllers already designed for mobile iOS hardware. While Apple reversed that decision in mid-2016 to allow for MFi-exclusive games, Apple TV game developers continue to complain about the fragmented control landscape on Apple’s set-top box.

«

Long overdue (as is the addition of multi-user); the WWDC keynote felt like being in a bus station, waiting for them all to arrive after noodling around for ages.
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Apple launches ‘Sign in with Apple’ button for apps, ‘no tracking’ login • 9to5 Mac

Benjamin Mayo:

»

Apple announced a new Sign in with Apple button as part of its iOS 13 announcements. The button offers Apple ID single-sign on functionality similar to sign-in buttons from Twitter, Facebook or Google.

Apple is marketing this as a privacy-secure sign-in option. Apple will mask user email addresses and other personal information, whilst still allowing the apps to contact users indirectly.

Users select what information to share with the destination app. You can share your real email address with the third-party app, or use the ‘hide my email’ option to forward email onwards. In the latter case, the app would only see a random anonymous email address.

Of course, apps must update to integrate the ‘Sign in with Apple’ button. A lot of apps may not want to add the Apple ID login because they cannot access customer data they want.

«

Logical expectation is that Apple will push it on its devices, so apps and sites may feel they need to support it. But with the tech landscape as it is, there might be some reluctance to not gather data when you can slurp it up via Google or Facebook. Those sites and apps aren’t on your side. They’re on their own side.
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China accused of ‘rigging’ 5G tests to favour Huawei • Daily Telegraph

Anna Isaac, Christopher Williams and Hannah Boland:

»

More than 100 computer security experts are conducting a security test of 5G equipment, from makers including Huawei and Western rivals Nokia and Ericsson, in which hacking techniques are used to check for weak spots. The ostensibly legitimate exercise is part of planning for 5G and its leap forward in speed and data capacity in the world’s biggest mobile market.

However, British officials and industry sources tracking the tests allege they are being rigged to defend Huawei. It is believed that vulnerabilities discovered by China’s secret state hackers have been passed to the 5G testers to ensure Nokia and Ericsson’s equipment is found to be unsecure.

Officials and Western telecoms executives held crisis meetings about the campaign last week.

Although knowledge of the effort is patchy, it is expected that testing will end around June 10, in time for Beijing to use the results to attempt to influence a crucial EU review of 5G security this summer. Two sources suggested China particularly intends to undermine cautionary advice on Huawei provided by British intelligence. Beijing’s hacking attack comes after a series of steps to turn China into what one corporate source has called a “hostile environment for non-Chinese telecoms firms”.

«

The discomfort of western intelligence agencies at this is very clear. It would be astonishing if China’s leaders didn’t long ago decide that telecoms is a critical infrastructure for the future, and that if they happen to be the ones supplying to the rest of the world, all the better.
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Lenovo’s Smart Clock is small, simple, and limited • The Verge

Dan Seifert:

»

The Smart Clock’s greatest asset is its size: if you have a very limited amount of space where you plan to use a smart alarm clock, the Smart Clock’s footprint is much smaller than a Nest Hub or other smart display. It’s similar in size to Amazon’s Echo Spot, but with a rectangular wedge shape instead of the softball-like design of the Spot. It has a couple of volume buttons on top, a mute switch for the microphones on the back, and a clever USB-A port that can be used to charge your phone.

Even with the small size, the Smart Clock’s screen is easy to see and read from across the room, thanks to the large-sized fonts it employs in most of the software. It also does an excellent job of automatically adjusting the brightness of the screen for the available light in the room, so it doesn’t become blinding or distractingly bright in the middle of the night when you’re trying to sleep. It doesn’t have a camera to worry about, which is a nice thing for something that’s designed to live in your bedroom. (I put a googly eye on the Echo Spot’s camera specifically to block it in my bedroom.)

But reading the time is about all you’ll do with the screen because, unlike the Nest Hub and every other smart display, the Smart Clock cannot play video content, whether it’s on YouTube or cast from an app on your phone. It also cannot display images from Google Photos, which is one of my favorite features of the Nest Hub. The only video you can watch on the Smart Clock is feeds from Nest cameras (though Lenovo says support for other home security cameras will be available “soon”).

The Smart Clock does offer some limited weather and calendar information on its screen as well as basic controls for music and smart home gadgets. But you can’t browse anything through the touchscreen, nor does it have a dashboard of smart home controls like on other smart displays.

«

I see we’re at the “just try redoing any domestic object but add a screen and voice control and sometimes camera to it” stage of desperate tech late capitalism. Someone at Lenovo greenlit this, after all.
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We found the guy behind the viral ‘drunk Pelosi’ video • Daily Beast

Kevin Poulsen:

»

[Shawn] Brooks, a 34-year-old day laborer currently on probation after pleading guilty to domestic battery, claims that his “drunk” commentary on an unaltered Pelosi video had no connection to the now-infamous fake clip that premiered less than 15 minutes later. “I wasn’t the individual who created that Pelosi video,” he insisted in a telephone interview.

It’s conceivable that someone else actually edited the clip. But a Facebook official, confirming a Daily Beast investigation, said the video was first posted on Politics WatchDog directly from Brooks’ personal Facebook account.

Brooks acknowledged that he’s involved in the management of both Politics WatchDog and AllNews 24/7, the Facebook pages that sent the bogus video on it’s viral tear. To the outside observer, the two pages are unconnected, but after a tell-tale link on one of the pages led The Daily Beast to Brooks, he admitted that the ad revenue for both outlets goes directly into his personal PayPal account.

In the first hint at a possible motive for the Pelosi smear, Brooks volunteered that the video brought in nearly $1,000 in shared ad revenue.

That number would have been higher, he said, except that Facebook cut off any future earnings when the company’s fact-check partners ruled the clip a hoax about 36 hours after its Politics WatchDog debut. “It makes money for Facebook too,” he groused. “I’m sure that’s their motive for not taking it down.”

In a statement, Facebook disputed that, saying, “We have zero interest in making money from fake news and our policy is to not allow people to make money from content that has been rated false by a fact-checker.”

«

..but it is a policy to leave it up so people spend more time on Facebook. There’s controversy though because Facebook provided Poulsen with the data about Brooks, but only after seeing that Brooks was using fake accounts to amplify and control his “news” sites. But Poulsen had done a lot of the identification work first, right down to Brooks’s personal account. Facebook tends not to help if you ring up and ask “hey, who first posted that video?”
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

It’s Apple’s WWDC today, and Dark Mode is expected to be announced for iOS. But is it actually good for what we do on devices? CC-licensed photo by tua ulamac on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 11 links for you. Leading in the polls. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years • Ars Technica

Timothy Lee:

»

I read every word of Judge Koh’s book-length opinion, which portrays Qualcomm as a ruthless monopolist. The legal document outlines a nearly 20-year history of overcharging smartphone makers for cellular chips. Qualcomm structured its contracts with smartphone makers in ways that made it almost impossible for other chipmakers to challenge Qualcomm’s dominance. Customers who didn’t go along with Qualcomm’s one-sided terms were threatened with an abrupt and crippling loss of access to modem chips.

“Qualcomm has monopoly power over certain cell phone chips, and they use that monopoly power to charge people too much money,” says Charles Duan, a patent expert at the free-market R Street Institute. “Instead of just charging more for the chips themselves, they required people to buy a patent license and overcharged for the patent license.”

Now, all of that dominance might be coming to an end. In her ruling, Koh ordered Qualcomm to stop threatening customers with chip cutoffs. Qualcomm must now re-negotiate all of its agreements with customers and license its patents to competitors on reasonable terms. And if Koh’s ruling survives the appeals process, it could produce a truly competitive market for wireless chips for the first time in this century.

«

The quotes in this article – taken from the court documents and testimony – are eye-opening. Charging not on the value of the patents, but on the retail value of the phone. An incredible scam. Now, there’s a worthwhile piece of antitrust action. Speaking of which…
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Justice Department is preparing antitrust investigation of Google • WSJ

Brent Kendall and John D. McKinnon:

»

The department’s antitrust division in recent weeks has been laying the groundwork for the probe, the people said. The Federal Trade Commission, which shares antitrust authority with the department, previously conducted a broad investigation of Google but closed it in 2013 without taking action, though Google made some voluntary changes to certain business practices.

The FTC and the department have been in talks recently on who would oversee any new antitrust investigation of a leading US tech giant, and the commission agreed to give the Justice Department jurisdiction over Google, the people said.

With turf now settled, the department is preparing to closely examine Google’s business practices related to its search and other businesses, the people said.

It couldn’t immediately be learned whether Google has been contacted by the department. Third-party critics of the search giant, however, already have been in contact with Justice Department officials, some of the people familiar with the matter said.

«

This story is amazingly thin on detail, which hasn’t changed through being repeated over the weekend up and down the techosphere. I doubt Google is that worried, at least existentially; the US DoJ hasn’t done nearly as many tech cases as the EU, and the big one – against Microsoft – hardly stopped it, long-term.
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The dark side of Dark Mode • TidBITS

Adam Engst:

»

To summarize, a dark-on-light display like a Mac in Light Mode provides better performance in focusing of the eye, identifying letters, transcribing letters, text comprehension, reading speed, and proofreading performance, and it results in less visual fatigue and increased visual comfort. The benefits apply to both the young and the old, as that paper concludes:

»

In an ageing society, age-related vision changes need to be considered when designing digital displays. Visual acuity testing and a proofreading task revealed a positive polarity advantage for younger and older adults. Dark characters on light background lead to better legibility and are strongly recommended independent of observer’s age.

«

«

I’ve never understood the attraction of Dark Mode. I had enough years of green-on-black terminals and MS-DOS’s white-on-black to recognise that black-on-white text is how it’s meant to be. (Plus you can’t have an effective serif font in a white-on-black setting.) Engst is right. Steve Sinofsky pointed out on Twitter that the interest in Dark Mode also means two problems: it leads to new bugs through its own implementation, and the effort spent implementing it means other existing bugs don’t get fixed.
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Instagram Adam Mosseri: profile of important Facebook business leader • CNBC

Salvador Rodriguez:

»

In late 2017 and early 2018, Mosseri was involved in a series of meetings about how Facebook would deal with the issue going forward, according to people with knowledge of the matter. In those sessions, Mosseri supported aggressively removing fake news across Facebook’s services, the people said.

On multiple occasions, they said, Mosseri squared off with Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of US public policy and a former member of the George W. Bush Administration who stirred controversy last year for showing up at the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Mosseri, who has donated to Democratic political campaigns in past years, advocated for completely removing fake news from the company’s News Feed, rather than simply pushing it down the rankings, the people said. He also lobbied for the removal of far right outlet Breitbart News from the list of publications that receive preferential treatment on the company’s News Feed, and opposed partnering with the Daily Caller, founded by Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, for fact-checking.

Kaplan argued that Facebook couldn’t afford to appear biased against conservative media, but Mosseri countered by focusing on the difference between showing bias and banning objectively false information. On one occasion, the debate got so heated that Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s former vice president of communications and public policy, had to calm Mosseri down, sources said.

Mosseri was ultimately unsuccessful. Breitbart still gets equal treatment with other major publications, and last month Facebook added Check Your Fact, the Daily Caller’s fact-checking site, as a partner.

«

Which is just absurd. Outside the US, the Democrats look like a centre-right party, on a par with the Tories in the UK. The Republicans are far to the right, and Breitbart and Daily Caller on the wild extremes. Kaplan is a blight, and Zuckerberg’s failure to recognise that indicative of the failure of its (lack of) shareholder model.
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New Zealand’s next liberal milestone: a budget guided by ‘well-being’ • The New York Times

Charlotte Graham-McLay:

»

[New Zealand] is moving away from more traditional bottom-line measures like productivity and economic growth and instead focusing on goals like community and cultural connection and equity in well-being across generations…

…Under New Zealand’s revised policy, all new spending must advance one of five government priorities: improving mental health, reducing child poverty, addressing the inequalities faced by indigenous Maori and Pacific islands people, thriving in a digital age, and transitioning to a low-emission, sustainable economy.

The government is promoting the new framework as bringing much-needed clarity to the budgeting process. In the past, individual government ministers vied for the new money available in each year’s budget, and “relatively arbitrary” decisions were made about who got what, the country’s finance minister, Grant Robertson, said in an interview.

This year, those ministers have to collaborate on funding proposals with their colleagues, and the proposals must fit the new criteria. “Governments are notorious for their silos, and so we’re actually saying, no, there’s an outcome there that we want you all working together on,” Mr. Robertson said.

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That’s radical: no more GDP growth targets, but more touchy-feely.
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iPhone privacy is broken…and apps are to blame • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

»

Congratulations! You’ve bought an iPhone! You made one of the best privacy-conscious decisions… until you download an app from Apple’s App Store. Most are littered with secret trackers, slurping up your personal data and sending it to more places than you can count.

Over the last few weeks, my colleague Mark Secada and I tested 80 apps, most of which are promoted in Apple’s App Store as “Apps We Love.” All but one used third-party trackers for marketing, ads or analytics. The apps averaged four trackers apiece.

Some apps send personal data without ever informing users in their privacy policies, others just use industry-accepted—though sometimes shady—ad-tracking methods. As my colleague Sam Schechner reported a few months ago (also with Mark’s assistance), many apps send info to Facebook, even if you’re not logged into its social networks. In our new testing, we found that many also send info to other companies, including Google and mobile marketers, for reasons that are not apparent to the end user.

We focused on the iPhone in our testing—largely because of Apple’s aggressive marketing of personal privacy. However, apps in Google’s Play Store for Android use the same techniques. In some cases, when it comes to providing on-device information to developers and trackers, Android is worse. Google recently updated its app permissions and says it is taking a deeper look at how apps access personal user information.

«

Stern must be furious that her former colleague Geoff Fowler, now at the Washington Post, got ahead of her with the story – his appeared a day or two before hers – but it shows that we’ve become complacent about apps, and especially the third-party trackers they tend to incorporate.
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How Nepal can address overtourism on Mount Everest • Skift

Adam Minter:

»

In 2014, the government considered a plan to lease out unclimbed Himalayan peaks to private entities that would manage them and collect fees from mountaineers. The idea was to lure climbers away from Everest, boost tourism in other areas, and shift the management burden to operators with a financial incentive to keep the environment safe, clean, and friendly. Nothing came of the idea, despite support from Nepal’s mountaineering industry. That shouldn’t be the end of it. Nepal should revive the proposal and expand it to Everest and other popular peaks.

There are several ways to accomplish this. The most straightforward would be to establish concessions whereby a select group of qualified operators are offered exclusive rights to guide expeditions. A reduced number of well-qualified operators would boost climbing fees and local-government revenues while lowering numbers and boosting safety. It’s a model that has a track record of success around the world, including in the US, where the National Park Service leases multiyear concessions on some of its signature peaks, including Denali and Mount Rainier.

A more ambitious approach would be to establish private concessions for entire mountains or — more practically, in the case of Everest — base camps. For example, the Nepali government could lease out Everest Base Camp to a private operator for a royalty that’s recouped via trekking and climbing fees (permit fees for a trek to Everest Base Camp are currently less than $100, while an organized trek can cost in the thousands of dollars). In return, the private operators would be expected to meet safety, sustainability, and marketing goals.

«

If you eliminate deaths from the April 2015 Base Camp avalanche that killed 19, and a similar one in 2014 higher up which killed 16, Everest had been getting safer; but even before this year there was an average of 5 deaths per year. The problem is always that bad weather followed by a good weather window means queues. The pendulum will swing again.
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China threatens sweeping blacklist of firms after Huawei ban • Bloomberg

»

China will set up a mechanism listing foreign enterprises, organizations and individuals that don’t obey market rules, violate contracts and block, cut off supply for non-commercial reasons or severely damage the legitimate interests of Chinese companies, Ministry of Commerce spokesman Gao Feng said. “Necessary measures will be taken” against those on the list, he said, adding that specifics would be released soon.

The US government has moved to curb Huawei’s ability to sell equipment in the US and buy parts from American suppliers, potentially crippling one of China’s most successful – but controversial – global companies. That step has helped broaden the tariff war into a wider confrontation between China and the US, at a time when negotiations between the two sides have broken down.

The vague wording of the Chinese state media report opens the door for Beijing to target a broad swathe of the global tech industry – from US giants like Alphabet’s Google, Qualcomm and Intel to even non-American suppliers that have cut off China’s largest technology company. Those run the gamut from Japan’s Toshiba to Britain’s Arm.

Shares in Apple, Qualcomm, and Intel fell more than 1% in pre-market trading on Friday.

«

China won’t ban Arm (which anyway is owned by Japan’s Softbank) – its designs power all the smartphones it makes and exports. It might choose to nick its designs, which is a different problem for Arm. Ditto Qualcomm, and to a lesser extent Intel. And Google is banned inside China; not much leverage there.

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Why Tesla’s dashboard touch screens suck • Fast Company

John Pavlus:

»

Raluca Budiu, Nielsen Norman Group’s director of research, doesn’t think that touch screens in cars are a priori awful. Buried in her lengthy, technical article are a few compliments for Tesla: The huge screen makes it easy to see multiple information sources at once; it’s really good at pointing out charging stations on a map; and “the autopilot and self-navigation systems acknowledge the possibility of failure.” (Damn, that’s faint praise.) “Many of these features should make driving a safer and more comfortable activity,” she writes.

But that’s the key word: should. In reality, she argues, small but fundamental design flaws can make car touch screens overly fussy to use in cars. And when you’re traveling at 60 mph, that fussiness has a higher cost—particularly in a Tesla, which puts so much dashboard functionality in its touch screens that The Verge called the Model S a “tablet on wheels.” As Budiu puts it: “In a car, time spent with the UI is time spent ignoring the road.”

The Tesla Model S’s entire center console—the space between the two front seats that’s traditionally studded with physical knobs, buttons, and dials—is one enormous 17-inch touch screen. It looks eye-poppingly futuristic, and goes a long way toward making owners feel like they’re driving a “magical space car,” not just an automobile. But like any “pictures under glass” UI technology, Tesla’s controls require you to look directly at them in order to operate them.

«

I made the same point back in January 2015, about Android Auto and Apple CarPlay: if you have to look at the screen, you’re not looking at the road. And without haptic feedback (which you get from a physical knob), you’re forced to look away.

I guess Tesla’s solution would be for everyone to be on Autopilot. But that brings other perils..
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HTTP Status Dogs

Mike Lee:

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Hypertext Transfer Protocol Response status codes. And dogs.

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Or, photos of dogs that reflect HTTP status codes. A good way to start the week. (301 and 405 are pretty fine.)
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Lithium levels in tap water and psychotic experiences in a general population of adolescents • NCBI

Shimodera S and 12 others, mostly from the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science:

»

to our knowledge, no study has investigated lithium level in tap water in relation to psychotic experiences in a general population of adolescents. This is the first study to investigate this using a large dataset. Information on psychotic experiences, distress associated with these experiences, and depressive symptoms were collected in 24 public junior high schools in Kochi Prefecture in Japan. Samples were collected from sources that supplied drinking water to schools, and lithium levels were measured using atomic absorption spectrophotometry.

The association of lithium levels with psychotic experiences, considering distress as a degree of severity, was examined using an ordinal logistic regression model with schools and depressive symptoms as random effects. In total, 3040 students responded to the self-reporting questionnaire (response rate: 91.8%). Lithium levels in tap water were inversely associated with psychotic experiences (p = 0.021).

We concluded that lithium level in tap water was inversely associated with psychotic experiences among a general population of adolescents and may have a preventive effect for such experiences and distress.

«

Ooooeeee. Another study in Denmark suggested that lithium in drinking water is associated with lower incidence of dementia. Fluoride for our teeth, lithium for our brains? Yet its benefits in water have been known since the 1970s – correlated with fewer suicides, homicides and rapes. (The UK has lower levels of lithium in water than many other countries, such as Japan.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Suddenly very unpopular with Wikipedia after a Google stunt. CC-licensed photo by gingerbeardman on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Until next week. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The North Face used Wikipedia to climb to the top of Google search results • AdAge

Ann-Christine Diaz:

»

When you first start planning a big trip, step one will likely happen at the Google search bar. Step two might be clicking onto the images of your target destination. The North Face, in a campaign with agency Leo Burnett Tailor Made, took advantage of this consumer behavior to keep its name top of mind with travelers considering an adventure sports excursion.

The brand and agency took pictures of athletes wearing the brand while trekking to famous locations around the world, including Brazil’s Guarita State Park and Farol do Mampimptuba, Cuillin in Scotland and Peru’s Huayna Picchu. They then updated the Wikipedia images in the articles for those locations so that now, the brand would appear in the top of Google image search results when consumers researched any of those locations—all done for a budget of zero dollars.

“Our mission is to expand our frontiers so that our consumers can overcome their limits. With the ‘Top of Images’ project, we achieved our positioning and placed our products in a fully contextualized manner as items that go hand in hand with these destinations,” explained Fabricio Luzzi, CEO of The North Face Brazil in a statement. 

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As you might expect, Wikimedia (owner of Wikipedia) is absolutely furious about this.
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An AI taught itself to play a video game; for the first time, it’s beating humans • The Conversation

Amit Joshi on DeepMind’s latest:

»

The Capture the Flag bot from the recent study also began learning from scratch. But instead of playing against its identical clone, a cohort of 30 bots was created and trained in parallel with their own internal reward signal. Each bot within this population would then play together and learn from each other. As David Silver – one of the research scientists involved – notes, AI is beginning to “remove the constraints of human knowledge… and create knowledge itself”.

The learning speed for humans is still much faster than the most advanced deep reinforcement learning algorithms. Both OpenAI’s bots and DeepMind’s AlphaStar (the bot playing StarCraft II) devoured thousands of years’ worth of gameplay before being able to reach a human level of performance. Such training is estimated to cost several millions of dollars. Nevertheless, a self-taught AI capable of beating humans at their own game is an exciting breakthrough that could change how we see machines.

AI is often portrayed replacing or complementing human capabilities, but rarely as a fully-fledged team member, performing the same task as human beings. As these video game experiments involve machine-human collaboration, they offer a glimpse of the future.

Human players of Capture the Flag rated the bots as more collaborative than other humans, but players of DOTA 2 had a mixed reaction to their AI teammates. Some were quite enthusiastic, saying they felt supported and that they learned from playing alongside them.

«

How long before there’s a system which can learn to play any game, and trounce humans at it? In which case, isn’t that something like the scary AI, except just limited to video games?
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The Galaxy Note 10 won’t have a headphone jack or physical volume and power keys (rumour) • Android Police

David Ruddock:

»

Speaking to a source familiar with the company’s plans, Android Police has learned that Samsung will likely begin its wind-down of the headphone jack – and even physical keys for functions like volume and power – with the Galaxy Note 10. The Note 10 will have no 3.5mm connector, and exterior buttons (power, volume, Bixby) will be replaced by capacitive or pressure-sensitive areas, likely highlighted by some kind of raised ‘bump’ and/or texture along the edge (i.e., a faux button). We don’t know if it’s Samsung’s intent to carry over both of these changes to the Galaxy S11 in 2020.

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Slightly delayed courage?
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This ID scanner company is collecting sensitive data on millions of bar-goers • One Zero

Susie Cagle:

»

mouths off to a bouncer, tags a wall, gets in a fight, or is just too drunk and disorderly. They’re not just kicked out for the night, but “eighty-sixed” — permanently banned from the establishment.

Now imagine if a bar owner could flag that ejected patron digitally, documenting their transgression for other bar owners to see and placing them on a nightlife equivalent of a no fly list that stretches across city, state, and even international borders.

PatronScan allows bars to do just that. The PatronScan kiosk, placed at the entrance of a bar or nightlife establishment, can verify whether an ID is real or fake, and collect and track basic customer demographic data. For bars, accurate ID scanners are valuable tools that help weed out underage drinkers, protecting the establishments’ liquor licenses from fines and scrupulous state alcohol boards. But PatronScan’s main selling point is security.

The system allows a business to maintain a record of bad customer behavior and flag those individuals, alerting every other bar that uses PatronScan. What constitutes “bad behavior” is at a bar manager’s discretion, and ranges from “sexual assault” to “violence” to “public drunkenness” and “other.” When a bargoer visits another PatronScan bar and swipes their ID, their previously flagged transgressions will pop up on the kiosk screen. Unless patrons successfully appeal their status to PatronScan or the bar directly, their status can follow them for anywhere from a couple weeks to a few months, to much, much longer. According to a PatronScan “Public Safety Report” from May 2018, the average length of bans handed out to customers in Sacramento, California was 19 years. (The company’s “Public Safety Report” is embedded in full below.)

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And of course you don’t know what the company is doing with all that data because it’s America, where your personal data is my potential future revenue stream.
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Would you recognise yourself from your data? • BBC News

Carl Miller had the clever idea of getting all the data held about him, to see what it revealed – and whether it was accurate:

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About 1,500 of those pages were this kind of educated guesswork, all of it from companies I had never heard of before.

It’s easy to find data on this scale a little alarming, but most of it I found more silly than sinister:
• The age of my boiler had been predicted
• My likelihood to be interested in gardening was 23.3%
• My interest in prize draws and competitions was 11%
• My “animal/nature awareness level” was low
• My consumer technology audience segmentation was described as (among other things) “young and struggling”.
• My household was found to have no “regular interest in book reading” (I have written a book)
• At one moment I was a go-getter, an idea-seeker.
• Then I was a love aspirer, a disengaged worker, part of a group called budgeted stability or, simply, downhearted.
• Something I did triggered a “Netmums – women trying to conceive” event.

If this was a reflection of myself, I didn’t recognise it.

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Not a very accurate picture, in other words. This is the world of “targeted” advertising?

And of course when he did try to get the data, in many cases he was directed to broken systems or told to send his request by snail mail. Though there’s an argument that you want to make it a little harder to access that data than just downloading it, because otherwise it might be open to hackers.
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Border collies run like the wind to bring new life to Chilean forest • Mother Nature Network

Mary Jo Dilonardo:

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The worst wildfire season in Chile’s history ravaged more than 1.4 million acres early in 2017, destroying nearly 1,500 homes and killing at least 11 people. More than a dozen countries sent fire-fighting specialists to help battle the dozens of destructive blazes. When the fires were finally extinguished, the landscape was a charred wasteland.

A few months later, a unique team was brought in to help restore the damaged ecosystem. They have four legs and a penchant for careening at high speeds through the forest.

Border collies Das, Summer and Olivia were outfitted with special backpacks brimming with seeds. Then they were sent on a mission, let loose to race through the ruined forests. As they bounded and darted, their packs streamed a trickle of seeds. The hope is that these seeds will take root and sprout, bringing the forest slowly back to life one tree at a time.

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Look at those doggos. This is your happy story for today.
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Huawei a key beneficiary of China subsidies that US wants ended • AFP.com

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Huawei’s annual reports and public records show that it has received hundreds of millions of dollars in grants, heavily subsidised land to build facilities and apartments for loyal employees, bonuses to top engineers, and massive state loans to international customers to fund purchases of Huawei products.

“Below market price land sales, massive targeted R&D grants, and export financing on terms that are more favourable than what Huawei could get from the private sector collectively appear to provide significant subsidies that other countries could challenge at the WTO if they are harming domestic companies,” said Claire Reade, a former assistant US trade representative.

Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei had denied that the company received subsidies in a BBC interview in February, but a Huawei spokeswoman later said Ren meant the firm did not receive any special government aid.

“Like other companies, Huawei receives research subsidies from governments in several jurisdictions,” the spokeswoman told AFP.

Over the past 10 years, Huawei has received 11bn yuan ($1.6bn) in grants, according to its annual reports.

More than half was given by China as “unconditional government grants” because of the firm’s “contributions to the development of new high-technology” in China, according to Huawei’s 2009 annual report.

Even some of Huawei’s top engineers receive bonuses through government programmes: more than 100 of them received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the city of Shenzhen last year…

…Huawei inked a $10bn credit line with the China Development Bank (CDB) in 2004 to provide low-cost financing to customers buying its telecom gear. It was tripled to $30bn in 2009.

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The grants don’t amount to much, but the credit line does.
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What Apple Watch design alternatives do you wish had made it into the final product? • Quora

Anna-Katrina Shedletsky worked on the team that built the first version:

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One of the important skills in engineering and designing a new product is making tough decisions about how to weigh the risk of a feature with its potential value add and to make the call as to whether it should be in the first generation, or a later version (after some of the other risks have been figured out). ECG is a good example of Apple showing restraint: just because it was potentially possible, doesn’t mean it should be in the product. The team figured ECG out on later generations of the product and it’s helping a ton of people manage their health better – so congratulations to them!

I also wish we had been able to make the cellular antenna work in the first generation product – we couldn’t figure it out because the antenna design was already incredibly challenging and the chipset for cellular at the time would have taken up 1/2 of all of the board space available (and we needed that space for other important stuff!).

Antenna Design was a challenge because the design was … not particularly antenna friendly: it’s a metal box strapped to an incredibly lossy surface (your wrist). Think back to the contemporary designs of the day: iPhones had splits in the enclosures to enable large portions of the metal enclosure itself to be an antenna. That didn’t work for Watch because it’s not possible to make a split between metal and non-metal (an insulator like plastic) that is also waterproof under pressure.

While Watch had many engineering challenges this one was fundamental: without at least a Wi-Fi antenna, we had no product.

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The story that follows of how they figured out the Wi-Fi antenna is remarkable – and might explain why the Watch didn’t arrive quite when expected; the supply chain has a lot of hysteresis.
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Deceased GOP strategist’s hard drives reveal new details on the census citizenship question • The New York Times

Michael Wines:

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Thomas B. Hofeller achieved near-mythic status in the Republican Party as the Michelangelo of gerrymandering, the architect of partisan political maps that cemented the party’s dominance across the country.

But after he died last summer, his estranged daughter discovered hard drives in her father’s home that revealed something else: Mr. Hofeller had played a crucial role in the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

Files on those drives showed that he wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats. And months after urging President Trump’s transition team to tack the question onto the census, he wrote the key portion of a draft Justice Department letter claiming the question was needed to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act — the rationale the administration later used to justify its decision.

Those documents, cited in a federal court filing Thursday by opponents seeking to block the citizenship question, have emerged only weeks before the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legality of the citizenship question.

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He died in August; the story relates a remarkable chain of events – just off coincidence – that got the files to the court. That word “estranged” is doing a lot of work here; the obvious subtext is that she disagreed strongly with his politics. And now she might have overturned them.

Of course, in past times those hard drives would have been letters.
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Leap Motion, once a virtual-reality high flier, sells itself to UK rival • WSJ

Parmy Olson:

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Leap Motion, a virtual-reality startup that helped pioneer gesture tracking technology, has agreed to sell itself to British rival UltraHaptics [based in Bristol] for approximately $30m, according to people familiar with the matter—about a tenth of its valuation just a few years ago.

Leap Motion, based in San Francisco, develops and licenses sensors that track hand movements for virtual-reality experiences. Over the past decade, firms have rushed into the nascent fields of augmented and virtual reality. Augmented reality overlays computerized images on the real world through glasses or a headset, like Microsoft’s HoloLens 2. Virtual reality aims to more fully immerse people in a digital world through a headset like the Oculus Rift, owned by Facebook.

Leap Motion made an early splash in the VR field. Founded in 2010, the startup initially attracted an array of venture capitalists including Silicon Valley investor Andreessen Horowitz. By 2013, the company was valued at approximately $300m, according to a person familiar with the matter.

But it struggled to take advantage of its early name-brand recognition in a field that was new, fast-changing and tied heavily to the AR and VR hardware market. A device Leap Motion rolled out to help control a computer with finger movements met mixed reviews.

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Apple considered buying it twice, according to reports. UltraHaptics has been using LeapMotion’s tech for six years for “using focussed sound waves to create the sensation of touch in midair”; potential application in cars. The clock ticks louder for Magic Leap.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

New York is going to join London by introducing a limited congestion charge. CC-licensed photo by Leo Reynolds on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

One year into GDPR, most apps still harvest data without permission • AdExchanger

Allison Schiff:

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The front door may be locked, but the basement windows are wide open.

Unauthorized data harvesting from mobile apps has continued nearly unabated in the year since Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation came into force last May.

In a recent test conducted for AdExchanger, mobile analytics company Kochava examined the behavior of the top 2,700 apps in the Google Play store in the United States compared with France, where GDPR applies.

Despite a small drop in the average number of network requests coming per app in France, which was to be expected, there was no discernible difference in the prevalence of data transmission between regions.

Nearly 60% of apps sent advertising IDs to a remote endpoint at least once either directly or through a third-party SDK, regardless of where the users were located or whether they’d given consent.

Apps often presented users with a consent notice screen and then ignored the user’s choice, transmitting the data regardless of the user’s preference.

“The regulation exists, but is there a body in Belgium looking at the mobile ecosystem to try and determine which calls from a device are legitimate or not – hell no, that’s not happening,” said Grant Simmons, head of client analytics at Kochava.

But even if there was, this stuff is hard to catch by design, Simmons said. Around 30% of the data calls transmitted to and from devices are encrypted and when fraudsters enter the picture, they usually use transitory domains to obscure their actions, including data harvesting.

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Websites not available in the European Union after GDPR • Verified Joseph

Joseph O’Connor:

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On 25 May 2018, the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came in to force, resulting in organisations (mainly US-based newspapers) blocking people living in the European Union from accessing their websites as they are not compliant with the new regulations. This dataset lists websites that are or were unavailable, along with links to archived versions of the websites and archived block messages. This dataset has been featured in a number of news articles including NiemanLab, TechRadar and publico.pt

The Los Angeles Times’ website is reportedly available in Bulgaria as of 08/08/2018. The website remains unavailable in other European countries.

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Bulgaria. Why there? Anyhow, there’s 1,129 unavailable sites. There’s also a list, at the end of “Costs and Unintended Consequences” of a number of companies which “have left the EU in droves (or shut down entirely)”. At which one looks and says: sure, but there are plenty more which are still here, in those sectors, and they don’t seem to be dying because of GDPR. Perhaps it was your lousy business model reliant on grabbing personal data?
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Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone • Moxie Marlinspike

Marlinspike went on a bicycle trip into the Chernobyl exclusion zone:

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When the firefighters from the first night, before they understood that this was not just a fire, showed up at the hospital sick and suffering from radiation burns, the medical staff there knew that they must have been severely contaminated, but they stayed and treated them anyway, potentially exposing themselves to the same fate.

Every interview I’ve seen or account that I’ve read from those involved, most of whom died within weeks or have suffered life-long health problems, has a common theme of no regrets; the sentiment almost universally “It had to be done. Who would I expect to do it instead of me?”

There’s so much in Pripyat that by the time we had to leave, we had probably explored less than 1% of the city. We went out on the same road that the residents did 33 years ago. Riding across the zone under the full moon, we’d stop sometimes and stare out at the woods and fields around us, all alone in the middle of that huge seeming expanse. The experience is full of tensions. It is so beautiful and so peaceful that it really feels like paradise, but it’s a paradise that you can’t enjoy. You have to be careful about where you sit, what you eat, how you eat it, what you touch; which is — ironically — why it exists. The reason it’s so beautiful and so peaceful is precisely because we can’t consume it. Like, perhaps, all real paradises everywhere.

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If you haven’t seen the Chernobyl TV series, you should; it’s possible that the accident couldn’t have happened anywhere but the Soviet Union, and couldn’t have been stopped with the human sacrifice that it demanded anywhere but the Soviet Union.
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Uber will start deactivating riders with low ratings • TechCrunch

Megan Rose Dickey:

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Uber is now requiring the same good behavior from riders that it has long expected from its drivers. Uber riders have always had ratings, but they were never really at risk of deactivation — until now. Starting today, riders in the U.S. and Canada are now at risk of deactivation if their rating falls significantly below a city’s average.

“Respect is a two-way street, and so is accountability,” Uber Head of Safety Brand and Initiatives Kate Parker wrote in a blog post. “Drivers have long been required to meet a minimum rating threshold which can vary city to city. While we expect only a small number of riders to ultimately be impacted by ratings-based deactivations, it’s the right thing to do.”

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Black Mirror: less a warning, more an instruction manual.
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Studies don’t support Elon Musk’s Autopilot safety claims • The Information

Matt Drange:

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In 2016, for instance, [Elon Musk] said that “half a million” people would be saved if Autopilot were more widely available. In 2017, Musk tweeted that the latest Autopilot software update could reduce collisions by “90%.”…

…In an effort to verify Tesla’s claims about the safety of Autopilot, The Information interviewed dozens of safety experts who have studied the software—many of them Tesla owners themselves. The interviews, along with internal documents, research reports and an analysis of five years’ worth of crash data collected by state and federal government agencies, show that attempts to measure the safety of Autopilot have failed to back up Mr. Musk’s claims.

The reality, researchers say, is that only Tesla has the data needed to determine whether its cars are safer when on Autopilot mode. Despite calls for transparency, Mr. Musk has kept this information from the public and attacked those who question the technology. Mr. Musk has gone so far as to say that journalists who write about crashes involving Autopilot are “killing people” if the coverage dissuades them from trying the technology.

The questions surrounding Autopilot’s safety come at a critical juncture for Tesla, which continues to burn through cash as it ramps up production. That has forced the company to raise more money: Earlier this month, Tesla said it would raise $2bn in new debt and equity. The company’s share price, meanwhile, continues to decline, dropping steadily from $376 in December to about $189 Tuesday.

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Ready when you are, Mr Musk.
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Donald Trump’s Wikipedia page: inside the brutal, petty battles over the president’s entry • Slate

Aaron Mak:

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Unlike most Wikipedia pages, which mostly anyone can edit, the only way for an entry like Trump’s to function is with a hierarchy. Any user can still argue for a change, but more senior editors—those with at least 30 days of tenure and 500 edits under their belts—have to approve it. And there are even higher levels of power above them: administrators (volunteers who apply for the right to wield special override abilities and are voted in by fellow users after a review of their edit histories) and arbitrators, a group of 13 editors chosen in an annual election who can make final decisions when there’s high-profile misconduct or conflicts arise involving administrators. On Trump’s page, there’s also an unofficial editorial board of experienced users who try to protect the page’s integrity.

The senior editors put the Helsinki proposal to a vote, which clarified little. The results were roughly tied, but even final tallies don’t necessarily dictate outcomes. Instead, administrators with special editing privileges weigh the quality of the arguments made on both sides against Wikipedia’s editorial policies on things like neutrality and reliable sourcing, and make a decision.

After 10 days of trying to reach a consensus on the Helsinki debate, administrator Awilley concluded there was enough support for the inclusion and closed the discussion.

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Has undergone more than 28,000 edits since it was created in 2004. The page has the equivalent of its own bodyguard protection squad – and that’ll probably remain the case for a long while.
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Google relents slightly on blocking ad-blockers – for paid-up enterprise Chrome users, everyone else not so much • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

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Google Chrome users will continue to have access to the full content blocking power of the webRequest API in their browser extensions, but only if they’re paying enterprise customers.

Everyone else will have to settle for extensions that use the neutered declarativeNetRequest API, which is being developed as part of a pending change to the way Chrome Extensions work. And chances are Chrome users will have fewer extensions to choose from because some developers won’t be able to rework their extensions so they function under the new regime, or won’t want to do so…

…developer Raymond Hill, who created popular content control extension uBlock Origin, contends blocking capabilities matter more than observing. Losing the ability to block content with the webRequest API is his main concern.

“This breaks uBlock Origin and uMatrix, [which] are incompatible with the basic matching algorithm [Google] picked, ostensibly designed to enforce EasyList-like filter lists,” he explained in an email to The Register. “A blocking webRequest API allows open-ended content blocker designs, not restricted to a specific design and limits dictated by the same company which states that content blockers are a threat to its business.”

Google did not respond to a request for comment. The ad biz previously said its aim with Manifest v3 is “to create stronger security, privacy, and performance guarantees.”

But Hill, in a note posted over the weekend to GitHub, observes that performance problems arise more from bloated web pages stuffed with tracking code than from extensions intercepting and processing content.

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So, basically, Google is making harder to have adblocking extensions that actually block ads. (Thanks Stormyparis for the link.)
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The end of mobile • Benedict Evans

Benedict Evans notes that there are about 4bn smartphones in use, and surveys the broader market:

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the PC market, which has had flat-to-falling sales for the last few years, has something around 1.5bn active devices (including a bit over 100m Macs and a similar number running Linux of various kinds, and 800m running Windows 10, which was released 4 years ago), split roughly 50/50 consumer/enterprise. Quite which number you use depends on which analyst firm’s estimates you prefer, but they’re all in the same range.

What about tablets? Apple says 900m iPhones and ‘over 1.4bn’ total actives devices: if you subtract 200m Macs, Watches and Apple TVs combined that leaves about 300m iPads (again, this is consistent with historically reported unit sales) – 350m seems possible. Google’s numbers cited above imply something between 100m and 150m (I hesitate to be more precise given how rounded these numbers are). Non-Google Android tablets in China might be double that, or even more – here again the question of whether the device goes online to show up in the stats means it’s hard to make a firm estimate (I’m sure people will disagree with this one). But this means there are certainly over half a billion tablets in use.

So. There’s an old joke that the career of an analyst progresses from Word to Excel to Powerpoint. That’s pretty much what’s happened here over the last 20 years: first we discussed what might happen (“imagine if everyone had a phone!”), then we tracked the numbers of what was happening, and finally we draw diagrams and bullet points of what that means. That’s where we are now – we try to work out what it means that almost everyone has a phone or a smartphone (I made a presentation about this). 

But this also means that now we go back to the beginning: I’m not updating my smartphone model anymore. The next fundamental trends in tech, today, are probably machine learning, crypto and regulation. I can write about those, but it’s too early to make charts. 

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Yup – I’ve long since stopped updating my many spreadsheet models. There’s no drama about the industry itself. Outside it, well, that’s different.
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New York’s adoption of congestion charging might mean something much more radical could come • Forbes

Brad Templeton:

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New York is going to institute a congestion charge below 60th St. in Manhattan. This is controversial, as expected, and fees don’t start until 2021. They may be around $12 for cars and $25 for trucks, so not minor. The plan is to use the $1bn generated each year to pay for public transit.

New York’s charging, like London’s, is very imprecise. It’s a daily fee. It charges the same no longer how long you spend in the zone. The idea is almost 45 years old, and so it’s strange that NYC isn’t considering something much better and more modern. Singapore began with paper tickets you put on the windshield, and moved to electronic tolling over 20 years ago. We now live in the era of the smartphone. By 2021, it’s entirely reasonable to require that every car entering downtown Manhattan have a smartphone in it.

This means that much more is possible today than was imagined 45 years ago.

Congestion charging has had mixed reactions around the world, but not always as expected. In Sweden, support for it was 40% before it started, and rose to 68% later. For example, it was feared that downtown retailers would hate it – it’s effectively a tax on people driving to shop at their store – but by clearing the roads, it made the shopping more pleasant and worth the fee.

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OK, congestion charges are regressive (proportionately, they affect poorer road users). But if you use them for public transport, you square the circle: personal road users can shift to that mode, or shift to ride-sharing (hello Uber). London has followed with a ULEZ (ultra low-emission zone) to reduce emissions. London’s congestion zone reduced traffic by 10% and generated £2.3bn ($2.9bn) in its first ten years.

More US cities should use it – Los Angeles, with its smog, would benefit from forcing more ride-sharing.
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China gears up to weaponize rare earths dominance in trade war • Bloomberg

Jason Rogers, David Stringer, and Martin Ritchie:

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The world’s biggest producer, China supplies about 80% of US imports of rare earths, which are used in a host of applications from smartphones to electric vehicles and wind turbines.

The threat to weaponise strategic materials ratchets up the tension between the world’s two biggest economies before an expected meeting between Presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump at the G-20 meeting next month…

…The US shouldn’t underestimate China’s ability to fight the trade war, the People’s Daily said in an editorial Wednesday that used some historically significant language on the weight of China’s intent.

The newspaper’s commentary included a rare Chinese phrase that means “don’t say I didn’t warn you.” The specific wording was used by the paper in 1962 before China went to war with India, and “those familiar with Chinese diplomatic language know the weight of this phrase,” the Global Times, a newspaper affiliated with the Communist Party, said in an article last April. It was also used before conflict broke out between China and Vietnam in 1979.

On rare earths specifically, the People’s Daily said it isn’t hard to answer the question whether China will use the elements as retaliation in the trade war.

China is “seriously” considering restricting rare earth exports to the U.S. and may also implement other countermeasures, the editor-in-chief of the Global Times, said in a tweet.

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“Trade wars are good, and easy to win.” Someone tweeted that a year ago. How’s it working out?
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Apple expected to remove 3D Touch • Michael Tsai’s blog

Michael J. Tsai:

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Last week, in a research note shared with MacRumors, a team of Barclays analysts “confirmed” that 3D Touch “will be eliminated” in all 2019 iPhones, as they predicted back in August 2018. The analysts gathered this information from Apple suppliers following a trip to Asia earlier this month.

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What’s different about Tsai’s approach is that he rounds up not just the news, but also the reactions, and his reactions. 3D Touch has always felt like one of those things that’s just on the verge of being really useful, but didn’t tip over into it as much as anything because Apple hasn’t shown a clear path for third-party developers. And it did tend to confuse things: the subtle distinction between a long press, a 3D press and a short press can be particularly annoying when you’re trying to reorganise your home screen and it brings up the 3D Touch menu, or vice-versa.

A quick note too that when it became known that Apple was going to introduce this in 2015, Huawei hurried out its Mate S with the same feature, which was quickly abandoned.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified